The Wellspring Publishing Group
Contents
The Wellspring Publishing Group Vision Statement:
The Challenge of Being Human


The self-assigned mission to meet the challenge of being human may be stated, at least in part, as a quest to discover, invent, identify, select, and implement patterns that live, in all domains of human life, and human action on Earth; and to identify, deselect, or replace deadly patterns, with patterns that live. This is the vision, and the purpose, of The Wellspring Publishing Group.

Now what does that mean? Elaboration follows.


"Things that can't go on forever don't."[1]

A widespread consensus, even among the most humble of us, would probably reach agreement that we humans are the most privileged of all Earth's creatures and species. We're at the top of the food chain, for example: we eat anything; nothing eats us — well, except for a few thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions, of species of microbes, insects, and so on; and at rare intervals, maybe a large aquatic or land predator. Oh — and many of us "eat each other," in a manner of speaking. But then, that may be part of why being human is sometimes such a challenge.

Anyway, many of us do have a pretty high opinion of our humanity: because there seems to be no other creature, or living species on the planet that compares to us, or can even come close to matching our amazingly versatile capabilities. We apparently occupy a class of our own, shared by nothing else on Earth.

However, borrowing from Douglas Adams, who has often had something stimulating to say about many things that may interest WPG Members:

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.[2]

One might say there are two sides to the coin: one of which may be labeled, The Blessings of Being Human; and the other, The Challenges of Being Human.

It appears that all beings on Earth — not including humans — have evolved over the course of many millions of years into the forms and patterns that identify them as what they are; such that they somehow "know" how to be what they are, and how to function successfully within the natural conditions that have presumably co-evolved with them. Those that have not, have ceased propagating their kind, and have become extinct.

The "ways of being," of the successful species, are consequently in some ways "hard-wired" into what they are; and so they are never challenged, in more than minute, incremental ways, by any ambiguity about how it were best for them to be.[3] They already "know" how to be what they are, and are seldom taxed with the need to "reinvent the wheel," or somehow "figure out" how to deal with the circumstances they have been dealing with daily and seasonally, for at least the past several millions of years.

Humans, in contrast, besides being the most recent new arrival on the planet, seem also to be so constituted that we lack a great many "pre-installed" instinctual patterns that automatically instruct other species in how to be what they are. In the absence of such "pre-installed" patterns, humans often have, either to "figure it out for ourselves," or to "make it up as we go along." We seem in some ways to be a species in perpetual infancy, or youth. This can be at once a liberating blessing, and a vexing challenge.

Until relatively recently, a number of different races, ethnicities, and human cultures have evidently developed in almost complete isolation from one another, in various regions of the planet; demonstrating that "there's more than one way to skin a cat," and innumerable ways of dealing with similar circumstances. However, when they eventually did encounter one another, the confrontations among these different cultural groups have often been quite traumatic; and have occasioned numerous and almost ceaseless conditions of warfare and mutual self-destruction among humans with strongly conflicting views over allegedly "right" and "wrong" ways of being human.

From the beginning, competition over land, food, and vital resources has occupied a large part in these controversies, and may have been the original "spark" that touched them off. In any case, all such contentions have been significantly intensified and prolonged by strong differences of opinion over alternative "ways of being human," that are frequently claimed by their respective proponents to be mutually exclusive. That is, adherents to this or that "way of being human" often claim in effect that their way is the only "right way," and that all other ways are "wrong," and deserve nothing better than extermination.

Today, we have arrived at the dawning realization that we Earth-humans — all of us, whether we like it or not — regardless of our differences, are in effect a single "island people," occupying a precarious outpost in the midst of a vast ocean of relative vacuum, with no known similar islands anywhere within view; and no effective means of navigating to them, even if any such were known. This means, among other things, that if we cannot learn to tolerate one another's "ways of being human," then we've got a "problem" here.

Further, although human experience has demonstrated that there are innumerable different "ways of being human," some of these ways seem to work better than others; and the ways that work better have recognizable properties in common, that distinguish them from the ways that do not work as well.

This understanding is illuminated by the concept of patterns, as described by architect Christopher Alexander, 1977, 1979,[4] and discussed by Grahn, 2010.[5]

Alexander observes that everything is made out of patterns: patterns of events, patterns in space, and patterns of relationship among patterns. Even patterns are themselves made out of patterns; which come in two distinguishable varieties: patterns that balance all their constituent forces, and patterns that do not. The first, Alexander calls patterns that live; the second, he calls dead patterns.

The natural world is filled with examples of patterns that live, such as the patterns of relationship among blossoms and honeybees. These of course, are patterns, made of patterns, made of patterns . . . virtually ad infinitum; and their distinguishing qualities are universally recognizable as being "beautiful," "harmonious," "balanced," etc. All their elements balance in exquisite equilibrium, whereby nothing that is needed is missing, and nothing extra or unnecessary is included.

Many patterns that live are found in the human world as well: such as finely crafted old buildings, parks, streets, pathways, roads, and towns that nestle comfortably and timelessly within their surrounding landscapes. They look, and feel, as if they belong exactly where they are, exactly how they are — even though, being alive, they are in a constant process of gradual change. Yet they remain always as natural, and as at home in the world, as that old weeping willow, with its gnarled roots sipping from the edge of the stream that meanders through the town, its foliage sometimes trailing their fingers in the cool water.

