what's the plan man!

I’m not getting much sleep lately, taking on too much, burning with ideas; not a good plan. But then neither is humanity’s plan for us all to make decisions 16 times faster every lifetime forever. It indicates we’re missing something, like where the heck are we going anyway! Sounds presumptuous perhaps, but I can fix that. The underlying problem is that our perceptions of where we are operate on a sliding scale.

We always see change as a little more or less compared with the present, always sliding our base of reference with the change, and that denies us the overall comprehension of things that would come from seeing where we are on nature’s absolute scales. It takes a little getting used to, but nature uses the same scale for everything, the developmental history scale, growth and decay, adjusted to the time horizon of anything that’s happening. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a spark with an invisible seed that starts from nothing and grows to maximum intensity in a thousandth of a second, or a world civilization with an invisible seed that starts from nothing and grows to maximum intensity in a thousand years. Every kind of happening goes through the four phases of development: Inflation, Integration, Disintegration and Decay, a life cycle. You can read the turning points and judge your place and role in what makes them tip one way or another.

Being oblivious to the consequences of making decisions 16 times faster every lifetime forever(1) is a bad plan. It’s a very very bad plan to do that with your own physical life support system, also designing it to get 16 times bigger every lifetime forever(1). What natural systems do, the ones we’d like to emulate I think, is not to reinvest their positive feedback in compounding rates of growth until they explode with contradictions and collapse. What they find instead is a point in development they’d like to refine to perfection and divert their positive feedbacks to that purpose instead.

Whether to pursue growth to destruction, climaxing your creative efforts with loosing your base, or taking growth to perfection, climaxing your creative efforts with broadening your base, is a very common choice in personal-scale social and business matters of all kinds. What’s keeping mankind from making good common sense decisions about it globally are partly the various vested selfish interests. There’s also the fact that the scientists can see that there must be limits rapidly approaching of all kinds, but have not been able to make any useful model of living systems. More than anything, though, our inability to judge where we are and where we’re going as a civilization is because of its vast scope and that it looks to us as if it was static at any given moment. That appearance is what our sliding scales of perception present us which hides where we are on nature’s absolute scale.

The question is, are we getting messages from the future? Are we heading into a period of ever more rapid dodging of natural limits? Is there anything we’d like to perfect in how we live in this fantastically beautiful place we found to experiment with? What are the likely consequences of pushing the speed of human development, consumption and change to a point of failure? We can each know these answers. All that’s missing is the common sense realization that much of what applies to creative happenings on a personal scale also applies to any other.

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1) 3 1/2% real growth = real doubling of activity to make decisions about every 20 yr. In 80 yr life => 2*2*2*2 = 16 times, making each year's change about half the size of the whole system of 80 years before, forever, supposedly....

Failure in responding to Katrina

So soon after the embarrassing failure of emergency response it’s a little risky to venture an explanation.    The appearance is that government planning for emergency response to “the big one” failed to include providing food and shelter for those stranded by it.     My opinion is that the problem was mainly that FEMA kept following the plan they had on file even when it was apparently not working.   I think both key failures, the bad plan and bad leadership in response, come from the scale of the problem.    The disaster caused by Katrina was different in kind and was treated as only being different in degree.

 

I really don’t want to minimize the direct fault of the personnel in charge of the state and federal response, even if exemplary ability to change plans in the midst of a crisis may not be in their job description.   It should be.    The plans that would have worked fine for smaller disasters were incompetent for the bigger one.    The “big one” did surprising things.   For one, the evacuation plan seemed to selectively evacuate the people who ran everything in response to unexpectedly heavy storm damage and the loss of all communication.   The effect was to tear the institutions of community, city and state apart.   Blinded and crippled it’s no wonder that the emergency responders could only seem to stagger around.     Judging from results, that was the plan.

 

Looking at it from the other side it’s possible that had the planners noticed that the “big one” would be different in kind they’d also see that the state and federal response would be necessarily inadequate.    Maybe the needed difference in response would have been good local civil defense plans and supplies.    

 

If nothing else the people stuck behind have clearly acted helpless and apparently had no civil defense training whatever.    That they acted helpless was partly their own fault of course, but if there were only stores of critical supplies left for the purpose, it might have made a huge difference in both fact and appearance.   It might take leadership, like federal mandates, to persuade neighborhoods to do adequate civil defense, but the professional planners probably need to do a better job of telling the feds horror stories like that of New Orleans to persuade them to do it.    

 

There’s lots of other blame to go around, for the breach of the levy on Lake Pontchartrain, for building below sea level on a storm path in the first place, etc. The fact is that you can’t always be prepared for the worst and nature is full of hazards.   Like one old friend liked reminding me, this is life, and nobody but nobody gets out alive!   Ultimately we’re dealing with a crappy hand and making the best of it, and do a rather fine job of that in many ways, exemplified by New Orleans.   

 

My other concern is with the plans for recovery.   I won’t say much for the moment but this.    A vibrant community, urban spirit and way of life such as New Orleans represents is actually a living thing that grew up on its own without anyone knowing the design.   We certainly don’t know how to make these kinds of things that make life wonderful any more than a farmer knows how to make corn without seed.    What we can tell about the ‘seed’ of a living community spirit is that it lies in the connections between the people, which the defacto solution for the city was to break and scatter.    That is really not good.    Galveston was never the same again after it was hit by a great storm, and New Orleans seems sure to be greatly changed too.   In life and nature you can never go back.    There is, though, a way to improve the chances that the real ancient cultural roots of New Orleans will survive to thrive again.   It a lesson that applies to lots of other situations too.    Keep the connections going.   In the shelters have neighborhood corners, fund the local paper to expand its web site, capture unused public access TV, etc.    You can’t tell where that’s going to work, but you can be sure, I think, that the chances of a living community decay rapidly with its connections severed.