Spontaneous Remission

 As anyone familiar with it knows, cancer is lethal: once a tumor spreads beyond its origin, whether on the skin, in the internal organs, or elsewhere, and gets into the bloodstream and lymph nodes, it quickly metastasizes throughout the body, and we die. But in rare cases, for reasons yet unknown, terminal cancer will go into spontaneous remission--a phenomenon widely attested in the medical literature, but very poorly understood.  Current estimates suggest that fewer than 25 out of 1.5 million cancer patients have spontaneous remission. So it is possible, but highly unlikely. 

One possible explanation for spontaneous remission could be some version of the "butterfly effect," a familiar phenomenon in complex systems where small changes in initial conditions can lead, through escalating feedback effects, to unpredictable large-scale global changes in the system as a whole. The name was coined in the 1960s by meteorologist and complexity theorist Edward Lorenz, who showed how tiny "butterfly-scale" changes in his computer models for weather systems could tilt the whole system unpredictably, through interrelated runaway feedback loops, leading from tiny perturbations (like a butterfly flapping its wings) to large scale weather phase shifts, such as thunderstorms, tornadoes, or hurricanes. This effect can likewise be found in all other complex adaptive systems besides our weather--including our politics (e.g. how two geriatric fascists--Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump--have poisoned the well of public discourse in our country, undermining the social consensus that is, in turn, a prerequisite to a healthy democracy).

What happens if we apply this understanding as a metaphor for our global crisis today? The metaphor fits, as it turns out, very precisely. Our global market economy today ("Glomart") has clearly become a cancer on our biological support system (Gaia), and this cancer--a self-accelerating feedback loop resulting from the vast surge of cheap energy made possible by fossil fuels, leading to the infinite growth of production, consumption, pollution, and population on a finite, living system-- has recently become terminal. Like our bodies, our biological support system itself--Gaia--is breaking down altogether, and with it the (cancerous) industrial, social, and political infrastructures that support us all. 

So is spontaneous remission of the terminal Cancer of the Earth on a global scale even possible? I have no idea; the odds are heavily stacked against it. But I don't count it out. It is still possible--however improbable--that some new initiative on an individual scale could "go viral," leading to entirely unpredictable, mutually reinforcing feedback loops, resulting in a phase shift of the entire system--toward the rapid proliferation of Gaian consciousness, by which I mean nothing more than a shared sense of ecological awareness, understanding, and responsibility, and of our global interconnectedness, not only with each other, but with Gaia herself--our unique and irreplaceable biological support system.

How might such a "butterfly effect" happen?  I have been mulling over this question for many years--most of my life, in fact. And of course, I still don't know, nor does anyone else.  But I have recently hit on my best candidate yet for an initiative that could trigger such a "butterfly effect."

I call it the "Garden Guild" initiative--which has quickly become my all-consuming obsession. Imagine a group of neighbors within a small radius--about a square mile or so--forming a Garden Guild, where they meet once a month for convivial potluck dinners, to share dishes and recipes grown from their backyard vegetable gardens, as well as gardening tips and suggestions.  Then imagine that they work with local neighborhood organizations and city council to disseminate their model to other neighborhoods, and they use the tools of the Internet--databases, communications, social media--to disseminate their model further afield...soon the idea goes viral, and everyone, everywhere, is forming Garden Guilds--growing their own food, meeting and collaborating with their neighbors, solving problems and managing emergencies collectively.

The basic structure of Garden Guilds--all homes within walking distance of each other--is the key to their potential success. For this renders them largely immune to catastrophic disruptions in the global infrastructures we all depend on for our basic needs (food, water, shelter), our lifelihoods (the money system), the electrical grid (which enables heating and cooling, long-distance communication, and news), and our circles of friends (whom we mostly need cars and gasoline to visit at all). If any or all of these were disrupted by a catastrophe, whether natural or socioeconomic, Garden Guilds would be able to keep in touch, and help one another adapt and survive.  But even if nothing awful happens, they would make neighborhood life much more healthy and enjoyable, with friends all around--in contrast to the mutual isolation and paranoia most of us live with today. And equally important, they would cultivate an ethos of caring, compassion, tolerance, and ecological stewardship, and render our communities far more resilient in an increasingly chaotic world.

Again, I have no idea if my Garden Guild initiative has all the necessary conditions to trigger a self-accelerating feedback loop and go viral. But it is the best idea I have had yet, so I plan to pursue this idea until I am pushing up the daisies!

 

A Simple Solution?

"Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple." --Bill Mollison

The global climate crisis is all over the news these days, due to the recent, accelerating climate-related disasters now afflicting the world--the unprecedented droughts and killer heat waves in the West and flash floods in the East and in Europe; the catastrophic hurricanes in the South; the melting permafrost in the North; the vast, uncontrollable wildfires in  Australia, California, Greece and Turkey, the Amazon, and Siberia; the melting glaciers and snowpack everywhere, the dwindling reservoirs, the disappearing flora and fauna, the bleached coral reefs.... This awful news is interspersed, of course, with equally dire political news of failed states, civil conflict and atrocities, and vast swarms of economic, political, and climate refugees, along with increasingly hostile, schismatic politics at home and truthless, neofascist pseudo-populists arising here and everywhere.

The attitudes of journalists and commentators toward this state of perpetual crisis run the gamut from denial to despair. At one end of the spectrum, you have brainless denialists like Trump, who pooh-pooh the Climate Crisis as a "Chinese hoax;" a stance echoed (until recently) by far too many Republicans; at the other, you have the "doomers"--including respected climate scientists like Dr. Guy McPherson, who darkly prophesies that "humans could go extinct within this decade," and who accordingly have given up all hope of a future for humanity. 

In between these extremes are the techno-utopians, who are itching to seed clouds, launch satellites to shield the Earth from the sun's rays, create carbon sucking machines to draw down the atmospheric concentration, build electric airliners, new nuclear plants, fusion reactors...all forgetting entirely that the only available energy for these quixotic schemes of new industrial infrastructure would have to come from...fossil fuels. And then, of course, there are the survivalists, who are preparing to head for the hills, guns loaded, build high walls, and then try their best to grow their own food while everyone else around starves...or attempts to lay siege to their fortresses. No thanks!  Death, for me, is preferable to such a hellscape.

I confess that in recent months, I have moved closer to Dr. McPherson's gloomy outlook--particularly as a result of the historically unprecedented droughts and catastrophic wildfires afflicting the American West--my own region of the planet. However, I am by nature both an optimist and a realist. For years, I have repeated--to my students and everyone else--the line that Norman Myers gave us in the early 1980s, when he said "We have two choices: a Gaian future or No future." It is obvious that our global civilization as a whole has chosen the second option, due to its intrinsic addiction to the cheap and abundant energy from fossil fuels and the money game, which depends on endless growth of production, consumption, and population on a finite planet. But do we as individuals have another choice? And will it matter?

 The Garden Guild is a concept that came to me in the middle of the night last Monday, as an  easily grasped, potentially viral meme for inviting and encouraging neighbors to grow their own food, meet and socialize with one another regularly, and overcome their habitual alienation and mutual mistrust by working together on the common goals of growing healthy, abundant gardens, eating healthy and delicious meals, and socializing regularly. It has the virtue of simplicity, for I have framed it to reach people where they are right now, as an invitation. Here is what I sent out to Nextdoor, verbatim:

A Garden Guild is a voluntary association of contiguous neighbors, who live within walking distance of one another, to collaborate in growing and sharing vegetables, herbs, fruit trees, shrubs, and flowers, and also in sharing ideas, skills, and tools for growing these more efficiently and responsibly. 

Our neighborhood organizations would then set up a communication network between guilds within each neighborhood, allowing these guilds to share information with one another on best gardening practices for their own particular area, and the Marion County Master Gardeners would provide educational resources for us all, as needed, while Salem Harvest would be available to collect the surplus to donate to Marion Polk Food Share.

The benefits of setting up neighborhood Garden Guilds are obvious, and include the following:

·        Getting to know our neighbors better.

·        Sharing recipes, and cooking and eating delicious, local, organic vegetables.

·        Learning more about how to grow our own food and flowers in this bioregion.

Secondary benefits might include the following:

·        Creating a basis for mutual assistance in the event of emergencies (such as wildfires or power outages)

·        Becoming more aware of, and taking care of, the needs of elderly or disabled people in our neighborhoods.

·        Cultivating an ethos of ecological stewardship and caring for others.

·        Making lots of new friends.

Rationale: In our modern industrialized world, almost all of us are entirely dependent--for our livelihoods, our social interactions, and our food and supplies--on vast global infrastructures: 

(1) our fossil-fuel-dependent transportation infrastructure; 

(2) our electrical grid (for heating, cooling, news of the larger world, and communication); 

(3) our global market economy (which likewise depends on the first two);

(4) our political infrastructure (local, state, and federal).

(5) our mass media infrastructure (radio, television, and above all, the Internet)

As a direct consequence, most of us have little or nothing to do with our immediate neighbors, and in most cases don't even know who they are.  Many of our more recent neighborhood patterns reinforce this alienation; we often live on cul-de-sacs (which isolate one small group of houses from the next, require cars to go anywhere, and largely preclude conversations with passing strangers) and we most often have tall privacy fences surrounding our property, which make our adjacent neighbors literally invisible to us.  We have come to think of this as normal, but in fact, by the standards of history and the rest of the world, such patterns of mutual isolation are supremely abnormal. 

And of course, this alienation and paranoia is intensified by the privatized internet--the tailored information (and often disinformation) that is algorithmically delivered to us by partisan news media and huge information utilities like Google or Facebook to reinforce our existing interests and biases. And so we live, isolated from each other, and only tenuously connected to a global network that enables us to communicate at a distance, but feeds us only the news (and commercials and gossip) that we unconsciously choose. This renders us incredibly vulnerable, not only to corporate and political brainwashing, but more directly, to breakdowns in our increasingly fragile infrastructures: power outages or cyber-sabotage that would cut us off from the world, from our heating and cooling systems, our jobs, and all our family and friends far away; fuel shortages or cut-offs, leading to shortages of food and water; climate catastrophes like droughts, wildfires, floods, and killer heat waves, likewise damaging or destroying the sources of our life-giving food and water. And in such acute existential crises, the neighbor we know could be our best friend, while the neighbor we don't know could easily become our worst enemy...

Garden guilds could be, as Bill Mollison says, "an embarrassingly simple solution" to this overwhelmingly complex problem of a global industrial, commercial, and electronically mediated civilization going into progressive meltdown. For one thing, they are designed to be entirely independent of two of these critical global infrastructures--corporate agriculture and fossil-fuel based transportation. And in a crisis, they could also become independent of the money economy and the Internet--since everyone in any one guild would know many of their neighbors, and could bring them important information or assistance on foot or on bicycle. 

Putting it simply, even if Glomart (the Global Market Economy) has no future due to all these converging crises of overshoot and collapse, individual neighborhoods, who had formed convivial Garden Guilds and already collaborated on local, ecologically adaptive food production and sharing, would be ideally poised to become the seeds of a Gaian future, based on growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness.