| Sense in the City Issue 8, July 15,2006 Page 1 |
| Sense in the City Issue 8, July 15,2006 Page 1 |
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Sustainable Beehives: Lessons and Strategies for Sustainable Cities? July 15, 2006, © Marilyn Hamilton PhD CGA The honey bee has lessons for understanding human systems – including sustainable cities. To understand the bee’s behavior, and discern its lessons for human systems, we first must grasp that the beehive has a survival goal. A beehive must produce 40 pounds of honey per year in order to survive. The survival strategy that the beehive has evolved depends on the performance of five roles (Bloom, 2000): conformity enforcer, diversity generator, inner judge, resource shifter and intergroup tournament player. It turns out that about 90% of the beehive are conformity enforcers (CE). They tend to fly to the same patch of flowers where they find abundant pollen. When these CE bees return to the hive with a full load of pollen, “dancing the directions” to the patch of flowers so other CE bees can match their productivity, the inner judges reward them with bee fuel (fill up their bee “gas tanks”) so they can return to the field for another load. Meanwhile, it is the nature of diversity generator (DG) bees (only 5% of the hive) to fly to other sources of pollen. They return to the hive where they are equally refueled for achieving their goals (but notice the DG’s are successful because they demonstrate behavioral flexibility -- they use a multiplicity of bee “maps” different than those used by the CE bees). Given that any patch of flowers, has a limited amount of pollen, eventually the CE bees return with less and less of a full load. The inner judges recognize this lower production by instructing the resource allocators to withhold bee fuel; ie. they shift resources. This changes the state of the CE bees so that they no longer dance with sufficient energy to signal their CE siblings to return to the depleted field of flowers. In this “depressed state” the CE bees finally notice the only bees who are “fully charged” are their DG peers – who, fully fuelled, energetically “dance” directions to the new source of supply. Finally the CE bees, whose life conditions have changed sufficiently to motivate them to change their behavior, fly in the direction indicated by the DG bees. Thus, in the bee community, both conformity enforcers and diversity generators are vital to survival. Additionally, it should be noted that the hives in other fields are engaged in the same survival strategies and are co-creating competitive life conditions that amount to intergroup tournaments amongst the hives. This is the way that bees have naturally evolved to ensure the survival of their hives, their species and the environment (which they pollinate for sustainable future resourcing). The pattern of emergence in human communities seems to follow a similar sequence. We might think of the conformity enforcers as similar to cultures, eras or stages where the values of the group are enforced; and the diversity generators as similar to the cultures, eras or stages when the values of individuals are enforced. In any given culture, era or stage there is a survival goal that is defined explicitly and implicitly as the key survival value (see Figure 1). Over time, we realize that both the human stages influenced by DG’s and those influenced by CE’s are vital to the long term survival of the human species. We can also see, in response to the increasing complexity of life conditions, that each culture, era and stage emerges a greater complexity of community expression. The rules, laws, rituals, structures, roles, learning competencies, assets and physical capacities are integral outcomes and expressions of the relationship between the group and the individual, as complexity increases. The relationship is dynamic, because life conditions are dynamic. And the work of our inner judges and resource shifters responds to life’s complexities and changes in order to keep us focused on the key organizing principle or “on goal”. The insights from Spiral Dynamics Integral give us a metaview that allows us to see patterns in the human condition that seem similar to patterns in other living systems, like the honey bees. Several decades before Bloom contemplated the wisdom of bees, Clare Graves (2003) in the 1960’s and 1970’s conducted an 18 year study that ended in a theory that explained the “evolutionary complex levels of human existence”. Graves’ research, showed that human behaviors arising out of one set of conditions created problems of existence that could not be solved at that level. As a result new adaptive behaviors are called into existence. Graves identified a group-centric cluster of behaviors he called “sacrifice self” values; and an individual-centric cluster of behaviors he called “express self” values. Moreover, his research showed that these behaviors adapted and alternated with one another at an ever increasing levels of complexity, as life conditions changed. Graves used a set of identifiers to represent life conditions (designated by letters from the first half of the alphabet) and bio-psycho-cultural-social human existence (designated by letters from the second half of the alphabet) (see Figure 1). Beck and Cowan (1996) and Beck (2002) have devised the Spiral Dynamics system of colour codes to identify each level of complexity: beige, red, orange, yellow (ie. warm colours) relate to “express self” versions of existence; purples, blue, green, turquoise (ie. cool colours) relate to “sacrifice self” versions of existence. Figure 1: Levels of Complexity (adapted from Beck, 2002)
