There is a paradox in ecology where if you divide systems into their parts, they operate inefficiently.
For example, keeping a plant in a pot, or a bird in a cage, is a lot more energyEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More intensive and wasteful than having them living in nature. If we tried to keep every wild bird in a cage, we would quickly run out of time and resources to do this.
We’ve structured our own lives similarly. We compartmentalise and in doing so, make society inefficient.
We spend fragments of time with our kids; other times at work; other times doing the shopping. Family time is increasingly divided out from other parts of our life.
The counter this, when we take kids shopping as a family, we increase bonding time. We might even inspire them to take an interest in food. Give them a say in the meals and they might learn to cook, contributing to more efficient family life.
It’s not the individual components of any system that matter. It’s where and how they are combined, overlap and connect. The true ‘value’ of family life can only be expressed when a family unit functions sustainably. Likewise, productivityThe power of an ecosystem to process energy. The most productive ecosystems have reached a steady stable-state with maximum entropy production. That’s to say, the number of species has reached an optimum and the functions they fulfil, have translated free surplus energy into nutrients that is either stored inside plants and animals, or is entrained within the biological cycles that More in work can only be maintained if there is a relationship between work and play.
When we compartmentalise our lives, we become inefficient as the amount of wasted energy grows. In other words, we have to spend a lot more time maintaining the individual parts, than we would have to, if they were functioning together. This is embedded in the principle of entropyThe degree of disorder or chaos in a system, most often used to describe thermodynamic energy but also used the behaviour of information. All else being equal, physics determines that all matter and energy moves towards chaos, therefore biological systems are in a continual state of battling against entropic forces in order to remain stable. The most stable ecosystem is More, which I have written about extensively.
Entropy principles are the antithesis of how we’ve built society around technology and policy. In doing so, we create collapse through the creation of surplus energy. This is the very opposite of how nature works.
Is it any wonder that we have teacher strikes?
Teachers have become quasi-nannies. They bear the burden of responsibility for looking after a part of the family life where kids are separated, like birds in a cage. Of course, that’s a necessary part of upbringing but it’s become out of balance with the rest of the system.
The consequence? A breakdown in the mental health of parents, teachers and kids simultaneously. Mental health is the community equivalent of climate change. It is a symptom of when the ‘energy’ we are wasting to survive, overwhelms the system we live in.
But we can’t isolate a single cause for this, because there isn’t one. It’s a system-level decline in the complexity of our communities. To solve such crises means addressing the underlying causes wholistically.
Society doesn’t work like nature
Nature, of which we are part, is a complex system and it runs most efficiently when it’s structured with the requisite balance of animal life, interacting in the right quantities and proportions.
But now we risk putting a price on nature in the wrong way too. We select individual components e.g. trees or seagrass, and assign each of them a dollar value. However, when you add all of this together, you end up with an number that isn’t acceptable to society.
Before COP26 countries descended with fistfuls of paperwork that showed the potential for climate mitigation using nature-based solutions. The problem, said Oxfam, is there is not enough land in the world to realise all the ambitions added together.
Oxfam were correct but also incorrect. There is enough land to do this. It’s just the way we measure the value of nature-based solutions is not integrated with the whole ecosystemHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More.
The Oxfam examples proves that no community can ever match funding sufficient to solve environmental problems if we measure each component separately. It’s impractical. This is how we are killing koalas.
Business-as-usual means adding up all the costs of maintaining our living environment and finding it’s too expensive to maintain. Cost of living increases and mental health suffers.
How nature really works and what we can do differently
The most efficient system, whether it be your family, work, society or nature as a whole, functions when connections and overlaps are optimised.
If you’re wanting to help teachers, you don’t just pay them better, you also address the systemic problems that stop parents, kids and teachers to connect. This leads to your kids being educated better. When you want a strong economy, you don’t simply spend more on protecting seagrass, you protect the connections in the system that allow the seagrass to thrive.
We already know that 4-day working weeks work. There has been a renewed push in Australia for this. In Iceland, they reduced the number of weekly working hours for four years and productivity remained the same or improved in the majority of workplaces.
By recognising ‘guilt-free’ time off as part of our economy, we become more productive. It allows society to reconnect in ways that aren’t possible when we are working too hard. Like all animals, if you remove the threat, humans adapt fast, and restructure in ways that make communities wealthier and more resilient. Mental health issues decline.
To protect our living environment we must invest where and how it supports the reconnection between people and nature. Not in the individual components. This isn’t simply about saving animals (though this is a key part). It’s also about allowing people the chance to behave better. If we can get this right for nature – and we are making rapid advances on this front – we will also do it for our whole society as they are both linked.
