Comments on: Moving from Control Toward Intelligent Interaction, in Gardening and in Life https://arealgreenlife.com/from-control-toward-intelligent-interaction/ Making healthier choices. For you, your family and community, and our Earth. Fri, 04 Aug 2023 02:40:01 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: Kate https://arealgreenlife.com/from-control-toward-intelligent-interaction/#comments/426 https://arealgreenlife.com/?p=15409#comment-426 In reply to Hilary.

Wow. Hilary, thank you so much for the link and the quote. I wasn’t aware of this resource; I’ll most certainly be spending some time exploring it.

]]> By: Hilary https://arealgreenlife.com/from-control-toward-intelligent-interaction/#comments/425 https://arealgreenlife.com/?p=15409#comment-425 Thanks Kate, I continue to appreciate your thoughtful and thought provoking writings. Here’s another tidbit to add to your conversation here, from David Fleming, who was a British guy involved in Transition Towns etc so spent many decades stewing on similar topics to those you address. Have you seen his dictionary? This entry online here: https://leanlogic.online/glossary/death/

Death
David Fleming

The means by which an ecosystem keeps itself alive, selects its fittest, controls its scale, gives peace to the tormented, enables young life, and accumulates a grammar of inherited meaning as generations change places.

A natural system lies in tension between life and death: death is as important to it as life. A lot of death is a sign of a healthy large population. Too much death is a sign that it is in danger; it is not coping; its terms of coexistence with its habitat are breaking down. Too little death is a sign of the population exploding to levels which will destroy it and the ecology that supports it. No death means that the system is already dead.

The reduction of life to an icon—the assertion that life (viz, human life) is sacred—disconnects the mind from the ecosystem to which it belongs. It is a fertile error. Beneath the exaggerated regard for life lies an impatience with, a disdain for, the actual processes that sustain the ecology that sustains us. Expressing faith in the sanctity of human life is a licence—in a series of little, well-intentioned, self-evident steps—to kill the ecology that supports it.

The large-scale system, relying on its size and technology, and making an enemy of death which should be its friend, joins a battle which it cannot win. In systems thinking, death is sacred.

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