The tranquil and barren island of Rapa Nui, commonly known as Easter Island, illustrates the rich cultural and ecological history of the self-sustaining Rapa Nui civilization that existed in complete isolation from the 13th – 17th century A.D. The island’s several hundred abandoned megalithic statues (moai) stand tall amongst the treeless, grass-covered terrain, stoically gazing across the region as monumental markers of the tireless physical labor and determination of the fallen Rapa Nui people. Unfortunately, what remains of Easter Island’s characteristic statues has since been referred to as a symbol of self-destructive and unsustainable practices adopted by the Rapa Nui people.

With this in mind, is it realistic to believe that the same cultural practices that once sustained this population for generations suddenly became detrimental? A further, more comprehensive examination would reveal that the people of Easter Island endured the perfect storm of environmental, physical, and social burdens that eventually led to the demise of this once-thriving Indigenous society.

The inactive volcanic landmass known as Easter Island is one of the most isolated human inhabited landforms in the world, with the nearest continental body (South America) located nearly 3,750 km away[1]. Initial arrival of Polynesian settlers to Easter Island from more western islands, such as the Marquesas, Tuamoutu, and Gambier Islands, dates back as early as 800 AD[2]. But, despite potential ecological challenges associated with geographic location and isolation, the island was once densely forested with palm trees and other lush flora predating Polynesian settlement[3]. If that was the case, then how could this vast deforestation event have occurred?

As geographer Jared Diamond puts it, this is the result of their cultural “ecocide”, the wilful destruction of the natural environment by humans. His hypothesis claims that the Rapa Nui people were responsible for their own cultural demise due to their mindless practices of deforestation and over consumption – ultimately resulting in famine and civil unrest[4]. Several other researchers have also argued the idea that the people of Rapa Nui were shamelessly clear cutting their forests to use as resources in supporting their growing population[5].

While sediment records from the island mark that the onset of deforestation coincides with Polynesian settlement around 750- 1150 AD, Rapa Nui populations were still thriving even well after this period of time – suggesting that this simple accord of deforestation could not be the only reason for their cultural demise[6].

Because of Easter Island’s sheer isolation amid the Pacific Ocean, there is but a small number of native plant and animal species that can naturally prosper there; as a result, pre-existing wildlife is highly vulnerable to invasive species[7]. An indirect effect of settler immigration to the island was the introduction of an invasive rat species, Rattus exulans[8]. Since the rats arrived on the island with next to no predators, their populations were able to flourish. The prosperity of these rats ravaged habitats essential for other naturally occurring wildlife and even lead to local species extinctions, ultimately contributing to and worsening the larger issue of island deforestation[9].

The struggle for survival on Easter Island following the gradual destruction of natural resources only intensified after initial contact with European Explorers. One of the first accounts of Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggeveen, in 1772 describes the unarmed and peaceful nature of the Rapa Nui people, while later revealing plans to “defend” at all costs should him and his men be attacked during their invasion of the territory[10].

By the late 1870s, thousands of Rapa Nui inhabitants had been enslaved by the Europeans, leaving just over 100 native islanders to fend for themselves on their land that was then ravaged with new diseases and characterized by a great deal of social disarray[11]. During their invasion, European explorers also brought over more invasive species including rabbits, cows, horses, sheep, goats, and pigs—all of which severely degraded the island’s ecology[12].

The history of the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island reveals many lessons about the interrelated impacts of geographic isolation, invasive species, a complex history of deforestation, and European colonization. Though it is widely believed that the Indigenous people of Easter Island induced their own societal demise through a blatant disrespect for the finite nature of the surrounding environment, their misfortune is more reflective of colonial pursuits of land, money, and resources. A more balanced history of Easter Island than is offered by the “ecocide” hypothesis is owed to the people of Rapa Nui, as the collapse of this imaginative culture can be regarded as a microcosm of the cumulative and detrimental global impacts of colonialism throughout the last century and a half.

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It isn’t the burgeoning global human population that is the main threat to planetary sustainability, but rather the escalating expectations of a global human population rapidly committing itself in ever-increasing waves to the current Western “mindset.” This mindset, crystallized by modern economics, generates a world in which economic actors operate as if each individual were an infinitely desiring self, driven by a dynamic of constant progress, and thereby requiring an infinite bounty of resources to meet their infinite desires. These exploding, fantastic infinities – now playing out in a globalizing economy – need, reflect and reinforce each other. 

However, we now find ourselves confronted by a new “frame” that presents us with a fundamental challenge – an interdependent, bounded and finite world. The unexpected arrival of the first powerful symbol of the finite in modern times – the Earth from space as a bounded sphere – and the grimness of subsequent ecological warnings are proving to be catastrophic to the continued proliferation of endless infinities. 

