In this essay, I explain 4 reasons why people should make courses & workshops at Euglena Academy a priority, even during economic hard times. I'll even boldly assert that the future of our civilization depends on effectively weaving the ideas taught at Euglena Academy & other similar schools around the planet into mainstream consciousness & everyday experience.
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Introduction
You've probably noticed that there's a global economic crisis going on. Reports are that the recent market drops are the largest since the great depression, & that it's likely to be around for several quarters ... at least.
Last week, I heard an economist explain a big part of the problem: whereas national markets were once more isolated, now "the economy" is globalized, meaning that all parts of it are closely coupled (linked or connected). It's easier for perturbations to quickly ripple through the highly-connected global economic system leading to instability & chaos.
Even though I'm a biologist, I understood that explanation intuitively because it references a systems principle that I teach in my courses at Euglena Academy. The basic idea: when there are "too many" links between system parts, even small perturbations can spread quickly & be amplified by positive feedback causing the system to become unstable, exhibiting larger, chaotic fluxes instead of being damped out locally by negative (stabilizing) feedback. (For those who want a technical reference: check systems scientist Stuart Kauffman's binary network models.)
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Now, I'm NOT telling that story to dissuade you from studying with me & others at Euglena Academy during the current economic crisis. Quite the contrary: I offer it as but one example illustrating the value of the academy's curriculum for understanding "how the world works", & to argue that our courses & workshops should be a priority even during the crisis.
Food, mortgage/rent, health care & transportation understandably get priority when times get hard, while "alternative" education (i.e., not courses for a college degree) often becomes an "unnecessary luxury" & get cut from the budget.
However, I assert that Euglena courses & workshops are not an "unnecessary luxury", but are as important to you, your health & well-being, & the future of our community & even our species as any other expense.
Why? During a conversation yesterday with a former Euglena student visiting from Chicago, I said that the current economic downturn has contributed to lower than average student enrollment at Euglena when we are working hard to grow the academy, expand course offerings, add new instructors, develop multimedia tools, etc.
He wisely counseled that I was being "too humble" when describing the importance of courses at the academy. He enthusiastically reminded me again - as in the past - that his study here taught him far more about the "way things work" than his undergraduate & graduate studies that required much longer to complete & cost much more money.
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So below I explain 4 reasons why people should make courses & workshops at Euglena Academy a priority, even during economic hard times. I'll even boldly assert that the future of our civilization depends on effectively weaving the ideas taught at Euglena Academy & other similar schools around the planet into mainstream consciousness & everyday experience.
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1) Euglena Academy teaches a set of scientific principles - collectively called "systems sciences" or "complexity sciences" - that allows one to understand in an almost intuitive way "how things work", the nature of reality, existence, nature, life, health & disease, evolution & even consciousness.
Once one learns how system principles apply to a particular type of system - for me, a biologist, it's biological systems - one can then understand the basic operation of ANY system, whether physical, chemical, social, ecological, climate, political, economic, astronomical, etc.
Systems sciences allow people from different disciplines to communicate freely with each other about their "systems" using a common language & conceptual framework involving about 20 - 30 key ideas like networks, feedback (positive & negative), non-linearity, self-organization, emergence, autopoiesis, attractor state, critical threshold (tipping point), phase transition, bifurcation, chaos, the edge of chaos, fractal & power laws.
No other school in Eugene or elsewhere in the region offers college-level workshops & courses integrating systems sciences, climate change (#3) & geophysiology (#4) to any person (18+) with any background (including no science) like Euglena Academy does. Not UO, not LCC, not OSU.
2) One of the most astounding revelations extending from systems sciences is a compelling, awe-inspiring new understanding of the nature of life that is radically different from the view of life put forth by the mechanistic reductionism of the last 100 years. For the first time in scientific history, we are not only able to define & explain what life is (previously, the word "life" was not included in biology text glossaries) & how life began, but also offer a scientifically-credible response to the the question, "Why does life happen?". (That question was previously relegated to philosophy & religion.)
I have learned far more about life - its nature, evolution & healthy function - since beginning to study & teach systems sciences than I did during 16 years of university, including a BS & MS in biology, an MS in probability theory & a PhD in ecology & evolution (UNM, 1990).
3) One cannot - CANNOT - fully understand the linked crises of "global warming" (global heating) & climate change without a rudimentary understanding of systems sciences, including geophysiology or Gaia theory (see #4).
Many writers, speakers, politicians & even scientists still contend that by reducing greenhouse gas emissions even modestly (e.g., 50% by 2050), we can stop global warming & climate change, adjusting Earth's thermostat to a temperature of our preference.
However, climate change is advancing much faster than most of them are aware. In my public lectures, workshops & courses on climate change - offered to close to 1000 people, none of whom have yet offered a counterargument - I advance Lovelock's argument, supported by principles of systems sciences & published evidence, that Earth's climate has now passed the tipping point for large-scale change.
Translation: it is very unlikely that we can "stop" global warming & climate change even if we can muster the political will to try, & that during the next few decades, Earth's climate will undergo a rapid transition to a much hotter, extreme, chaotic & violent state that last occurred 55 million years ago during the PETM. (Also see PETM blog.)
With significant emissions reductions, we may be able to slow climate change, but it's highly unlikely that we can stop it. Thus, we need to now spend as much time, money & effort planning for adaptation as trying to slow it.
To be clear: Euglena's curriculum is the ONLY one in Eugene & probably the region that explains Earth's current climate crisis using systems sciences & geophysiology, offering a realistic assessment of our climate crisis necessary to plan for adaption to large-scale climate change.
4) A major focus of Euglena's curriculum is geophysiology or Gaia theory. Formalized over the last 30 years by James Lovelock & microbiologist Lynn Margulis, it is neither philosophy nor mysticism, but science, taught as such at universities in Britain & Europe, even if rarely taught in the US. Neither UO, OSU nor LCC offer courses in Gaia theory.
The basic idea is that Earth is not merely a ball of rock, water & air controlled by physics & chemistry with a coating of life clinging to it, but is, instead, a tightly-coupled physiological system involving air, water, rocks & life that operates much like your body on a planetary scale: it automatically - without conscious thought - regulates its temperature & chemical composition at states that have supported the existence of life for nearly 4 billion years. That is, Gaia is homeostasis at a planetary scale.
Gaia is also Earth's climate regulation system. Thus, to understand climate change, one must understand geophysiological changes as well. For example, Lovelock refers "interglacial" period (between ice ages, like the last 11,000 years) as "planetary fevers" triggered (not caused) by minor variations in Earth's orbit called Milankovitch cycles. With our fossil fuel use, we are heating Earth abnormally, or as Lovelock says, "piling blankets on a fevered patient".
Lovelock & Margulis argue - & I agree - that without widespread understanding of the principles of geophysiology in human communities to promote behavior that favors the health of Gaia, the probability of the demise of civilization & even human extinction increases significantly. While we acknowledge the importance of the current financial crisis, peak oil, wars & other issues, none are as important to the long term survival of the human species, let alone civilization, as Gaia theory.
As Lovelock writes in Revenge of Gaia:
“Humanity ... faces its greatest trial. The acceleration of the climate change now underway will sweep away the comfortable environment to which we are adapted... We need most of all to renew that love & empathy for nature that we lost when we began our love affair with city life."Cultural historian William Irwin Thompson - friend of Lovelock & Margulis, advocate of the extreme importance of Gaia theory - puts it this way this in his book Coming Into Being:
“In my literary friendship with chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham, atmospheric chemist James Lovelock, microbiologist Lynn Margulis, & neuro-scientist Francisco Varela, I am seeking, as a poet, not to write about the return to nature that one would find in the works of such poets as Gary Snyder or Wendell Berry, but about a much more radical re-visioning of nature, a re-articulation of nature & culture ….”Euglena Academy's program & curriculum have been designed over seven years to facilitate a "re-articulation of nature & culture" by promoting an elegant, new understanding of the phenomenon of life via systems sciences, including our planetary climate regulation system called Gaia without which we cannot survive.
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Having said that, I invite you do the following soon:
- Take a course or weekend workshop at Euglena, like the Systems, Gaia & Climate course beginning Oct 30. (See next post.)
- If you don't have time for a course or workshop, please consider sponsoring another person with a full or partial scholarship.
I hope to see you soon.
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