Humans have been on the planet for 200,000 years, Tom Wessels said, and for 95 percent of that time, the culture was one of hunting and gathering, with the focus on the well-being of the clan.
A member who had a successful hunt would share with the others, knowing that if someone else was successful, they would also share.
“Their view of the world was incredibly relational,” he said. “We’ve lost a lot of that in our society. A lot of our consumptive tendencies have shredded that.”
Wessels, a professor emeritus at Antioch University and author of “The Myth of Progress,” presented “Coevolution: The Model for Humanity’s Sustainable Future” at the Monadnock Summer Lyceum at Peterborough Unitarian Universalist Church Sunday. Moderator Brett Amy Thelen, a former student of Wessels and now the science director at the Harris Center for Conservation Education, called him a “friend, mentor and fellow desert rat” and said that when she was a student, Wessels would take the class to a different forest and teach them how to find clues in the landscape.
“Every week, he would blow our minds with the level of detail he would discern,” she said.
Wessels, who has experience as an ecologist focusing on forest, desert, arctic and alpine ecosystems, said coevolution is a self-organizing process in ecosystems. As systems grow, they get bigger and more complex, and the parts get more specialized and more integrated with the others, making the system more energy-efficient, stable and resilient.
Using the human body as an example, Wessels said everyone started life as a single, microscopic cell, but that cell turned into 254 types of specialized cells that are integrated and keep bodily functions stable and resilient.
“When we get sick, we get injured, we heal,” he said.
In nature, Wessels said that during the wildflower blooming season, from late April to November, the flowers are sustained by more than 1,000 insect pollinators at different times, creating a repetition of function.
“Every critical role out there has thousands of species handling that role,” Wessels said.
While integration makes systems more energy-efficient, Wessels said competitive overlap wastes energy, so natural selection forces specialization, which is why owls forage for food at night, while hawks do so during the day.
As to how this relates to human behavior, Wessels cited “The Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith, which focuses on merchant economies and the ways merchants developed relationships that were beneficial to each other, such as the butcher buying knives from the blacksmith, who in turn buys meat from the butcher.
Today, however, Wessels said society has shifted to a model focuses on competition, not integrated relationships, between a few large corporate entities, lacking stability and resiliency.
Wessels used the 2008 financial meltdown as an example, saying that risky investments were the catalyst, but the underlying reason was that the financial system was concentrated and lacked self-organization, with 54 percent of all banking assets held by 10 banks all involved in the same forms of investments. Therefore, he said, the banks weren’t specialized or integrated, and when Lehman Brothers failed, if the government hadn’t intervened, “that whole thing would have cascaded down.”
And because so many banks that failed during the crisis got swallowed up by larger banks, Wessels said that the system is even less self-organized now. According to Wessels, the last time he checked, 82 percent of banking assets held by the top 10 banks.
“I don’t know what the next catalyst will be, but if there is one, we’re going to see a financial crisis that’s going to be much greater than what happened in 2008,” he said.
A better approach, Wessels said, would be to relocalize and reregionalize services. For example, he said it’s not necessary to have industrial farms to feed the world.
“We can do it, but it means we need a lot of farmers with small farms,” he said.
On an individual level, Wessels said people can volunteer and take small steps to help others in the community.
“It’s just a matter of starting, and then once you get something under your belt, you take on more and take on more and it snowballs,” he said.
Weseels encouraged people to find their niche. For example, he realized his niche is as an educator, and even though people have encouraged him to go into politics, it’s not for him.
“I would not do well in a political setting,” he said.