On Monday, when my wife came to tell me that Wendell Berry had died, I was rereading the poems he had written in the voice of the Mad Farmer. I had just highlighted a line from one of those poems. It read, “Practice resurrection.” I imagine the author heeded his character’s call to do the work of resurrection before his death.

I ran into Wendell Berry’s essays in a used book store in Davis, California. First was Standing by Words, and then The Gift of Good Land. At the time, almost 40 years ago, as the preacher for two small churches in farming communities, I was interested in both words and land. But it was the way Berry wrote and the way he thought that drew me in and kept me coming back. I sought out older collections of essays and bought each new one as it came out.

A few years later, while staying with my sister and brother-in-law in Princeton, New Jersey, I discovered Berry’s poetry. Once again I was hooked and scoured used book stores for more of his poetry books and bought each new collection when it came out.

Through thirty years of preaching to small congregations in farming country I have felt a special connection with the farmer/writer from Kentucky. He has been a trusted companion, mentor, and encourager. His writings have been the inspiration for many prayers and the source of numerous sermon quotes. Over the years my appreciation of the clarity of his mind and the affections of his heart have continued to grow.

During those years, my taste in Berry has shifted. I’ve moved from essay to poetry, particularly the Sabbath poems. This is a movement from human culture to nature. Berry distinguishes between these two worlds.. In his poem, “Some Further Words,” Berry writes:

… I like
the world of nature despite its mortal
dangers. I like the domestic world
of humans, so long as it pays its debts
to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.

I don’t think it is just me. Berry seemed to be focusing more and more on the world of nature. In an opinion piece he published in The Christian Century, he couldn’t help adding this paragraph at the end of tightly argued essay on two hot topics, “Caught in the middle: On abortion and homosexuality” (April 3, 2013):

But the wealth of this idea of kindness is not exhausted by kindnesses to humans. It is far more encompassing. From some Christians as far back as the 12th century, certainly from farther back in so-called primitive cultures, and from some ecologists of our own time, we have the idea of a great kindness including and binding together all beings: the living and the nonliving, the plants and animals, the water, the air, the stones. All, ultimately, are of a kind, belonging together, interdependently, in this world.

I know of no other author who could move from ethical arguments about abortion and homosexuality to the kindness we humans owe to stones.

As one, among many, I am sad to hear that Wendell Berry has died. His memory will be a blessing in my life. I hope in yours as well.

So is the mad farmer on to something when he calls us all to practice resurrection?

Berry had floated this idea early on in “A Man Born to Farming”:

… He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

The soil and the light, the dung and the plant produce the harvest through death and rising. Life on earth survives and thrives as it practices resurrection.

Practicing resurrection may be humans’ only hope of making it through to the other side of our climate crisis and into a sustainable future. We won’t get there by progress or evolution or revolution. We won’t get there by creating a better economy or government or culture, we won’t get there by building a better civilization, even if we could do that in time, before we hit all the tipping points.

But we might be able to get there by practicing resurrection.

Have you tried that? It gets a bit easier with each new death.

It is a practice both mysterious and beyond our control. It includes a willingness to die and a trust that death will lead to something better. It includes patience until resurrection appears, the ability to recognize it and the courage to welcome it.

Wendell Berry practiced resurrection when he left the career path of a writer in New York and returned to Kentucky to farm. There the writer welcomed resurrection, life as a farmer/writer, and for that, for his unique voice, so clear and kind, I and so many others give thanks.

“We couldn’t help noticing that the two of you seemed to be having a real conversation,” a stranger said to us as he and his wife were leaving the restaurant.

Every Monday, my wife and I go out for breakfast. We have a favorite restaurant and a favorite table, the one outside that gets the most sun, and the one everyone needs to pass by to get into and out of the restaurant.

So Nancy explained how our tradition of weekly dates started when I was getting my second graduate degree. We needed to find a time and place to talk to each other, and have continued this practice because it has become so valuable over the years.

One question led to another and we discovered that this couple was just visiting our area and that they live in the city where I graduated from seminary with that degree and that they are members of the small denomination that seminary serves and that they know many of my professors and live in the same complex with one of my classmates, the best preacher in our homiletics class, who wasn’t allowed to preach in a church of that denomination because she was a woman. We spent about a half hour talking about people each of the four of us care for and respect, most of whom I haven’t seen for more than thirty years.

But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t thought of these folks often. That’s one of the points of the long introduction. They have all influenced my life. One of those influences (a matter of Greek grammar) shows up regularly in these posts. And another one pops up right now.

One of people we talked about was the president of the seminary, Elmer Martens. In a chapel service he said, “Most preachers have only one or two sermons, which they preach in slightly different forms every Sunday. Good preachers have three or four, but great preachers have five or six or seven or maybe even eight sermons.” He then pleaded with us to learn how to preach at least three different sermons for the sake of those who would would listen to us each Sunday.

I have tried to do that.

And I’ve also developed an ear to notice when I’m hearing the same sermon—or political speech, or op-ed, or essay—in different words, at different times, by different people.

Last week I picked up a book of essays, Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, in order to read “The Greening of the Self,” by Joanna Macy. I was so impressed that I decided to read the rest of the collection this week. I discovered, to my delight, two other unique voices in the mix. But most of the essays reminded me of sermons, and of the same sermon.

Here’s an example of the essay I heard again and again. This particular iteration1 begins:

It is time for us to apply the spiritual forms of healing to the ecological crisis of our times … we must live a life that honors and respects the earth and all of life.

That’s a good thought and one I readily ascribe to. But here is how monotonous this form can become. On a single page of that same essay, six of the eight paragraphs include sentences that begin like this:

We must acknowledge …
We need to learn to …
We must remember that …
We need to incorporate …
We need to be able to …
We must remember that …

Have you heard that sermon before? Sometimes it is subtler. Sometimes it has more bells and whistles … or more smoke and mirrors. But it is the same sermon, or the same speech, or the same op-ed.

After beginning with Joanna Macy’s essay, I had hoped for better. After all, she had verbalized what I was beginning to notice. She wrote, “One thing I love about the ecological self is that it makes moral exhortation irrelevant. Sermonizing is both boring and ineffective.” She then includes a quote from Arne Naess when he talks about “the extensive moralizing within the ecological movement.” I’ve noticed that. Maybe you have too. I guess I should have expected spiritual ecologists to be as prone to moralizing as ordinary ecological activists.

It is very easy to fall into a pattern of sermonizing, telling the hearers or readers what we need to do. I catch myself doing just that time and again. And apparently it is not easy to write essays about the ecological crisis without starting to sound preachy. But I am going to try. Lest I bore you and my words have not the slightest effect.

In a similar manner, as I write these posts, I invite you to think along more than one or two of the common paths we use to make sense of our world. I challenge you, dear readers, to take a few steps along some less-travelled ways of thinking. A few of these paths (like embodied thinking) I have been traveling for a while, some (like layered evolutionary thinking) I’ve discovered recently. Maybe, with a little persistence, we may blaze a path or two of our own as we use this Substack to think together.

The purpose of thinking along less-traveled paths is not simply to keep things interesting, but to help us find our way through the climate crisis.

Which brings me back to the introduction. A conversation is much more interesting than a sermon. So it seemed to the couple from out of town who stopped to talk to us at the restaurant; even though they had no idea what we were talking about. We were engaged with each other, thinking about things together. And the couple couldn’t help noticing this.

One of the ways we learn how to think in new ways, maybe the best way, maybe the only way, is by conversing with others, by thinking together. Usually this is with other humans, including those who have gone before us and those who will come after us. But it needn’t always be.

The great powers of the human mind, including imagination and empathy, allow us to converse together and think together with animals and plants, and even with Earth herself. As we include more creatures in our conversations, the more open we become to thinking together, the better we will be able to work for a broad common good, and the more likely we will be able to find our way through this current crisis.

So Let’s Think Together is not simply an invitation to think along less-traveled paths. It is also an invitation to think together with some new conversation partners. Last week it was with tarantula hawk larvae. A few weeks ago it was with some bumblebees. Many more to come, and not just insects.

Come for a variety of ways to think. Or come for a variety of conversation partners. Stay for both. Let’s think together.

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Sometimes the direction we follow along a path is as important as the path we choose. This week I tapped into some long-dormant muscle memory and stood on my head to illustrate a change in direction: thinking from the ground up instead of from the top down.

Our conscious minds see problems and purpose and design everywhere we look. We are capable of designing processes and structures to solve problems in order to achieve our purposes. It is only natural that we attribute purposes to other creatures (sometimes even to the universe), that we recognize problems in need of solving, and find order and design in everything around us.

Charles Darwin turned this top-down thinking on its head. He imagined a purposeless process of trial and error, working through millions of years, and trillions upon trillions of trials, combined with a complementary process of natural selection. Through trials upon trials upon trials, with nature selecting out error after error after error, some behaviors and structures survived and reproduced. Once they have established themselves, these bacteria, protists, plants, animals, and fungi appear to the human mind as design, order, organization.

So we call them “organisms.” But, even if we trust Darwin and believe in the science of evolution, as soon as we begin thinking about life as organisms we start thinking from the top down again. We find ourselves amazed at the intricacy and elegance and variety of the designs that nature has created. We sense that even we humans, with all of our cognitive abilities, could never produce designs that match the designs we see in the natural world. Life in Earth is truly amazing.

We stand amazed … for an appropriate amount of time … and then we get back to the work of designing solutions to our problems in order to achieve our purposes. And so we build and burn, extract and consume, and live more of our lives in human created environments. In this new century, regular people, not just philosophers, spend hour after hour in virtual worlds, now brought to us through our screens.

But our thinking can move in another direction, one that leads to a different trajectory. We can think from the ground up. This is not familiar, comfortable, common, or likely to impress others with how smart we are. But thinking in this opposite direction, at least some of the time, might help us get through the climate change that top-down thinking has aided and abetted.

Here’s a favorite personal example of thinking in the opposite direction.

A giant wasp was hovering around my native plant garden.

So I looked it up on the Internet and discovered it was called a tarantula hawk. A bit scary in person but absolutely amazing on wikipedia. The female wasp (2” body length and 3” wingspan) will sting a tarantula with a neurotoxin that immobilizes the spider but leaves all the vital organs functioning. The wasp drags the spider inside its burrow, deposits a single egg in the tarantula’s abdomen, and then seals the burrow. Over the next few weeks the one wasp larva feasts on the spider’s living body, saving the vital organs for last. The mother wasp has already gone back to feeding on nectar until the next year’s tarantula season, when it will find another fuzzy but juicy spider. This is one of the most efficient reproductive strategies in the animal kingdom.

This natural history inspires the question: How does that wasp larva know to keep the tarantula alive as long as possible? It seems these wasp larvae may be as smart as those reputed problem-solving bumblebees I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Actually it is just doing what larvae do. It doesn’t intend to keep its food supply fresh. It doesn’t understand that the spider’s pumping heart is keeping it alive. The only important thing it knows it that it likes the taste of spider legs and eyes and antennas better than the taste of heart. Its keen sense of smell leads it straight to the yummy parts first.

In some distant past some tarantula hawk larvae preferred the taste of vital organs. They quickly killed the spiders their mothers had provided for them, and then most of the rest of the meat spoiled. They didn’t get enough nutrition to mature to adulthood and mate and reproduce. Only their brothers and sisters with different tastes survived. Within a few generations no tarantula hawk larvae like spider heart anymore. Wasp larvae don’t intend to keep the spider alive till the end. They just eat their dessert first.

As it turns out, it’s a matter of taste and not a case of elegant order. You might say that simple desire has mimicked high-level purpose; or that the process of natural selection mimicked intelligent design. But there is no mimicry here, either intended or evolved. The tarantula hawk wasp doesn’t trick us humans. We fool ourselves by seeking purpose and looking for design. In the process we often become blind to the ways of life.

We problem-solving, purpose-driven, designing apes tend to overlook our greatest cognitive agility, empathy. We do not always have to observe our world from the top down, from the heights of our palace of consciousness. It is possible to imagine ourselves inside the lowliest of life, and begin to think from there, from the ground up. I find that I can imagine myself inside that wasp larva and ask, “Why would I want to eat the heart when this leg tastes so good?” Can you?

One reader of last week’s post “Revival of the Playful” picked up on life’s tendency to play and wrote a comment about

two complementary observations about the universe, and, eventually, life:

1. a tendency of all things toward order—for example, molecules of elements that gather and align into crystal formations

2. an opposite, perhaps complementary tendency toward play, experimentation

That is an insightful description of what we observe when we think from the top down.

In particular, when we observe life in Earth we see order and organization. We classify all of life, from archaea to arachnids, as organisms. But “order” and “organization” carry with them ideas of intention and purpose and design, cognitive abilities which humans share with only a few other species.

When I try to think from the ground up, when I activate the imaginative power of empathy and feel my way inside of a life with desires but without intentions, I no longer see a tendency to order. What I feel is a tendency, a desire, to connect with other life.

Life has played with this desire to connect for millions upon millions of generations. Most of those experiments have failed. But some have succeeded phenomenally well: when different bacteria somehow or the other got together to form a cell with a nucleus and organelles, when sperm connect with eggs to form an astronomically large variety of similar and yet unique individuals, when cells got together into colonies and multicellular species, when algae connect with fungi to produce lichens. What begins as an internal tendency to connect appears, to the external observer, as a tendency to order

Life appears different when standing on your head, when thinking from the ground up.

When we approach the climate crisis with top-down thinking we see a problem that we humans need to solve by designing and creating a new more sustainable order.

When we approach the climate crisis with at least a hint of ground-up thinking we seek connections. With other humans who are also seeking connections, yes. But more importantly, with other life. We can use our great cognitive gift of imaginative empathy to feel our way inside Earth’s ecosphere. We can intend connection with Earth insisted of continually intending growth for ourselves and enlargement of our species.

It’s worth a try. Let’s think together.

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One morning this week, before my wife was out of bed, she asked me, “What’s the weather like? Is it cold?”

“It’s not really cold,” I said. “It’s just kind of gloomy.”

We live on the coast and the temperatures are usually moderate. In the summer, the heat inland draws the air off the ocean and sometimes brings the marine layer of fog onto the coast. It was one of those days. No sun, foggy and overcast, 60 degrees, even a little drizzle now and then.

“Gloomy, again, huh?” she said. “Are you happy we moved to this climate?”

“Oh yes!” And I am. We get enough sun for our spirits and for our solar panels. We don’t get enough heat to grow melons like I used to, and sometimes not enough for good tomatoes. But I don’t miss the hot summers. I’m happy we retired to this climate.

That evening when I took our dog out back I stayed up on our porch. I could catch a glimpse of the bay over the rooftops. And on the other side, the lights of the peninsula. The surf was big enough that I could hear the muffled crashing of waves from about a mile and a half away. The time lent itself to thinking.

I felt grateful for the beauty of this place, for the landscape and the plants, natives and maybe even the exotics, and the animals, and our neighbors and friends and acquaintances. A feeling of affection for life in Earth began to well up within me.

Then I remembered the earlier conversation. I am grateful for our climate here. Especially now, at the beginning of climate change, I am glad this place by the ocean will be less affected by rising temperatures than many other places. Also, given the lay of the land, this location is less threatened by rising sea levels than many other coastal areas.

My gratitude for living here, for its climate now and for its insulation from some of the severe effects of climate change, was tempered by grief for other places whose inhabitants, both human and other-than-human, will suffer more severe consequences of global warming. I started thinking of places and people and ecosystems that will become increasingly stressed by a warming climate.

My grief and my gratitude both seemed to flow out of love, a love of life. … But maybe I was confusing two different kinds of love as one.

I love living in this body. Because I love my life, I will fight til my last breath to stay alive.

I love the whole of life in Earth, this biosphere and each of its inhabitants. Because I love life in this broad sense, I am working and writing on its behalf.

Looking out over the bay, toward the ocean beyond, I imagined it curving around toward Japan until the image became a living planet. At this time in life, my love of Earth and all her life is deepening. At the same time, the urgency of my love for my bodily life is waning. Under that starless sky I could imagine letting go of my love of my life for the love of Earth’s life. Nothing heroic, nothing sacrificial, just love finding itself at home in a larger love.

Then our dog was done exploring and wanted back in.

It was still early so I picked up a book with an essay by someone whose name had come up in my reading twice in the last week. I found, “The Greening of the Self,” by Joanna Macy, in Spiritual Ecology. So I read it and was enthralled by all of it. One sentence, however, stood out from the rest:

When we mourn the destruction of our biosphere, it is categorically distinct from grief at the prospect of our own personal death.

That was exactly what I had been thinking and feeling.

The two distinct griefs flow from two distinct loves.

Later, I followed that thought back toward the climate crisis.

I wondered if there might be more than one distinct life force driving evolution. Maybe something aside from Darwin’s survival of the fittest. Could life in Earth be motivated by something other than the selfishness of Richard Dawkins’s genes or even the altruistic behavior of individuals within the selfish behavior of animal societies in E. O. Wilson’s understanding? Something other than the drive to survive, thrive and expand?

There is a life force within each body, from bacteria to blue whales, which seeks energy to maintain its organization and safety to mature and reproduce. In nature this life force dominates during times when the climate is stable and the pace of change within habitats is slow. Species then settle into structures which best support behavior that fits into that creature’s ecosystem. In times like these, nature selects generations who are slightly more fit than their parents’ generations, a little stronger or faster or smarter. The predominate life force in normal times is the will to survive, and to thrive and expand.

But Earth’s climate hasn’t always been stable and the rate of change within habitats hasn’t always been slow. There have been brief periods of rapid climate change and fast paced habitat change. Life in Earth has experienced crises. It has survived these crises, and then, on their far sides, exploded with new life.

In the midst of a crisis it is no longer the fittest who survive. It doesn’t matter how fit you are if the habitat you are fit for no longer exists, or no longer behaves the way it always had. When a crisis takes hold, it is, instead, those who are best able to adapt who survive.

There are three ways to adapt which function in different time scales (or, more accurately, generational scales):

• Migrating to a location with a similar climate to the one an organism was fit for. We see this even now as species migrate towards the poles or higher up a mountain range.

• Learning a new behavior. Animals can adopt a new diet; plants can change their habit.

• Genetic evolution. Nature selects odd ball offspring who happen to be more fit in the new habitat than their parents are. Here the advantage goes to species with short generations and more offspring per generation. Bacteria rock at this. Humans are at a severe disadvantage.*1

There seems to be a distinct life force that revives in times of crisis and its immediate aftermath.

As I write this post, I will refer to this life force as play.

Life constantly plays with myriads of possibilities, new behaviors and new structures. In times of stability, almost none of these survive because habitats are already full of elegantly fitted creatures. In times of crisis, though, more of these creatures with new behaviors and new structures survive; they fit into new niches opened up by changes in habitats. In the raucous variety of life all around us, we can see the results of past life playing with possibilities. Every day new and wondrous species are discovered.

Life also plays with possibilities of new collaborations among organisms. In normal times almost none of these survive. But in times of crisis, as ecosystems change and the relationships within them fray, there is room for new collaborations. We see the results of this in the amazing complexity of life. Look no further than the complex interactions of your own body’s systems.

In times of crisis, times when Earth’s climate is rapidly changing, the life force that plays with possibilities becomes more important than the life force that wills survival.

It may well be time for us humans to tap into that distinct life force, to love Earth more passionately and our individual bodies less urgently.

What do you think?

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When people ask me, “What exactly is your Substack about?” I hesitate and fumble. I struggle to present an answer that is both concise and clear. Each new attempt on my part seems to fall flat.

I have a vision for Let’s Think Together which has continued to compel me to write and post each week for six months now. But my vision isn’t linear. Everything fits together in my head in a quirky sort of way but I have struggled to get it out and into a line of words.

In June, I took a month off for a family road trip. That gave me the opportunity to return to where I started and ask myself, “What am I trying to do here?” One way of answering that question is with another question: “What question am I trying to answer with my writing? What question am I exploring and living into? And where does that question lead?”

The question I came up with was this: “How will human systems behave when we have made it to the other side of the climate crisis?”

This question is less direct than some of the standard questions climate writers address:

• What are the facts about climate change?

• What are the likely trajectories?

• How will that affect us?

• What is the solution?

• What are people doing to solve this problem?

• What can we do, individually and corporately?

• How will we need change our lives to adapt to the new normal?

When I thought about my question I began to see how I could vocalize what I’m trying to do with Let’s Think Together. Here goes …

We start with the fact and the experience of climate change. Earth’s climate system is out of balance. Temperatures are climbing, patterns of flood and drought and fire are shifting, glaciers are melting, storms are becoming more severe. The climate is no longer behaving the way it did for thousands of years. The percentages of greenhouse gases are growing so quickly the climate’s regulatory processes can’t keep up.

The change in the physical systems of Earth are affecting her biological systems. Some ecosystems no longer behave in ways they have for thousands of years.

Earth as a whole is in crisis and that crisis threatens our civilization and even human survival as a species. And we are rightly alarmed.

Humans are responsible for this crisis. Not the behavior of a collection of individual people, but the behavior of human-created systems is responsible; political, economic, technological systems all share some of the blame. Our human systems have behaved in a way that has knocked Earth’s ecological and physical systems off kilter and sent them into crisis.

We begin with the present crisis.

And then we look to the future.

Because we humans are responsible, we can act in ways which slow the change. Our actions now can also reduce how much our climate changes before it settles into a new equilibrium. And, most importantly for this Substack, by changing the behavior of the systems we humans have designed, we can get to a future where Earth’s systems have returned to life enhancing homeostasis. The deeper our changes, the better the future will be, and the sooner the crisis will end.

We intend to get to the other side of this crisis. We choose a future without crisis, when the climate has quit changing and settled into a long equilibrium, when Earth as a whole has settled back into homeostasis. AND we choose a future that continues to include humans.

Once we choose that future then we can ask, “How will human systems behave—how will they have learned to behave—when the climate has quit changing?”

A general answer to that question is fairly simple: In this future we choose, human systems will behave in ways that don’t cause crises. They will have learned to behave in ways that strengthen climate equilibrium and enhance ecological homeostasis.

And then we return to address the present.

One sure way to get to the future we choose is to change the current behavior of our human systems, including agriculture, industry, finance, education and politics, and of the larger systems in which they are embedded, the global economy and Western civilization.

There are many ways to change the behavior of human systems. The systems guru, Donella Meadows notes that systems change behavior when changes are made at certain points within that system. In Thinking in Systems, she lists twelve of these leverage points and ranks them in order. In her experience the three most powerful leverage points are “Goals” and “Paradigms” and “Transcending Paradigms.” Below is a visual model of her understanding of increasing leverage. This model portrays “Mental Models” as the level of greatest leverage.

