Cycles

Inherent in the recognition and celebration of the darkest time of the year is the return of the light.  Our confidence in the promise of the winter solstice is reflected in the birth of Christ, the miraculous Hannukah light that carried us through the dark time, the reinforcing of community ties of Kwanzaa, and personal resolve to reinvent ourselves in our New Year’s resolutions.  Individuals, events, and even institutions begin and end, but others of similar nature begin again and again in endless cycles.

Cycles come in all sizes, from the almost instantaneous birth and death of a subatomic particle to the lifetime of the universe, whose demise and rebirth we will have to take on faith for the next few billion years.

Ecological communities, as well, pass through a succession of states leading to a climax state that eventually gives way to a new cycle.  The initial pioneering phase appears in an area that has recently been swept clean by landslide, fire, bomb blast, clearcut, Walmart store demolition, or whatever.  Pioneers are highly invasive, fast growing annual weeds that actively gain or cede ground over the first few years.  You know them as the ones that take over your newly turned garden beds.  If left alone, herbaceous perennials will move in and shade out the weeds, and animals will fill available niches.  In some instances, perennial grasses of this stage will become the climax inhabitant, but in most others, larger and longer-lived trees move in to eventually create a climax forest.  Differing environments will result in climax communities with countless combinations of species.

While the pioneering phase is short lived and chaotic, the climax stage is a stable, highly organized, efficient, and specialized community of species.  The climax stage is the last stage of succession and is followed by the demise of that community and the birth of another.  The climax system may continue essentially unchanged for thousands of years, but its fatal flaws are built in from the start.  In the pursuit of efficiency, climax systems eliminate redundancies and specialize different functions.  These are its fatal flaws.  Specialization and the elimination of redundancies make all the species contributing to the viability of the system heavily interdependent. The system has lost much of its resilience.  This means that a single disease, pest, or act of nature that destroys one member in the system might bring down the system as a whole.   A climax system is a beautiful and impressive thing to behold, which makes its fragility a hard thing to accept.  Still harder to accept is that it is natural that it should eventually die and be replaced.  The belief in renewal at winter solstice is easy because we can see by the next day that the days are getting longer.   The longer a successional cycle is, the more we tend to see it as unchangeable reality, and if it seems to be in trouble at some point, we fear its end and fail to see the possibilities beyond it.

My hypothesis is that the nature of all things is cyclical. Studies have been done that apply the biological succession model to the development and evolution of human institutions.  It’s pretty easy to see that as civilizations mature, they become more organized, efficient, and specialized.  Civilizations end for the same reasons:  failure of part brings down the whole,  An advanced civilization’s lack of resilience can be seen in its inflexible hierarchy and ideology, extreme specialization, and failure to adapt.

Our corporate capitalist, fossil-fueled civilization has now encompassed the entire planet.  As the dominant order becomes more firmly entrenched, change becomes the enemy because change is inherently destabilizing.  Yet change is the real essence of life and will not be stopped.  Something has to give, and that will have to be our current order.  We can continue to talk about endless growth and extraction of endless resources but that, plainly, is not to be.  We can either keep our heads in the sand and back into the future unprepared, or we can adapt to the new conditions we can clearly see developing and grow into a new understanding of our purpose.  

Human systems are different from other natural systems in that we can see dangers looming ahead of us and can change our behavior to avoid or at least mitigate those dangers.  In fact, we are doing that right now at the local level in many ways.  The  tragedy of civilizations is that, even though those that  wield power can see that the  political and economic institutions are failing, they nevertheless soldier on into oblivion because they can see no way to abandon the failing ways and still remain in control.  That is why meaningful change must come from all of us. (that is, you and me.)  
We are in the dark time:  the end and the beginning.  We have all the tools we need:  renewable energy technologies, food growing techniques, and an awareness of our place on this planet that will heal our climate and allow us to live in harmony within the life system that we depend on.  The question is, will we be able to muster the imagination and resolve to act in time?  A good New Year’s resolution would be to personally change some aspects of our lives to gracefully hasten the end of the old regime and bring in the new.