Introduction

My late friend Danny Hamsley once told me, “The web of life on Earth is complex.” Danny and I often discussed the challenges of being human and raising children, long before I married or had children of my own. Danny called this the “curse of the big brain.”

Kids don’t fall out of the womb ready to make the bed, treat others with respect, or program iPhone apps. Human development from babe to self-sufficiency includes a long apprenticeship supervised by parents, and along the way we communicate and reinforce dozens of expectations and biases. Our job includes loosening the reigns as they grow and mature and, ultimately, letting go.

Systems Seek Balance

In 2012, as part of researching wood bioenergy markets, I reread The Limits to Growth[1], a 1972 book which explored the interaction between exponential growth and limited resources. The book concluded that the world would reach its limit within the next 100 years, resulting in massive population and industrial declines. While criticized upon publication, key elements of the research held up, reinforcing historic relationships between resources and growing populations.

While working on this research, I called Danny and we talked about life as an interconnected system. He said, “If any part gets out of balance, there are consequences. If a predator, for example, develops a huge advantage over its prey, it will profit for a time until the prey is decimated, and the predator will crash, too. I suspect that the big brain has made us so successful, the balance has been upset.”

Systems seek balance through feedback. Whether climate change or over-population or economic disparity or some other consequence associated with the narrow and ‘successful’ deployment of human ambition, the system seeks to reset. When people feel off-center, the feedback can be emotional, political, economic, viral…

“With the dense population centers and the hyper-connectivity in the world, we are pushing the envelope on many fronts,” said Danny.

The idea of stress on the system resonated with me. “Weirdly, human nature seems to both induce and adapt to stress,” I said. “It’s like going to the gym. We stress our muscles to break them down, and they adapt by getting bigger and stronger.”

“Which requires a period of rest and recovery,” said Danny.

“Like the Sabbath and letting our fields lie fallow every seven years.”

Then we discussed how the name Mia Farrow doesn’t rhyme with fallow. “Sparrow doesn’t rhyme with fallow, either.” No, it doesn’t.

When an organism exceeds its carrying capacity, the extreme stresses make it more susceptible to disease. Populations ebb and flow, and they can crash when out of balance.

I described a feeling, a thought, when driving from one side of Athens, where I live, to the other. “We’re like ants, chewing everything up to build our developments and industrial parks.” Trees, fields, grasses mowed down and paved over. “I wonder about the balance.”

“Maybe the big brain will figure out how to fool Mother Nature,” said Danny. “Every dog has its day. However, we may not always be the dog.”

Don’t Mark the Bottle

Danny once told me a story of sitting with friends around a fire and playing music. They passed a bottle of “brown water.”

“That wasn’t apple juice, I’m assuming,” I said.

“No, it was not,” laughed Danny.

One person started notching the bottle to see how much each person drank, and the act ruined the mood. It wasn’t in the spirit of sharing.

“Don’t mark the bottle,” said Danny. This lesson has stuck with me. Marking the bottle means keeping score, and keeping score is a bad way to maintain a friendship or marriage.

This was some of the best marital advice I ever received (which, unfortunately, also makes it the best marital advice I’ve ignored at times). As the man said at my brother’s wedding, “do you want to be right, or do you want a relationship?”

#

[1] The authors published a 30-year update in 2004.