World Turning

Dr. Lenny has been reading about systems biology. Nature competes through a variety of mechanisms to determine a survival of the fittest strategy for every ecosystem. The niche in the ecosystem that a species holds is the key to its survival in the short run - if you are important, nobody will wish to eliminate you. The keystone species have a niche so embedded, that the eco-system revolves around them.

This does not mean that keystone species never go extinct. It means when they do go extinct - there are boat loads of other species that go down with them. The mass extinctions that come about thru-howdt history have been due to either a massive event like an asteroid hit, or the sudden elimination of a critical overly important species like the woolley mammoth. The systems follow some basic mathematical structures at the border of order and chaos - where the energy flux is great and small changes can be leveraged into large effects.

American society today is a universal system in free-fall chaos that is under-going extinction. The keystone political system was communism and the fall of the USSR in 1987 was the event that set the ball rolling for the dissolution of american capitalism. The one size fits all system that we live under is so frayed at the edges, that there is no critical mass to stop the collapse once it has momentum. The past twenty years looks like a good start on the accellerator - the USSR kicked over almost overnight at the end.

Take a peek at the East Germans. How are they doing in the world today? What about the Byelorussians? Is the a better life in Slovenia or Slovakia? How do you find your own melting pot in the next world? Life will be fairly isolated and it will be up to you to decide how big or how small your unit size is. The overstructure will not be there - the infrastructure will be like swiss cheese - but the fiber structure of what is around is of mostly the same composition as it always was. As the line from Talking Heads says - Same as it ever was.

If you wish to tether a hook to dr. lenny - as long as the net remains, there will be yourclassroom.com. ONRRI - the oregon natural resources research institute is back to a one-man information system in natural resources science. Become a student of ONRRI. We have a reasonable science library that is only as good as the veracity of facts published in the volumes. And lots of pictures, descriptions and accounts. When i return from the next adventure - there should be a membership structure for the zone/howdt domain. The concept will be to provide structural integrity and information to enhance self-directed community self-sufficiency. The buzz-word sustainability has been co-opted : but the mechanisms to be sustainable are multiply redundant.