This boundedness is the fundamental theme underscoring, expressing and exemplifying such cultural shifts as the rise of ecological understanding, the deepening of environmental consciousness, the potentially transformative insights of ecological economics and the arrival of pre-emptive mourning for a deteriorating future. The tightening of boundaries around the Earth is causing what I call an “implosion of sensibility” – a slow replacement of the images, metaphors and ideals of the infinite modern self, with a new (and also very old) ethos based on a finite, Earth-bound person, whose growth is intensive rather than extensive

Explosion

In the 1970s, Marshall McLuhan argued that with the arrival of the image of Earth from space, and the growth of the “satellite surround,” there was no longer any wilderness left on Earth. More profoundly, and by making reference to the familiar image from the psychology textbooks of the figure/ground reversal (enshrined in the duck/rabbit or the kissers/flower vase), McLuhan stated that the Earth, which was once the ground on which the human “figured”, had now flipped into a figure within the ground of the human enterprise. We can focus our attention on the world as a whole. We have attained the God’s eye view. 

Ironically enough, this revelation of the Earth’s extraordinary living boundedness was the unexpected result of a long dynamic of replacing God with ourselves. The aspirational agenda of modernity – freedom from constraint, movement, dependence on others and immortality – derived from our original model, the omnipotent, omniscient, God.

This agenda was fuelled by the well-known sagas of the scientific and industrial revolutions. Those astonishing breakthroughs and breakaways from previous natural and technical constraints on population, agriculture and energy use; as well as the toppling of the ancient fossilized regimes of king and priest in the related sequence of political revolutions. This explosive dynamic of revolt from constraint was reinforced by a complementary dynamic, articulated most powerfully in the poetic stirrings of late 18th and early 19th century Romanticism. 

While Romanticism represents a resistance to the bleaker aspects of the emerging modern world, it ironically contributed to the heroic glorification of the “strivings” of humankind to “break all the chains.” Romantic individualism is both an internalization of the new powers of emerging modern heroes (cf. Napoleon), and a reaction against the mobilization of mass numbers of people in industrial, military and sociopolitical contexts. The Romantic, individualist hope is under construction. Human beings are not yet free of all constraints, but perhaps in time and with enough resources they will become as God. 

Infinite Economics

This soaring desire was captured by the arrival of modern standard economics, which began as a description of a quickening movement of goods, services and people. From the middle of the 18th to the end of the 19th century, it evolved into a strange quasi-physicalist model (dubbed neo-classicism), sketching out an abstract market of utilitarian individuals rationally maximizing the fulfillment of their infinite desires under conditions of scarcity.

The appeal of this model is its explanatory power, simplicity, purity and its formulaic predictability. It blends aspirations of the Romantic individual, with the emerging toolbox of 19th century physics and statistics. Individuals have desires deemed essential to self-fulfillment; these desires can be managed and adjudicated through market prices; everyone involved has perfect information; supply curves beautifully intersect demand curves; all markets instantly respond; everything tends towards equilibrium. 

A further appeal of this model was that it captured – and has subsequently fostered – a modern phenomenon dubbed “disembedding.” The basic idea of disembedding, as originally described in the work of Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation, 1944) and adopted by later influential sociologists like Anthony Giddens, focuses on how the arrival of capitalism uprooted labour, land and capital from their original contexts and dissolved them into marketable commodities. Ripping people and things out of the web of their original relationships enables them to be priced according to “exchange value” as opposed to “use value,” and thus makes them inter-comparable with everything else. Their specific character is replaced by whatever they are now worth in the universal market. 

What has made this particularly poisonous in the modern era is the combining of this dynamic of capitalist disembedding and theoretical purity, with the arrival of cheap fossil fuels. This provides a seemingly frictionless landscape over which people, goods and services can move effortlessly and infinitely. For example, California strawberries arrive at our tables year round practically for free. This frictionless landscape extends throughout the world, corrupting and unmooring everything from place, time and even language, making it harder to pin down what’s going wrong, particularly with ourselves. 

Implosion

Climate change is the return of heat, that is, friction to our lives. The work of the Stockholm Resilience Centre headed by Johan Rockström on Earth boundaries suggests that four of their nine boundaries, such as nitrogen loading, have now been crossed by humanity. These are among the many converging facts and concepts that have begun to generate the opposite of the exploding, centrifugal infinite. Like the mechanism and casing around an atomic bomb – a timed series of conventional explosions that are driven inward to spark a critical mass – the detonations of the ecological crisis are driving us inward, towards a re-valuation of our immanent dwelling place. We are witness to a counter-force: the centripetal implosion of sensibility. 

This suggests we have moved into a period where people are looking for the infinite as embodied in the finite, the globe as locally focused. What is striking about our time is the way in which this kind of feeling has become increasingly widespread as a necessary element of environmental consciousness – perhaps captured best in the high-grained photographs of Ansel Adams and others. It is in many ways a resurgent homage to the call of the material world, given that we currently live in the least materialistic culture in history. If we actually cared about material objects, we wouldn’t treat them as nothing more than temporary carriers of dreams, to be tossed away when new dreams swim into view.

The “one world” syndrome poses a problem. As economist Kenneth Boulding said, “The most worrying thing about [today’s] Earth is that there seems to be no way of preventing it from becoming one world. If there is only one world, then if anything goes wrong, everything goes wrong” (from “Spaceship Earth Revisited”). In environmental terms, this sensitivity began with the arrival of the nuclear age, with the prospect of immediate destruction, and was joined by the revelations of the movement of pesticides and other chemicals through the intricate web of global ecosystems, as most famously sketched out by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. We are plugged in, whether we like it or not, to the ultimate ecological interconnectedness of our bounded world. The web is the wiring diagram of the implosion, the internal expression of our boundedness. 

