According to a NASA report, hypoxia is so extreme in some areas, that total anoxia (zero oxygen availability) can be found, allowing for no animal life to exist. In the Mississippi River delta, feeding into the Gulf of Mexico, it is thought that agricultural waste is creating a glut of nutrients for phytoplankton, which leaves excess organic matter for bottom-dwelling bacteria to feed on.

“When the fertilizer reaches the ocean, it just becomes more nutrients for the phytoplankton, so they do what they do best: they grow and multiply. Which leads to more organic matter reaching the bottom, more bacterial respiration, and more anoxic bottom water.”

The water becomes anoxic because bacteria use oxygen and give off carbon dioxide, depleting the oxygen other life forms require to sustain life.

We need responsible, enforceable agricultural waste policies, clean water regulations, oceanic industry controls, and international consensus to put an end to these harmful outcomes of unchecked industrial farming, fish production and fossil-fuel use, all of which contribute to or feed back into the vicious cycle of oxygen depletion in the world’s oceans.

• Join the discussion on The Hot Spring Network

Remember: the only constant is change, so to oversimplify is to willfully strip ourselves of needed understanding, the power of intellect that can do the best work against entropy. To paint in broad strokes an entire universe of experience to exist only in dualities of black and white, up and down, matter and void, is to confuse simplicity with clarity, at our peril. While the best explanation is usually the simplest one, the truth is almost always more complex than we can perceive.

So, we are left to navigate a universe of traumas and disappointments we cannot just dismiss as signs of the wrong thing happening or the other side gaining temporary control over our otherwise pure and decent environs. Darkness and light are lies in that they are not so diametrically opposed as they pretend; there are better options for understanding what they mean. As R. Buckminster Fuller has written: “We have relationships, not space”.

Relativity posits that light and other cosmic forces or expressions of energy and mass are not constants, but exist in a relational continuum. Moving at the same speed as an object makes it appear not to move at all, as with the Earth that carries us through its orbit around the Sun, and our Sun’s orbit around the galaxy’s deep center. We also experience this when we are traveling inside an automobile or an airplane. Light and dark are both wave dynamics relative to perception, frequency, local electro-magnetic activity, even the refractive capabilities of gravity, distance and time.

Resilience in the face of complex pressures requires nothing less than complexity, at the root and at the growth point, in any system, a diverse barrage of tools and relations, the corresponding adaptability, instead of the all-or-nothing, hit-or-miss romantic balladry of monoculture, of uniform essence, of limited relatability. Resilience requires the ability to perceive and adapt to challenges that come from beyond the one-versus-other, either/or, bipolar mentality that informs phenomena like the Cold War, religious fundamentalism, or military rule.

So, what happens to matters of principle in the face of such prevaricating, precarious, uncertain socio-metaphysical structures? The dogmatic would say it cannot survive, that to acknowledge flux or atranscendence is to do away with principle and submit to the random indulgences of pure moral relativism. This is wrong, in every way. Our best option, and the one that brings us closest to the truth of things, is to first acknowledge the failings of dogma.

Dogma is a lie: it operates on the assumption that those who submit to its power will experience genuine terror at the very idea that the dogma be overturned or made irrelevant, and by way of that moral terror, they will be unable to see beyond the mandates of the dogma they follow. Dogma operates not by speaking the truth, but by ruling out what it cannot absorb.

Accepting that the prevailing narrative may need to evolve, not because truth is relative, but because we can only experience truth relationally, and our prevailing narratives can never be complete, is the best way to understand how principle survives the transition from one paradigm to another, how to find intellectual transcendence in the midst of general atranscendence or the entropy of a given system of thought and consequence.

We cannot give in to the temptation to oversimplify the landscape of human experience and human endeavor, then expect to have the tools necessary to address the compounded complexities from which the world that sustains us emerged. It should not be dogma that complexity is preferable, but it would be best for us to understand that excessive simplicity leads to dogmatic thinking, hostility to new approaches to understanding, and rivalries in the world of ideas that can limit our ability to find our way through the night of the unknown.

We need to bring as many factors of understanding, from as many diverse disciplines as we can, to the process of locating, illuminating and examining those aspects of our vast sensory and intellectual experience, as a species, that will point us to the next major opening up of new understanding, knowledge and innovation. And in the age of resilient complexity, or which seeks it, we need to be able to find the real values of hyper-specialization and of a renewed and intellectually curious, determined devotion to creative generalism.