Let’s Think Together will focus on the level mental models, on the leverage points of goals and paradigms and transcending paradigms, and I will write about them in terms of how we think. We focus at this level in order to make deep changes in the behavior of human systems and so to help us through the climate crisis and to help us humans become fit for life beyond crisis.

So, practically, we will explore ways of thinking that lead to human systems that create crises in Earth’s larger systems. And we will search for alternative ways of thinking which work together with Earth’s systems. We will consider changes as simple as vocabulary—using “habitat” instead of “environment”—and as revolutionary as the change Darwin introduced into human thinking with his theory of natural selection.

If this sounds interesting to you, welcome. Let’s think together!

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I was sitting in the hallway of a rehabilitation hospital outside the door of a friend waiting for her to return from physical therapy. An aide was wheeling an older gentleman down the corridor when he said, “Stop, I ain’t going any further.” It had been a simple mistake. They had passed the doorway for the man’s room. But there was an emotion in the man’s voice that revealed something deeper.

So I wrote—or more appropriately found—this poem:

That poem was then published in a haiku journal that also publishes readers’ responses to individual haiku. The issue after my haiku was published included a response to my poem by a fellow writer, Tom Clausen. I was pleased, of course, and also surprised. When he read my poem he heard “this far and no further” in a way I hadn’t intended it.

What I had heard was a person who felt they were being pushed down the hallway, further into the hospital, toward more severe illness and eventually death. That person then and there summoned up the will to push back, “I have been pushed this far but I will go no further!” I heard resistance and rebellion and a desire to leave the hospital and get back to life as they had known it.

Tom heard something different. He wrote:

What a fragile thing our life energy is and so easy to take for granted. Mark’s haiku is an evocative reminder that when we are diminished by illness or from an operation we measure our existence in just how far we can make it in a hospital hallway. There is something so simple and telling in this excursion; both the will to go that far and the understanding that at this time the energy to go further does not exist.

Tom pictured a person trying to walk far enough down a hospital hallway to be deemed fit for discharge, one who then comes up against a limit. “I have come this far but I can’t go any further.” They accept that the hallway doesn’t lead out of the hospital, at least not yet. This reading is more in tune with the Zen influences in haiku. And more true to life.

Tom’s interpretation helps my own poem evoke a different emotion in me now as I read it than it did when I wrote it. I had been inclined to celebrate human will power as an expression of life energy, something beautiful that springs from our depths. It feels heroic to take a stand and declare, “No further!” There are times when I have acted on this emotion and felt proud of it.

Now I tend to hear the second line, “this far,” as an expression of human will power, as Tom does. And with the third line, “and no further,” I feel contentment and a connection with all of life when I accept my limits.

I have become suspicious of the power of the human will. When someone says, “You can do anything you set your mind to,” my nostrils flare and my skin crawls. And now, in times of reflection, I am learning to release some of the pride I’ve held in feats of will power, either personal or communal.

I am beginning to see that the climate crisis presents us with a choice. Are we going to play the hero and summon up the collective will power to save our planet from climate collapse (from the consequences of our own behavior)? Or are we going to begin to accept the limits of human will power and trust the life energy of all creatures and all of Earth’s systems to lead the way through the climate crisis?

About a month ago, Barbara Brown Taylor included a definition of life in her beautiful essay, “Vibrant Matter.” She wrote in her Substack, Coming Down to Earth:

According to the Astrobiology program at NASA, there are seven key traits of life as we know it on earth: it 1) is highly ordered, 2) reproduces itself, 3) grows and develops to maturity, 4) utilizes energy to function, 5) maintains homeostasis, 6) responds to stimuli, and 7) adapts to external pressures, evolving in response to them.

I would like to add two additional traits to this definition of life, traits which our culture—both scientific and common—seem unable to see.

The first of these key traits is death. There is no life on earth as we know it—no natural selection, no abundant variety, no curious complexity—without death. You could include death in trait #3: life grows and develops to maturity and declines and dies; But it is probably important enough to deserve its own number.

The second of these key traits of life as we know it on earth is that life never lives alone. Life is embedded within other life; life is connected with other life; life depends on other life. And often in death and in decay, life feeds other life.

Adding these two traits probably won’t help astrobiologists discover life elsewhere in the galaxy. But recognizing them will help us choose how to approach the climate crisis.

Are we humans going to summon up our collective will power to save our planet from climate collapse? Or are we going to accept the limits of human will power and to trust Earth herself to lead us into a sustainable future?

1. Death — The only way to believe that the human will is all-powerful, or at least powerful enough to get us out of the climate crisis and save the planet, is to ignore its inability to conquer death. In many instances human will power can delay death. And in many instances human action, such as replacing fossil fuel energy with solar energy, can slow the acceleration of climate change; and that’s good. But the human will can never keep life from ending in death. We are mortal no matter how strongly we will otherwise. Ignoring death, and the eventual death of our civilization and our current way of life will never lead us into a sustainable future.

2. Life never lives alone. — The only way to imagine that collective human will power acting upon nature can get us out of the climate crisis is to ignore how deeply our lives are embedded in other lives and how firmly we are connected to other lives and how much we depend on all of life. It is only by working within Earth’s physical and biological systems that we can have any positive sustainable effect. What our human will can do is reduce the ways we continue to disrupt Earth’s resilient systems. And then we can lend a friendly hand to help Earth repair herself … or maybe nudge a trajectory in a slightly different direction. But Earth is the only one who is going to save our planet. And the cycle of life-and-death-and-decay-and-new-life is the only one that we can ever hope to enjoy, and the only one that can bring us through to the other side of this climate crisis.

With Tom’s insight, and with my natural aging, I have come to see things differently. When we summon up our will power and declare, “No further!” we set up (or fall into) an adversarial relationship with whoever or whatever has pushed us too far. We fight a disease or death, global warming or Nature. It becomes “us against the world.” Will power will win some battles for us, but we will end up losing the war.

I have also experienced the same things Tom did in that hospital hallway, where human will met human limitation and they made peace with each other. And I have felt that peace ripple out to become a peace with death, and a peace with Nature and with all Earth’s creatures.

If we can spend more time and energy in that sweet spot where our will and our acceptance of limits work together as friends we will be a few important steps closer to a sustainable and resilient future.

Let’s try to think together in a different direction: counterclockwise instead of clockwise. That will probably be easier for me than for you because, as you can see in the photo, I have set up the clock in our living room to run counterclockwise. You’ll notice, if you look carefully, that the clock reads 5:47.

I like to play. It’s fun to play with words and ideas, and to play games, and to play with people.

Of course I’m using the photo of the clock to play with your mind. 😉

If we were in the same room I would be testing to see how you react.

Are you going to play along? Maybe pretend the clock is real and respond as if you too were living an imaginary world where counterclockwise was normal. Maybe you would come back at me with an imaginary world of your own.

Or are you going to stay serious? Maybe even become a little annoyed at my silliness.

I can’t wait to show this picture to some of the kids I know and see what reaction I get.

When we play with other people, or with our dogs and cats, or, say, with the two scrub jays that would follow me around as I was weeding our yard, we are testing each other out, seeing just how far we can trust each other.

Edward Slingerland writes in Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, “Although researchers have long thought that the primary function of play was for skill practice and training, this socializing and trust-building function seems more fundamental.”

I agree. Part of the reason my wife and I were able to celebrate our 50^th anniversary is because for most of those years we have played a game of cribbage every morning after breakfast. We don’t compete. Early on we developed a cooperative form. Both players’ points are counted with the same two pegs and we strategize to see how we can help each other get the most points out of our hands. It’s all socializing and trust-building even as it reminds my wife and me that we really can work well together, when put our hearts into it.

We get to know people as we relate to them. And the same goes for all sorts of creatures and places. As we get to know them we can learn to trust them and work together with them for mutual benefit.

This knowledge of particular people, creatures, and habitats in the real world, is fundamentally different from the general, factual knowledge taught in schools and so highly valued in our culture. There are two ways of knowing: a bodily way to get to know a real world—relational knowing—and a heady way know about the world —theoretical knowing.

Some languages have separate verbs to denote these two different types of knowing. For example Spanish uses saber to talk about theories; and conocer to talk about facts and relationships.

In last week’s post, while exploring the claim that bumblebees understand cause and effect, I distinguished these two different types of knowing by the purpose behind each type. Sometimes we seek to know particular people, creatures, habitats, and systems in order to take our place within them, to belong. And sometimes we seek to know what makes the world tick, to understand cause and effect, in order to plan actions which will produce desired effects.

In the processes of rewriting my rough draft I stumbled upon another difference between these two types of knowing. After some severe edits I wrote:

When we get to know our fellow creatures with their own ways of thinking and behaving, and with their own agency, we will better know the outlines of a broad common good. And then, we can reactivate our brilliant cause-and-effect reasoning in order to produce that broad common good with minimal harm.

What bubbled up out of my subconscious was that particular relational knowing comes before general theoretical knowing, both in time and in importance (assuming we humans want to make it through this climate crises and continue living in Earth, the beautiful.) Relational knowing came first in the long history of thinking. And it came first in our individual history of thinking as our minds matured from infancy through adulthood. We can’t outgrow it. And if we pretend that theoretical knowing has somehow made relational knowing irrelevant, we risk eliminating our species—along with that very way of knowing—from our planet. We will need both ways of knowing to find our way into a sustainable future.

What I began to see this week is that relational knowing and theoretical knowing flow in opposite directions with respect to time. (Which spawned the somewhat silly metaphor of a counterclockwise clock.). Here’s the way I see that happening.

In relational knowing, our history with others, our past experiences within relationships, leads into our present behavior within those relationships. If trust is built over time then our present behavior can lead to mutual, and sustainable, benefits. An example that comes to mind is the domestication of plants and animals for agriculture and as pets. Past experience leads to present behavior.

On the other hand (maybe the one that moves clockwise) theoretical knowledge is used to designs plans of action to achieve an imagined future benefit. If the theory is accurate and foresees all significant consequences of the planned actions then those particular actions and that type of behavior can lead to benefits for humans which don’t cause significant harm and can be sustained. Irrigation of crops is one example that may fit the bill. An imagined future leads to present behavior.

In my little metaphor, theoretical knowing moves clockwise and relational knowing moves counter clockwise.

The danger of theoretical knowing is that it can easily accelerate, the hands of the clock can spin faster and faster, eventually (currently?) spinning out of control and lead to an explosion of knowledge AND to such threats as accelerating and reinforcing global warming.

The promise of relational knowing lives in its counterclockwise movement which can slow the clock down so that it keeps steady time, returning a sustainable future to our beloved Earth.

When I was going into fourth grade my family moved to a new home, one my father had helped to design and build. The lot it was built on was more than an acre, but most of that was canyon, down one side and up the other. I had great fun exploring the canyon. About half way down I discovered a tire from a piece of heavy equipment, probably discarded into the canyon when they were leveling the lots for the new houses. It was almost a tall as I was and had been painted green but the paint had been worn off of the treads. I thought it would be fun to play with, so my dad and I rolled it up and out of the canyon and into the back yard;.

I imagined myself standing on top of the tire and rolling it around the yard, kind of like lumberjacks do with logs. So I spent hours trying to climb on top of that tire. The treads were big enough that I could easily get handholds and footholds, but as soon as I pushed and pulled my way up, the treads moved down and the tire rolled toward me. Of course. The trick seemed to be climbing faster than the tire rolled. I tried and tried and gave up, and tried and tried the next day and gave up again, The problem, of course was that the faster I got at climbing the faster the tire got at rolling. I suppose I could have dug a pit for the tire to rest in, but that would have been cheating. I never made it to the top of that green monster.

So last week, when I watched the video of the bumblebee rolling the ball, my body—and all of me—remembered what it was like trying to climb on top of that tire. I felt for the bee. I knew that it was only trying to climb whatever it could grab onto. It didn’t intend to roll the ball or push it or move it in any particular direction.

I sensed that when the researchers placed a pit directly under the food source in the first experiment, they were cheating. And when they placed the food source on the ceiling of an alcove surrounded on three sides by walls in the second experiment, they were cheating again. I don’t think they knew they were cheating; they were attempting to be as fair and impartial as possible. Something had blinded them from seeing that they were setting the bumblebees up to succeed. The bees could actually “solve” the problem that the researchers had designed simply by doing what bees naturally do, and without understanding simple physics or working through cause and effect.

When I watched the videos of the two experiments, a second time and a third time, again and again, I had an experiential understanding of trying to climb a rolling object that the CNN reporter, and the experts he contacted, and even the researchers themselves probably lacked. I could see it differently because I had been in the position of those bumblebees.

Like the researchers and the experts and the reporter, and like most of the readers of The Wonder Theory, and like most of the readers of Let’s Think Together, I am a problem solver who generally sees the world through the lens of cause and effect. And that is what I saw the first time I watched the videos.

Along the way I have learned to question that lens. Sometimes that lens has kept me from seeing what’s actually there. Sometimes it has convinced me that I am seeing what isn’t there, as it did at first with this experiment and as it seems to have done quite effectively with the reporter and experts and researchers. Seeing the world through a lens of cause and effect can lead us astray. But sometimes, this way of seeing can cause harm, even great harm.

Here is a simple way of understanding how that happens:

Humans tend to look for the causes of effects for two major reasons:

1. To find the causes of effects that are beneficial to us in order to reproduce those causes and their positive consequences. (Cooked meat is tasty and easier to chew, so we roast the lamb)

2. To find the causes of effects that are harmful to us in order to eliminate those causes and their negative consequences. (Uncooked meat can carry pathogens which make us sick, so we barbecue the chicken.)

By and large this has worked very well for us as a species and so most of us have been brought up, by our culture and in our schools, to see the world through a lens of cause and effect.

When we use cause and effect as our default reasoning we tend to begin seeing Earth and her physical system and her creatures and their habitats simply in terms of the benefit we can make them provide for us; and we neglect, and often destroy, the benefits they provide naturally, without our intervention. In exploiting the earth’s resources to cause human benefits we can harm habitats and creatures, and even Earth’s climate, and, in the process, diminish or destroy their ability to benefit our lives.

In specific instances, cause and effect reasoning can cause more harm than benefit in this way: In order to solve a problem we begin with the effect (either desired or undesired) and work backwards to discover the cause. Then, in our understanding, we often tie the cause to the effect, one-to-one. But while one effect may have one cause, one cause will have multiple consequences, if for no other reason than each consequence becomes a cause of further consequences.

Ignoring the other consequences of a cause that produces a positive effect can lead to harm much greater than the intended benefit. The prime example for the purposes of this Substack is the unintended, and initially unforeseen consequence of global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

So beware of the blinding influence of seeing the world in terms of cause and effect.

We do want to know what makes the world tick. But we also want to know our world in a way that helps us belong within the life of Earth in all her beauty and complexity and diversity. We sense there is more than simply making lives for ourselves on top of a rocky planet. We want relationships where we are seen and known and welcomed even as we try to see and know.

There is a significant difference between seeing and knowing in order to use and learning to see and getting to know in order to belong. It is the difference between asking, ‘Why do things work this way?’ and ‘How can we work together?’

If we are going to survive in Earth, in sustainable ecosystems, we will need to see ourselves as part of those ecosystems. When we get to know our fellow creatures with their own ways of thinking and behaving, and with their own agency, we will better know the outlines of a broad common good. And then, we can reactivate our brilliant cause-and-effect reasoning in order to produce that broad common good with minimal harm

Maybe, as a small concrete example, spend some time in a meadow or garden watching the behavior of bumblebees instead of wondering if bumblebees really are as smart as chimpanzees.

It was a great trip AND it is good to be home. And it’s good to be back writing again about ways our thinking can help get us through the climate crisis.

When we arrived home I was amazed by the sheer size of the tomato plant in the front yard planter. In three weeks it was more than twice the size of last year’s plant at the end of the growing season; same variety in the same location. It must be all the compost I added when I replaced the rusted out chicken wire at the bottom of the planter with galvanized fencing in order to keep the gophers out. I can hardly wait to taste this year’s crop of vine ripened tomatoes.

Then Sunday, after service, I walked around our church’s native plant garden to see how some of the plants I’d tucked in the ground before we left were faring. The blue-eyed grass and the silver bush lupine were healthy but not flowering yet. It was the other perennial lupines, up the hill that grabbed my attention, both with their size and with the beauty of their purple-blue flowers. And when I got close to the show I noticed a whole colony of small black caterpillars mulling around on the flower stems.

So then my attention shifted from plants to insects and I heard the humming of bees, honey bees and bumblebees. I went from flower to flower looking for other species of native bees but couldn’t find any yet. So I hung out around the sage watching the constant motion of a few of the bumblebees until normal human life called me out of the garden.

I enjoy watching bumblebees crawl around on flowers. And so I wasn’t surprised by the behavior of bumblebees in an experiment I read about this past month in the CNN Wonder Theory newsletter: “Bumblebees show advanced problem-solving skills in new experiment,” by Jacopo Prisco. What surprised me were the conclusions the experimenters took from that behavior.

The article includes video loops of bumblebees in two different experimental settings. Watching the videos I saw each bumblebee sense sugar and crawl over anything it could, in any way it could, to get to some food. That’s what they do. I’ve seen them do it a thousand times.

But when I read the article about the conclusions drawn from these experiments I saw humans thinking the way humans often think, in a way that I’m beginning to believe has helped lead us into the coming climate crisis.

Take a minute and watch the first video. The experimenters have set up an arena with a transparent ceiling low enough that the bumblebee can’t fly and high enough that a bee can’t reach it when standing. Into the ceiling they have placed a sugar source surrounded in blue ‘flower’ after training the bee to associate the color blue with sugar. Inside the arena they have placed a foam ball and familiarized the bee with the ball. And they have made pits in the floor so that the bee can climb up the ball when it rests in a pit. Observe what the bee does in this first video.

Here’s what I see: The bee approaches the ball from the direction of the blue sugar source. Then it tries to climb the ball. Given the physics of the situation, when the bee tries to climb, the ball rolls back toward the bee and thus toward sugar source. The bee falls off and the ball rolls into a ‘wrong’ pit. When the bee climbs the ball and reaches toward the blue, the ball rolls out of the pit, again toward the blue as the bee keeps trying to climb. The ball then rolls into the ‘right’ pit underneath the blue circle. The bee keeps climbing up and toward the sugar source (this time moving its body toward the center of the ball and not away from it). The ball stays in place and the bumblebee gets the sugar.

The ball rolled in the perfect direction simply because the bee placed itself in a position closest to where it wanted to go before it started climbing (perfectly natural and expected). The ball stayed in the ‘right’ pit so that the bee was able to climb to the top of it because, as the bee kept moving toward the blue, its center of gravity kept moving toward the center of the ball. (In the ‘wrong’ pit, when the bee moved toward the blue behind it, its center of gravity moved away from the center of the ball and the ball rolled out of the pit.) Simple physics. And the simple intention of a bumblebee moving toward a food source. The rolling of the ball was incidental, a positive unintended consequence of the bee simply trying to climb higher. Unintentionally the experimenters set the bumblebee up for success.

The second video is viewed from the top down through a transparent ceiling. It seems to me that the first part of the video has been sped up until the bumblebee tries to climb the ball and then it proceeds in real time. Watch the second video and see what you see:

Here’s what I see: Once again, as the bee tries to climb the ball, the ball incidentally rolls, and it rolls in the direction of the sugar source because the bee’s body is in that direction. When the ball hits the wall the bee is able to climb on top. When the bee moves the weight of its body toward the food source the ball rolls in that direction, hitting the next wall. Now when the bee keeps trying to climb the ball, the ball gets boxed in beneath the blue and the bumblebee can climb up and get the sugar. Once again the experimenters have set the bee up for success.

All I see in the videos of these experiments is bumblebees’ typical innate behavior of persistently moving toward a food source … combined with two atypical experimental settings and some simple physics.

The authors of the study and some experts asked to review it see a whole lot more.

I happen to agree with the conclusion of the article that quotes Lars Chittka, professor at Queen Mary University of London, even if the experiment is irrelevant to this conclusion.

… humans as thinking beings are surrounded by all kinds of other thinking beings, “however radically different their modes of thinking might be.”

However I don’t agree with most of the interpretations presented by the researchers, reviewers and reporter. Here are some of those interpretations that seem unsupported and, frankly, far-fetched, at least to me: (You can read the whole article here.)

• Lead author, Akshaye Bhambore, University of Oulu in Finland, “We showed for the first time that bumblebees can solve a completely novel object-manipulation task, spontaneously and without being trained to do so, or without any trial and error.”

• James Nieh, UC San Diego, “But the experiment shows that [bees] can remember a hidden goal location and manipulate an object in relation to that goal.”

• Olli Loukola, University of Oulu, “… the real problem, which is using the ball as a ladder to reach the blue flower. … [The bumblebees] knew that if they could not reach the flower on the ceiling, there was a ball they could move to make themselves bigger, so they needed to kind of understand the physics of the task, and they needed to have a goal in mind.”

• Lars Chittka, “All this really requires some understanding of the task at hand, keeping in mind where the target is, and taking appropriate action.”

• Jacopo Prisco, the CNN reporter, “… insight is … an understanding of cause and effect that does not rely on trial and error, copying others, or previous knowledge. … Now, a study … suggests that bumblebees possess insight.”

I think it might be time for professional problem-solvers, such as these scientists, to get out of their heads and back into a garden, time for them to observe bumblebees clamoring over sunflowers instead of designing problems for them to solve.

Bumblebees never cease flying and crawling and climbing until they taste that drop of nectar, and the next, and the next. I have never seen one stop to think about ladders, or consider how to get bigger. They never seem to take the time to understand the physics of the task, though they are subject to a physics that the researchers don’t seem to quite appreciate.

As an amateur bumblebee observer with an amateur’s understanding of physics, I see these two lab bees behaving as they normally and innately behave even in these two arenas the scientists have meticulously designed to test what goes on within their less than pea-sized brains.

As a citizen scientist, when I read “Bumblebees show advanced problem-solving skills in new experiment,” I see a way of thinking that never sees the bees, a way of thinking that stands outside of Nature and nurtures itself on its own thoughts. I see a way of thinking that has, at times, led people to exploit and harm Earth’s natural systems.

In next week’s Substack, I plan to explore that way of thinking and present some antidotes.

Thank you for reading. I hope you return.

