Shining light on the impossible
“Let’s face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That’s what makes the world interesting, that’s what makes it beautiful, and that’s what makes it work.”
Ecosystems are also messy, despite ecologists best attempts to define, describe, delineate, and determine phenomena, our “margin of error” in understanding could also be named, simply, “messiness”. Yet ecosystems have thrived through millennia, disturbance after disruption after perturbation. Systems of all types, human-designed or not, have a way of stabilizing and self-correcting and restoring their function. The vast majority of the time they are quite successful in maintaining themselves, for better or for worse. In fact, only disruptions significant enough to sufficiently dismantle a large proportion of the interconnected relationships amongst system components cause massive system changes. (The other path to wholesale systems change is pulling different levers of existing relationships in novel ways…but that’s a different essay). For those interested in how to shift systems, this interplay between maintenance and disturbance is important—especially at this critical moment in time.
With COVID-19, both the news and many thoughtful conversations are covering how the disturbance is disrupting and dismantling the systems one might argue define the very existence of modern human society. Our economy is in a rapid downward spiral, our health care system is stretching beyond capacity, our food system is revealing its weakest links, the markets skate on thin ice when not crashing through, and our perceptions of and engagement in community are undergoing massive transformation. Bottom line, life—as we have come to know it, is no longer the same. For many, it feels like the world has coming crashing down.
As a biomimic, trained systems thinker, and ecologist, I’ve been reflecting on lessons nature might offer. While many brilliant minds, far better writers and thinkers than I, have shared powerful insights on the great pause, the great unraveling or the new normal, my thoughts keep circling back to this reality of systems crashing down.
Yes, when a tree falls in a forest it makes a sound.
Ecologists study disturbances and how biological communities respond to them, both immediately after and over time. Obvious disruptions include hurricanes, forest fires, floods, invasive species, or even longer events like droughts or ice ages. As a student, I was delighted to learn that something as simple as a tree falling constitutes an ecosystem disturbance after which entire successional processes can play out. This is most studied in tropical rain forests when a large dominant tree, whose canopy shapes a whole plethora of biological processes from forest floor to the topmost leaves more than 200’ from the ground, falls over.
The loss of the canopy creates a zone called a light gap. Photons suddenly reach the forest floor where sunlight has likely not been seen for many, many decades. What lies in wait is where I’d like to draw your attention. If you look closely, amongst the scattered broken branches, you’ll find small seedlings of a wide variety of tropical tree species. You might assume that these (now) lucky individuals sprouted just this year and fortunately for them, there is now a gap, an available niche, light to fuel their growth.
Source: Brenkee, Public domain, via Pixabay
But they didn’t just show up this season, or last season. Chances are high they’ve been waiting for decades! Indeed, their small above ground showing hides a significant below ground investment in roots—spread far and deep. Each year that light never revealed itself, these trees put their reserves into their roots, building a subterranean infrastructure that would be primed for the time when the established system that held them back would come crashing down.
I’ve had the incredible fortune of spending a lifetime interacting with change agents. People with powerful visions seeking to bring about radical, yet critical transformations to our systems, only to encounter one system maintaining hurdle after another. All the while though, the patient ones have also invested that energy in roots—networks of collaborators, pilots and prototypes of their best ideas, honed formulations and tuned and crafted stories. Is this their/our/your light gap moment?
What little seedling have you been nurturing, held back by the bonds that have kept our current systems in place, that now, suddenly are dissolved? What will you do with those sun rays now shining on you? How might each of us be sure that we use this tree crashing down to make sure we take one step forward instead of two steps back?
I’m just in the early stages of deciding which seedlings I’ve been investing in will leverage this newfound reality. I’ll be exploring this concept more as part of The Impossible Summit (May 20-25). In the meantime, I invite you to consider, is there something about this moment in time that makes what has always felt impossible, possible?