Succession of ecology,
success of revolution
Notes on ecological succession as a model for successful post-industrial
community building
In ecology, "succession"
is the term used to refer to the sequence of living creatures who
appear on land that is new and empty of life, or that has been stripped
of life for some reason (perhaps by a clear-cut). On a barren sand
dune, for instance, hardy, drought tolerant grasses are the first
to appear. Over time, the grasses grow and die and add biomass
to the sand. This organic matter in the sand helps to build soil that
can retain water and nutrients. This allows the growth of less hardy,
more specialized leafy plants, which continue building the soil at
an accelerated rate. These plants give shelter for the seedlings of
shrubs, and then trees, which grow up into a forest to provide shelter
for a whole host of other inhabitants: animal, plant, and fungal.
From the simple dune ecology based on grasses comes a complex and
diverse ecology with many different creatures, species, niches and
relationships.
I think that the example of ecological succession is profoundly relevant
to our current situation. Civilization has been spreading across the
globe for millennia, consuming the human and ecological communities
in its path. It is like a raging global forest fire (which has burned
up most of its fuel). It is an avalanche hurtling down a mountainside
(and almost at the bottom). It is an exploding, erupting volcano (with
the pressure of its subterranean source almost spent). Civilization
has destroyed so many cultures, so many species, so much of the surface
of the planet.
When it comes crashing down, inevitably, some time in the next couple
of decades, we will be left with a world which has been clear-cut
of life. The great Cedar forests of the Middle East have been cut,
and replaced by deserts. The massive herds of Buffalo that roamed the Great
Plains have been killed, the grasses they once fed on are almost gone,
and more of the prairie soil those grasses grew in blows away every
year. The immense flocks of sky-darkening Passenger Pigeons are gone,
as are the Chestnut groves that fed them. In the last fifty years
alone the populations of ocean fish have been reduced by ninety percent.
Who knows what more we'll lose (that is, what
more will be destroyed) before energy shortages, ecological collapse
and human resistance finally end this reign of destruction?
Our loses are cultural as well as ecological. Centuries of systematic
genocide have resulted in the deaths of many tens (if not hundreds)
of millions of indigenous people, and the corresponding losses, suppression
and appropriation of their culture. Most of the more than 6500 languages
in the world are on the verge of dying out and being replaced by English
or other colonial languages as a result of this. And so we are left,
for the most part, with a cultural wasteland in which the single most
popular internet search is "Britney
Spears."
The cultural and ecological wasteland that we will be left with is
not so different from the sand dunes of the succession example; we
have lost so much of the forest-like diversity of the human and ecological
world before civilization.
That's
why I think we have some valuable lessons to learn from those hearty
dune grasses. The first species to arrive in succession are rugged
generalists. They don't
grow especially fast, or especially tall, or produce especially large
fruit. (If they did grow especially tall without protection, the wind
might blow them over, and if they grew large fruit it would be unprotected
from the heat and sun and might dry out.) No, the time for these species
has not yet come. The grasses can deal with a range of harsh weather
and temperature extremes, because that's
what you expect in the bare desert. But over time their actions will
create a more stable, gentle environment in which a richer and more
varied community will flourish.
These generalists are good at a lot of things; they're
not specialists, just good enough to get by because that's
what counts. They're
very patient because they know that there's
a lot of growing, healing and building of the soil that needs to happen.
They have the fortitude and strength to make it through dry times.
They spread bit-by-bit, setting their roots and bearing their seed.
These strong, patient, caring generalists are the sorts of people
who I'm
hoping to equip by writing In the Wake. None of the information here
is the sort of stuff that would boggle the mind of a graduate student
in Water Sanitation Systems Engineering, or Combustion Thermodynamics,
but it's the basic information
on water purification and cooking stoves (and so on) that people need
-
that they can learn quickly, remember, and pass on to other people
to make real, concrete differences in a disaster situation.
And that's
what I think is one of the most important priorities for industrial
collapse. Not complex, hierarchical institutions of university-educated
specialties that are dependant on sophisticated technology and industrial
"renewables."
Those arrangements are fragile and require the sort of stability that
we are far from guaranteed in the coming years. People experienced in such situations have noted,
"Only
simple arrangements are effective in emergencies."
That's
why we need many, many small and tightly knit groups of people with
some basic skills and tools, a flexible and adaptive spirit, a knowledge
of how things came to be this way and a vision of how they want
things to be. People with a basic knowledge of first-aid, food
growing and gathering, tool making, community building, and other
simple skills that they can use and share.
When I started reading about the great work that groups like HealthWrights
have done with people with disabilities in the non-industrialized
world, I was struck by how non-technical their work really was. When they helped to create devices to give people
greater independence and autonomy they didn't
need advanced degrees in engineering, or precision-machined aluminum
wheelchairs -
to the contrary, precision industrial wheelchairs couldn't
hold up to the rough terrain! The essence of their work, I saw, was
simply caring, paying attention and listening to the needs of the
people they were trying to help, and using basic carpentry and handicraft
skills to make what was needed. I think that's
an excellent example of the sort of "grasses" approach that I'm
trying to describe.
I must admit that I very often worry about the darker times that
may be ahead. Historical collapses have frequently involved varying
degrees of violence between individuals and groups over resources
as well as general displacement and deprivation. And to make the situation
worse, the dominant culture has created a society of people who are
isolated, alienated from each other (and themselves), fearful and
paranoid, and generally lacking in strong family and community bonds
and skills -
the sorts of things that often help people get through hard times.
And with this, I can't
help but think of the analogy of the sand dunes again. Like society
at large, the dunes are made up of tiny, atomized particles that can
move, slump and drift suddenly and unstably. When I think of collapse,
I wonder: Will these sand dunes slide and swallow up the few oases
of life and community that remain? Will rioting and brutal struggles
over resources destroy even more?
Which is, of course, where the dune grasses come again. In nature,
the intertwining roots of the grasses hold and stabilize the dunes.
In that same way these small, generalist groups - call them Collapse
Co-operatives, or what you will -
can reach out and provide knowledge and basic skills and tools for
dealing with the situation. And crucially, they can offer stabilizing confidence,
a direction to go in, and a vision of how things could be.
No one knows for sure exactly how things will happen in the coming
years, but there is much we can do about it. So let us gather our
seed. Let us plant our grasses; let us begin succession in this desert
that civilization has created. It's
not going to be easy, but grasses lead to soil, and soil leads to
shrubs; and some day the world will be forest, again.
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