From: Colin Stark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>"By Chaord, I mean any self-organizing, adaptive, nonlinear, complex
>>community or system, whether physical, biological or social, the behavior
of
>>which exhibits characteristics of both order and chaos. Or, more simply
>>stated, a Chaord is any chaotically ordered complex."
>>
>>Hock seems to be saying that Chaord is nature's way of organizing.
>> Do list members agree?
>
>yes
Those who beleive "nature's way" is the prefered future, do not understand
"nature's way". THis is nature's way:
---------------------------
IN THE LANGUAGE OF ECOLOGY -- a language which it behooves us all
to learn—the conditions of an imperiled environment are described
in a few short and pungent words: 'drawdown,' 'overshoot,'
'crash,' and 'die-off.'
"Drawdown is the process by which the dominant species in an
ecosystem uses up the surrounding resources faster than they can
be replaced and so ends up borrowing, in one form or another,
from other places and other times. For our age, though the
examples of such depletion are numerous, the most vivid is that
of fossil fuels. In the space of a little more than a hundred
years we have used up perhaps 80 percent of the buried remains of
the Carboniferous period -- oil, gas, and coal—that were
deposited over a period of a hundred million years or more, and
what's more we have become totally dependent on continuing the
process. One can argue about the due-date, but the outcome is
certain.
"Overshoot is the inevitable and irreversible consequence of
continued drawdown, when the use of resources in an ecosystem
exceeds its carrying capacity and there is no way to recover or
replace what was lost. It takes many forms, depending on the
system, but perhaps the clearest and in some ways the most
touching is exemplified by Easter Island. When it was first
settled a thousand years ago, the island was a rich and forested
land covered with palms and a small native tree called the
sophora, and on its sixty-four square miles a prosperous and
literate culture developed organizational and engineering skills
that enabled it to erect the famous massive stone statues all
along the coastline. For reasons lost in time, the population of
the island over the years increased to something like 4,000
people, apparently necessitating a steady drawdown of vegetation
that eventually deforested the entire island and exhausted its
fertile soils. Somewhere along the line came overshoot,
unstoppable and final, and then presumably conflict over scarce
food acreage, and ultimately warfare and chaos. By the time of
Captain Cook's voyage to the island in the 1775 there were barely
630 people left, eking out a marginal existence; a hundred years
later, only 155 islanders remained.
"Crash, as with the Easter Islanders, is what happens after
overshoot-- —a precipitate decline in species numbers. Once a
population has exceeded the capacity of its environment in one
life-giving respect or another, there is no recourse, nothing to
be done until that population is reduced to the level at which
the resources can recover and are once again adequate to sustain
it. Take the case of the famous Irish potato famine. For well
over a century, year after steady year, the British encouraged
and the Irish developed a near-total dependency upon a single
dietary mainstay, the potato, and the population of the island
grew from 2 million people to more than 8 million. Then suddenly
in 1845 a natural competitor for the potato came along in the
form of a parasitic fungus that got to the tubers somewhat before
the people did and turned the potatoes into sticky, inedible,
mucous globs. Crash: within a generation the country was
devastated, more than half the population died or emigrated, and
those who remained were reduced to a poverty that diminished only
a century later.
"Die-off and, in its final form, die-out, is a phenomenon common
in the history of zoology and botany, and the dodo and the
passenger pigeon are not exceptional. There is, for example, the
everyday but suggestive experience of yeast cells introduced into
a wine vat. Enormously successful as a species, they gobble up
nutrients from the sugary crushed grapes around them and expand
their population without a thought to the consequences of
drawdown; within weeks, however, the 'pollution' they
produce -- alcohol and carbon dioxide, which of course is what
the fermentation is all about—have so filled their environment
that they are unable to survive. The resulting crash, in that
vat at least, means an acute die-off and then extinction.
"Where along this ecological trajectory can we locate the
modern -- the theoretically sapient -- human?" [p.p. 24-26]
DWELLERS IN THE LAND, by Kirkpatrick Sale;
New Society Pub., 1991, Phone: 800-253-3605; ISBN 0-86571-225-5.
