Holistic Vision, Hydropower, and the Spirit of the Beaver
Beneath the calm waters of Balbina Lake ghostly remnants of acai, ipe, andiroba, copaiba, kapok, and mahogany trees stand as markers of an aquatic cemetery, a haunting testament to the once vibrant Amazonian ecosystem that thrived here. The damming of the Uatumã River not only transformed this landscape into a watery graveyard, but also ruptured the eco-spiritual tapestry the Waimiri-Atroari people had woven with their homeland for millenia. Balbina Dam, intended as a source of renewable energy, paradoxically emits more greenhouse gases than a typical coal power plant due to decaying underwater anaerobic digestion.
We live in an immaculately complex cosmos, in the milky way galaxy, on this blue, green, white, floating marble. This world we have woken up to has evolved over billions of years to function through an interplay of abiotic and biotic dynamics, where minerals, soils, water, atmospheric gases, plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms, ecosystems, biogeochemical cycles, and climate systems all weave together a vibrant tapestry.
Since the neolithic revolution some 12,000 years ago (10,000 BCE), we humans entered a novel iteration of the evolutionary story. This transition featured the emerging normalization of agriculture, animal domestication, stone tools, pottery, and the metamorphosis from hunter-gatherer to sedentary-agricultural populations. These are the hallmark traces of an increasingly mechanized relationship to the world, developed as we learned to harness with increasing skill, the underlying patterns of nature for the interests and needs of our species.
5,000 years ago (3,000 BCE) in the Bronze Age, increasing levels of urbanization, social stratification, and cultural complexity manifest the cradles of civilization. In ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, the Andes and Mesoamerica, the intensification of agriculture makes possible dense settlements, specialized occupations, social classes, surplus exploitation, monuments, and writing.
300 years ago (1700 CE), ingenious trends in technological and socioeconomic development enable the industrialization of socioecological processes. Coupled with a globalizing planet and imperial world order, the Industrial Age brings modern technological and scientific knowledge to serve the values of a hyper-extractive planetary economy.
50 years ago (1970 CE), growing widespread awareness sparks the realization that modern civilization has reached the boundaries of the planet. Burgeoning human populations tooled with advanced technologies and extractive economies test the earth’s limits and reveal the potential of a malthusian bottleneck on the horizon.
Today, Modern Society finds itself in a sort of a mad rush, a scramble, in the attempt to resolve the mounting crises which our way of life has generated. Yet, in our urgency to implement action, impact, and results, we seem to exacerbate the problem, replicating the patterns of our past in the formulation of the future.
So attached are we to “action and impact”, that the most subtle and imperceptible formative layer of our operations remains hidden from our best intentions.
The Holistic Vision
We tend to think that operations - what we do and how we do it - are guided by strategies… and to a certain extent they are, but there exists a more essential and formative field of influence that makes our actions possible.
If you are a traveler, you can easily observe this field of influence by experiencing varying societies and cultures. Every distinct people, whether they be Yawanawa, Basque, or Japanese, imprints a distinct pattern upon the world. This distinct pattern transgresses arbitrary societal compartments, revealing itself isomorphically across customs, architecture, cuisine, economy, religion, philosophy, and recreation.
This formative field of influence - what Thomas Kuhn and Donella Meadows refer to as a paradigm - makes possible a human’s way of understanding themselves, and the nature of their relationship to the world. This is not only true for entire societies, but it is also true for individuals and social organizations. Our paradigms underlie, influence, and create every process we are a part of. Any new technology, any scientific research, any political or business strategy, any human actions whatsoever, are subject to this patterning.
Paradigms are always adapting and evolving, growing and transforming, according to the tides of the millenia and centuries. What over the past few centuries seemed a good idea, like the thoughtless pollution of our land, water, and air, reveals itself to be a misunderstanding of our relationship with the ecosphere. Similarly, the negation of spirituality and religious life in the secular age reveals an increasingly discombobulated social system marked by social incohesion, cultural fragmentation, political polarization, and psychological imbalances. Where John Locke’s paradigm once enabled him to think that fallow land was unproductive, we now know the naivety of this worldview.
