The graphs above are from a book titled Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows recomended by public educator Ismatu Gwendolyn in several of their essays, all worth reading. The section of the book containing these graphs speaks about the possible scenarios following the overharvesting of renewable resources. Renewable resources include us and our humanity:
Whether a real renewable resource system can survive overharvest depends on what happens to it during the time when the resource is severely depleted. A very small fish population may become especially vulnerable to pollution or storms or lack of genetic diversity. If this is a forest or grassland resource, the exposed soils may be vulnerable to erosion. Or the nearly empty ecological niche may be filled in by a competitor. Or perhaps the depleted resource can survive and rebuild itself again.
I’ve shown three sets of possible behaviors of this renewable resource system here:
• overshoot and adjustment to a sustainable equilibrium,
• overshoot beyond that equilibrium followed by oscillation around it, and
• overshoot followed by collapse of the resource and the industry dependent on the resource.
Which outcome actually occurs depends on two things. The first is the critical threshold beyond which the resource population’s ability to regenerate itself is damaged. The second is the rapidity and effectiveness of the balancing feedback loop that slows capital growth as the resource becomes depleted. If the feedback is fast enough to stop capital growth before the critical threshold is reached, the whole system comes smoothly into equilibrium. If the balancing feedback is slower and less effective, the system oscillates. If the balancing loop is very weak, so that capital can go on growing even as the resource is reduced below its threshold ability to regenerate itself, the resource and the industry both collapse...
The trick, as with all the behavioral possibilities of complex systems, is to recognize what structures contain which latent behaviors, and what conditions release those behaviors—and, where possible, to arrange the structures and conditions to reduce the probability of destructive behaviors and to encourage the possibility of beneficial ones.
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Yesterday, our president accounced on X that we bombed Iran. In my US History I class my junior year of high school, yesterday would have been a textbook page accompanied by a scanned black and white newspaper headlined "US BOMBS IRAN" with an image of pandemonium on the New York City streets.
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We are at a time where our humanity has been severely depleted. It seems as though we are headed for scenario three. We've pulled the rubber band too far back and it is about to snap.
But it hasn't snapped yet.
We're alive. In the belly of an empire actively trying to expand.
Preoccupied with greed.
With fear.
To me. That simple fact implies that we're at a moment in history teeming with latent potential for radical change.
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The powers that be are asking us to return to our nature. The nature we don't follow because we've been taught to mistrust it but we know is true because we feel it.
We know what we need to do.
We always have.