About twelve years ago I added strength training to my exercise routine. My doctor suggested that I do this to augment the cardio workouts. So I bought a little home-gym and have continued to up the resistance and the number of reps ever since. Slowly I have been building muscle, mostly in my upper body. You could say that I have become more fit.

Although my weight has remained constant (my BMI continues to register as over-weight) some of that weight has shifted around. Now some of my favorite shirts don’t fit. Becoming more fit has made it easier for me to do some activities that demand strength while making it more difficult to fit into some of my clothes. Not a problem. I can get larger shirts.

Here’s the connection: Humanity has bulked up so much that we don’t fit into Earth’s climate system any more. And we can’t just go out and buy a bigger planet. We need to change our trajectory. Instead of trying to become the fittest species ever to have lived, we’ll need to switch our mindset and try to fit into our global ecosystem.

Strength happens to be a good metaphor for the way we no longer fit into Earth. We have bulked up. We’ve added more power by burning more and more fossil fuels. Think muscle cars and monster trucks. The carbon dioxide that we produce by exercising our strength simply won’t fit into Earth’s atmosphere without causing problems such as global warming, more destructive storms, sea level rise, and more.

In the past we have thought about evolution as the survival of the fittest. Life is a competition between individuals or species or genes. The ones who are the fastest or strongest or meanest or slyest are the ones who outlive the others. If you want to survive in this world you need to be fit. Or, as my doctor implied, “If you want to live to be 90, you’ll need to add strength training to your exercise routine.”

There is, of course, more to staying healthy than building a fit body and maintaining a strong heart. On average, people who build and maintain strong interpersonal relationships live longer. As do people with pets and those who spend time in nature. Healthy humans stay physically fit and at the same time fit into their families and neighborhoods and their natural habitats.

Fitting-in can have the negative connotation of behaving as someone you aren’t in order to be tolerated by some larger group. A better word, one Brené Brown has made a good case for, is belonging. I tend to favor participating. We participate in the ongoing life of Earth when we bring our best gifts—some of them unique—and offer them for the common good of the whole.

If we are to survive as a species, it will be by fitting into our climate, belonging to Earth, participating with the other members of our ecosystem. Not asking how much power we can gather and what great things we can do with that power. Because Earth is our home and not a storehouse of resources in our back yard, we will not survive by becoming the fittest, but only by seeking what is appropriate to our beloved place within the family of things. Wendell Berry gets at this in a phrase that has been haunting my thinking this past month: “the ignorant use of knowledge.” Here is the context:

To state the problem more practically, we can say that the ignorant use of knowledge allows power to override questions of scale, because it overrides respect for the integrity of local ecosystems.

We can only survive if our local ecosystems survive whole and intact. And that will only happen when humans learn to use power in amounts that are appropriate to our habitats, when we settle into a fitting use of the great power that could be available for our use.

It is time to for humans to quit asking and answering this question: How can we humans become the strongest, fastest, smartest, most envied and most feared species on earth?

The question can become instead: How can we fit our great human gifts of intelligence, imagination, empathy, and adaptability into this ongoing life, in ways that lead to a common good?

This is a fairly simple question which we can ask again and again in our relationships with all of our kin here on this beautiful planet. Learning how to work for the common good is a great human muscle we need to exercise until it becomes strong and finds its way into our body memory.

Invitation 20:

Relax your grasp on the ideas of survival of the fittest and life as competition.
Ask yourself: How can I fit my gifts into the ongoing life of a community I care about, in ways that serve a common good?

Last week, as I was pulling weeds and soaking our four fruit trees with water from a rain barrel, my mind blurted out, “The human brain is evolutionary overkill.”

We don’t need all this brain power to survive and thrive and adapt as a species. Nature, who is generally very thrifty, has abandoned all sense of propriety when it comes to the size of our brains and complexity of our minds..

Why the overkill?

Might it have been a short-lived mistake? Could it have accounted for the quick extinction of the other three human species who had been contemporaries of Homo sapiens? Might we not be the winners of the evolutionary race but just the last species still breathing and soon to expire?

So we return to the question, How did we get into this mess? More particularly, Where did we go wrong to turn something so helpful and advantageous and wonderful into a threat to our own survival?

Homo sapiens has not survived and thrived and adapted—and filled almost as much of Earth as ants have—because of any special physical traits or abilities. Neither size nor strength nor speed nor stamina can claim credit for our success. Nor have we done so well so far because of wisdom, that “sapiens” which we have adopted as part of our name. We are still alive as a species not because we are wise but because we are wise together. We do not thrive as individuals but as families and tribes and communities and civilizations. And it is the size of our brains and complexity of our minds that made it possible for us to work so well together.

All of this was made possible by the sheer size of our brains and the immense complexity of our minds. And, at least until these few years into the Anthropocene, we have survived and thrived and adapted and filled Earth.

But.now we are threatening ourselves and much of the biosphere around us. The bigness of our brain has allowed us (and tempted us, and led us) to think big thoughts, and to behave in ever bigger ways as ever bigger nations and corporations. And the power of our minds has allowed us (and tempted us, and led us) to use ever more extra-human power, including fossil fuels and nuclear power. The horsepower (and fuel use) is overkill for more than 99% of automobile use. Nuclear deterrent is dependent on overkill when both the loser and the winner are destroyed in a global inferno. Many of us feel threatened by annihilation either by nuclear war or climate change. We have fallen victim to overkill.

How can we use the immense power of our minds without overkill, in ways that reduce the threat to ourselves and our civilization, our habitats and all life? If we suspect where we went wrong, we can start from there again in a new direction.

If we go back to the beginning, we can attend together not just to Earth’s gifts and dangers. We can attend to Earth as a subject in her own right and listen together for her desires and fears and pains. Here’s a current example from Julie Gabrielli:

Homecoming

What the river says

. . . We know…

Read more

3 months ago · 30 likes · 22 comments · Julie Gabrielli

Then we can intend together with Earth for our broadened common good, and stand together with Earth to protect the whole from the damage some of us continue to wreak, and to care together with Earth for any and all in need.

Instead of going bigger and bigger, expanding and strengthening our dominance over the earth, we can go broader and broader, participating in the intricate web of life, the variety of creatures and habitats we work with and protect and care for.

And because the immense power of the human mind, together with our language and our culture, we can adapt our way back into this way of attending and intending, maybe before it is too late, within a couple of generations.

Invitation 19:

In her Substack, Homecoming, Julie Gabrielli and friends listen together to what the river says. Try listening together with someone else to what Earth might say about her desires, or fears, or pain through the voice of a river or sunset or bird or tree or … ?

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I feel an imminent threat to the life I know and to Earth whom I love.

Our planet is warming and its climate is changing. I have experienced hotter temperatures and new weather patterns. At first view, it appears that the threat I feel is coming from Earth’s physical systems. So when they say that we are entering a climate crisis that will only get worse for our children and grandchildren, I tend to agree. And so I have written about, “taking a few steps along less-traveled paths of thought to get through the climate crisis.” I coopted “climate crisis” to connect with readers who would be familiar with the term and also out of intellectual laziness.

But the term is unfair to climate and a distortion to the meaning of “crisis.”

It is unfair to blame climate change for our crisis. Earth’s climate didn’t change itself. We have sent it spiraling off in unfamiliar cycles. We, of the dominant capitalist-scientific-technological civilization of the second half of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first, we have changed the climate and warmed the globe. We have feverishly burned millions of years of ancient plant carbon to significantly increase the percentage of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Not only that, we have initiated a change that will continue on, even if today we should happen to swear off all fossil fuels. And this warming will likely only continue to accelerate, at least in the near term.

If we are in a crisis, it is a crisis of our civilization and not of our climate. We cannot expect the climate to recognize the error of its ways and have a change of heart and begin to cool the temperatures and calm the storms. But civilizations, formed and embodied in humans, can recognize the error of their ways and change their minds and dampen their fires of fossil fuels and cease their destructive behavior. You and I can participate in that, both in our personal behavior and in our communal work to change our civilization.

Are we even in a crisis? The answer to this question is skewed from the beginning. As soon as we determine that the threat comes from climate, “crisis” becomes an apt word to describe the stage our Earth has entered. Here’s one definition of crisis: “a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events … is determined; a turning point.” Climate scientists tend talk about a “tipping point,” either in the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the degrees of rise in the average global temperature. And many scientists seem to think that we are at or near their best projection of that tipping point. This can lead to despair because once we’ve passed the tipping point, our future, with its horrors and suffering, is determined. A focus on climate science, at least the way it is currently understood and popularized, naturally and almost by definition, leads us to conclude that we are in a crisis.

• Are we at a turning point where the trend of all future events is determined?

• Have we come to a stage in the history of civilization when how we act and behave, how we think and speak, can determine whether we begin a trend toward extinction as a species or a trend into a sustainable and resilient human habitat?

• Have we entered a crisis?

I feel the threat … but I don’t know. I can’t imagine how I would know. Knowing may even be impossible.

But that’s okay. Our ignorance can be put to good use.

If we knew that we, as a civilization, are at a turning point, then we would need to know all the right actions to take, and do everything right, and right now. A single mistake of understanding or competence or timing, and we’d be doomed. But if we don’t know that we’re in a crisis, then we don’t need to behave perfectly; we just need to do as much good as we can.

On the other hand, if we knew that we are not in a crisis, then we could procrastinate. We could postpone the changes we will eventually need to make within ourselves and within our civilization. We could do the easy stuff now but wait until we know for sure that we’ve entered a crisis before we do the hard stuff.

So here, ignorance has its benefits. When we think that we might be in a crisis, then both our agency and our hope are heightened. The urgency of “might” gets us working to change ourselves and our civilization in order to live in a sustainable and resilient human habitat. The openness of “might,” its refusal to accept a determined future, leads to hope. And in a wonderful ancient human process, exercising our agency increases hope; and exercising our hope increases agency.

Take this as an invitation to step out of crisis and into “might.”

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. —Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

Invitation 18:

Enter “the spaciousness of uncertainty.” Invite someone you trust to join you there and see if you might work together to subvert our civilization’s suicide.

Leave a comment

I wrote this haiku about twenty years ago and it has become one of my favorites. (You may have learned that haiku is a poetic form with three line of five, seven and five syllables. For a variety of reasons, many modern English language poets modify that form, as I have here..)

Here’s what inspired this haiku: As a pastor I conducted an Easter sunrise service each year in the city park. Amongst a small grove of redwoods, we could watch the sun rise out of the Sierra Nevada mountains on the far side of California’s Central Valley. Early Easter morning, at the first hint of daylight, I would walk due west from my home to the park. At that time of day and that time of year (the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox) an almost-full moon would hang low in the sky directly in front of me. I always enjoyed the beauty of that walk. And on each of those yearly walks I was reminded of the walk that Mary Magdalene took to Jesus’s tomb at that same time of day, beneath that same moon.

One Easter I composed that story in my mind as a haiku. When I wrote the words on paper I noticed that it could be formatted as a concrete poem as well. Over the years the poem has grown on me as the juxtaposition of its two halves began to play with each other in different ways. (One of the non-formal characteristics of haiku is the interaction, the play, between two juxtaposed images.)

Here are some of the juxtapositions I have have noticed and played with over the years (most were not consciously intended):

• left-to-right / top-to-bottom

• verbal / visual

• sun / moon

• rising / setting

• line / circle

• male / female

• earth / sky

• history / seasons, or chronos / kairos

The juxtaposition from this poem that most consistently surfaces in my mind is that of the line and the circle, and its extension into lineal time/cyclical time. It is this interplay of the lineal and the cyclical, and a poetic sensibility that allows for and welcomes that interplay, that can help point a way through our climate crisis and that gives me hope of a sustainable future.

Here’s how I see it: Earth and all her inhabitants, including you and me, are beginning to experience some of the negative consequences of humans burning fossil fuels: rising temperatures, stronger storms, rising sea-levels, 500-year floods, firestorms, and others. By adding significant amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere we have shocked Earth’s climate systems so that they can no longer maintain the conditions under which we humans have evolved. In our ignorance of the compounding consequences of our behavior, we have created a civilization which may well lead us to our demise as a species, taking many other species along with us.

Thinking in terms of cause and effect makes us feel smart; we are a race of problem-solvers! But thinking in terms of behavior and consequences, particularly long-term consequences and compounding consequences, can expose our ignorance, as Wendell Berry so clearly shows in his essay, “The Way of Ignorance.” Berry writes that it is this “ignorance and arrogance that is leading the world to destruction.” His answer:

I am aware that invoking personal decency, personal humility, as the solution to a vast risk taken on our behalf by corporate industrialism is not going to suit everybody. … But having looked about, I have been unable to convince myself that there is a better solution or one that has a better chance of working.

Berry counters human arrogance with personal decency and respect toward “every individual creature.” And he counters human ignorance of the consequences of our behavior with humility. Twenty years ago, even five years ago, that is probably as far as I would have gone. Recently I have expanded my understanding of human decency. Respect for every individual creature more than ever includes listening to, conversing with, and learning from those creatures. And respect for the ecosystems we inhabit includes listening to, and conversing with, and learning from our habitats. And when we do this our ignorance is not only tempered by our human humility, but it is reduced by extra-human knowledge.

Here is where the cyclical enters into our thinking.

Thinking in terms of behavior and consequences is, almost by definition, lineal; there is a sequence of actions and reactions. A sequence may branch into two or more sequences, and two or more sequences may fuse into one. Consequences for lines along the arrow of time. But eventually those lines, the sequences of consequences, curve around and become part of a circle, part of a system. The ouroboros finds his tail. The consequences of your behavior circle round and sneak up from behind and begin to change your behavior. And the cycle begins again.

Invitation 17:

Imagine behavior and consequences as part of a cyclical system:

1. When have the consequences of your behavior returned to change your behavior?

2. When has this taken a short amount of time?

3. Has that circle ever taken most of your lifetime to complete itself?

Leave a comment

Sometimes, though, those sneaky consequences do more than change behavior. Sometimes they kill an organism. Sometimes they extinguish a species. Sometimes they destroy multiple species along the way. Sometimes they permanently alter the ecosystem.

But species survive over time. They live through millions of cycles of the consequences of their behavior cycling through their ecosystem and back into their behavior without killing them or the other members of the ecosystem on which they depend. In other words, these organisms are not ignorant of the consequences of their behavior. Listening to them and conversing with them and learning from them—thinking together with them—might be a way of reducing our ignorance of the consequences of our behavior.

And ecosystems survive over time. They can be seen as extremely complex systems of behaviors and consequences. After cycling millions of times they contain only behavior and consequences which fit within their system. In other words, ecosystems are not ignorant of the consequences of the behavior they contain. Listening to them and conversing with them and learning from them—thinking together with them—might be a way of reducing human ignorance of the consequences of human behavior.

Human arrogance can be tempered by personal decency and that decency can be enhanced by respecting and learning from the systemic knowledge of every individual creature. Human ignorance can be tempered by human humility and that ignorance can be reduced by thinking together with creatures and ecosystems (without any reduction in the humility part).

We can only do this when we begin to think like systems, in cyclical ways; when we ease off our dependence on the lineal logic many of us have been schooled in. And, of course, as we invite our poetic sensibilities into our paths of thought.

I received some helpful comments and questions from readers this past week. Thank you. You kept me thinking about the law of compounding consequences. In the process I went back and read an essay from Wendell Berry, “The Way of Ignorance” (“Written as a preliminary paper for a conference of the same title at the Land Institute.”)

After rereading the essay and deciphering my marginal comments and questions, I realized that my 54 year old self of twenty years ago could well have written almost all of last week’s post, “The Law of Compounding Consequences.” That essay sounds like a summary of Berry’s, though less eloquent. His thoughts are worth repeating and well worth reading in full (in the collection of essays, The Way of Ignorance). But my thoughts have shifted in a couple of ways recently and that shift didn’t come through clearly last week. So here’s a follow-up piece.

First the connection with what Berry wrote and then the shift.

He begins this way:

Our purpose here is to worry about the predominance of the supposition, in a time of great technological power, that humans either know enough already, or can learn enough soon enough, to foresee and forestall any bad consequences of their use of that power. This supposition is typified by Richard Dawkins’s assertion … that “our brains … are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences.”

Berry then presents a taxonomy of human ignorance to illustrate the harm and destruction that arrogant ignorance of long-term consequences can cause. My notes in the margins from when I first read this essay show that I agreed with him then. And my post from last week shows that I still agree with him twenty years later.

I also noticed that Berry writes about scaling back and slowing down and working locally, all of which I have continued to practice and advocate for, including in last week’s post. And twenty years ago Berry answered the question, “What can we do?” in much the same way I propose today:

If we find the consequences of our arrogant ignorance to be humbling, and we are humbled, then we have at hand the first fact of hope: We can change ourselves. We, each of us severally, can remove our minds from the corporate ignorance and arrogance that is leading the world to destruction. … This change can be called by several names—change of heart, rebirth, metanoia, enlightenment …

My favorite is “metanoia” even though I expressed this as rebirth a few weeks ago in “The Embryo Within.” The mission of this Substack as a whole is to invite readers to experiment with some ways of thinking and behaving that might be new to them.

So here’s the shift:

The first half of this shift is a matter of intensity. In the last twenty years the destruction of our ecosystems and natural habitats has increased at an accelerating rate. And the change in climate has increased to the point where it endangers life’s experiment with human intelligence. Only in the past few years have I even considered that humans might cause our own extinction. The threat I feel now from arrogant ignorance of compounded consequences of human behavior is more intense than it was twenty years ago and more existential and immanent that the “worry” I understood from reading “The Way of Ignorance.”

At the same time, my understanding of human ignorance and our inability to “force and forestall any bad consequences” of our behavior has intensified. One of the reasons for this is that the consequences of any particular human behavior are compounded; they are never simply short term or even long term. And compounded consequences are far more difficult to foresee and forestall than long term ones.

Here’s an example. Some of the long-term consequences of the industrial revolution are:

1. Destruction of natural systems and habitats due to the extraction of natural resources; ores and fuels and even water.

2. Pollution of natural systems and habitats due to the waste from industrial processes.

3. An increase in #1 and #2 due the the increase in the number of revolutionaries, the number of people producing and consuming industrial “goods.”

4. An increase in #1 and #2 due to innovation of new technologies and new means of production.

5. An increase in air pollution due to the increased use of fossil fuels to power both the industry and the products of that industry.

Today we are well familiar with the long term consequences. And we can, at least partially, project how these consequences will extend into our future. Some of these bad consequences we have been able to mitigate. And the scientific-technical-industrial mindset promises to be able to mitigate them all. I doubt if Berry ever would have banked on those promises and I know that I don’t.

But there are also compounding consequences of the industrial revolution. One of these is the migration of large numbers of people from agricultural communities into large cities. This migration divorces many of those people from daily interactions with, and work within, natural systems and habitats. And that divorce leads a decrease in interest in and attention to the natural world. And that leads to a lack of knowledge of how to care for these systems and habitats. And that leads to more destruction and pollution. With each step the consequences are compounded.

For me, the most significant threat from compounding consequences comes from the increased release of carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. When you add up the long-term consequences of more people using more machines to burn more fuel we produced an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide which grew exponentially after World War II.

Due to the greenhouse effect the consequence of all this burning has been and will continue to be an increase in global warming. One consequence of global warming is a decrease in ice-packs and glaciers as they melt which then compounds the global warming. And warming allows permafrost to thaw and release methane which also compounds global warming. And the increases in temperature increase wild fires which release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The dead trees can no longer sequester carbon which then increases the greenhouse effect and compounds global warming. These are just a few of the compounding consequences of the ongoing scientific-technical-industrial revolution.

We in the dominant civilization have not done a great job of foreseeing and forestalling longterm destructive consequences of our behavior, either out of willful ignorance or arrogant ignorance or the simple ignorance due to the limits of the human mind. But compounding consequences usher in a whole new level of ignorance with a concurrent demand for a deeper humility than I ever could have imagined twenty years ago.

My first shift from twenty years ago has been a shift in intensity which heightens our attention to the question, “What can we do?” It seems even more urgent to act slowly, on small scales, locally. And our metanoia must continue to reach deeper.

The second shift I’ve made in the last few years adds a new dimension to the metanoia (rebirth, change of heart, enlightenment) that can help us get through this climate crisis. But that will have to wait until next week.

Invitation 16:

Try thinking in terms of compounding consequences:

• What do you see as some negative compounding consequences of our culture’s wholesale adoption of smart phones?

• How might these current consequences compound even further in the future?

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Invitation 15:

Try substituting “cause and consequences” whenever you start thinking in terms of cause and effect and take more time than you normally would to imagine the consequences:

• Does this affect how you think about sequences of events? Are any of them branching, or circular, or exponential?

• Does this make any difference in how you behave?

Leave a comment

Here’s why I’m inviting you to take a few steps down this path of thought:

If our ancestors had known that the Industrial Revolution would lead to global warming, would they still have revolted? If they had known the existential threat they were causing their seventh generation descendants, would they have hitched their wagons to coal?

They didn’t know. That’s excusable. But in their arrogance they didn’t care to find out what they didn’t care to know. They had discovered the laws of the universe, laws of cause and effect, and with this knowledge they could harness great power and do great things. With this knowledge of these laws and a little ingenuity they could conquer the world. And that they set out to do. They came to believe that science and technology and industry had made them more powerful and, to tell the truth, much smarter than all the generations that had come before.

In the excitement and thrill of this new found intelligence and power, they forgot, or ignored, or simply tried to hide one particular law of the universe. They became so enthralled with the laws of cause and effect that they (and all of us) fell victim to the law of compounding consequences.

When we think in terms of cause and effect we tend to reduce the consequences of a particular event or behavior to a single effect. But that way of thinking ignores or downplays two compounding factors:

1. Causes can have multiple effects.

2. Effects turn into causes of new effects which themselves become causes.

The consequences of a cause or event or behavior compound over time. This is a simple law which is easy to observe both in nature and in human behavior. Many people throughout human history and across a spectrum of cultures have understood this law and sought to live within it. The leaders of the Industrial Revolution, at least in part, revolted against this law. And the dominant Western Civilization has continued that industrial, technical, scientific revolution.

Hiroshima should have been our wake up call.

The nuclear bomb itself obeyed the law of compounding consequences. The splitting of each atom produced two immediate consequences: It released a large amount of energy and it emitted free neutrons. That second effect then caused the splitting of other uranium atoms in its vicinity. It became a chain reaction of compounding consequences, all happening in a fraction of a second and releasing an astounding amount of energy.