However, the human world also harbors and proliferates many examples of dead patterns. The trash middens and city dumps in back corners of old villages, and the outskirts of modern cities, are ugly places, where things and substances that are no longer useful, or valued, are discarded, ignored, and forgotten.

Have you ever noticed that in a virgin forest — or in any balanced ecology — nothing is ever unvalued, ignored, or forgotten? Nothing. True, animals and plants are constantly discarding stuff, like leaves, fur, feathers, droppings, and eventually, even their own bones, for which they have no further use. Yet everything they discard contributes something of value to somebody, or something else, within the ecological pattern. That is why a balanced ecology is a pattern that lives: everything balances; every byproduct of every process is an input for some other productive process.

This is also why human processes that produce a stream of products and byproducts on a one-way journey to the dump, is a pattern that does not balance, and does not live, but is dead; and is ultimately deadly. It is a pattern, for as far back as historical human memory is able to reach, and even farther, that has been universally present among humans everywhere: things and substances that humans require or desire for their sustenance and projects very often end up on a one-way journey to the trash midden, or the dump, where they are of no further use to anything, or anybody.

An extreme instance of this deadly pattern — which is only a single example among a great many other deadly human patterns — has drawn particularly alarmed global attention during the time this Vision Statement was being written.

Friday, 11 March 2011 at 14:46:23, local time at the epicenter, a Magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred off the east coast of Honshu, Japan,[6] sending a devastating tsunami ashore along the Japanese coast.

There have been many casualties in the wake of this event, one of which was the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant near the epicenter of the earthquake; which has been, and is likely to continue being, during future decades, the source of many additional casualties: in Japan, neighboring Asia, and possibly in other parts of the world.[7]

As gathered from fragmentary, conflicting, and possibly not entirely reliable reports, it appears that, in immediate response to the quake, the stricken nuclear reactors at the power plant were successfully shut down. However, vital to every nuclear power plant — which had received scant public attention prior to the Fukushima Disaster — are the spent fuel pools where spent nuclear fuel is kept for later disposal, after it has been exhausted as the source of the nuclear reactions that generate the "clean" electrical power nuclear plants produce.

Spent nuclear fuel is still highly radioactive, and literally hot; and so must be kept submerged in constantly circulating pools of water, to keep the spent fuel cool enough not to boil the water away, and allow the spent fuel to melt — one form of "meltdown." At Fukushima, the tsunami evidently disabled some of the systems that keep the spent fuel submerged, and the spent fuel pools cool; which has created the alarming situation of spent fuel melting and fissioning out of control in the open air, outside of any containment whatsoever.

The "dirty little secret" about nuclear energy, which is being unavoidably exposed to the light of day by the Fukushima Disaster, is that throughout the history of the Atomic Age, which began in 1945, there has emerged no satisfactory pattern for disposing of nuclear waste.

In addition to "clean" electricity, all of the several hundred operating nuclear power plants around the world today produce ever mounting quantities of very "dirty" nuclear waste: which is kept in spent fuel pools, for disposal . . . "later." Only, "later" never arrives. And so, these hundreds of spent fuel pools have become the de facto dumps for all the accumulating nuclear waste on the planet — each one of which is the site for a potential replay of the Fukushima Disaster, end of story.

But of course, this is not really the end of the story. It is only the end of the one-way, dead-end street for a prototypically dead, and deadly, human pattern — among many others — that cannot go on forever. And so: they will not go on forever.

Therefore:
The self-assigned mission to meet the challenge of being human may be stated, at least in part, as a quest to discover, invent, identify, select, and implement patterns that live, in all domains of human life, and human action on Earth; and to identify, deselect, or replace deadly patterns, with patterns that live. This is the vision, and the purpose, of The Wellspring Publishing Group.

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1. Herbert Stein, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors during the Nixon administration.

2. Douglas Addams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

3. "Never say 'never'." A rich variety of terrestrial and aquatic, possibly reptilian species, the dinosaurs, that dominated the planet for 185½ million years during the Mesozoic Era, abruptly ceased to exist, when 65½ million years ago, they encountered changed conditions throughout the world that they were unable to accommodate. Whatever these changed conditions were, and whatever caused them, the entire planet underwent a sudden geological transformation that no dinosaur species survived. Some small mammalian species, however, which had coexisted with the dinosaurs since early in the Mesozoic, did survive. No longer opposed by competition with the now extinct dinosaurs, the mammals evidently proliferated into the rich menagerie of species that characterizes the Cenozoic Era, in which we are still living today.

The moral of this story is that even the most successful of species or beings can meet circumstances with which they are unable to cope; and even the least successful species or beings can be given a boost by a change of circumstances that allows them to thrive.

4. Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, Oxford University Press, New York, 1977; Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, Oxford University Press, New York, 1979.

5. J. Harmon Grahn, The Writing on the Wall #1: "Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, Everything is Out of Control!", The Wellspring Publishing Group, 24 September 2010, 28 pp., 161.7 kB, § 6, Patterns, p. 13.

6. USGS.

7. To put it mildly. For example, see: