Living Systems
“Cybernetics provides the tools for noticing how a lake is like a city, or asking how a forest is like a university, or how the church is a body?” MCB
Excerpts from Chapter 3 Living Systems
Every period of history has had a prevailing systems theory that shaped how people see and make sense of their world. Since the mid-twentieth century, the term “systems theory” has generally referred to a class of systems that are open, organic and living, existing in relationship with each other in one degree or another. They are multi-causal, non-linear relationships that move well beyond the bounds of systems governed by simple, linear cause-and-effect logic. Today, we often hear the terms complex systems or complexity theory.
Both the lake and city are teeming with an abundance of interdependent life. A lake and a city each exist in permeable, interconnected space. The shoreline of the lake and the demarcation of “city limits” show us their footprints in physical space. They both influence and are influenced by their surrounding environments. Those environments can bring vitality, stagnation or decay. In a lake’s ecosystem, responsible land-management practices can protect the lake from outside pollutants, like ground water run-off or unregulated human development. A city, being both a social and natural ecosystem, is likewise in the hands of human actors, who choose among an array of public policy and urban geographic considerations to provide for the health and welfare of their inhabitants.
A lake and a city are in constant relationships both within their own boundaries and with their neighbors. The lake is dynamic in the reciprocity of its diverse varieties of plants and aquatic subsystems. The loss of species due to external influence can upset this delicate balance. The city has its various sectors of business, residential, arts and services, even the vitality of green space, and too much of one or not enough of another can be devastating.
When the residential, almost exclusively white flight of the middle-class from American cities began, in the decades after World War II, urban areas went through a period of steady decline. Over the following decades, the economic loss of the tax base accelerated as corporate businesses started to follow their employees, relocating closer to suburban areas. This brought cities spiraling deficits and, in some cases, dramatic defaults. The flight also brought a loss of vibrancy to the cultural fabric, exacerbating urban social problems like poverty, crime, and glaring disparity in income. The structural and socio-racial inequalities that existed before these changes became an ever-increasing and vicious cycle, with each factor of decline feeding the devaluation of another. It is a classic example of a self-sealing entropic system, the serpent eating its tail.
Not surprisingly, during this same period, there were similar declines in natural ecosystems—particularly oceans, lakes, rivers and other bodies of water. Pollution increased due to a flurry of under-regulated development, waste-water discharge and ocean dumping of garbage. I still recall the sickening feeling of seeing syringes and other medical waste washing up on the sand while walking the beach at the New Jersey shore.
The lake/city metaphor offers us a glimpse into some of the key aspects of living systems. First, systems can be unpredictable. This is probably why many people refer to systems as messy. Yet systems are patterns, and you must look deeper than the surface to see the relationships that can actually be quite elegant. Think for a moment of birds flocking or fish schooling—both seemingly random, yet ordered. How do they do that? What messages are passing among those little heads saying, turn here, or, stay close, but don’t touch? Living systems are organic: they exchange energy and information with their environment, and they have a structure that is bounded yet permeable.