Ariadne Systems

increasing the health and vitality of the living world • the novelty of our own success • the ultimate question of life, the Universe, and everything: "What is good?" • we are in the pilot seat • can we be stable for millions of years? • there is no definition for health • your health and the world's health are the same health • two modes of knowing: scientific and experiential

What is an ecologically harmonious lifestyle anyway? What does it mean to live in harmony with nature? It basically just means that we are increasing the health and vitality of the living world around us as we pursue our own ends. This was the normal condition of all living things before the advent of modern technology. There was no waste, because there was nothing that didn't return naturally to the environment. A stone ax, left on the ground, is just a stick and a stone.

When we started to make artifacts that could not be returned to the environment, that are not what we call biodegradable, that was the beginning of the problem. The other aspect was the sudden and enormous growth of the human population and our livestock and crops. Today we outweigh all other land animals together by more than ten to one.

So there are a lot of us and we create a lot of trash and destroy a lot of living things. However, almost all of this wasteful and destructive activity is actually orthogonal to the things we're trying to accomplish. It's an accidental side effect, and we can accomplish our goals without waste and destruction, and it should be easier and more fun too!

An ecologically harmonious lifestyle is economically cheaper, both for the household (in reduced expenses) and the surrounding economy (via reduced degradation of ecosystem services.) It is the foundation of prosperity, and it can be a source of profit as well. Along with advances in technology, this should result in massive reduction of work required to maintain a given quality of life and the option to retire after working only a few years.

Bucky Fuller calculated that we would have this level of technology by sometime in the 1970's. We did (e.g. transistor, atomic power), but we have yet to engage our technology coherently to make it happen.

The problem that we face now is the very novelty of our own success.

All our technology is pushing us towards answering the question "what is good?" and the answer must come from studying the living world around us, as it is our only model for health and sanity. When it comes to our effects on the global ecology we must adopt a stance of profound conservatism (not in the modern political sense of the word, but in the older sense of conservation of what is good.) We must be careful not to disrupt the only example (and certainly the only reachable example) of a living biosphere in the known Universe.

Hominids

We don't yet know for sure if the hominid is a successful organism. At some pre-human stage of our evolution, maybe ten or twenty million years ago, we were de facto living in harmony with nature. This shouldn't be too controversial I trust because by definition, before the evolution of human intelligence, all animals were presumably in some sort of harmony with each other, not in the sense that their lives were free of conflict, but in the sense that the long-term activity of their species contributed somehow to the overall health and longevity of the ecosystem.

Or so we assume... This of course gets back to the fundamental question of life, the Universe, and everything: "What is good?" Life, seen from some outside, coldly objective viewpoint, is a chemical tautology. Evolution has no point, no goal. What endures, endures. What doesn't, doesn't. The word "evolution" is just a euphemism for "shit happens". Since there is no goal, it is meaningless to talk about the "efficiency" of living systems. It's very difficult to talk about health. "Health" is an emergent property. It cannot be defined. Yet we know it when we feel it.

Goal-seeking in living systems is an illusion. There are feedback mechanisms, which appear to have goals to our human minds, but which are just self-adjusting circular loops in causality. Your body carefully maintains an internal temperature, yet this is just the result of several interacting self-regulating homeostatic systems. There is no goal, just feedback. How does your body "know" the "right" temperature? How does the chimpanzee know how much damage it can do to the trees before the forest changes?

Do large multicellular organisms live in harmony? Or is the very idea of harmony in nature just some human gloss over a senseless maelstrom of chaos? Has the three or four billion years of life on this plant just been a lucky fluke the whole time?

It doesn't really matter. We are here now. We have goals, however inchoate and wild. We would fain exist, will the Universe or no.

Some time along the path from ape to human we became responsible for the results of our actions. For better or worse, we are in the pilot seat.

We can deduce that there must be information paths among the large-scale organisms to enable large-scale (both in space and time) orchestration of living systems to maximize adaptation of the whole ecosystem.

Remember that the ecosystem is unitary. It's a single bubble-shaped volume only a few kilometers thick. It has had a few billion years to learn to cope with the various troubles that come from both inside and outside of it, but that was all the soup/slime mode of life. We multicellular organisms are relatively new, and it's not yet clear at all that we were a good idea.

Anyway, since we do find large-scale organisation and coordination between multicellular lifeforms we must assume that there are information flows to carry this coherence. We must learn about them, and cooperate with the system, or risk destroying multicellular life of this planet.

Agriculture

Humans have been human for about a million years, maybe two, depending on whom you ask. The oldest known cave art is about fifty thousand years old, and the development of farming seems to have started "independently in different parts of the globe" about twelve thousand years ago.

The development of agriculture about 12,000 years ago changed the way humans lived. They switched from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to permanent settlements and farming.