The consequence of the energy released from the bomb destroyed a city and incinerated thousands and thousands of humans. The consequence of the radiation released from the bomb killed many more and the monstrous health effects of that radiation were passed on from one generation to the next.

The scientists who designed the atomic bomb were able to use the laws of cause and effect to predict the energy released from the splitting of uranium atoms. And they were able to use the law of compounding consequences to predict, within an order of magnitude, the amount of energy released by the chain reaction. But the human and political and environmental consequences were beyond anyone’s ability to add or subtract or multiply or divide.

Hiroshima should have been a wake up call. We could have revived the importance of the law of compounding consequences to begin a counterrevolution.

Some did. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons has significantly reduced some of the compounding consequences of the United States bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Others tried to sidestep the negative consequences of the atom bomb by harnessing the nuclear reaction to produce electrical power. In the process they ignored the law of compounding consequences which crept back in with the production of centuries of nuclear waste and with events like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

With the dawn of the nuclear age a few of the industrial-technical-scientific leaders deserted, but most of us continued the glorious revolution against the law of compounding consequences. And so it accelerated its growth, in scope and intensity and speed.

Now, at the beginning of the new millennium, as Earth enters the Anthropocene (or Pyrocene), we have received a second loud wake up call in the form of global warming, climate change due to human behavior. And that particular behavior is the industrial-technical-scientific revolution.

Will enough of the now billions of revolutionaries hear the call and desert? Will enough people in the developed and developing world recognize the law of compounding consequences? Will you? Will I?

Around us and among us are people who never joined the revolution and other who have already jumped ship, humans who acknowledge the law of compounding consequences and seek to live within it. These people know how to relate within their habitat. They have learned to change their behavior slowly and incrementally and locally. In other words,

• Small is beautiful.

• Slow is graceful.

• Local is sacred.

As one who woke up to the the law of compounding consequences at an early age during the Cuban missile crisis, and as one whose conscience has been energized by the climate crisis, I invite you to begin to desert the industrial-technical-scientific revolution by taking a small step or two. Instead of thinking solely in terms of cause-and-effect, also consider cause-and-consequences. Take time to think through multiple recursive consequences. And when you act, try to keep your changes small and slow and local.

And, maybe paradoxically, the sooner we adapt our thinking, and the more comprehensive our paradigm shift, the better.

Let’s examine a famous statue by Auguste Rodin, The Thinker. It has served both as a reflection of how we think and as an icon which has helped to shape the way we think, or at least the way we think about thinking.

More than fifty years ago, when I spent a year in Belgium as an exchange student, I took the train to Paris three times to visit a friend from my hometown. I loved Paris and got to see all the major tourist sights. My favorite was the Rodin Museum. I spent hours wandering among the exhibits, enthralled by everything; everything except the statue I had most wanted to see. The Thinker, sitting high on his pedestal, was untouchable and unmoving, in a word, disappointing. Even back than I felt there was something not quite right about this image.

So this week I figured that maybe the body language of Rodin’s thinker might yield clues to how some of our thinking went astray over the last hundred years since the statue was cast. By revisiting the statue through photos I hoped to see and feel where our thinking might have gone off track. What I discovered surprised me. Here’s how that happened.

One of the first things I tried was sitting the same way Rodin’t thinker is sitting. That’s where the insight began. So I invite you to try it as well.

Invitation 14: Model The Thinker in your body. (You can do this dressed.) (If you get lost look back to the photo above.)

• Find a chair or stool that is low enough that your feet can rest comfortably on the floor.

• Sit on the edge of the chair (scoot back if you begin to lose your balance)

• Pull your feet back so that your knees stick out further than your toes.

• Rest your left wrist on your left knee.

• Lean forward and place your right elbow on your left thigh (try not to twist your torso or splay your right leg).

• Flex your right hand to a 90 degree angle and twist your forearm so that your fingers are pointing toward your chest.

• Rest the front of your chin (up to your lips) on the base of your first two fingers

• Sit this way for one minute.

• Think a deep thought. (Only half kidding.)

When I did this exercise, when I contorted my body in this way for at least a minute, I felt uncomfortable. (The bronze statue has had no trouble holding it for more than a century.) There are ways to sit leaning forward with your chin in the palm of your hand or lightly resting on your knuckles. But Rodin’s way isn’t one of them. I can’t imagine anyone (except maybe a professional contortionist) ever choosing this way to sit in order to think. So what was Auguste Rodin thinking?

It was then that I realized that I might have gotten it all backwards.

I had originally asked questions like:

• How does this person’s body language say, “I’m thinking deep thoughts?”

• What relationship between mind and body is conveyed by this work of art?

• What might it say that this statue is larger than life and is elevated on top of a plinth?

After conforming my body to the shape of Rodin’s Thinker, I asked myself what the form of the thinker’s body might tell us about the content of his thought. What sort of question might this man have been wrestling with that twisted his body into this very uncomfortable shape?

What do you think?

My first draft of this essay began like this: “How do you think? More particularly and concretely, What is your body doing when you think most deeply or creatively or productively?”

Now, after examining The Thinker, I am asking different questions, ones which flow in the opposite direction:

• What sort of questions force me to think on my feet?

• What sort of questions encourage me to think together with others?

• What sort of questions push me to work them out in real life?

• What sort of questions lead me to keep asking the same question, only deeper and deeper and deeper with each iteration?

What sort of question might have contorted Rodin’s Thinker into that uncomfortable shape? I imagine he was wrestling with something introspective, self-important, and purely philosophical like: “What is the meaning of my life?” or maybe, “What is the true, unique, eternal essence of me?” Uniquely human questions we tend ponder alone. Questions which rarely lead us forward.

And I have a sneaking suspicion that questions that don’t contort our bodies into uncomfortable shapes like that of The Thinker can lead us into a better place. We can test that out. I’ll be testing that out. Maybe even here on this Substack. We might even discover a few surprising questions to help guide us through this climate crisis.

What do you think?

There is a lie we tell ourselves. Sometimes we propagate it, sometimes even those of us who know better. This big one began in religious systems and has found its way into all arenas of human thought. When humans act on this lie they can create great harm, including the global threat of climate change.

Like all persistent lies, this one holds within itself a kernel of truth. And the lie is especially pernicious because its kernel of truth is vitally important to understanding any system any of us participates in. So, in order to lessen the power of the lie, we must set free the kernel of truth hidden with it.

Here is the lie: all systems (social, political, cultural, military, economic, biological, ecological, geological, climatological) are hierarchical.

Here is the kernel of truth: all systems are layered, with multiple layers of subsystems, with increasing complexity of organization from lower to higher. And the relationships between the layers are critical for the functioning and sustainability of the system as a whole.

The lie flows from the word hierarchy, from the Greek heiros, meaning “holy” and arche, rule. It originated as a church doctrine where higher heavenly beings rule over lower ones. Then it was used to describe the church’s habit of higher level priests ruling over lower ones, say, from Pope all the way down to people. From there the metaphor moved out to incorporate any system with multiple levels of organization, physical or biological or human.

Because hierarchy carries with it the connotation of rule from above it loses its validity when applied to some systems. Put the other way around: when we say a system is hierarchical, we are biased toward understanding that its higher layers rule over its lower layers. Yes. Many human systems, social, political, cultural, military and economic are often formed and function in this way. But in many ways, for many systems rule from above just isn’t true. Layers? Yes. But a flow of commands from top to bottom? Not necessarily.

Invitation 13:

Think about one system of which you are a part that functions as a hierarchy, where you are expected to serve the purposes of someone or something on a higher level than yourself. Can you imagine that system functioning with the same layers but without the ordering coming from higher levels to lower levels? Any suggestions for a word (or words) to name a non-hierarchical layered system?

Leave a comment

Donella Meadows points toward the truth in Thinking in Systems:

Hierarchical systems evolve from the bottom up. The purpose of the upper layers of the hierarchy is to serve the purposes of the lower layers.

Biological systems such as your body do evolve from the bottom up. They start with the cellular layer and add a tissue layer on top of that and then an organ layer and a system layer and then the body as a whole. And unless the higher layers serve the purposes of the lower layers the body will die. If the heart quits pumping blood to the cells then the whole body dies. So far so good, except for the use of “hierarchical” with its connotation of “rule from above.”

Even if we replace “rule” with “service” the metaphor of hierarchy assumes that the relationships between layers flow in one direction. For Meadows evolution flows from simple to complex, from lower to higher, and with that evolution purpose flows from lower to higher. And because purpose flows from lower to higher, service flows from higher to lower. When a higher layer is added on to a biological system, that system will only survive if that higher layer serves the lower layers.

What this particular statement from Meadows fails to take into account is that purpose and service flow in both directions simultaneously, from higher to lower and from lower to higher. A higher layer will only survive—and the new whole will only survive—if the lower layers also serve the purpose of the higher layers. When coronary arteries become clogged with plaque and quit delivering blood to the heart, then the heart quits pumping blood to the body and the whole body dies. The whole system fails because a lower layer failed to serve the purpose of a higher layer.

A system survives and thrives when higher layers simultaneously both rule and serve the layers beneath them. The Pope is both patriarch, ruler and “servant of servants,” as symbolized when Pope Francis washed the feet of prisoners and refugees and when Pope Leo carried the cross through all the stations in the Colosseum.

As a teacher I have wrestled with the paradox of rule and service in the classroom. The writing and teaching of Parker Palmer have helped me embody this paradox, as have some words of Priya Parker in The Art of Gathering:

… you may be wondering: If I am to rule my gathering, what kind of ruler should I be? The kinds of gatherings that meaningfully help others are governed by what I call generous authority. A gathering run on generous authority is run with a strong, confident hand, but it is run selflessly, for the sake of others. Generous authority is imposing in a way that serves your guests.

We humans have too often fallen for the lie that we are the top level of a hierarchy of beings and therefore are meant to rule the earth and all of its beings and all of its resources and that the earth and all of its beings and resources are meant to serve us. Because this is a lie, because hierarchy is an invalid metaphor to refer to Earth and her systems, we have created a crisis of global proportions.

My initial question: “How do we find our way through this crisis?” leads into a series of questions:

• How do we find our place in the multi-layered system of Earth?

• How do we relate to all the layers above and below us?

• How do we understand the workings of a system where each level serves the purposes of the layers above it and those of the layers below it?

One of the ways I understand it is through the history of life on Earth. This is both bad news and good news.

It took bacterial life a billion years and likely trillions of trials and errors to evolve a next higher layer to the system of biological life, single cells. Finding a higher layer in which the purposes of that layer served the purposes of the lower layer and the purposes of the lower layer served the purposes of the higher layer was a special event with a probability exponentially less than winning the lottery. Then it took single cell life millions of years and maybe billions of trials and errors to evolve the layer of multi-cellular organisms and usher in the Cambrian Explosion. Life added a higher, third layer which served the purposes of the layers below it and whose purpose was served by the layers below it. Once again an extremely rare event.

That’s the history. Here’s the bad news. Even with all of our amazing brain power we aren’t going to be able to design a higher layer for us humans to live in. It would take too much time to add a layer which serves the purposes of all the layers below us and whose purpose is served by all the of those lower layers. At the rate the globe is warming we probably have less than ten generations to get it right If this is our only plan, we are bound for extinction.

The good news: Life has already designed a multi-layered (non-hierarchical) system that works. We have the brain power to find our way into our place in that system if we can only let go of the lie of hierarchy.