As this cultural implosion proceeds, we begin to rediscover the old ways of life of peoples who lived within boundaries out of necessity, often limits not of their own choosing. Peoples who lived according to the disciplines of nature now speak to us with increasing resonance. They speak of what it means to cope and thrive in a bounded world, in a world of deep embeddedness. Their hard-earned wisdoms leap over modernity and post-modernity to re-emerge as urgently relevant. There are multiple expressions of this re-emergence, from these Indigenous teachings to the developing insights of ecological economics, from “slow” living to a resurrection of the sacredness embodied in the natural world by religious traditions. 

Most importantly, we are drawn to a spirituality of immanence, rather than transcendence. The Western tradition still struggles with the legacy of a widespread belief, however crude theologically, in an external creator separate from creation. The so-called “death of God” may have finished off that deity, but it left the structure intact, like a haunted house emptied of its resident ghosts. In a finite world we are abandoning the projects of our elders. In other traditions, such as Hinduism or Taoism, the universe is an internal, self-organizing phenomenon. The externalist metaphors, such as the artist standing back from his or her creation and seeing that it was good, are replaced by metaphors such as the spider spinning its web from its own innards, or, more pointedly female, birth from a universal womb. In learning to live in a finite world, we look to self-organization: place rather than space; intensive rather than extensive growth; inscape not escape.

Among the many aspects of this rich implosion, I want to focus on three finitudes. 

1. Conditions, not Constraints

First, we need to consider the notion of limits. I once read of a madman who asphyxiated himself because he was trying to find a substitute for breathing. As part of his madness, he was convinced that having to breathe every few seconds was a conspiracy to trap him in some complex web of deceit. This is a fair analogy to those destroying the planet in the name of economic freedom. 

A finite model would propose that true freedom involves a recognition of our dependence on planetary processes – that we are not victims of natural constraints, but beneficiaries of natural conditions. Coming face-to-face with those conditions challenges us personally and socially in profound ways. For example, we are witnessing a current obsession with one-way travel to Mars. This smells like despair, a culture grasping at the end of the infinite and turning away in fear from the prospect of being trapped on a shrinking and degraded planet. It is a flight (literally) from self-understanding as creatures of the Earth. 

2. Abundance, not Scarcity

Contrary to obvious and real concerns over growing scarcities, resource constraints and burgeoning population growth, learning to live in our situation requires the reintroduction of a counter-intuitive belief in a fundamentally abundant world. 

In some ancient and Indigenous traditions there is a sense of gifted abundance. Let us call this an ontology of primary abundance. We did not create the world, we do not keep it running, we do not provide the air, sun, water, fire, animals, plants and the rest of the things around us, including us. These are essentially given to us. The prevalence of “gift relationships,” however complicated, is grounded in homage or replication of the foundational gift of things. When scarcities arise, they do so because the gods (or God) are (is) angry, usually because human beings have sinned, made ritualistic mistakes, or otherwise strayed. Perhaps the best known examples come from hunting rituals among many traditional peoples, including, in Canada, the Mistassini Cree of the James Bay region where the animals are the orchestrators of the hunt, and require obedience to strict rules about how an animal is to be hunted and killed. If this obedience is ignored or transgressed, the animals withdraw their abundance. This is an ontology of abundance based on mutual trust, and assures an endless flow of sustainable life, if the wellsprings of that life are treated with respect and consideration.   

Beginning in the early modern period society began to shift towards an ontology of primary scarcity and secondary abundance. It is ironic that with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and the first taste of general wealth, there began to develop a dynamic of false, temporary scarcities associated with the emerging spending power of middle classes, including the deliberate creation of fashion and the arrival of untethered commodity fetishism. It is at this point that early economic theoreticians (beginning with Bernard de Mandeville, David Hume, and Adam Smith) articulated arguments that these false scarcities were in fact the primary condition of humanity. In a world in which needs and desires were potentially infinite, scarcity was inevitable. This led to the reversal enshrined on page one of economics textbooks: we are in a world of primary scarcity that needs to be “developed.” In such a world nature will not and cannot supply us on its own, so our task is to create a secondary abundance to fill up the hole where the original abundance once was. 

The problem of course is that this artificial abundance can only mask the loss of the original abundance, leading to a berserk desperation for “development.” Each new product holds out the hope that it will assuage our loss, but in fact it merely reminds us of something beckoning to us, just out of reach. We require economic growth in order to repair the ecological damage caused by economic growth. 

In contrast, a world of abundance knows nothing of limits. It knows about flourishing according to generous rules to be acknowledged and respected as the source of all the original gifts, emerging out of the primary, immanent abundance of things. It is a world of joy, of radiating being, of generosity, of learning to rejoice in a finite world. 

3. Cycles, not lines

Essential to a worldview committed to breaking limits is the image of the straight road ahead – we drive to the border and then smash through the frontier into the infinite beyond. Modernity is all about abandoning the past in the name of progress. Moving inward seems like a failure of nerve. But with the resurgence of the finite, this linearity has reached the end of the line. 

Yet, what is progress if not a civilizational attempt to move forward in a world that has lost a transcendent purpose? What are our lives if not a line that begins at birth and stops at death? Is there anything more finite than that? 

Inscape, not escape

Our desire to escape the “limits” of the Earth is like our desire to escape the limits of language. Just as the philosopher Wittgenstein pointed out that language is not a cage preventing us from direct unmediated connection to the real world, so the physical and biological webs that make us who we are, are not constraints on us, but the conditions of our existence. In order to break out of the false cage of our boundedness, we threaten to enter onto a barren landscape without markers, where we and language go astray together. If there is one overriding danger from uncontrolled infinitism, it may be that it is the degradation of language, that we can no longer speak to ourselves convincingly in meaningful terms about the urgency of the dangers we face. We find ourselves in agony trying to find the right words to argue, persuade, compel a world that outwardly proclaims its conversion to all things environmental, but continues to utter mantras of unending economic growth and prosperity. 

The best example of where this leads comes from Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment), a young man who becomes a murderer and outcast because he believes that murder is a gesture of total freedom by “extraordinary men.” By committing such an act Raskolnikov becomes a lost soul, drifting aimlessly through an opaque world, and increasingly incoherent to himself and others. Only by admitting his guilt can he recover ordinary life and meaning, and find peace.

If Dostoyevsky is right, then learning to face up to, and truly live on the Earth again, is potentially the great outcome of this pivotal moment in human history. In our struggle to cope with our situation, we may become clearer about what it is to be truly creatures of Earth, and learn finally, again, what it is to live in a finite world.

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In his latest book, Haydn Washington clearly documents and discusses the value and limitations surrounding the development of our understanding (and misunderstanding) of sustainability, as well as the initiatives and agreements it has spawned. He argues for ecological sustainability rather than sustainable development, which he believes has been co-opted and compromised by those who want to maintain growth and “business as usual” in the face of ecological and resource limits.

The author clearly explains economic, ecological and social sustainability and the relationships between them, along with the multiplier role of population. He also discusses the importance of ethics, a sense of wonder, and the need to nurture these, especially in children.

The role of denial is a key obstacle to necessary personal and cultural transformation. This is an important area requiring much greater understanding than it is commonly given. Firstly, denial is largely subconscious – so, denial of the denial is the norm! Secondly, this characteristic paradoxically has positive origins as a part of our survival strategy. However, over time it becomes both personally and culturally maladaptive.

In all of these areas, Washington provides the data and explanations the reader needs to make wise and responsible decisions, both personally and politically, and to get started in initiating effective action. 

In addition to providing many valuable lists of things we need to do, he puts forward nine “solutions” – really nine areas with specific suggestions for action – that must be central to the development of an integrated program for fundamental and progressive change.

Washington’s argument is that since at least the dawn of agriculture, our species has been undermining life-enabling ecological processes and destroying ecosystems and the species within them. Now, as a result of a number of interrelated “cultural maladaptations,” we face a major crisis of unsustainability – the system is seriously broken and in need of healing. This unsustainability is being caused particularly by:

• Our political and business commitment to endless growth in production and consumption despite living on a planet with finite resources, many of which have already passed the peak in possible extraction.
• Our perception of ourselves as special and not subject to the same bio-ecological limits that affect other species. In fact, because we evolved (and are continuing to evolve) within the same ecosystems as other species, we are subject to essentially the same limits. Furthermore, because we are part of nature, Washington argues (along with the deep ecologists and ecocentrists) that we should regard and treat nature as a whole system having intrinsic value – and rights – rather than being selectively treated as just a resource, having only utilitarian value. 
• The low level of interest in, and understanding of, bio-ecological processes by most of the population, particularly in the most industrialized countries. Many of those who claim to advocate sustainability have an increasingly narrow view of it. They tend to neglect its essential qualitative aspects, such as caring for and love of nature, responsibility, ethics, beauty, harmony and the sacredness of nature (what Washington characterizes as the “old, strong” sustainability). They instead focus on quantitative measures, such as carbon footprints, resource use, pollution, waste production and environmental impact (the “new, weak” sustainability).
• And finally, the driving forces and associated confusions of modernism, postmodernism, social constructivism, anthropocentrism, Cornucopianism, mechanistic materialism, neoliberalism and market forces. Washington clearly explains all of these, and many more, relevant terms.

This book does not aim to provide technical information on how you and I could live sustainably. Rather it provides us with the essential information to, firstly, no longer say we don’t have enough information to act, and secondly, to get started, alone and with others, in making genuine progress toward truly living sustainably.

This is Washington’s sixth (and I consider best) book on the environment, following: Human Dependence on Nature, How to Help Solve the Environmental Crisis (2012), Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand (2011), The Wilderness Knot (2009), A Sense of Wonder (2002), and Ecosolutions: Environmental Solutions for the World and Australia (1991)

Demystifying Sustainability: Towards Real Solutions by Haydn Washington, London: Routledge, 2015, 222 pages. Reviewed by Stuart B. Hill.

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We ought to have rebelled. We ought to have said it was nuts to reduce all of literature, and by extension all of life, to various kinds of conflict. But that did not occur to us.

Our grade 10 English teacher claimed that all literature is about conflict – within the person, among people, or between humans and nature. She then assigned us to put each of our readings into one or more of the three conflict boxes.

We ought to have rebelled. We ought to have said it was nuts to reduce all of literature, and by extension all of life, to various kinds of conflict. But that did not occur to us.

We had all been brought up in a world defined as theatres of conflict: the free world versus the commies, righteousness versus sin, modern progress versus primitive misery, order versus chaos, us versus them, the Leafs versus the Habs. Most news stories were framed as one side against another. Science was the conquest of nature. Economics, sports, international relations, law and politics were more or less fierce competitions if not open warfare. 

Besides, grade 10 was not a hotbed of critical thinking. Mostly it was a hotbed of hormones and insecurities. We were all far too consumed with winning peer acceptance and hoping for mutually enthusiastic carnal experience to notice that our main aspirations were focused on the opposites of conflict. We did not see that our own lives and fantasies contradicted how our English class and surrounding culture were framing the world. 

Not much changed after grade 10 English. Conflict continued to be reported as the main story, though the old Cold War contestants were now joined by various clubs of old white guys facing the rising forces of colonial liberation, civil rights, gender equity, transparent government, pollution control and rock and roll.

As before, our lives were only sometimes consumed by conflict. We slouched into adulthood with our uneven allotments of contest and struggle, sharing, experimenting, messing up, imagining, coupling, laughing, crying, goofing around and dabbling in the non-medical use of mind-altering substances.

Although our literature and movies often featured battles with the KGB, giant sharks and the undead, we also had Jack Kerouac, Jorge Luis Borges and Monty Python. We had birth control technologies and Woodstock. We read, saw and experienced life that for all its puzzlements and tragedies was far richer and more complex than any simple conflict narrative could capture.

When conflict is the main frame for stories, it easily becomes the main frame for observation and explanation

Nevertheless, all that richness and complexity remains on the margins in a world that still favours the grade 10 English theme. The stories that get most attention today in literature, the news and in public discussion still feature the drama of conflicts – competing ideologies, interests and institutions; battles for political power and economic advantage; clashes of cultures; struggles for wealth and influence; and fights over technological superiority, jobs, markets and positions.

The effect is crippling. When conflict is the main frame for stories, it easily becomes the main frame for observation and explanation. We see the conflicts and we miss or marginalize less dramatic developments and options that may serve us better. 

We notice the wars and neglect the foundations for peace. We report dramatic cures but not anticipatory prevention, big individual disasters but not broader declines, criminal acts but not law-abiding cultures, noisy confrontations but not quiet collaborations or lasting agreements. We take sides in jobs versus the environment and miss opportunities for serving both. We notice the basic winning and losing but overlook the more intricate world of ties and interactions. 

The old English assignment merits an overdue rejection. Conflict is not the defining characteristic of life and literature. Nor are desire, fate, uncertainty, love, loss, power or any other single candidates. A limited focus on any one degrades the others.

Our new task is to recover the mix of other-than-conflict themes. We could start with the classics of literature – even the great conflict stories such as Gilgamesh, The Iliad, Beowulf, Macbeth, The Origin of Species, and Green Eggs and Ham – and see how much else is there. Or we can start with the daily news.

Either way, the results should prepare us a little better for grade 11.

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“Science insists that we can’t express particulars. But we love things in particular, not in general … and when you love something in particular, you’re not inclined to see that it could be replaced by anything else.”
– Karen Houle, writer-in-residence, rare Charitable Research Reserve.

In one of the oldest villages of Upper Canada, a hidden gem of ecosystem biodiversity rivals the Niagara escarpment looming above it. The rare Charitable Research Reserve is a 370-hectare plot of protected land at the union of the Grand and Speed rivers near Blair, Ontario. Nearly as large as Vancouver’s Stanley Park, the reserve is home to over 24 habitat types, 600 species of plants, 379 animal species, eight kilometres of public hiking trails and a community garden.

Hikers, birders, historians and field naturalists all use the reserve. Biologists, ecologists, archaeologists, geologists and geographers from universities both near and far have conducted nearly four dozen research projects there since 2004. But now, rare is blurring the lines between natural science and the arts.

One such new departure is the Eastern Comma writer-in-residence program, a joint venture with philanthropic arts organization Musagetes. Named after a black and orange butterfly that frequents the reserve in summer, the program aims to bring “an additional layer of meaning” to the hard scientific research commonly conducted at rare, says executive director Stephanie Sobek-Swant. 

Seeking someone to inaugurate the Eastern Comma residency whose insights might be “more accessible” to the general public, and whose work reflected an interest in the environment, rare and Musagetes chose Karen Houle. Author of two nationally acclaimed books of poetry, Houle is also a philosophy professor at the University of Guelph with a background in biology. This “tripartite expertise,” as Houle calls it, made her an obvious choice.

During Houle’s time at the reserve, she developed an idea about what’s missing in science, and what might help us care more about the loss of Earth’s many unique species and ecosystems.

For three months in the fall of 2014, Houle’s residence was rare’s North House. The high-tech, solar-powered prototype dwelling was designed by a team of students and faculty members from Waterloo, Ryerson and Simon Fraser universities as an entry in the 2009 United States Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, finishing in fourth place. Active and passive solar features produce twice as much energy as the building uses, with the surplus powering the nearby Springbank farmhouse.

With floor-to-ceiling windows on three full sides and glass panels even in the bathroom, Houle found the house didn’t satisfy her dual human impulses for, as she puts it, both “closedness and openness.” With no privacy indoors, she said “I needed to go outside all the time. Even though in a funny way, you already are outside in that house.”

North House \ photo by nik harron

Luckily, being outside suited Houle’s kinetic writing process. “Any poem I’ve ever written,” she explained, “I’ve first had to move my body,” whether through walking, biking or riding in a train or car. “Things around you are moving at different paces, so you get this syncopated feeling – I guess that’s called parallax. There’s a rhythm that can start happening, and ultimately, poetry is about words jumping onto that rhythm.”

Eventually a poem would start to “knit itself together.”

Still, Houle’s creative process had much in common with the more observationally meticulous, lists-and-measures science usually carried out at rare. She spent a lot of time walking the trails, often in company with scientists, absorbing as many impressions as she could from the environment: “the alvars and the deciduous forest and leaf litter; the boardwalks over the marshy parts; the rehabilitated fields of high grass prairie; the soggy parts of Cruickston Park and Bauer Creek.” She peppered researchers with questions, and read articles based on their work at rare. Once she felt fully saturated with information, she would go out and just walk. Eventually a poem would start to “knit itself together,” she says. “I think that’s what they call ‘the muse’.”

Back “indoors” at North House, Houle would reread scientific papers, “looking for a phrase or a claim that felt like it had a kinship with the pieces I had pinned down.” These she used to “scaffold” her poems with empirical insights. Speaking publicly in March 2015, Houle described her use of research this way as a fast-track to precision and detail, relying on “hands and eyes that had spent more time than I had” finding patterns in rare’s ecosystems.

But this, to the poet, seemed to overlook something. “Where’s the particular in this? Where’s the, ‘this is the branch of this river that I love’?”It was as she read and reread the science that has been done at rare, however, that Houle began to articulate long-held reservations about the value that science places on universality. “I was reading those articles,” she recalled, “and had in my mind that, ‘Yeah, this is the kind of approach that’s needed, because it’s neutral or objective.’” Indeed, both the language and practice of science are rooted in the desire to describe universal general rules: E=MC² or, in Houle’s example, comparing one stand of butternut trees to another to draw conclusions about all butternut trees.

“Because of this methodological demand to generalize or universalize,” Houle argues, there’s no room within science for a “confession about loving one tree, or one person, or one patch of gravel.”

“There needs to be a kind of complementary gesture, able to express the love of and concern for the particular without that seeming irrational.”
– Karen Houle

The point resonates in the practical realm, she adds. When the science used to rationalize development, innovation and political decision making is expressed in universals, it makes a false assumption about the perfect substitutability of elements: if all butternuts are similar, any butternut is as good as another – and can substitute for it.

This “thinking that something can be replaced by something else with no real loss or concern,” Houle argues, is “getting us all in a lot of trouble.” Some things are simply not substitutable.

This is hardly news to many environmental thinkers. As Houle observes, it’s a love of particular places and things that inspires much scientific work, yet that love is rarely able to shine through.

Houle doesn’t know exactly how to counter the imperative of universality in science, only that “there needs to be a kind of complementary gesture, able to express the love of and concern for the particular without that seeming irrational.” We need, that is, to let science appreciate both the big universals and the unique particulars. One approach, she suggests, is to cultivate an “historical sense” of our surroundings: producing not just a “snapshot of a river,” but an understanding of this river, and its story over time.

Only by infusing the scientific search for general truths with the sensibilities of the particular – honed in the arts, history, or by a poetic ear that can “hear past the language of science” – can we truly appreciate the unique and the irreplaceable. We must learn not only how to know things, Houle argues, but also “how to be moved by things.”

The 2015 Eastern Comma writer-in-residence will be First Nations (Stó:lō) poet and author Lee Maracle. raresites.org

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NASA’s powerful Kepler telescope has shown that almost all stars in our galaxy have planets. This breathes new life into the Fermi Paradox, which considers why, given the age of the universe and vast number of planets, we have not encountered alien civilizations.

NASA’s powerful Kepler telescope has shown that almost all stars in our galaxy have planets. This breathes new life into the Fermi Paradox, which considers why, given the age of the universe and vast number of planets, we have not encountered alien civilizations.

Recently an astrophysics professor put forward a theory to answer the Fermi Paradox: All advanced civilizations inevitably destroy themselves through self-inflicted climate change brought on by intense energy harvesting of their home planets.

In this audio piece we meet Leonard, Rose and Lanny as they ponder the existence of aliens and whether disastrous climate change is inevitable for us and the rest of life in the universe.

All music in this piece was produced from this NASA Sputnik sample.

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Meanwhile in the realm of humans, mighty nations and comfortable individuals stand on small rises, wishing for bigger antlers. 

