Stupendous Change Leadership Series: Energetics
14/February/2007 14:19 Filed in: Weekly Column
14 February 2007; Volume 9, Issue 7
PDF copy
I awoke in the midnight darkness, just as if someone had turned on a light.
“Light yes, energy is what stupendous change is all about. Destructive force energies beyond the scale conceivable to man, fighting against a restoration of order by human God given talents, to create anew and afresh from the chaos. Believe it or not, just like God created the world in the beginning and continues the creation saga, from chaos to definable order. Amazing.”
Wikipedia defines energetics as “the scientific study of energy flows under transformation.” As the definition continues it states that energy flows at all scales, from the quantum level up through the cosmos, so energetics is truly a very “broad” discipline. Another way to define energetics is the application of kinetic energy to creation, in contrast to the potential energy which is stored.
I took a class in Ecological Energetics between when I got out of the service and when I arrived at graduate school at WSU. I believe we used a small paperback book by John Phillipson, but through photocopied papers we looked at energy flows in the broad context of wilderness ecosystems, to human energy flows in various environments, to the pronounced energy deficit of producing ethanol from midwestern corn, and many other energetic models. That single class changed the way I naturally look at the world, well beyond what I could have ever understood previously.
If you want to understand why I thought we made a grave mistake in our invasion and subsequent operations in Iraq, don’t look first at the religions or the politics, look first at the energetics and then let the rest of your decisions flow from there. The Bush Administration did not do that, and 3000 dead and billions of dollars later, we are just beginning to ask what went wrong. Duh, the energetics (in the scientific sense) of the operations did not and will not support what we were/are trying to do. Furthermore, perhaps the Administrations biggest tactical error was not realizing that energetics, this time with a political spin, would become a dominate force in the homeland, as battlefield energetic problems mounted.
I might add, a couple of days alone in the woods will begin to show you that, if you are willing to look around and enjoy the experience. Supplanting your urban culture simplicity within the wilderness complexity will begin to enlighten you. Furthermore, this half breed metis wisdom is not found anywhere in Washington DC lobbing firms and think tanks.
You probably will not find this wisdom either in America’s great theological cemeteries or megachurches. But you will find sound energetics in the Bible, especially human ecological energetics. In the Bible there are no races or countries in our modern sense of cultural endpoints, what you will find are tribes and nations.
Modern countries require energetics beyond natural energetics to hold them together. That includes the greatest country in the history of the world, the United States of America. Race does not exist in the Bible just unique people groups (a Christian politically correct term for tribes) adapted for survival to certain areas of this fallen creation. As mentioned above, part of the current debate on the handling of the war in Iraq stems from this tribes and nations concept. Different groups of people view war in dissimilar ways, some of that difference is religious, some genetic, some of it environmental, both in the physical and psychological senses.
We have posted on the website the link to the “Scenario for a Magnitude 6.7 Earthquake on the Seattle Fault.” The reason 6.7 was chosen was the fact that there is natural evidence that such an earthquake once took place. We have a pretty good idea from that data what will happen if the ground shakes that much. After looking at similar earthquakes around the world, some planners think that an earthquake in the low sevens on the Richter scale is just as possible, perhaps more probable.
We can’t contemplate in our minds the difference between 6.7 and 7.1. The energy released difference is not 4/10ths higher it is 4 times higher. Look over the report and then envision if you can, multiplying that energy release and destruction again 4 or more times. About all you can say for sure is that the decimation in any concept we can understand, will probably be much greater than the numbers we just used. Beyond that we are not capable of processing the data without seeing some sort of visual model representation. No one really ever wants to see that in actuality.
Tuesday night on the PBS News Hour there was an essay about New Orleans 500 days after Katrina. The city that once had a population of 650,000 had dwindled because of poor living conditions to about 450,000 just before Katrina. Today’s best guess is that about 220,000 people remain. Of the 100,000 homes beyond hope, less than 500 have had their insurance claims settled. As the essayist mentioned, every current resident has a mental evacuation plan now in place. At a time when they have had more than enough, they will just pick up what they can and leave New Orleans for good. Tongue in cheek he mentioned that of course no one will admit to having such a plan. Such is the reality of living with stupendous energetics.
New Orleans as we perceive the city is over a couple of hundred years old. Good and bad, the Big Easy had developed 200 years of infrastructure. That includes natural infrastructure, but in New Orleans, without making any value judgments at all, the social culture is virtually irreplaceable. Virtually all that was destroyed in Katrina. To think that you can replace that with anything in 500 days is foolishness. A decade later some things will have changed, but the point is that you will not live in the new New Orleans for a very long time, without a commitment or calling to rebuild the city. It is just that simple.