Holling (2001) suggests that humans as complex adaptive living systems are evolving a “panarchy” of capacities. He explains that a panarchy is the “hierarchical structure in which systems of nature … and humans … as well as combined human-nature systems … and social-ecological systems are interlinked in never-ending adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring and renewal”. Like Wilber (1996) and Graves (2003), Holling proposes that these transformational cycles are nested at ever-increasing scales of complexity. He suggests that wealth (potential), controllability (connectedness) and adaptive capacity (resilience) are the “properties that shape the responses of ecosystems, agencies and people to crisis”. The basic resilience loop in Holling’s model describes two separate objectives: maximizing production and accumulation (stages 1 and 2 – and similar to Bloom’s conformity enforcement) followed by maximizing invention and reassortment (stages 3 and 4 – similar to Bloom’s diversity generation). Holling proposes that the success at achieving one objective sets the stage for success at achieving the next objective in an endless figure 8 “panarchic” cycle. The functioning of those cycles and the communication between them determines the sustainability of a system.” (p. 396) Because the dominant behaviors in human systems, like cities, arise in response to life conditions each level of existence behaves with increasing levels of complexity in order to maximize the organizing principle (or value) of the current life condition. This behaviour results in a tendency to protect the status quo at its current level of complexity. In Bloom’s terms this could be interpreted as conformity enforcement (of the organizing principle / value). Thus a tension in favour of the values and behaviour that is most coherent with the current life conditions, will be demonstrated as conformity enforcement. The flip side of this behavior is that the dominant culture, like the beehive, will also ignore and/or protect itself against diversity generation, until such time as life conditions require the solutions that diversity generation can offer to the problems created by maximizing the values and organizing principles in play at any level of existence. This very natural process can set up the conditions for the healthy, evolutionary, upshifting emergence of the integral city (like Vancouver or Seattle) or the unhealthy, chaotic, downshifting degeneration of the urban human system (like New Orleans). Indeed the recent exploration by Jared Diamond (2005, p. 11) of the conditions for sustainable human existence, details a long history of failure by humans to understand that their societies, cities, homes and very lives depend on goals embedded in the deep and tangled interconnections of five factors: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours, friendly trade partners and society’s response. Diamond cites the repeated blindness of societies to grasp the implications of their short term behaviours as the ultimate price paid for their long term survivability. He describes in horrific detail the histories of societal “Collapse” from the south Pacific to the north Atlantic to Latin America. He warns that these historical instances of goal blindness may be more than metaphorical warnings for the continuation of life on earth. Likewise,
Laszlo (2006), a worthy inner judge for the human condition,
reminds us that “No new chapter in human civilization will
ever emerge if we just sit around with our hands in our laps
waiting for a holistic convergence that will foster a new
way of thinking [aka an appropriate new goal]. A critical
mass of people in society must stand up to make it happen
[ie. change the goal to suit the life conditions]. That
means you and me, and many others around the planet. And now
is the time to get started.” Perhaps the lessons of the honey bee can inform us of the simple rules to which we need to pay attention in order to prevent the collapse of human systems and understand the principles of sustainability for our cities? Perhaps, like the bees, the strategy that human systems need to adopt is to contribute to the thriving of the environment which supports us and by doing so we will naturally contribute to the thriving of our cities? Ervin Laszlo (2006) provides us life giving “bee-inspired” directions (parenthetical comments added):
1. Let go of old beliefs
that no longer make sense (discard linear mechanistic
worldviews and embrace the wisdom of natural systems for
survival). 4. Evolve your consciousness. (If the intelligence of bees enables thriving of their hives, species and environment, surely the intelligence of humans can enable the thriving of our cities, species and environment.)
REFERENCES Beck D., Natural Designs and MeshWORKS™: Creating our Region’s Tomorrow through Second Tier Leadership, Organizational Foresight and Integral Alliances, The Spiral Dynamics Group, 2004 Beck, D., Spiral Dynamics in the Integral Age, 2002a, p. 3 Beck, D., The Color of Constellations: A Spiral Dynamics Perspective on Human Drama, 2002b Beck, D., Stages of Social Development: The Cultural Dynamics that Spark Violence, Spread Prosperity and Shape Globalization, 2001 Beck, D., Cowan, C., Spiral Dynamics, Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishers, 1996 Bloom H., The Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, John Wiley & Son Inc., New York, 2000 Capra, Web of Life, Anchor Book, Doubleday, New York, 1996 Diamond, J., Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Viking - The Penguin Group, New York, 2005 Graves, C.W., Levels of Human Existence, Eclet Publishing, Santa Barbara, 2003 Hamilton, Marilyn and Barry Stevenson, How Does Complexity Inform Community? How does Community Inform Complexity?, (Emergence, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2001, pp.57 – 77) Holling, C.S. Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems, Ecosystems (2001). Vol. 4, pp. 390-405 Laszlo, Ervin. (2006), The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads, Hampton Roads Wilber, K, Sex, Ecology and Spirituality, Shambhala Publications Inc., 1996 |