Sun, cloud and blue trade places as wind pushes the sky. The wind turbine spins and trees jostle. Green deepens, summer quickening, prescience of autumn.
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My previous two posts — exercises in using the Whole Communities quadrant map as a flexible tool — have led me to a few of new thoughts on the Whole Measures approach. I have been creating a series of maps reflecting changing perceived contrasts in the social and ecological landscape of Monteverde, Costa Rica. As I did this I noticed that the second map I drafted, the Quakers Arrive, 1950′s-60′s, seemed to contain the previous map, Before 1951, nested in one of the new quadrants. This reminded of the exercise we did in the yurt with the illustrations from Zoom by Istvan Banyai. I am offering this interlude between my mapping posts to reflect on this.
map paradoxes revisited
In the my first post related to the July 2011 Whole Measures workshop, I laid the ground for my mapping exercise by mentioning two map paradoxes. In that post I did not discuss the differences between the two and instead focused on the “map is not the territory” conclusion that can be derived from both. However, they are different paradoxes, though both relate to scale. Lewis Carroll’s paradox of the complete map simply presents the nonsensical conclusion that the most accurate cartography would have a 1:1 scale. This results in map that is as large as the territory it attempts to represent. Josiah Royce, on the other hand, presents the idea that a perfectly accurate map would have to duplicate all the features of the world, including a copy of the map itself:
Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been leveled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity — The World and the Individual (1899)
I’ve called this the paradox of the perfect map. The map-within-the-map image is like the Zoom pictures, but there is a difference that is worth examining: the nested pictures in Zoom are not copies of themselves.
seeing the system
The Whole Measures guide begins with a discussion of “Levels of Engagement: A Systems Approach.” The guide presents a diagram of concentric circles representing “nested levels of engagement,” from the “individual” to the “globe.” The guide then moves to a description of the “Whole Communities Quadrant Framework.” It’s a sparse section, and there is not much discussion of what being a system means.
Systems theory has its own history, different traditions and varying applications. Most simply, a system is a whole made up interrelated parts. It is dynamic — energy, nutrients, information — move through a system. Organisms can be viewed as systems, as can ecologies (ecosystems, of course), organizations and other communities. A part of a system has a synergistic relationship to the whole, thus the call for “whole measures,” “whole thinking,” “whole communities,”etc. The biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela describe living systems as autopoeic: self-making and self-maintaining. The chemist Ilya Prigogine calls these dissipative systems: as living things our response to entropy is the constant rebuilding of ourselves. What characterizes this process of self creation and re-creation? How does it relate to the idea of “levels of engagement?” in a larger system? How are we as individuals embedded in our groups, organizations and communities? Do the nested pictures in Zoom represent connected but discontinuous worlds, or is there an embedded continuity (story?) that can be followed through the levels?
The best way I can present my thoughts (given my predilection) is visually.
The graphic above is a nested triangle, a kind of fractal, also known as a Sierpinski Triangle. I’ve programmed these versions of the triangle using a lovely educational computer programming language named LOGO that uses the analogy of a turtle that draws a line behind it. To draw various pictures one simply gives the turtle instructions to go forward or back and turn left or right.
What is most striking about the Sierpinski Triangle: what appears as a complex pattern is constructed from a set of instructions that are the same as what it takes to draw a simple triangle: go forward some amount, turn 120 degrees, repeat this three times. What causes the increasing levels of nesting is related to how many times the instructions repeat using three recursive calls (I’d be happy to send anyone interested the code). This looping of instructions appears very simple, but it produces a dizzying complexity if one tries to follow the path of the turtle. This is because each time the turtle comes to a repeating instruction it makes a copy of the entire procedure (the set of instructions). This has the effect of sending the turtle on a kind of mirror-facing-mirror Carroll-like journey into a labyrinth of copies, like the Morton Salt girl or the Droste coco nurse. How many times the triangle nests depends on the number of copies the turtle passes in and out of.
This complexity from simplicity appears in nature over and over again, and we can model many apparently complicated forms using simple tools like the LOGO computer language; for example, the fern on the right.
How does all this relate to Whole Communities quadrant maps and my Monteverde map series? What has struck me as I have been constructing the Monteverde maps is what seems to be an echo of the patrón/campesino relationship: the Quaker settlers entered a social-ecological landscape that had this strong pattern. While they have been arguably “change agents” that have altered the landscape, there is a kind of inertia that pulls relationships back into this fundamental pattern. The quadrant map approach may be a way of finding the fundmental contrasts (differences) that define a particular social-ecological system, working up and down nested levels, from the individual to a larger landscape and society. If we wish change, we will need to recognize how these contrasts/differences reverberate, fractal-like, throughout a system.
