Understanding Nature's Purpose in Starting All New Lives With Compound Growth- New Science For Individual Systems

Authors

Abstract

We often associate compound growth with the Anthropocene and our overwhelming economic impacts on the Earth. Today our actual choices for future society appear to lie with studying the class of natural systems that first develop by compound growth, referred to here as new lives, natural complex adaptive systems (NCAS). It is preserving the organization of new lives that growth creates that is the challenge. Here we offer a way of studying the organizational milestones of new lives (MNL), teaching alternative paths to follow and informing a natural systems science for new lives, such as those of plants, animals, ecosystems, weather systems, civilizations, economies, communities, businesses, cultures, societies, social groups, personal relationships, and even work habits, home, office, and artistic projects, etc.

Our ability to take part in, create, and guide new lives seems learned from nature, as our methods and nature’s show the same organizational milestones. That is the biggest discovery and source of hope that careful study might lead us to splendid choices for how to escape our growing world economic crises. At first, it is easiest to recognize the milestones of growth in familiar subjects and apply that to other subjects. For the Anthropocene, the pattern suggests our economic steering is confusing growing income with wealth, as in a tragedy of the commons, and exposes a plausible creative escape. There might also be much confusion and wonder as nature pushes us to abandon fruitless efforts and follow her path to real success. Though mostly hidden in plain sight now, the natural course ahead might rise through the clouds of confusion and release humanity to act in its own best interests.

The primary milestones for new lives include 3 critical events that initiate 3 feedback periods for 3 organizational development stages, occurring in 3 environments that together we can call egg, nest, world, or natural growth. A key to studying the growth milestones is learning from life experiences, watching the growth of children, personal relationships, and projects to see how to respond to emerging internal and external relationships. The model is universal, based on the first principle of thermodynamics, the conservation of energy. Energy conservation requires continuity in energy processes, forcing organizational development to build smooth shapes like the ubiquitous “S” curves as assembly lines for beginning and ending changes of state.

The most critical milestone is the midpoint turn, from individuation during compound growth to maturation during a long climax. That generally comes as new lives exhaust their starting resource and leave their protected egg to begin a new life of learning in the nest! They must then radically adapt and find internal resources to seek new external resources and prepare for the long future. That shift also marks the inflection point in development rates, from initial positive feedback (relative to the floor) to negative feedback (relative to the ceiling). For future society to do it would take more than a technical change. It would seem to require a well-informed planetary sense of community, wide recognition of the milestones, and willingness to take the risk. It seems impossible, of course, but new futures are often not visible from the past. We would only need to trust our ability to innovate and born interest in the success of new lives to make it happen.

Author Biography

Jessie Lydia Henshaw, HDS natural systems design science

Jessie’s work is published in research papers, her RNS journal of research reports, and her archive of experiments. She was born in 1946, growing up in Hamilton NY, and now lives in New York City.   She received a 1968 B.S. in physics from St. Lawrence University, followed by some postgraduate study in mathematics at Stony Brook and Columbia, and then a 1974 MFA from the Univ. of Pennsylvania in architecture, landscape, and micro-climate design. Her many years of independent research then began when moving to Denver and making her first important findings studying the natural micro-climates of homes. She has since continued to accumulate a body of useful new work.  

Publication: https://www.synapse9.com/jlhpub.htm    BioBlurb: https://synapse9.com/jlh-blurb.htm 

Published

2022-04-12

Issue

Section

Special Systems Track 1: The Future of the Human Social System