After School Jam Session

How was school today? Fine. Did you learn anything important? Maybe. I'm not sure yet. Really? What are you considering? We talked about Howard Odum's natural trinity of altruism. Maybe I skipped that day way back in premillennial times before Permaculture Design had taken over deep learning development. Who is Howard Odum and how does his natural trinity diverge from my traditional Holy Trinity? Or, maybe it doesn't. Howard Odum was an early systems theorist who studied ecosystemic trends of nutrition building and disintegration, of sustainable balance and runwaway monocultural disasters like climate and landscape anti-nutritional pathologies. Did you just say climate change derives from monocultural overshoot, a weedpatch taking over our garden, also known as Earth? I guess, but in this case the weedpatch is also known as over-industrialized LeftBrain dominant anthropoids. But, the natural trinity of altruism is about climates of inter-relational health, and not about monocultures and anthropocentrism. I'm sure I missed this class, if they even had it back in my Baby Boomer day. You probably just got the Holy Trinity part, when you studied metaphysics. I don't think they were teaching ecosystemic theory when you took MultiCultural Civics Development classes; although Howard was published well before your high school years. It probably took awhile for educators to figure out the significance of ecosystemic balance, within and without, rather than merely lecturing about unsustainable imbalances hoping for civil democratically optimizing multiculturing and, thereby, self-other regenerative systems as wellness, and not so much sickness. Anyway, so is there a summary version of this natural trinity that you might share? Well, yes, I suppose the basic idea is as simple as any convex and therefore also concave implicated triangle. I'm already lost. No recall of convex and concave in my Holy Trinity. Oh, right... you missed postmillennial Bucky Fuller metrics too. Let's see... OK, Odum's natural trinity is a dynamic model for balancing lifetime energy investments, but at two levels. The individual biosystem. And, the collective species' regenerational biosystem, conceived as a not totally discontinuous ongoing spacetime ecosystem sharing Earth with other biosystemic ecosystems. At both of these levels, individual and higher-order species, about a third of energy invested into the system is required for healthy metabolic regeneration of each and every mental-physical system. Another consumed third of energy feeds back to maintain mutually subsidiary subsystemic prey, providers of fuel and energy. The last captured third of energy produces re-investments outward to what Odum calls "higher-order system controllers." Do you have an example? What might be one of my potential investments in a higher-order control/nurture system? Well, in class the hierarchical trinity we used was grass in relationship with rabbits in relationship with a predator, like a fox, for example. So the rabbit's energy waste fuels the grass, and the more vulnerable rabbits feed the foxes. Yes, especially the young and lame. The ones who see and sniff and move less well. I don't see how that works out so well as a trinitarian third. If you are young or lame or blind, especially. But how does Odum approximate this one-third math at the individual creature level? That's what we're talking about in class. I would imagine if you view successfully hunted and devoured from a predator's perspective you might feel the prey had made nearly a 100% re-investment, perhaps omitting the larger bones, in your higher-order controlling species. Perhaps a hungry pride of lions. This natural trinity of altruism seems to suffer in the end from more competitive taking without asking and less cooperative giving without needing to be asked, which is what I though altruism was more about. I suppose Odum was looking at balanced ecosystems as a resonantly deep whole, in which about one third of a species' generation, as seen from God's Higher Order perspective, redeems the other two-thirds by feeding the metabolic thrival needs of higher-order predators, controlling risks of overpopulation, leading to monocultural landscapes and climates of descending, and increasingly rabid, pathology. You mean like mother pigs eating their young to better feed those remaining in her litter? OK, if that actually happens I'm not sure I wanted to know about it. Also, if that happens, then we are talking about an out of balance system between generations within the same species. Perhaps Odum was speaking of some cosmic balance of energy. Really big picture. Global. Polypathic energy exchanges. And maybe higher order systems are not limited to controlling predators. Perhaps a higher order ecosystems might nurture potential victims of Earth's imbalance, especially our young and enslaved and addicted to competing sensory blindness and malnourished projects for ego-identity expansion, continuation, until we each discover that pain and loss and death could be revisited reconceived as equal to two-thirds of cooperative life and multiculturing gain through monoculturing absence, emptiness, loss of egocentric WinLose interest, divestment of self as re-investment in higher-order YangControl/YinNurture balance. So, that would be the connection, then, between Odum's natural trinity of altruism and Christianity's Holy Trinity of and for Earth's multiculturing altruism. Where is Holonic Spirit in this dual level trinity of higher order control with lower order nurturance producing self-regenerating healthy wealth of ego/eco-systemic Earth? That would be the middle ego/eco feeding balance, growing out to extend family identity to include gratitude for nurturing embryonic cousins, extending on through our ultimate individual biosystemic loss to higher order nurturing.