There is no solution to the climate crisis. No technical solution. No moral solution. No matter how smart we are, no matter how good we are, no matter how good and smart we are, we can’t solve our way out of this accelerating threat. Neither problem solvers nor ethicists will be able to cut through the chain of events that we have set in motion.

But then there are the gardeners. If a group of people will be able to lead us through this crisis. it will be the them.

Gardening is the most accessible way to learn how to think systemically and to put that thinking into action. Wendell Berry put it this way more than 50 years ago, before most of us knew we were in a climate crisis (and used gender neutral pronouns):

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has set his mind decisively against what is wrong with us. He is helping himself in a way that dignifies him and that is rich in meaning and pleasure. But he is doing something else that is more important: he is making vital contact with the soil and the weather on which his life depends. He will no longer look upon rain as a traffic impediment, or upon the sun as a holiday decoration. And his sense of humanity’s dependence on the world will have grown precise enough, one would hope, to be politically clarifying and useful.

Every garden is a physical and biological system, a small system nested within the larger climate system and intimately related to it through weather. Gardeners generally begin as problem solvers, as masters of their small plot of land. But then, as their finger nails gather dirt, their thumbs turn green. They begin to blend into the garden as members. Some even go so far as to long for their dead bodies to be buried in the garden to physically join the soil and soil biota and the roots and stems and leaves; and then the fruits and vegetables for others to enjoy and be nourished by.

Gardeners begin to think in terms of seasons and lifecycles, sowing and growing and harvesting and composting. They touch death and taste life; and at times, even before they die, they spill some of their blood into the soil. They touch and listen and see and smell and taste, and turn those senses into behavior which is good for themselves and good for the garden. In other words, they learn to think sustainably and resiliently.

We gardeners learn how to recognize healthy systems from as small and low as the soil, up through watersheds and politics, all the way to the climate of habitat Earth. We learn to think metaphorically. We learn from systems we know well in order to live well within ones we are less familiar with. We learn humility and generosity and honesty and empathy and other ways of behaving which promote the health of any system we care about and care within.

For the simple reality that our climate is a system, the lineal thinking of problem solvers won’t be able to lead us through this crisis, but the systemic thinking of gardeners might.

Here’s a little, local, current example to help expand the point:

This week my wife and I are sitting our grand-dog while his family is checking out prospective colleges for our grandson. I am taking Romeo for a walk each morning and evening. On Tuesday morning, on our way downhill toward home, I experienced a sharp pain in my left ankle. I stifled a yell into a moan and stopped in my tracks. But Romeo kept walking. So I compromised and hobbled across the street, favoring my ankle. When I stepped up on the curb my right knee started talking to me. So I modified my limp to favor my ankle with one step and my knee with the other. Half way through that block—still more than two blocks from home—my back began hurting.

This had happened before so I knew what to do. I had solved the problem of pain in my ankle by limping. But that solution had caused a new problem; and the solution to the new problem had created a third problem. So I commanded my body to quit limping and my mind to experience the pain without trying to solve it. I straightened up and walked a very long last two blocks as normally as I had walked those blocks on the way out. By the time I opened the gate to our back yard, I no long noticed my knee or back pain and even the pain in my ankle was decreasing.

I tell this story for two reasons. As soon as the pain hit I tried to solve the problem. Problem solving is a natural normal response to pain or to any other negative experiences or threats. And our education and our culture value and promote and reward problem solving skills. So it is to be expected that we would see global warming as a problem to be solved, even though a couple of centuries of industrial problem solving have caused our crisis.

But then I thought systemically. My musculoskeletal system works very well when I walk normally, “gracefully” if you will. Every once in a while I get a pain like I did on Tuesday but I had probably walked for a thousand blocks without a pain in my ankle, or knee or back. But as I was trying to solve the ankle pain, as I limped ungracefully for half a block, I experienced two negative unintended consequences of my original solution. After I thought systemically and again walked gracefully the unintended consequences went away.

Healthy natural systems flow gracefully, they get as much work done with as little energy as possible. When we think systemically and behave within systems in ways that promote their health then we dramatically reduce the frequency and intensity of unintended consequences. Wendell Berry once again, from one of his Sabbath poems:

Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap
Great work is done while we’re asleep.

The logic of system thinkers proceeds gracefully, conserving energy and minimizing unintended consequences.

But problem solvers tend toward a logic of escalation, the more resources we throw at a problem, the greater the chance of success. And this can lead to the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force, and horrifically this week to the threat, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Gardeners and other system thinkers seek to behave humbly and generously and honestly and empathetically, and gracefully. They are, among all humans, most to be trusted to lead us through this climate crisis.

Invitation 12:

Wendell Berry, “[A person’s] sense of humanity’s dependence on the world will have grown precise enough, one would hope, to be politically clarifying and useful.”

• Has the ability to think systemically been politically clarifying and useful to you?

• How might systemic thinking lead to a healthier political system?

• What might happen if negotiators thought more like gardeners and less like problem solvers?

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Our civilization will not make it through alive unless we change how we live together. Barry Lopez expressed this same thought in Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World:

We must invent overnight, figuratively speaking, another kind of civilization, one more cognizant of limits, less greedy, more compassionate, less bigoted, more inclusive, less exploitive.

When I read that sentence a few years ago I agreed with every word of it except one. Yes we must. And the time scale is, figuratively speaking, overnight. We must recognize limits and become less greedy, more compassionate, less bigoted, more inclusive, less exploitive. I began this Substack, in hopes of helping us alter the trajectory of our civilization and move it toward one which Lopez and I, and many others of us, are beginning to imagine.

So I enthusiastically second with every word of Lopez’s sentence except “invent.”

It is impossible to invent another civilization. If we must invent it, we are doomed. Fortunately no civilization is ever invented, not even ours which is so proud of its many amazing inventions. It is actually some of those inventions, particularly those designed to harness the energy of fossil fuels, which have led us into this climate crises. We will not invent our way out, even if we could invent a kinder and gentler civilization.

It is, however, possible to change a civilization, and it is possible to set the direction of that change. One simple way is by replacing mechanical metaphors like “invent” with more organic ones. Changing the metaphors we think with will change the way we live our lives. Renewing the metaphors we speak with and write with will affect the way we think together as a culture and the ways we relate to others and to our world. Using more sustainable and resilient metaphors can help to move us into a new way of living in Earth. It won’t be as quick as inventing another civilization and implementing it from above. But, figuratively speaking, we may even be able to do it overnight. No guarantees but it is possible.

Already in Let’s Think Together I’ve suggested two metaphorical shifts, changes in vocabulary: substituting “habitat” for “environment”, and “thinkers” for “organisms.” This week offers one possible metaphor to use when thinking about how our civilization must change in order to survive.

In the midst of the crisis of the American Civil War Abraham Lincoln used a powerful metaphor to unite his Gettysburg Address. He said, “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, … shall have a new birth of freedom”. Lincoln imagined another nation at the end of the crisis, one whose liberty would include all of its population, one in which “all men are created equal” would be much more than a proposition.

The metaphor of new birth flows deeper than it first appears. A new birth means there already was a first birth. A new, or second, birth is required because some how or another, that first birth didn’t live up to the promise of its conception. Somewhere between conception and the present, something when wrong. The embryo was good but the adult has a fatal flaw. For Lincoln, somewhere between “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” slavery was allowed in, right at the birth of the nation. By the time of Lincoln’s election, slavery had proved itself to be a fatal flaw. So the nation needed a new birth, it needed to go back to its embryonic beginnings in the concepts of liberty and equality for all and begin again. You could say that new birth comes with a radical dissimilarity and a radicle similarity.

I have a personal connection to this metaphor. About a dozen years ago, I had a heart catheterization because of some anomalies on two earlier tests. While I was on the table, under conscious sedation my cardiologist sat down to talk to me. “Mark, it’s much worse than we thought.” He explained to me that they had discovered 90-100% blockages in three of the major arteries of my heart. He also told me that my heart had formed collateral arteries to bypass each of these blockages. Without those natural bypasses, I would have experienced a heart attack and may well have died. I never knew that I had heart problems. I wasn’t experiencing any symptoms. My heart had healed itself without any conscious knowledge or effort on my part. I was amazed and thankful and very curious about how my heart had formed these life-saving collateral arteries.

It turns out that my heart didn’t design and construct these new arteries, it didn’t grow them. These arteries were part of the embryo’s early network circulation. Before I took my first breath that system had transitioned into the branching system I was born with. Sometime, somehow (the “mechanism” is still unclear) a few of these embryonic arteries reactivated to become a vital part of my heart’s circulatory system and give me more years to live. The adult developed a fatal flaw and needed a new birth, same conception, new birth.

This metaphor has helped me think about how we get through this crisis, and in particular how we move toward a more sustainable and resilient culture and civilization. The changes we must make will be as radical as new birth. But they will grow out of embryonic patterns of thought and behavior that have been at work within civilization and within each human for thousands of years, some within our pre-human ancestors. We won’t need to invent anything new. But we must choose to think and behave in ways that are more sustainable and resilient. That will include a shift to metaphors which are more organic and embodied, more systemic and recursive, more vibrant and alive.

Invitation 11

Pay attention to the metaphors you hear and read and think:

• Which metaphor did you encounter that most egregiously led your thoughts away from sustainability?

• Did you discover a new metaphor that opened your thinking out into new ways of sustainable behavior?

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And a haiku for this holy day:

Some weeks back I began a series on the “4 Dimensions of Me.” After the first post, “Nested,” I realized that I had left out the most important point, how understanding this nesting has changed my thinking.

To recap: Our bodies are nested systems all the way down to the molecular level. All of these systems have been tested out and found fit by our ancestors, human and mammalian all the way back to the beginnings of life. Almost all of these systems fulfill their purposes without us becoming aware of their work or without us needing to exercise any conscious control.

For example: Two weeks ago a shard of metal hidden in my closet ripped a little patch of skin off my left forearm. I put a bandaid over the wound to keep the blood flow making a mess. All of the rest of the work of repairing the skin was done by systems I can neither feel nor control. It was fun, every now and then to note the progress it had made as it scabbed and as skin grew in from the edges. I’m grateful my body heals itself, and maintains its health, almost always without any conscious intervention. All of these bodily systems, all the way down, work so amazingly well!

That gratitude continues to influence my thinking. And so does trust. All day every day for the past 73 years my body has trusted all of these systems to do their work perfectly. Only the tiniest amount of that trust passed through my consciousness. I can do work my mind intends and trust the rest of my body to keep doing its work. Each of my body’s systems can trust that all of the rest of them are working for their own good and for the good of the body as a whole. We have inherited wise and trustworthy bodies that nature has selected over the eons.

When we learn to consciously trust the systems that work unconsciously in our bodies we can begin to question a peculiar characteristic of human thinking. We often tend to spend more intellectual energy in accomplishing our purposes than we do in testing out the fitness of those purposes. We get so enamored with our plans that we fail to ask ourselves if our purposes serve a common good as well as an individual good. Nature has not quite had enough time to select out this characteristic of our thinking. But we can! Trusting the systems of our body to do what is good for our whole body can help us evaluate whether our purposes are good in the long term for ourselves and our descendants.

With this climate crisis we now know that we are smart enough to cause our own extinction. The question becomes: Can we learn from trustworthy systems to become wise enough not to?