Panarchy 101: The Cycle of Civilization
Islands in the Net
Imagine an island in a wide sea. On this island lives a tribe. While the tribe is small it lives in a world of abundant resources. Its health is limited only by its immediate surroundings. It has a frontier, namely, the unexplored regions of the island. However, as the tribe expands to occupy more and more of the island, it eventually reaches a point where it completely occupies the finite limits of its environment. When this happens the tribe will begin to experience “closeness”. Both socially as well as politically, there will be a lot of “rubbing of elbows.” At this stage, the tribe must undergo a fundamental shift in behavior:
- economically, from one of growth to one of sustainability.
- politically, from one of “stay or leave” to one of “getting along.”
The tribe must remain stable and in harmony with its finite context until it achieves a technological advance that will redefine its environment as something larger, thus creating the opportunity for a new dynamic. In this case, that technology could be the construction of a type of boat that can reach nearby islands. The new technology expands and redefines the tribe’s limits, thereby altering the relationship between occupants and environment. With a new frontier extant, the tribe can go into growth mode again, expanding to occupy other islands in its archipelago.
This process continues from archipelago to region to continent to planet to solar system to galaxy to galactic cluster and so on. This alternating cycle of growth and stability, characterized by punctuated equilibrium and driven by technological advance, is the cycle of civilization.
This cycle can be illustrated as follows:
- Growth
- Paradigm Shift
- Sustainability
- Paradigm Shift
Growth vs. Sustainability
Growth occurs until the civilization reaches the boundary of its particular context. At this point, either the civilization reconceptualizes its relationship to its context, or the context will do it for them. This often happens in ecology as groups over-occupy their bioregion, over-consume their food supply, and suffer subsequent loss of their own population to reach sustainable levels.
During growth, because interactions among sub-systems are distant and/or infrequent the primary ontology is atomistic, individualistic, and object-oriented. By contrast, during sustainability, the members of the system are tied together in a web of interdependence and so the key features of that paradigm are based on systems theory, cybernetics, and relationality.
To return to our example, it does not matter if there are multiple tribes on the initial island (or multiple nation-states on a single planet). While they are distant from one another and interactions are few, their development follows the same rules as a single tribe. As they grow they begin to experience “closeness”. As they reach the limits of their environment, they begin to form a single system of interconnected and interpenetrated sub-systems. At this point, reaching sustainability for all of the parts of that system requires a focus on cooperation instead of competition. Since the system as a whole is threatened, all of the sub-systems are threatened.
Panarchy is the stage into which civilization is now transitioning. There are two reasons for this:
- We have reached the limits of our physical environment vis a vis resources (food, air, water, etc.) under the existing political and economic structures.
- Consequently, the existing structures not only impinge on one another but furthermore grow increasingly interpenetrated and indistinguishable from one another forming a single highly connected system.
Having reached the limits of growth in a finite planetary environment, we must now shift to a sustainability paradigm, until such time as we are able to expand into our next frontier.
Addendum, Dec 2016 - An interesting and parallel story from the World Economic Forum:
