This is Part 11 of a continuing series. Go back to Part 10.)
I'd like to tell you a story:
For many years, cod fishing was a staple of the Canadian economy along the North Eastern Atlantic shore. But in the mid-1980's the codfish catch began a dramatic decline.
Alarmed, the governemt appointed a commission headed by Leslie Harris of Memorial University to determine the cause of this phenomenon. The Harris commission's finding was unequivocal: the decline was being created by the overfishing of the Canadian fishing industry, and greatly reduced quotas were needed.
However, this conclusion was considered inconvenient by the government. As the trade minister at the time said, "Harris doesn't have to deal with the economic, social and cultural effects of reduced quotas. I do." Unfortunately, nature paid no attention to these fine words and the catch continued to decline.
So the government came up with what it called a "commonsense" solution. It decided that the problem was the harp seal, which is the primary predator of the codfish. The solution to the problem, then, was to drastically reduce the population of the harp seal, which would thereby allow the cod population to grow. Voila!
To that end, and against the concerted protests of marine biologists and ecologists worldwide, government hunting expeditions slaughtered over half a million harp seals each year in the last half of the 1990's.
Well, this strategy didn't work. The codfish population continued its precipitous decline, to the point of commercial extinction. What went wrong?
The backwardness of the government's approach consisted in conceiving that a simple cause-and-effect relationship existed between the harp seal and the codfish. But that isn't so. Nature's networks aren't so simple.
In fact, the network of connections between the harp seal and the codfish is so extensive that ecologists estimate that there are over ten million distinct feedback cyces linking them. They are linked in cause and effect loops involving such fish as capelin, hake, herring and halibut as well as seabirds, squids, sculpin and countless other species.
The complexities of the North Atlantic network are simply staggering, and that in turn is only an infinitesimal part of the overall global network of life, Gaia.
Mathematicians and researchers studying the overall characteristics of networks in general have determined that the more complex a network is, the more stable it is. That is, the more likely it is that the network can hold itself together in the face of various disturbances.
As various nodes in a network disappear (go extinct) and the network becomes simpler, paradoxically the "diameter" of the network—that is, the average number of steps it takes to go from one end of the network to another—increases, because connectivity is decreasing. And as that occurs, the overall efficiency of the network's communications decreases.
Beyond a certain point of this process, a network can reach what's known as a "tipping point." This is the point where enough of its nodes have gone extinct and the network can no longer hold itself together—and fragments into pieces. And those fragmentary pieces suffer what's known as "secondary extinctions," and the network ceases to exist.
No-one can say right now where this "tipping point" is—that is, where the complexity of life's overall network would fall below the point where it could continue to maintain its existence—but ecological mathematicians and scientists are certain that such a point exists.
What this means is that the vary existence of life itself depends upon the complexity of its web—its interlinking feedback cycles.
Now consider that species extinction is roughly 1000 times greater now than before the technological revolution which began a couple of centuries ago.
Since the existence of life itself can be linked to the complexity of its overall network, what this means is that everything is necessary. Every different kind of life, the riotous diversity of species all contribute to the whole. The existence of the humblest life forms contributes to the whole. Everything in existence contributes to everything in existence.
And on a more personal level, it means that you also contribute to life...just by existing.
For example, my cat doesn't do anything special. Being sick now, he can no longer go outside. He eats, sleeps, sometimes sits on my lap, sometimes not. But the thing is, it doesn't matter what he does or doesn't do. I love to watch him do his little things, wash his paws or whatever. In other words, he brings joy to my life just by his very existence, even though he doesn't know it.
Your life is the same. You contribute to existence just by existing, even though you may not know it. Just by being here you contribute, no matter what you're doing or not doing, no matter what your life looks like, no matter your circumstances, no matter your "success" or "failure" about anything.
You are precious, necessary, a vital part of the totality. If you were not supposed to be here, you just wouldn't be.
The fact that you are here—just that—means that you are supposed to be here, that you are an essential part of existence, that you are valuable and precious to the web of life, and that just by existing, you make a contribution to the lives of everyone else and to all of reality.
This is not an endorsement of unrestrained population growth, of course, but rather, just another element of the recognition that reality is as it should be each moment. That—just as it is—reality is always right.
This is the end of Part 11. Go to Part 12.)
—jim sloman, 12.15.02 for 2.27.03
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