History of agriculture :: Wikipedia

So that's pretty new in the scale of things. By geological and evolutionary time scales we have just arrived on the scene moments ago.

The somewhat startling conclusion is that we have no idea whether or not humans are adaptive. We might have been adaptive in our pre-agricultural "nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles" but the evidence isn't there. What evidence we do have seems, if anything, to point in the other direction:

The Late Pleistocene to the beginning of the Holocene saw the extinction of the majority of the world's megafauna (typically defined as animal species having body masses over 44 kilograms (97 lb)), which resulted in a collapse in faunal density and diversity across the globe. The extinctions during the Late Pleistocene are differentiated from previous extinctions by its extreme size bias towards large animals (with small animals being largely unaffected), and widespread absence of ecological succession to replace these extinct megafaunal species, and the regime shift of previously established faunal relationships and habitats as a consequence. The timing and severity of the extinctions varied by region and are generally thought to have been driven by humans, climatic change, or a combination of both.[3] Human impact on megafauna populations is thought to have been driven by hunting ("overkill"), as well as possibly environmental alteration. The relative importance of human vs climatic factors in the extinctions has been the subject of long-running controversy, though most scholars support at least a contributory role of humans in the extinctions.

Late Pleistocene extinctions :: Wikipedia

In plain language: we killed almost all the large animals.

Then and only then did we settle down and start messing around with plants.

Anosibe Ambohiby

We don't know if farming villages are a good idea. They can last for thousands of years, but can they last for millions?

Recently some internet people saw a village in a crater Madagascar and hired some folks to go talk to them. What's inside this crater in Madagascar? It's a little silly, but now the world has met the people of Anosibe Ambohiby:

founded in 2008 by Betsileo farmers ... in search of a large plot of arable land. ... transportation in and out of the village is a challenge ... As of 2023, the village is made up of around 50 houses with a population of around 300 people.

Anosibe Ambohiby :: Wikipedia

I like to point to these folks as a living example of what must have happened all over the Earth for the last twelve thousand years. Some farmers need more land, so they go to some empty place and start a new village. Now, ten millennia later, almost all the land is full. Not all of it, as these folks can attest. Even in a place as densely settled as Madagascar there are still open, "virgin" lands.

With this living example in mind I want to ask two questions:

First, Is agriculture adaptive? Can such a lifestyle be stable for millions of years? Can a farming village subsist for ten million years? For a hundred million? We are playing for keeps here. The dinosaurs lasted 350,000,000 years and they didn't even have thumbs.

Second, assuming the answer to the first question is "yes" (and we won't know the true answer for millions of years!), the next question is, what would you add to such a village to give them greatest benefits of modern science and technology with the least ill effects?

Now, this second question is the point of Ariadne Systems so the whole site addresses it. Here I want to talk about the challenge of the first question, which is a part of the ultimate question, "What is good?", and which relates pretty directly to the question of health.

Health

Just to repeat (because it's rarely talked about, to the point where most people find it counter-intuitive) there is no definition for health. As the judge said of pornography, "I can't define it but I know it when I see it." We can't define health, you know it when you have it. Or more precisely: you only know what health is when you lose it. All our medical science studies illness and disease, because we can't study health because it doesn't exist. If you are healthy you just feel great.

For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

~ Aristotle

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

~ Tolstoy

Anna Karenina principle :: Wikipedia

So too with the happiness of the family of cells that make up your body. So too with the family of other organisms on whom we depend utterly for our food, our water, and the very air we breath!

Take a look at the Wikipedia entry for health:

In general, it refers to physical and emotional well-being, especially that associated with normal functioning of the human body, absent of disease, pain (including mental pain), or injury.

These definitions are circular. Health is "well-being", health is "normal", health is being "absent of" non-health.

Like the Lorenz Butterfly there is no shape there, the "shape" of "health" emerges from a dynamic system of inconceivable complexity that includes not just the entirety of the Earth in her living and physical systems but also the Sun and Moon! (Solar flux, lunar tides, etc.)

So when I said above that living in harmony with nature "means that we are increasing the health and vitality of the living world around us as we pursue our own ends" it was almost a trick, because the system in which we find ourselves inextricably embedded is in fact so insanely complex that any hope of understanding it, let alone actively aiding it in its emergent quest for longevity, is ridiculous!

We cannot even define the goal!

We have little reason to expect that any of our activity since developing intelligence has been adaptive. In fifty thousand years we killed the other large animals. In twelve thousand years we covered the Earth with our agriculture. In two hundred years we have poisoned the sky, the waters, the land, we have destroyed forest and jungle and made deserts out of seas, we have brought about a mass extinction event. We cannot yet be said to be an adaptive species.

Let thy food be thy medicine...

~ Hippocrates

As I alluded to above, one definite thing we can say about health is that our personal health and the health of the living world around us are not separate. You cannot be healthy without healthy food, clean water, fresh clean air (the breath of trees and plants and plankton), your health and the world's health are the same health. Medicine, properly understood, is a branch of ecology. I would even go so far as to say that we cannot truly be happy without the company of beautiful plants and happy animals all around us.

To stay healthy and "pursue our own ends" we must maintain the health of the living world around us.

Now even though health is indefinable and even a bit mysterious it's not as though we are wholly ignorant. We have studied health from pre-historic times, and recently our scientific approach has become quite capable and fruitful. To learn about the greater biological context we find ourselves in, and to put ourselves in a position to help (or at least not hinder) our shared emergent quest for longevity, we can turn to two reliable sources: the science of ecology (and again, medicine should be seen as a subset or branch of ecology) and communion with Nature Spirits (e.g. Findhorn.) These are the two primary "modes" of our knowledge: the modern way of science, and the ancient way of direct experience.

Ecology is a Science

I'm not going to go on at length about Ecology. For one thing I'm not an ecologist. Most of what I know about ecology comes from reading Paul Colinvaux's "Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare" a couple of decades ago. If you read the Wikipedia entries on Ecology and in particular soil ecology you can bring yourself up to speed on what we know so far, and you'll know more than me about ecology.

I will repeat, again, that we do not know how to define the health of ecosystems (conceptual subsets of the whole singular unitary ecosystem) any more than we can define our own health, the health of our families, or the health of our communities, and the best we can hope to do for many decades or even centuries to come is to study the living world around us.

If we set aside our ridiculous arrogance as a species and face the (abjectly terrifying!) situation confronting us, as we come to consciousness as a species, clearly we must adopt a stance of profound conservatism in those of our activities that impinge on this, the sole example of a living planet in the entire known Universe.

A talking ape made out of soggy mud wrapped around calcium twigs living in the greasy layer between hard vacuum and a droplet of lava which in turn is orbiting a puddle of hydrogen in the hem of the skirt of a black hole is something I continually find myself astonished to be.

We can hope to arrange our local (and by now "local" encompasses most of the planet!) activities in such a way that they do not mess up the systems we already understand, and that have a low likelihood of interfering with the as-yet unknown systems that we can be sure are out there waiting to be discovered.

We only have one system to study. It's almost inconceivable that we are destroying it!

There's nothing metaphorical about ecology. It's a "hard" science. Return to nature is often framed as "escape from reality" but this is inverted: wilderness is real, civilization is communal trance. Developing ecological harmony requires returning to awareness of reality.

Ecology is an Experience

In scientific terms our bodies can be thought of as instruments for interacting with and detecting information from the biological world around us. Whatever the "self" is, the body is indubitably its "interface" to the rest of the physical Universe. Your lived experience of the world is ultimately the ground or pivot of your life. Indeed, science itself is a process that proceeds within the human mind, an attempt to get beyond subjectivity and figure out what's what.

Because we ourselves are living beings, we don't have to rely solely on the objective and reductive mode of scientific inquiry. We have an ancient and reliable source of information "within" us, by means of direct communion and communication with the intelligence of the world around us. We can communicate with Nature Spirits.

There is a living example of what this looks like, the Findhorn ecovillage in Scotland.

An independent study concludes that the residents have the lowest ecological footprint of any community measured so far in the industrialised world and is also half of the UK average...

These folks created a garden with the help and advice of what they refer to as "devas" that astonished the world. The point here is that practical knowledge was gained from the method, so to speak, of being humble and listening to the plant and landscape devas.

These devas are millions of years old and they're living on an entirely different plane of consciousness than we humans. They are kindly and loving. We can, I believe, trust them to teach us how to arrange our farms and such in ways that will contribute to the greater beauty, health, and even glory (in the sense that cathedrals and symphonies are glorious) of the living world.

Ultimately health is the living expression of the flow of energy from "higher" worlds into and through our physical world of atoms and fields. Living matter is the expression of divinity, the art of devas, the way these angelic beings express their adoration of God. From this point of view of living beings as the expression of angelic energy onto the plane of physical existence the human activity of "enacting our dependence on the land", as Wendell Berry once describe farming, is a glorious and fulfilling spiritual exercise, a form of worship, sanctifying and holy.

Conclusion

Guided by science— our clear-minded reading of the Libre Mundi, the "Book of the World" —and by the ancient and timeless beings, wise and kind, who animate the myriad forms of life all around us, our hope of contributing to the life of the Earth is not so ridiculous. If we can be humble and observant and think clearly I believe we can construct a human civilization that not only supports us in our health and growth but that also harmonizes with and contributes to the ultimate purpose of life. We can be the answer to the ultimate question of life, the Universe, and everything: "What is good?"