Red Sky Morning

02/August/2010 11:00 Filed in: Oikos Thoughts | Web News
For some reason, early Friday morning I awoke, and normally my first instinct is to look out the window to see if it is still dark, then check the clock. What I saw outside was an unusual pink glow in the eastern sky. When I looked to the clock it was about 5 AM. I confirmed the window view again and decided this morning’s red sky was so intense I needed to go outside and check it out further.

Out on the deck, to the South the sky was almost black, like it was about to rain heavily. To the North it was just and overcast gray, but that eastern red sky morning was still very intense, illuminating the summit of the mountain across the river, were the sun will eventually rise to the point where direct rays will hit my place about two and a half hours later. I stood there watching while the red slowly return to the normal predawn grayness. I decided to go back to bed.

As I lay there I began to think about the old sailor’s rhyme, “Red sky at morning — sailors take warning. Red sky at night — sailors delight.” It had been very dry and hot for the last few weeks, so I thought a little, or a lot of rain would be a relief, but I mused that natural red sky weather report may also be a reality report on our economic future.

Most of the procrastinators and the pundits have stated that the recession is over but slow economic growth seems to be with us for some time. Even FED chairman Bernanke coined a now oft repeated “unusually uncertain” term to describe this current morning. When you look towards the sky further to the South however, you hear the dark sky reports of the bad weather of a stormy future — of maybe even a double dip recession.

I guess what that all means is that all the people who make the big bucks and those who don’t, really don’t have a clue to what the future holds, and that is especially true in the unnatural world of global economics. It seems to me, if professionals, who spend their whole life trying to figure out the economy, should be able to do a better job.

When you look at the whole of economic weather however, there is virtually no consensus, even to what is going to happen today, and forecasts, are when you get right down to it, more mysterious than scientific, and the results are more akin to a worldview or a religion than they are to a science. “Bernanke faces US growth mysteries” is an article in today’s Financial Times that pretty much verifies the point.

Give me the weather service, they are really pretty good now, with few exceptions, out about five days, and even climate models do track historic trends within the limits and paradigms of the modeler’s resources and predilections.

The weather however will go on long after we are all dead and buried, but when you look at it seriously, this global economic system is a pretty recent totally human development. So perhaps we should be looking at it more like growing a crop rather than the weather. Furthermore if we look at enterprises as subject to natural laws that govern plants and animals, we will be probably closer to reality, even if we look at the ivy on the ivy covered walls of the academics, rather than their predictions.

As we pointed out in last Wednesdays article, we have become a world of innovators, and we really haven’t invented anything totally new in about a century. Perhaps, to paraphrase a few of our business ecology terms, “We are running out of gas; the era of the free lunch is over; the season of leveraged debt has become winter; change is the only constant; that forces us to live within a natural world of God’s design.”

When you think about it seriously, we have also been told for a century to, “Don’t worry, be happy, everything will be all right"; provided we let the experts run our lives — for they know what they are doing.

What they have really been saying is that economic growth, within the constructs of the Industrial Age, will continue essentially unchanged forever. In the real world governed by natural laws, that is not a fib, that is a fraudulent lie.

In that real world, ecosystems eventually develop to what is known as a “climax state.” It has nothing to do with sex, or evolution, or egalitarian outcomes. It has everything to do with true diversity, energetics, weather and climate. Of course the only place that this climax ecosystem can be seen today is in what we define as true wilderness. Furthermore, Thoreau’s transcendental quotation, “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World,” takes on the reality of natural law that extents into every aspect of life on earth, including our human endeavors.

As much as we dislike the whole concept of wildness, or wilderness, it is the natural requirement for renewal, because what we perceive as insecurity is really the process by which chaos becomes reordered by design. If you create a world in which true life and death, and entropy are not allowed to occur, what you are doing is not creating true security but rather making the eventual restructuring all the more painful.

So we have “Too Big to Fail,” easy mergers and acquisitions, regulatory reform that creates inertia rather than freedom, laissez-faire crony capitalism that means only those who have access to capital can succeed, all of which leads ultimately to failure, by attempting to create solutions that cannot compete in a real world.

If we truly understood the principles in the establishment of a climax ecosystem we would apprehend that our hope for continued economic growth forever is really just a stupid, irrational farce as the Climax Curve illustrates:



However since we humans think we have it all figured out what really happens is more akin to the Sin Cosmos Curve:



So while you tune into the latest economic news from New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, or Singapore, perhaps it would be a better thing to take a trip to the wilderness and spend some time just taking in the complexity and the beauty of the whole natural world. Then we can use that reality to attempt to recreate a human scale economic model.

How long will these wildness treks take? You will begin to understand when you summarily gain the context to go back to your urban security and understand: “This too shall pass, for it is about to run out of gas!”

However in the proper wildness context of we human’s role in this world, your new wisdom will have the potential to help you become one of the inventors of the continual renewal that provides for natural security rather than artificial hopeless change.

Today is where artificial hopeless change rules, and what we really need is a redux similar to the original American Revolution.

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