ECODESIGN STRATEGIES FOR PEACE

Philip S. Wenz
February, 2003

 

The solutions that ecological design proposes for the world's manifold problems are usually implemented gradually. It takes a full season to grow an organic garden. It takes years, or even decades, to plan and build an ecovillage. The coming transition from a fossil fuel to a solar/hydrogen energy economy could also take decades, and may have to wait for a geopolitical cataclysm to get underway. If it ever gets underway, that is.

The Bush Administration's planned invasion of Iraq is laden with the potential to touch off a regional or even pan-Islamic war that could rapidly spin out of control and involve—engulf—the entire planet. War supporters who expect this action to be a rerun of America's recent campaigns in Panama, Kuwait or Afghanistan—dirty but quick—are likely to be in for an unpleasant surprise. The problem doesn't lie in "winning"the first phase of the war, i.e., bombing Iraq into submission and Baghdad into a pile of rocks while killing or capturing Saddham Hussein. America has total air superiority and the will to kill as many Iraqis as necessary to pave the way for its invading troops.

Can we design a solution that takes advantage of the latent potentialities of a complex system to produce the desirable emergent property of an emergency response?

The greatest danger lies in the period of America's occupation of Iraq, the weeks, months and years that follow the initial action. (Make no mistake that the Pentagon plans to maintain a permanent, substantial military presence in Iraq.) It is then that we may expect reprisals by those still-very-active and widespread Muslim terrorist groups whose cachet among their people will be sharply enhanced by the nightly broadcasts of American planes bombing and American soldiers occupying Muslim cities. We can also expect counter-reprisals by a desperate American military that finds that the enemy lies beyond yet another border.

Speaking of borders, Iran twice has been threatened publicly by President Bush. Forewarned is forearmed. Now that she knows herself to be an Axis-of-Evil state, soon to be surrounded on two of her principal frontiers, Afghanistan and Iraq, by substantial American garrisons, Iran has every incentive to accelerate whatever nascent weapons-of-mass-destruction programs she may be nurturing. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, tenuous American allies with vast, seething under classes comprised predominantly of fundamentalist Muslims, could explode given the right stimulus—a first-strike American invasion of a Muslim state, for example.

Speaking of reprisals, war is seldom a one-way affair, a turkey shoot, despite the fact that America's "victory"in Afghanistan has apparently lulled the superpower's military and populace into a dangerous presumption of invincibility. One of Saddham's megalomaniacal and corrupt sons last week threatened that if the U.S. attacks Iraq, its people will suffer pain that will make 9/11 look like a "picnic."Unless there is some sort of charade going on, in which the Bush and Hussein cadres are secretly conspiring to exploit world tensions, it would be suicidal for the U.S. authorities to ignore that threat.

Can the same governmental agencies that have failed to locate Osama bin Laden and other Al Queda leaders be trusted to protect us against such attacks?

Give credence, for the moment, to Bush's argument that Saddham is hiding weapons of mass destruction that he has no compunction about using. What better way to put that theory to the test than engaging this fanatic in what he considers the final battle against the Forces of Satan? If there are hidden stocks of anthrax and nerve gas, when would they be most likely to be deployed? And, where? While the American invaders and Israel are obvious targets, who is to say that Iraqi operatives have not already installed dirty bombs in Washington and other U.S. Cities? Can the same governmental agencies that have failed to locate Osama bin Laden and other Al Queda leaders be trusted to protect us against such attacks?

Speak of the devil, or at least the demonized human, bin Laden himself surfaced on tape just a day before this article went live. He urged Muslims everywhere, in the event of an American attack on Iraq, to revolt against western-influenced Muslim governments and attack Americans using any means possible, including sucide bombings.

One attack leads to another, of course. If we are hit by more terrorism at home or abroad we will strike again—and again. So will they.

This largely predictable escalation of an American/Iraqi war into a regional or world war has the potential, within one to five years of its beginning, to alter beyond current recognition not only the world's political landscape, but its physical environment as well. President Bush has threatened preemptive nuclear attack against any country which an unspecified group of decision makers within the government secretly decides poses a threat to American security. Though Russia and China do not seem to be candidates for preemptive attack at this time, there is nothing written in the Bush Doctrine to keep them from becoming targets in the future. And of course they have the capacity to strike back.

War only accelerates environmental catastrophe.

Meanwhile, ongoing environmentally destructive processes such as global warming and desertification will be largely ignored by populations and governments faced with immediate annihilation through armed conflict or its resultant famine, drought and displacement. War only accelerates environmental catastrophe.

Along with these frightening and very real possibilities, however, the current political situation also has the potential, slim as the odds may seem, to set us on the path to a solar/hydrogen, organic, diversified, egalitarian and harmonious future. The seeds for that future already have been planted. But before the immanent military conflict, it was possible for ecological designers to believe and hope, albeit with a dash of that healthy denial that allows dreamers to succeed, that we still had a few decades to cultivate them. It is now clear that we no longer enjoy even that paltry allowance. If events unfold as they well might, there will be no going forward to a bright future. The hour has come when our seeds must sprout and grow or die.

The challenge for the worldwide ecological design community is to find, within the principles of its craft, the means to design and implement a sufficiently powerful and rapidly deployed strategy for the prevention of war, then the dissemination of peace. Are we limited to making gradual improvements such as gardens and ecovillages and hoping that we'll survive long enough to turn things around? Or, can we design a solution that takes advantage of the latent potentialities of a complex system to produce the desirable emergent property of an emergency response?

Ecosystems on every scale from local ponds to the biosphere depend on cooperation and the development of communicating networks to sustain themselves.

I believe that designing and implementing an emergency response is entirely possible. Ecological design models human systems on natural ecosystems. Designers can draw upon, combine and restructure any chosen aspect of those ecosystems to achieve the desired result, so long as they design whole systems that are integrated within themselves and in relationship to their environment (stick within the rules that govern the ecosystems themselves). We only need to understand where the current system is dysfunctional, and to understand the guiding principles by which analogous functional systems organize and regulate themselves to design successfully. In principle, we can design any sort of response to operate in any time frame that is appropriate.

What are the "operating principles"by which natural ecosystems have sustained life on this planet for 3.6 billion years? They are the opposite of the fragmentation and divisiveness that characterize nationalism and hierarchical human politics.

Ecosystems on every scale from local ponds to the biosphere depend on cooperation and the development of communicating networks to sustain themselves. Cooperation and communication between its components (networking) is what allows a living system to coordinate and regulate its energy flows so that it can build its own structure and even regulate, or at least participate in the regulation of its environment. From the individual organism, which is merely a collection of interacting cells or cellular components aiming to feed and grow itself, to the biosphere where life as a whole regulates the planet's atmosphere, ambient temperature and global nutrient cycles, cooperative networking is the modus operandi, almost the very definition of a living system.

...emergent properties tend not to develop as well in top-down or centralized command systems (branching structures) as they do in distributed networks (cross-linked or web structures)

Living networks are highly-responsive (fast-acting) and diverse. Communication in nature is often instantaneous, as living systems must constantly adjust themselves to changing internal and external conditions.

By creating increasingly diverse and complex networks, life enhances it's ability to develop emergent properties, new forms which can adapt with impressive rapidity to changing conditions, surmounting threats while profiting from opportunities.

Note that emergent properties tend not to develop as well in top-down or centralized command systems (branching structures) as they do in distributed networks (cross-linked or web structures) where components on all levels have more or less equal access to communicate or interact with one another. Nature employs branching structures, but has learned to subordinate them to the more efficient and flexible distributed networks. Due to the fragmentation of early hominid habitats and other historical accidents, humans adopted and still are largely dependent on branching structures.

The components of distributed networks don't have to have equal status to create an equal effect. Although hierarchies form naturally between groups of components, a single component generating a sufficiently strong impulse can influence the entire system, one factor that lends resilience and adaptability to the system.

The components of distributed networks don't have to have equal status to create an equal effect.

How can these ecosystemic operating principles be applied to create a system to prevent war? First, let's look at the resources available to those who wish to change the current course of events. Principal among them is the internet. With it's millions upon millions of nodes (individual computers), available to almost anyone who wants to learn a few basic skills, it's potential for informing, activating and coordinating expressions of mass sentiment is unprecedented.

Well before the current crisis, the internet showed its value in coordinating mass demonstration such as the "Battle of Seattle"World Trade Organization protests. (I am not advocating violence, which, unfortunately, the media was able to use to characterize the whole of the primarily peaceful Seattle demonstrations. I am advocating the use of the internet to promote mass-scale, nonviolent resistance to the initiation of aggression by any country.)

Large-scale demonstrations tend to be coordinated and planned well in advance by activist organizations, however, as well they should be. They are an example of a gathering, a happening, that needs at least a modicum or centralized coordination in order to be effective and keep people safe, which, after all, is the point. And while it is important, if you oppose the proposed war to show up and have your body counted (and become energized) at mass demonstrations, it is at least equally important to multiply yourself, so to speak, using the very tool on which you are reading this essay.

The internet's capacity to develop emergency response systems capable of massive, spontaneous or rapid information transfer and subsequent informed action lays largely untapped. Most of our information about the international situation comes through top-down branching networks such as news services. We know what they want us to know when they want us to know it, and any debate on the issues is framed in their context. While I do not maintain that this is a cause for paranoia—overall people are better informed now than ever—I do believe that it is a cause for caution, especially when the disseminating organization has or is controlled by vested interests. In any case, why not know what a citizen of France, Pakistan, Egypt or even Iraq knows? More importantly, why not let them know what you know, or think?

The vast majority of American people do not hate Arabs or Muslims, nor do they hate us, despite the impressions given by many of our respective governments and corporations.

On a distributed network you can, with the click of a button, send a good email you have received on, say, conditions in Iraqi orphanages to 100 of your friends, 50 news services, your Congressional representatives (and everyone else's) and a massive mailing list of the authorities and citizens of the above mentioned France, Pakistan, Egypt and Iraq. There are millions of connections that can be made to ordinary, non-vested citizens of the world—a world in which roughly 80 percent of the people oppose the war plans.

One thing those people need to know is that the American people are not united in support of their government's drive toward war. What we can learn from them is that despite the parameters of the public debate set by the mass media on how many governments America has bribed, coerced or actually persuaded to accompany it to war, the vast majority of people oppose armed intervention. The vast majority of American people do not hate Arabs or Muslims, nor do they hate us, despite the impressions given by many of our respective governments and corporations. The possibilities for person-to-person or group-to-group linking are enormous.

Two emergent phenomena that were latent in the networking potentialities of the internet and have recently manifested themselves, or "self-organized"are worth mentioning in this regard. The first is ad hoc mass gatherings or internet-connected people. In a recent lecture in San Francisco former Wired Magazine editor Howard Rheingold, talking about his new book Smart Mobs, The Next Social Revolution, describes a remarkable event in which, "On January 20, 2001, President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines became the first head of state in history to lose power to a smart mob."

When used as an emergency response tool, a blog has enormous powers of self-replication

When a Senate Committee comprised of the of the crooked leader's friends abruptly called off investigations into Estrada's administration, ordinary Filipino citizens began sending each other cell phone text messages saying simply "Go 2EDSA. Wear black"With a click of a button, each citizen resent the message to everyone on his or her phone list until, Rheingold tells us, "More than a million Manila residents, mobilized and coordinated by waves of text messages assembled at the site of the 1986 'People Power' peaceful demonstrations (the seat of Government) that had toppled the Marcos regime."Less than four days passed from the time the Senate closed the hearings and the Smart Mob toppled the Estrada government.

The second emergent phenomena is known as the web log, or "blog."

During his Smart Mobs talk, Rheingold noted that in the 18 months since the "internet"was supposed to be in decline due to the "dot bomb"demise of first wave commercialization, several million personal blogs, the latest emergence combining networking software and the human need for expression into a new metapattern for communication networks, have appeared.

The web site Blogger, which provides software allowing individuals to create their own blogs in about five minutes, and for free, describes blogs as follows:

A blog is a web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically—like a what's new page or a journal. The content and purposes of blogs varies greatly—from links and commentary about other web sites, to news about a company/person/idea, to diaries, photos, poetry, mini-essays, project updates, even fiction. Blog posts are like instant messages to the web.

The biosphere is a single system, and its people, like the biological organisms which support them, are connected through the air they breath, the water they drink, the nutrients they share. Humans also share common aspirations.

 

When used as an emergency response tool, a blog has enormous powers of self-replication. In one quick posting, the blog's "editor"can analyze a news article, post another article or quotes therefrom, write rapid-response or in-depth commentary, link to numerous sites with common viewpoints or relevant information and, in what could be the blog's most powerful capacity, allow others to post as well, creating an ongoing forum or a collectively produced publication. When combined with email messages announcing new site postings and asking that the readers pass the word along to everyone on their email lists in phone-tree fashion, the blog, or the interlocking network of all related blogs, has the potential to become a predominant force in global information dissemination and politics. (To learn how to create and maintain blogs, visit master blogger Rebecca Blood, author of the Weblog Handbook, on her own blog.)

Mobbing and blogging are harbingers of things to come. No doubt other creative communication "technologies" are waiting to emerge from the complex system we call the internet. The ecological design principle that diversity leads to greater potential for new forms to arise should be kept in mind by anyone trying to shape information. The greatest power is in letting go, and trusting that the truth always finds a way to emerge.

The biosphere is a single system, and its people, like the biological organisms that support them, are connected through the air they breath, the water they drink, the nutrients they share. Humans also share common aspirations. While the planet's other organisms network unconsciously, humans can do it at will, whether for pleasure or out of necessity. We now have the tools and knowledge to abandon dysfunctional hierarchical models and follow nature's guidance by connecting person-to-person and group-to-group, planet-wide, for the mutual benefit of all. Taking advantage of those tools and knowledge still can guarantee a secure future.

The bad news is that this may be our last chance. The good news is that we are as powerful as we choose to be.