Understanding, episode 6: Ecology
By: John Kellden
Tags: Ecology, Ecosystem, Conv That Mind And Matter, Understanding, Network

In a network: ecosystemics.

Returning to a more nature understanding

“The fecundity and flourishing diversity of the North American continent led the earliest European explorers to speak of this terrain as a primeval and unsettled wilderness — yet this continent had been continuously inhabited by human cultures for at least ten thousand years.”

— David Abram

How are we going to inhabit Gaia for the next ten thousand years?

What platforms homesteaded into places, what places turned playgrounds by extending select, choice parts of our social sense of self?

How are we to go into character?

Card: Character

“What’s Identity?

It is not toil, yet feet happily descended and moving.

Nor technology wielding arm,

nor tracings of a too social sense of self inscribed on face,

nor any other part contested between

uniqueness and belonging.

To name, to another: What dialogue?

In a network, that which we call a chat.

By any other name would be as enactive.

So 8bn secret friends would, were they not story bound,

enacting that innate perfection, already awed.

Without that proprietary entitlement,

dear fellow human, rekindle your naming;

And for our naming, wending I and Thou and Thee,

coming alive, becoming ourcellves.”

@johnkellden riffing on Shakespeare

When Are We?

What play, possibility spaces, joint paths and evolutionary trajectories are we considering when not only crafting our scenarios, but meeting halfway, futures of our own shaping?

“That indigenous peoples can have gathered, hunted, fished, and settled these lands for such a tremendous span of time without severely degrading the continent’s wild integrity readily confounds the notion that humans are innately bound to ravage their earthly surroundings.”

— David Abram

Ecology Floats All Boats

“A branch of biology[1] that studies the interactions among organisms and their biophysical environment, which includes both biotic and abiotic components. Topics of interest include the biodiversity, distribution, biomass, and populations of organisms, as well as cooperation and competition within and between species. Ecosystems are dynamically interacting systems of organisms, the communities they make up, and the non-living components of their environment. Ecosystem processes, such as primary production, nutrient cycling, and niche construction, regulate the flux of energy and matter through an environment. These processes are sustained by organisms with specific life history traits.

Ecology is not synonymous with environmentalism, natural history, or environmental science. It overlaps with the closely related sciences of evolutionary biology, genetics, and ethology. An important focus for ecologists is to improve the understanding of how biodiversity affects ecological function. Ecologists seek to explain:

Life processes, interactions, and adaptations

The movement of materials and energy through living communities

The successional development of ecosystems

The abundance and distribution of organisms and biodiversity in the context of the environment.

Ecology has practical applications in conservation biology, wetland management, natural resource management (agroecology, agriculture, forestry, agroforestry, fisheries), city planning (urban ecology), community health, economics, basic and applied science, and human social interaction (human ecology).”

Ships And Boats

Everybody’s Building Ships And Boats

Some are building monuments, others

dummy pound notes.

How To Ecosystemics

Here’s how to build, informed by ecosystemics and living systems:

1. Situational Awareness

In a network, the best way to come alive is to trust and move; move and trust.

2. Mindset

In a network, mindsets that dynamically bridge and weave mind and matter.

3. Adapt

In a network, evolve with place.

4. Cultivate

In a network, the best way to steward is to understand seed, sprouts and fruit.

5. Cycles

In a network, folds and intersects, hopf fibrations and connected, social learning.

6. Win^n

In a network, corner of un-muddling and win^n.

7. Agency

In a network, hubs of mutually sovereign agents.

8. Story

In a network, the best place to story knowledge is amidst, among and in between people.

9. Discovery

In a network, the best place from which to undertand is the boundary of discovery.

10. Performance

In a network, performance is a function of joint sensemaking.

11. Signs

In a network, in ecosystems: life and signs, signs and life, co-extending.

12. Success

In a network, success is a function of graphs.

13. Complexity

In a network, simplicity beyond complexity.

Paths, Pitstops and People

The best place to story knowledge is between and among people. Whether path, pitstop or people, our story unfolds exactly according to our choices — crossing oceans, jumping puddles, taking axes ever so convivially wielded, to the frozen seas inside.

“Half-sleep, half waking: but as yet, I swear,

I cannot truly say how I came here.”

— Lysander, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare

In starting out I thought to go exploring

And set my foot upon the nearest road

A path by any other name would be as luminous to our true nature

The path. It unfolds, right? We might worry whether it will turn into something unexpected, only to realize the unexpected made it all the more interesting. Thus far along our evolutionary journey, a brief respite from our path: anticipating new, different worries, to be enacted and then encountered in our half-sleep, half waking expeditions.

Four Glimpses of Awakening Each Second

“Participatory knowing is transformative at least in the following two senses. First, the participation in a transpersonal event brings forth the transformation of self and world.

And second, a transformation of self is usually necessary to be able to participate in transpersonal knowing, and this knowing, in turn, draws forth the self through its transformative process in order to make possible this participation.”

— Jorge N. Ferrer

The words have all been writ

by one before me

We’re taking turns in trying

to pass them on

There To Be Found Along The Way

Is there sufficient nourishment to our joint intelligences, drawing forth our abilities to unfold our paths?

The pitstops? They’re there to be found along the way. Sometimes just a short breather, taking all of nature in, sometimes a more orderly establishment, with other people there for the conversation, a giving and receiving of either marching orders or some nourishment to keep us well and proper on our meanderings, sometimes separate and sometimes joint.

“It is exceedingly difficult for us literates to experience anything approaching the vividness and intensity with which surrounding nature spontaneously presents itself to the members of an indigenous, oral community. Yet as we saw in the previous chapters, Merleau-Ponty’s careful phenomenology of perceptual experience had begun to disclose, underneath all of our literate abstractions, a deeply participatory relation to things and to the earth, a felt reciprocity curiously analogous to the animistic awareness of indigenous, oral persons.”

— David Abram

I sat me down to write a simple story

Which maybe in the end became a song

Our unalienable story underneath all texts

The story? Is there purpose? Could it be? Is there information? Can we read the signs and the directions?

Conversations that Mind and Matter

Is there understanding? Understanding understanding?

Well along our way, our practices and tasks once again turned one meaningful, meaning-making-moving-with, do we leave breadcrumbs?

Do we leave them by design or by default?

Do others follow?

Do you do what needs done?