The Complexity of Nature

In my last post, I discussed the apparent paradox of “creative destruction” that was ingrained in ecosystems. And I left off with a question about what it meant to us, to humanity. Issues like global warming, species extinction, and new diseases. Should we intervene? Or let nature take its course? Or have we already inadvertently interfered through actions of ignorance and greed?

We can’t expect the natural world around us to run smoothly and safely for our benefit. New diseases, pollution, species extinction, and climate change are all results of unexpected impacts, whether caused by humanity’s activities or not. Though incredibly elegant, Nature is not simple, or “simple-minded”; Gaia has a complex agenda that we really aren’t terribly privy to yet.
 I mentioned scale in my last post. Scale is something you can’t see or easily measure and assess if you are in it. Scale is like hindsight. Perspective is another matter, and often connected to scale. According to research at the University of Bristol, a major extinction event (and climate change) at the end of the Permian (about 250 million years ago) killed over 90 percent of life on Earth, including insects, plants, marine animals, amphibians, and reptiles. Ecosystems were destroyed worldwide and this was the nearest life came to being completely wiped out. It apparently took 30 million years for ecosystems to fully recover, according to the Bristol study.

The systems of Gaia are complex from the tiniest cell to the complex planet itself. Weather, for instance, is a “chaotic system” that displays a fractal structure and a range of chaotic behaviour on many scales. Temperature, air pressure, wind speed and humidity are all sensitive to initial conditions and interrelated in multi-scales. Says Brian Arthur, professor at Stanford University: the complex approach is total Taoist. In Taoism there is no inherent order. “The world starts with one, and the one become two and the two become many, and the many led to myriad things.” The universe in Taoism is perceived as vast, amorphous, and ever changing. You can never nail it down. The elements always stay the same, yet they are always arranging themselves. So, it’s like a kaleidoscope: the world is a matter of patterns that change, that partly repeat, but never quite repeat, that are always new and different.

Western scientists are just beginning to appreciate this through the application of complexity theory and chaos theory, something the eastern world has “known” since ancient times: humility before nature, respect for richness and diversity of life, generation of complexity from simplicity, the need to understand the whole to understand the part. To live your life with integrity.

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.