Brain Spores- the advantage of 7 billion people

So, the world turned 7 billion.  Anxiety for a finite planet? or a hot bed of brain spores.

I’m terribly fond of mushrooms for all kinds of reasons.  For example, a mushroom in Oregon may be the world’s largest single organism.  “This 2,400-acre (9.7 km²) site in eastern Oregon had a contiguous growth of mycelium before logging roads cut through it. Estimated at 2,200 years old, this one fungus has killed the forest above it several times over, and in so doing has built deeper soil layers that allow the growth of ever-larger stands of trees.” —Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running

Mushrooms don’t have seeds; mushrooms drop spores.  The dispersed spores land like birdshot on a field of resources.  Then the spores look for each other and connect by hyphae.  Like any node (spore) and edge (hyphae) configuration, as the nodes connect edges, the ability to extract and allocate resources across the field increases as the network becomes more connected.

Today is Day of the Dead – and mushrooms know how to dance on the grave.  That is, mushrooms thrive by working the reciprocal relationship of exponential growth with exponential depletion.  Mushrooms understand and thrive on a steady state economy.  What is so exquisite about this mycelial mat, is that the mushroom mat can kill and eat a tree that is floundering in a shady area and move those resources to feed another tree in a brightly lit area.  That is, the system gleans and allocates from across a large landscape for the success of the overall system.

R Williams estimates the human brain has about 100 billion (10¹¹) neurons and 100 trillion (10¹⁴) synapses.  Multiply that by 7 billion brains; we have a force of nature.

While our collective population is a force of nature currently pushing toward the limits of our finite system in myriad ways (e.g. exponential increase in energy use causes exponential depletion of oil reserves which is directly related to exponential increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases thus exponentially increasing heat retained from the sun and disappearing ice pack reserves…), we are a reflective species.  In the same way we can learn how the exponential function is a way to access resources, it is also the means by which we can understand that growth is predicated on depletion in a closed system.  Geometrical cause and effect.  We can begin to change our focus of vitality based on the abstract monetary system of economic growth to one of steady-state ecological stewardship of our material home.  Economics and Ecology both come from the Greek oikos “house, dwelling place, habitation”.

What I’m trying to talk about here is how each and everyone of us is a witness of the state of our home.  Embodied within the global citizenry are perspectives, ideas, and solutions to global problems to redefine these status quo behaviors and inform sustainable solutions. This think tank project liberates, combines and sequentially layers ideas from people who might be geographically remote to each other to generate solutions that impact the global ecosystem.  By releasing these ideas, we will have a greater capacity to respond to our rapidly changing environments.  We can harness the power of the exponential to redefine civic action.

Let’s mat together.