• First published 30 January 2009 at TheHotSpring.com

“We’ve gone from a lunar world, where we measured everything in terms of days, weeks and months, to a transactional world, where every single transaction has to be part of your decision-making process.” — Colin Powell, 14 December 2008

TheHotSpring.com :: Each information transaction, sometimes as exemplary, sometimes as single element added to a sweeping aggregate of historical sway, is a precedent, which can motivate, influence or redirect the push of future happenstance. And, we must take note, every transaction involving matter or energy contains information, traces of a history of its coming into being, and generates a “footprint”, a trace of its appearance and its transition into something beyond the transactional moment.

The information age gives us a vast wealth of knowledge, or of a kind of knowledge, what we take to be knowledge, about the world, hints which are also indicators, though not predictors, indicators because they play a role in expressing current interest, embedded in human activity, and so in framing future expressions of human interest.

A transactional cosmology sees an interplay of resources, overlapping vectors of sometimes disparate knowledge-sets and creed-assertions, a vital climate of investment, of beings into beings, of cultures into cultures, of histories into histories, of methods into methods, willpower into willpower, communicty into community, potential into potential, outcome into outcome.

Such a cosmology allows us to see occurrence, progression, insistence, persistence, even entropy and erosion, as non-linear, making possible a fuller, more precise understanding of how things come to be and what we can do to urge better results into being. The resilience of vital life-supporting webs of persistent transaction, for instance, can be seen to underpin all transactions across the web of incident, recombination and dissolution, we claim as our own, as the human world.

“Transaction” is not merely a reference to commercial exchange, to the monetary fabric of traditional economics, to guesses about what people intend or demand from an interactive world of community and human moral regulation and creative expresssion: it is, more deeply, more comprehensively, a way of approaching the dynamics of ecological interchange, of web-dynamics, of the immensity of competing and overlapping social fabrics that promote or diminish the strengths of the individual in her environment.

Time —as we have measured it traditionally— is dictatorial, linear, categorized and categorizing in the extreme. Yesterday cannot be today. The 19th century cannot be the 21st. It is impossible for 31 December 1999 to fall on a Thursday, because it fell on a Friday. Saturday was the year 2000.

The idea of time, our preconceptions about how it feels, how it moves, what it intends, what it is helpless to do to be different, our customary way of talking about time, could have caused global calamity, if certain precautions were not taken to avoid the glitches that should have accompanied the inevitable arrival of Y2K. Some potential remedies explored included infecting computers on a massive scale with “virus” codes that would turn back their clocks, possibly doing it while presenting to the end-user a proper date.

Time is, ultimately, illusion. It is real, but it is about perspective, not about plunging along a straight line down, down, down into the dark, unknowable future. It is an impression, it is a representation of our senses, and their combined experience of the process of receiving one impression after another, in sequence, which in our awareness says time is passing.

A better way to look at the question of time is by way of synthesis and entropy, or entropy and what R. Buckminster fuller called anti-entropy. There are ways of applying knowledge to the reality surrounding us, so that we prevent, or put off a given instance of entropy, and conserve or remake something of the order of things that gives us our experience.

Entropy is the breakdown of systems. Organs are systems made up of cells, which are made up of molecular and chemical phenomena working together to create a more or less harmonious whole. At the organic scale, those systems collaborate to provide for the metabolic integrity of an organism, a being whose combined functions are provided for by the component organs, at an unconscious level, beyond our will or control.

But we know enough about the systems of the body to push back the onset of catastrophic entropy. We can prevent the heart from breaking down permanently. Within a narrow window of opportunity, a few minutes usually. We can “restore” brain function, if we do the right thing, quickly enough, to prevent its structure from being disassembled by lack of inter-organic activity and chemical impulse.

The body is a transactional phenomenon. The mind is transactional, its speed and health rooted, we think, in the efficiency with which its neural structure can produce “connections” across synapses, making patterns that appear to us as conscious awareness of specific realities. The metabolic functions of the body, processing energy inputs and expending energy, are transactional, infusing the body’s tissues with shares of energy corresponding to factors too numerous and variable to count.

So, there is a direct impact on our way of contemplating human health and related issues, from adopting a transactional cosmology. But beyond human health, human interaction, obviously, and our interactions with the natural environment, which includes —as a massive assemblage of those interactions— the built environment as medium, the expansion of our economic examinations to an ecological level, must be a major component of our work to fashion a world more balanced, more resilient in the face of the pressures we exert.

• For more on the Hyper-convergence media paradigm
• For more on Generative economics