The birds got to sing and dance. The moose had to grow a huge unwieldy rack and bash heads with it. Maybe once, back in the evolutionary mists, a less elaborate version of that strategy had made some sense. But now he would rather be a bird.

Meanwhile in the realm of humans, mighty nations and comfortable individuals stand on small rises, wishing for bigger antlers. 

They imagine themselves to be the crowning achievements of evolution. And yet no level of magnificence seems to be enough. They are convinced that status depends on becoming ever richer and more powerful, controlling and exploiting more resources, possessing more impressive and intimidating equipment. 

Maybe once, back in the cultural mists, a less elaborate version of that strategy had made some sense. But now it’s mostly disagreeable, inefficient, unfair and incompatible with life on a planet that has declining tolerance for expanding demands.

This is an excerpt from A\J’s Fashion issue

To read the full column, order the Fasion issue to subscribe today.
 

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The world has seen many versions of Napoleon and his Russian campaign. Probably they have been with us forever. The ancient Greeks saw the phenomenon often enough to adopt “hubris” as the word for the dangerous combination of arrogance and error, overconfidence and disrespect.

Hubris is no longer merely individual. The most important modern forms are collective and institutional. Today’s equivalents of Napoleon and his Russian campaign include the political and economic arrangements that support ever-growing fossil fuel extraction and consumption when the best science says greenhouse gas emissions are already disrupting climate stability. They are also evident in the institutions that have allowed 80 individuals to amass wealth equivalent to that of the poorest 3.5 billion of the world’s human population, disregarding the practical as well as moral perils involved.

Hubris today is global. It is entrenched in the ambition and blindness of whole systems of convictions and organizations that guide most human activities on this planet. And the effects are mounting.

As the rippling consequences lead to more evidently desperate needs for change, we may expect calls for bold and authoritative action, for confident and charismatic leadership, for the granting of exceptional powers. Effectively, these will be calls for a green Napoleon and a Grande Armée of sustainability.

This is an excerpt from A\J’s Ultimate Health Issue

What’s the big idea? Get your copy of the Health issue or subscribe today to read Robert Gibson’s column.

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Western medicine has made great strides in disease control in the last century. Diagnostic technologies and surgical procedures have advanced. Life expectancy has increased dramatically in most parts of the world. Antibiotics, improvements in sanitation and hygiene, as well as vaccines, have eradicated or reduced many of the world’s deadliest communicable diseases.

Yet many other diseases are on the rise: allergic rhinitis, inflammatory bowel disease and autism, to name a few. Asthma occurred in 2.3 per cent of Canadians 15 years of age and over in 1979; it’s now over 8 per cent. Most experts believe that food allergies are more common today than a generation ago. Just as medicine cures one disease, it seems a new plague emerges. Despite all of the medical advances, we are in some ways less healthy than before. And there is evidence that some of our efforts to control disease are creating further problems.

There is no simple explanation for these contradictions. But the complexity of the factors at play – from human physiology, to personal lifestyles to public health policy, all interacting and evolving constantly – suggest that what we face is a systems problem. As such, systems theory and resilience thinking may give us better tools for managing health in the 21st century.

Donella Meadows, lead author of The Limits to Growth, defines a system as an “interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.” Systems are maintained by feedback loops that either reinforce or brake trajectories within the system. For example, when your body needs food, a feedback loop triggers hunger and you eat until you’re full, when another feedback loop triggers the release of Cholecystokinin (CCK), a satiation hormone, and you stop eating. Feedback loops can be slow or quick, depending on the system’s reaction time.

Complex and unpredictable
Feedback loops with different strengths often pull in different directions. Change to the system may weaken one loop and strengthen another, altering the overall balance of forces. If you consume more calories than you require at dinner ñ either before your CCK kicks in or for emotional reasons – your body may speed up your metabolism to burn excess calories or store them as fat (or both).

Science deepens our understanding of the body’s complex system, but the real world is dynamic and unpredictable. We can still be surprised by its response to an intervention. And well-intended attempts to manage our health and its care can have unintended consequences.

Systems with redundancy – more than one way of dealing with an issue – are more resilient than those that emphasize efficiency.

Unpredictability in physiological response is well documented. Vaccinations have successfully reduced infectious diseases, making the flu vaccine seem a logical public health response to reduce flu incidence and mortality. Yet Canadian officials are reporting that “in healthy adults [the 2014-2015 influenza vaccination] offers almost no protection.” Even more surprising: Some recent studies suggest that receiving last year’s flu shot may be a factor in making this year’s less effective.

The overuse of antibiotics reflects another attempt to control disease that is creating more problems. The World Health Organization has declared antibiotic resistance “a major threat to public health.” Antibacterial chemicals like triclosan and triclocarban used in household products can disrupt endocrine hormones, the molecules that coordinate physiological activity around the body – yet another systems issue. And now emerging evidence links antibiotic disturbance of our body’s diverse microflora (all those bacteria resident in our gut and elsewhere) to the increased prevalence of syndromes such as asthma and inflammatory bowel disease. As these chemicals are flushed down the drain, residues enter the water cycle and find their way back to the kitchen tap.

Thinking resilience
With effects like those in mind, scientists and practitioners increasingly advocate the systems concept of resilience to achieve better health outcomes. Resilience, according to Australian researchers Brian Walker and David Salt, “is the ability of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure.” To illustrate how resilience-management concepts could be applied to our health, I’ve adapted four of seven principles articulated in a 2014 paper called Applying Resilience Thinking by the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

1. Foster complex adaptive thinking.
Adopting systems thinking for health means recognizing that when a disturbance occurs, its cause may lie in a part of the system remote from where the disturbance appears.

On an individual level, work and family responsibilities leave many of us with little time for self-care; downtime can seem like an inefficient luxury. Eventually, however, stress may weaken our immune system and leave us open to a cold or flu. If we ignore our illness without changing our pace, or rely on medication to mask its symptoms, our body cannot recuperate and may push us eventually to burnout and collapse.

We might instead take the time to heal and adjust our routine to get more sleep, relaxation and exercise, so that the next time we encounter a virus our body will have a stronger defence system. Stronger, but not infallible. Despite precaution, we might still get sick or be injured. We age. Our capacities and vulnerabilities change. Resilience thinking also helps us accept the unexpected and change as opportunities arise to develop new responses.

Healthcare providers can help by drawing attention to interconnections between aspects of a patient’s life or environment and their health and well-being. That may require longer patient visits, or an end to the rule in some physicians’ offices of discussing only one complaint per visit.

Governments can encourage collaboration among health-system stakeholders, and support experimentation and the timely integration of new ideas.

2. Virtuous redundancy.
Systems with many components are more resilient than systems with few. Those with redundancy -­ more than one way of dealing with an issue – are more resilient than those that emphasize efficiency. Eating a variety of foods regularly lowers the likelihood of developing food sensitivities. Cross-training between running, cycling and swimming helps prevent injury in all activities.

Extended employer healthcare plans that include preventative or holistic medicine (naturopathic doctors, massage therapists, chiropractors etc.) can improve employee health while reducing lost productivity. And if such preventative therapies were sufficiently covered by provincial health insurance plans, the shift in approach could save healthcare dollars in the long run by stopping a disease before it starts and reducing the need for more extensive and expensive conventional medical treatments.

3. Manage feedbacks.
Systems respond only slowly to some feedbacks. Unhealthy diet and sedentary lifestyle are such so-called “slow variables” – they might not impact health right away but over time can lead to irreversible diabetes or heart congestion. Understanding your genetic susceptibilities, individual vulnerabilities and stress thresholds can reinforce good habits and dampen negative ones. Regular visits to healthcare practitioners encourage an early response to emerging problems.

Similarly, programs to encourage health literacy, clean air and water, and safe outdoor space for exercise recognize the importance of engaging slow variables.

4. Encourage learning.
Resilience theory recognizes that knowledge is never complete. When our health changes, we need to re-examine existing knowledge to adapt appropriately. In social institutions power can influence that re-examination, such as when Western medical knowledge is favoured over other wisdoms. Policy makers need to encourage an open-minded health community that respects varied perspectives.

Healthcare engages complex interconnections among systems at multiple scales: physiology, behaviour, healthcare provision and public policies. Additionally, the prevailing neoliberal economic system is a powerful influence on all the foregoing. It’s little wonder we “manage” healthcare at some peril.

Resilience thinking reminds us that while change and surprise are part of a healthy life, we can also learn and adapt. We can step back and look for those connections across systems and scales before we intervene. As Donella Meadows said, “We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them.”

Learn more at resalliance.org and in A\J’s 2010 Building Resilience issue [36:2]. 

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There’s a lot that can be said about the relations between environmental history and science. Historians often use scientific knowledge to figure out past environments – and science itself is a focus of historical study.

Originally published on Stephen Bocking’s blog Environment, History, Science.

There’s a lot that can be said about the relations between environmental history and science. Historians often use scientific knowledge to figure out past environments – and science itself is a focus of historical study.

However the contributions of environmental history to science and environmental action get less attention. At least, historical insight is certainly useful in guiding ecological restoration – figuring out how to bring back vanished landscapes or species implies knowing something about what came before.

By encouraging growth of native grasses, they help lock up vast amounts of carbon in the soil.

But I just came across an interesting example of environmental history being useful in dealing with the future and with the climate change challenge. My original source was the Gallon daily environmental newsletter, which led me to the University of California alumni magazine. It turns out that compost can turn grasslands into effective machines for sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. By encouraging growth of native grasses, they help lock up vast amounts of carbon in the soil. It’s no panacea – definitely not outweighing fossil fuel burning – but it’s a help.

But the interesting historical thing is that environmental history provided the clues that this might actually work. California’s rangelands used to have huge herds of elk and other ungulates, that by harrowing and fertilizing the soil (with their manure), encouraged abundant native grasses, which then sequestered tonnes of carbon. Composting is, in a way, a return to that earlier kind of ecosystem. And environmental history also shows how this could be applied elsewhere: Bringing bison (and the grasslands ecosystem that they were part of) back to the Great Plains could probably make a serious dent in climate change.

Climate change research tends to be dominated by scientists – atmospheric physicists and energy engineers among them – but perhaps historians can play a bigger role than we might think.

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