At my latitude in Bristol, there are about 12 fewer hours of sunlight at the winter solstice compared to the summer. That’s half a day’s less light.
What’s more, the noontime midwinter sun sits far lower in the sky than its midsummer counterpart. This means the sunlight we do get has only a fraction of its June-time wattage.
There could not be a clearer signal from the living world to do less.
Somehow the topics of my posts have returned to the subject of the sea. It is apparently a rich subject to trawl. Sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun, but it is exactly to trawling that I am heading.
Yesterday I used Donella Meadows’s fish stocks example to show how humans can harvest a living resource while enabling it to thrive. A key to enabling this system to work is the balancing feedback loop between supply and the people doing the harvest. When the catch gets too low, the boats go home, and the fish can restore their population.
But what happens when that balancing feedback loop is broken?
Let us imagine an entrepreneurial fisher who, noticing that their catch was diminishing, decides to invest in a much bigger net. Now their catch goes up and it is worthwhile for them to stay at sea for longer. Other boat captains do the same, and the fleet stays out much longer.
Now, rather than the fish population having time to replenish itself, it is further depleted. When the fish are further apart, their rate of reproduction diminishes.
Here, trawling is breaking the balancing feedback loop between supply and harvesters. So, instead of stopping, fishing continues and the population becomes so low that it is not able to grow back. It has become what is known as a ‘desertified state’, a vulnerable situation in which a living system can no longer thrive.
Clearly, this is a simplified version of a much more complex system. But hopefully it serves to illustrate that in thinking about how we scale up options, we need to think about how we might inadvertently be breaking the feedback loops that enable our activities to operate within the living system’s limits.
Yesterday’s post on the fish écluses on the Île de Ré speaks to the idea of creating straightforward connections between the resources that humans need to live and thrive.
As engineers (and other humans) we need to find ways to harvest the materials and energy we need in balance with what the living and mineral world can sustain. So to help us understand how this can work I’m sharing Donella Meadows’s example of fish stocks to help see how humans can live as part of a sustainable system of supply.
Meadows’s model concerns the local fish population in an area of sea. Left to its own devices, the fish population is stable because there is only so much food to go around. Too many fish, less food per fish, some fish die. Too few fish, more food per fish, they reproduce more. This feedback loop stays in equilibrium around a mean.
Now, the local fishing fleet gets involved. By harvesting a small number of fish, the population goes down, increasing the reproduction rate of the remaining fish, and the population returns to what it was. Fish too much, however, and the fish are further apart. Fish that are further apart take longer to reproduce! And so for a while, there are few fish, the nets are empty and the boats go back to port. During this time the fish population recovers, and eventually the boats can go back to sea.
This simplified model beautifully illustrates how humans can harvest what they need while still living within the ecosystem’s limits. The key characteristics here are a living system that regenerates itself – the fish; and a feedback loop between supply and those doing the harvest. Simply, when the catch is too low, the boats go home.
This feedback loop between supply and harvesting is what interests us in regenerative design. It is what allows us to harvest abundance, and even create abundance, all while living within the ecosystem’s limits.
The wind was getting up. The waves were starting to blow in from different directions. The sea scape seemed to be changing at random. The day before, the waves had been rolling in with a nice rhythm.
This is another blog post that comes from the sea. And this one is about chaos. One characteristic of chaotic systems is the rules of the system keep changing. And this seemed to be what was happening around me. The wind was gusting from different directions, the tide was turning, the sun was coming in and out from behind clouds. And all of this was making a chaotic mess of the surface of the water.
Standing there trying to figure out what was going on I started to think about ways of coping with chaos. Think of these as working notes rather than a developed theory.
Get into the field – the sea looked messy from the shore but only in the water could I really feel how changeable it was.
The signal in the noise – there can be a lot of randomness but are there underlying patterns. There did seem to be a beat of waves heading in to the shore, confused by another set rolling in from the side. When you find a pattern in the system it is easier to work with.
Notice when the pattern ends – the rules of chaotic systems change. A pattern in the system is only useful as long as it persists. Look out for the pattern changing.
Think on your feet – you can’t rely on the normal patterns of working (see yesterday’s post on creating cycles in work). Instead you have to make the most of the situation you are in.
Learning is difficult – if learning relies on loops of action and reflection, then learning is much harder when the conditions keep changing.
Chaos is tiring – if you are constantly on alert trying to figure out what is going on then you are not getting time to rest and recuperate.
Writing these notes up I am left wondering:
Today’s post picks up on yesterday’s theme of riding the waves of human energy in our work. The idea is to create a cycle of working that tunes in to our own and others’ level of available energy to create better thriving for all involved.
For the regenerative designer, the living world often gives us a good template for how to create thriving systems. And so, whether the wavelength we are designing for is a day, a month, a year or even a lifetime, here are some modes of working inspired by the changes that living systems cycle through. I have organised these into five touch points.
Of course, how we spend our time is a negotiation with others. The invitation here is to look for opportunities to acknowledge the cyclical ways in which we work. And to acknowledge more widely the cyclical pattern to the living systems that enable us to thrive.