If the Scenario for a major earthquake on the Seattle Fault happens, it will make Katrina’s destruction look like a severe windstorm. Realistically if you survive, you are going to leave and not return, unless you feel you have a commitment or calling just as in New Orleans at present. Just as in New Orleans, a new Seattle should not be build where it once stood, at least in the same way.
This brings us to your energetic response to whatever stupendous change experience you may have to cope with in your future life on this uniform slowly and redundantly gradual changing planet earth. I suppose the question is best phrased in the statement. ”Tell me what you are willing to die for, and what you are willing to live for.”
Most people have thought about what they are willing to die for. Most people have not however, thought about having to live for what they are willing to die for. Dying for a cause maybe an instantaneous happening. It may happen more slowly through our conscious choice, perhaps through a time and place circumstance following that chosen vision. Living for something is much more difficult, because it doesn’t go away when you sleep, it is always there. The good thing however, if this living is truly what you are created by God to do, in spite of the hardships, the journey gives your life purpose. The problem however, is most people so compartmentalize their lives, they don’t even know where to look for that true purpose.
When tornados recently created a path of destruction through Florida, the CBS Evening News was anchored in front of a destroyed church. At the end of the program Katie Couric talked to the pastor asking him to show her the destroyed church. After the such as it was tour, she asked the pastor, “I understand you plan on having church services this Sunday, how are you going to do that when the church has been destroyed?”
To that the pastor responded, “The church was not destroyed, our building was destroyed, but the church that meets here is stronger than ever.” That is a calling and a commitment, from that basis will come the energetics to rebuild order from the chaos.
In my neck of the Seattle woods, the electric power is out from hours to days, a couple of times a year. I have the resources to deal with that. I experienced the Magnitude 6.8 Nisqually earthquake in 2001. That was all the earthquake I ever want to experience. Even though the epicenter was probably 60 surface miles away, the Intensity Map showed that the shaking was just about as strong where I was as it was in the immediate center of the quake.
I have no concept of the explosive force of a tornado. I can read about the center of the tornado being the lowest natural barometric pressure on earth, with wind speeds in excess of 200 miles an hour, but it really does not compute in my mind.
When I was in high school in Kettle Falls we got 24 inches of snow in one night. We were snowed in for most of the week, but that is a long ways from the 12 feet of snow they got last week and the 3 more feet they are now expecting in upstate New York.
The energetics of nature seems to be getting more destructive this winter than anyone I can recall. We can blame it on man’s effects on global warming if we like. Similarly, we can call it just a variation a nature. However, the fact remains that we have to deal with these stupendous events, and even if we somehow stop all greenhouse gas emissions at once, we are likely to have to deal with similar stupendous weather patterns for decades.
It really does no good to say if we started to reduce carbon dioxide emissions earlier we would not be in this fix. Likewise, to imply that these storms are a judgment from God or that The Rapture will happen in short order is just another tool we use to slough the real present into a more distant future.
The reason I am spending so much time with your God given mental coping ability in this article and the previous ones, is the fact that anyone of these natural occurences causes energy flows well beyond what you will ever control in your total lifetime. But yet, we have to cope none the less. It doesn’t seem fair, but still we will get by, we will adapt, we might die, it is a long potential list of outcomes.
To that mental list we will eventually add a list of stuff, to add to your chances of success, but for the most part the stuff will add to your convenience rather than save your life, provided you have or are prepared at all. Therein lies the other kicker, the better you are prepared mentally for whatever life gives you, the more you will prepare for the natural. It is a self fulfilling prophesy.
So out of the ruins of stupendous change you find your tent, your battery powered radio, your camp stove, your food box, and you begin to use your energetics to change real chaos into order. You get to do something that God instilled in your personality when you were created in His image. In our own created way, you are changing chaos into order. It might take a day, a week, or a lifetime, but that is something you can do. If you call on God to help you in that process, the progress will surely allow you to understand the proper perspective in all things. You can call it properly God’s grace, natural energetic utilization, or the military term command and control, there is really no difference.
There is a God, you are His prize creation. He has made a training path for you into an eternal perfect future. Pick up the shovel and get with the program. If you haven’t got a shovel and you think that is a good idea, perhaps you should go out and buy one, for in stupendous change events one will not be able to buy a shovel, it must be chosen for that special purpose before hand.
PDF copy
I awoke in the midnight darkness, just as if someone had turned on a light.
“Light yes, energy is what stupendous change is all about. Destructive force energies beyond the scale conceivable to man, fighting against a restoration of order by human God given talents, to create anew and afresh from the chaos. Believe it or not, just like God created the world in the beginning and continues the creation saga, from chaos to definable order. Amazing.”
Wikipedia defines energetics as “the scientific study of energy flows under transformation.” As the definition continues it states that energy flows at all scales, from the quantum level up through the cosmos, so energetics is truly a very “broad” discipline. Another way to define energetics is the application of kinetic energy to creation, in contrast to the potential energy which is stored.
I took a class in Ecological Energetics between when I got out of the service and when I arrived at graduate school at WSU. I believe we used a small paperback book by John Phillipson, but through photocopied papers we looked at energy flows in the broad context of wilderness ecosystems, to human energy flows in various environments, to the pronounced energy deficit of producing ethanol from midwestern corn, and many other energetic models. That single class changed the way I naturally look at the world, well beyond what I could have ever understood previously.
If you want to understand why I thought we made a grave mistake in our invasion and subsequent operations in Iraq, don’t look first at the religions or the politics, look first at the energetics and then let the rest of your decisions flow from there. The Bush Administration did not do that, and 3000 dead and billions of dollars later, we are just beginning to ask what went wrong. Duh, the energetics (in the scientific sense) of the operations did not and will not support what we were/are trying to do. Furthermore, perhaps the Administrations biggest tactical error was not realizing that energetics, this time with a political spin, would become a dominate force in the homeland, as battlefield energetic problems mounted.
I might add, a couple of days alone in the woods will begin to show you that, if you are willing to look around and enjoy the experience. Supplanting your urban culture simplicity within the wilderness complexity will begin to enlighten you. Furthermore, this half breed metis wisdom is not found anywhere in Washington DC lobbing firms and think tanks.
You probably will not find this wisdom either in America’s great theological cemeteries or megachurches. But you will find sound energetics in the Bible, especially human ecological energetics. In the Bible there are no races or countries in our modern sense of cultural endpoints, what you will find are tribes and nations.
Modern countries require energetics beyond natural energetics to hold them together. That includes the greatest country in the history of the world, the United States of America. Race does not exist in the Bible just unique people groups (a Christian politically correct term for tribes) adapted for survival to certain areas of this fallen creation. As mentioned above, part of the current debate on the handling of the war in Iraq stems from this tribes and nations concept. Different groups of people view war in dissimilar ways, some of that difference is religious, some genetic, some of it environmental, both in the physical and psychological senses.
We have posted on the website the link to the “Scenario for a Magnitude 6.7 Earthquake on the Seattle Fault.” The reason 6.7 was chosen was the fact that there is natural evidence that such an earthquake once took place. We have a pretty good idea from that data what will happen if the ground shakes that much. After looking at similar earthquakes around the world, some planners think that an earthquake in the low sevens on the Richter scale is just as possible, perhaps more probable.
We can’t contemplate in our minds the difference between 6.7 and 7.1. The energy released difference is not 4/10ths higher it is 4 times higher. Look over the report and then envision if you can, multiplying that energy release and destruction again 4 or more times. About all you can say for sure is that the decimation in any concept we can understand, will probably be much greater than the numbers we just used. Beyond that we are not capable of processing the data without seeing some sort of visual model representation. No one really ever wants to see that in actuality.
Tuesday night on the PBS News Hour there was an essay about New Orleans 500 days after Katrina. The city that once had a population of 650,000 had dwindled because of poor living conditions to about 450,000 just before Katrina. Today’s best guess is that about 220,000 people remain. Of the 100,000 homes beyond hope, less than 500 have had their insurance claims settled. As the essayist mentioned, every current resident has a mental evacuation plan now in place. At a time when they have had more than enough, they will just pick up what they can and leave New Orleans for good. Tongue in cheek he mentioned that of course no one will admit to having such a plan. Such is the reality of living with stupendous energetics.
New Orleans as we perceive the city is over a couple of hundred years old. Good and bad, the Big Easy had developed 200 years of infrastructure. That includes natural infrastructure, but in New Orleans, without making any value judgments at all, the social culture is virtually irreplaceable. Virtually all that was destroyed in Katrina. To think that you can replace that with anything in 500 days is foolishness. A decade later some things will have changed, but the point is that you will not live in the new New Orleans for a very long time, without a commitment or calling to rebuild the city. It is just that simple.
If the Scenario for a major earthquake on the Seattle Fault happens, it will make Katrina’s destruction look like a severe windstorm. Realistically if you survive, you are going to leave and not return, unless you feel you have a commitment or calling just as in New Orleans at present. Just as in New Orleans, a new Seattle should not be build where it once stood, at least in the same way.
This brings us to your energetic response to whatever stupendous change experience you may have to cope with in your future life on this uniform slowly and redundantly gradual changing planet earth. I suppose the question is best phrased in the statement. ”Tell me what you are willing to die for, and what you are willing to live for.”
Most people have thought about what they are willing to die for. Most people have not however, thought about having to live for what they are willing to die for. Dying for a cause maybe an instantaneous happening. It may happen more slowly through our conscious choice, perhaps through a time and place circumstance following that chosen vision. Living for something is much more difficult, because it doesn’t go away when you sleep, it is always there. The good thing however, if this living is truly what you are created by God to do, in spite of the hardships, the journey gives your life purpose. The problem however, is most people so compartmentalize their lives, they don’t even know where to look for that true purpose.
When tornados recently created a path of destruction through Florida, the CBS Evening News was anchored in front of a destroyed church. At the end of the program Katie Couric talked to the pastor asking him to show her the destroyed church. After the such as it was tour, she asked the pastor, “I understand you plan on having church services this Sunday, how are you going to do that when the church has been destroyed?”
To that the pastor responded, “The church was not destroyed, our building was destroyed, but the church that meets here is stronger than ever.” That is a calling and a commitment, from that basis will come the energetics to rebuild order from the chaos.
In my neck of the Seattle woods, the electric power is out from hours to days, a couple of times a year. I have the resources to deal with that. I experienced the Magnitude 6.8 Nisqually earthquake in 2001. That was all the earthquake I ever want to experience. Even though the epicenter was probably 60 surface miles away, the Intensity Map showed that the shaking was just about as strong where I was as it was in the immediate center of the quake.
I have no concept of the explosive force of a tornado. I can read about the center of the tornado being the lowest natural barometric pressure on earth, with wind speeds in excess of 200 miles an hour, but it really does not compute in my mind.
When I was in high school in Kettle Falls we got 24 inches of snow in one night. We were snowed in for most of the week, but that is a long ways from the 12 feet of snow they got last week and the 3 more feet they are now expecting in upstate New York.
The energetics of nature seems to be getting more destructive this winter than anyone I can recall. We can blame it on man’s effects on global warming if we like. Similarly, we can call it just a variation a nature. However, the fact remains that we have to deal with these stupendous events, and even if we somehow stop all greenhouse gas emissions at once, we are likely to have to deal with similar stupendous weather patterns for decades.
It really does no good to say if we started to reduce carbon dioxide emissions earlier we would not be in this fix. Likewise, to imply that these storms are a judgment from God or that The Rapture will happen in short order is just another tool we use to slough the real present into a more distant future.
The reason I am spending so much time with your God given mental coping ability in this article and the previous ones, is the fact that anyone of these natural occurences causes energy flows well beyond what you will ever control in your total lifetime. But yet, we have to cope none the less. It doesn’t seem fair, but still we will get by, we will adapt, we might die, it is a long potential list of outcomes.
To that mental list we will eventually add a list of stuff, to add to your chances of success, but for the most part the stuff will add to your convenience rather than save your life, provided you have or are prepared at all. Therein lies the other kicker, the better you are prepared mentally for whatever life gives you, the more you will prepare for the natural. It is a self fulfilling prophesy.
So out of the ruins of stupendous change you find your tent, your battery powered radio, your camp stove, your food box, and you begin to use your energetics to change real chaos into order. You get to do something that God instilled in your personality when you were created in His image. In our own created way, you are changing chaos into order. It might take a day, a week, or a lifetime, but that is something you can do. If you call on God to help you in that process, the progress will surely allow you to understand the proper perspective in all things. You can call it properly God’s grace, natural energetic utilization, or the military term command and control, there is really no difference.
There is a God, you are His prize creation. He has made a training path for you into an eternal perfect future. Pick up the shovel and get with the program. If you haven’t got a shovel and you think that is a good idea, perhaps you should go out and buy one, for in stupendous change events one will not be able to buy a shovel, it must be chosen for that special purpose before hand.