While we can observe the errors of paradigms, we can also observe their boons. The modern paradigm has realized the great degree of leverage made possible by the young scientific tradition, and the remarkable capacities of our entrepreneurial ingenuity to apply this knowledge practically.
Indeed, where H. Sapiens once looked out to the cosmos as the unapproachable aetheric realm of the Gods, it now looks out to the cosmos as a galactic ocean navigable by a new breed of sailors.
Yet the cosmic sight we now behold, which a few centuries ago would have been unthinkable, lies not only in our gaze outwards beyond the atmosphere, but also reflects back to earth. For the first time in 1972, we saw ourselves as a planet from the Apollo 17, a blue marble floating in space. With this cosmic sight, for the first time we truly comprehended ourselves as a planetary species.
This planetary awareness comes to us at the same time as we realize that the stability of our planetary habitat is on the edge of a cascading tipping point into ecospheric destabilization. We now plainly see that the unbridled economic and technological advancements of the past centuries have pushed the earth system to the brink - transitioning the geological epoch from a benign holocene to an unpredictable anthropocene.
Singling out or making lists of problems and solutions is only a part of the answer. The piecemeal approach we are used to is incomplete in the face of a complex dynamical system the scale of the earth. Instead of working piecemeal, within the terms of a disjunctive modern logic, there is a way in which we can evolve our human understanding to foster ecospheric symbiosis.
While reversing the trends of human development is perhaps impossible in a short window, or highly unlikely in general, it seems to me that any movement towards resolving the contradictions of the planetary age which doesn’t prioritize the evolution of our modern paradigm, will reproduce the patterns of the past into the formulation of the future.
While now I cannot provide a comprehensive detailing of the nature and genealogy of the modern paradigm, I can examine the ramifications of its impact through sustainable development.
Sustainable Development and the Modern Imprint
Many live in a climate crisis bubble where it is thought that our primary work is to solve the climate crisis, and if we do this, all will be fine. This has been referred to as Carbon Tunnel-Vision which the BioFi Project Glossary describes as, “A myopic perspective that ignores the multiple interdependent socio-ecological system crises that we face to focus only on carbon emissions, and/or focuses solely on carbon emissions reductions as the key climate change response.” This narrow approach fails to integrate both the natural and spiritual dynamics at play.
Carbon Tunnel-Vision should be recognized as a distinct imprint of the modern paradigm, generated by the reductive mode which is pronounced in our late-modern age. This is most likely due to the primacy of scientific reasoning in our age whose “leading edge” is reduction. The reductive mode arises in tandem with a paradigm which prioritizes analysis, mechanisms, abstraction, and causal relationships, at the expense of systems interactions, affective gradients, and holistic awareness. Convergent conclusions about this can be found coming from as varied of sources as indigenous knowledge, the catholic church, and modern philosophy.
In the narrow pursuit to solve the monolith of the climate crisis, modern society has triggered a Climate Finance Gold Rush with more than a trillion dollars of global GDP being invested on this single factor annually. While the intent is valid, the push towards electrifying the global grid and approaching net-zero might be inadvertently working backward. This shouldn’t be a surprise as in the words of eminent systems theorist Donella Meadows, “Leverage points are not intuitive. Or if they are, we intuitively use them backward, systematically worsening whatever problems we are trying to solve.”
This backward use of leverage points can be clearly seen in our normative approach to sustainable development.
Raw Earth Minerals
The rapid growth of Electric Vehicles (EVs), Photovoltaics (PVs), and Wind Turbines (WTs) is triggering a wave of predatory behavior in the extraction of raw earth minerals at an unprecedented scale (particularly cobalt, copper, and lithium). The effects caused by the exorbitant demand solely for lithium used in the production of batteries for popular EVs is indicative of the faulty nature of our paradigm.
Half of the earth’s known supply of lithium lies beneath the salt flats of the Andean region of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. The depletion and pollution of water aquifers due to brine extraction involved in the majority of lithium extraction is destabilizing the local socioecology, causing severe environmental degradation, landscape damage, and human migration (of primarily indigenous communities).
Consider the following paradox. In the pursuit of ecospheric integrity, we are implementing water intensive mining activities in the driest place on earth. Currently, lithium and other mining activities consume 65% of Chile’s Atacama Desert water supply (in Salar de Atacama), desiccating a water fragile region in the name of sustainable development.
Images of massive mining operations in the vast territory of Chile’s Atacama Desert come from photographer, artist, and writer David Maisel’s work, Desolation Desert
Hydropower
Hydropower is another unique instance of the paradoxical effects of sustainable development. While we don’t often speak about hydro in comparison to the popular polemics of nuclear energy and the economies of scale in solar and wind, hydro currently generates more electricity than all other renewable technologies combined and is expected to remain the world’s largest source of renewable electricity generation into the 2030s. For all the major countries with nearly 100% renewable electricity portfolios (e.g. Iceland, Norway, Costa Rica, Sweden, New Zealand, Denmark, Portugal, and Uruguay), hydro is the largest component of their electricity generation portfolio.
From left to right: Coulver Dam, USA; Itaipu Dam, Brazil; Three Gorges Dam, China
While many countries such as Brazil celebrate the apparent cleanliness of their electric grid, what is missed in the normative discourse on renewable and ‘clean’ energy is the nuance of the ecosphere, and the narrow vision we demonstrate thinking we can reduce our ecological relationships and entire sectors of our economy to singular features, “such as clean energy”. The reality is that if we look in detail at something as basic as hydropower, we can see how socioecological interactions are always a part of irreducibly complex systems.
As mentioned in the opening lines of this article in reference to Balbina Dam, the creation of new reservoirs for Hydroelectric Power Plants - especially in the tropics - are inadvertent methane generators. Dams and reservoirs fragment rivers, disrupt flow, and block fish migration, which fish ladders only partially mitigate. They trap sediment, depriving downstream areas of fertile soil, increasing erosion, and causing delta subsidence. Reservoirs also lead to low oxygen levels and temperature changes harmful to aquatic life. Flooding from reservoir creation destroys habitats, reduces biodiversity, and favors invasive species. These ecological disruptions affect local communities, forcing them to relocate and change their way of life. It is estimated that around the globe only 36% of very long rivers remain free-flowing.
Today, hydropower is seen through the lens of clean energy and electrification as a stride for sustainable development. It’s clear though that when we look at hydropower from a wider lens, innate to the very tendency of sustainable development is the destabilization of natural environments and decreases in ecosystemic vitality.
The Spirit of the Beaver
In Native American traditions such as Anishnaabe, Lakota, Haudenosaunee, and Diné, humanity is viewed as being the youngest brother of the natural world, and thereby to require wisdom gleaned from his older relatives, the elemental, plant and animal kingdoms. In our moment where the cosmos invites the modern paradigm to adapt and evolve so as to renew its symbiosis with the earth, we can look to the Spirit of the Beaver for insight.
The Beaver has been known amongst Algonquian Speaking Peoples of North America as the ‘sacred center’ due to its ability to enhance the conditions of entire ecosystems. In strikingly similar fashion, the Scientific tradition classifies Beavers as a ‘keystone species’ - a species without which an ecosystem would be dramatically different, or cease to exist altogether.
Beavers are only found in the Northern reaches of Eurasia and North America, although interestingly, due to a human experiment gone wrong, they are also now found in Tierra del Fuego, in the southernmost point of Patagonia.
Due to the high value of beaver pelts during the 17th-19th centuries, the North American Beaver was nearly extirpated, declining from an abundant estimated population of 60-400 million to near extinction. Today, their numbers have rebounded to some 10-15 million, a fraction of their previous numbers.
Beavers are not only considered sacred centers and keystone species, but they are also uniquely identified as ecosystem engineers. An ecosystem engineer is any species that creates, significantly modifies, maintains or destroys a habitat. Beavers are prototypical ecosystem engineers because of how they construct their niche. By constructing dams to slow and divert the natural water flow, they create aquatic environments suitable to build their lodge. These constructed niches are defined by deepwater refuges which ensure unfrozen waters, protection from predators, and consistent access to food sources.
In the process of developing their niche, a number of cascading effects are generally produced. The first is, by building dams and beaver ponds, Beavers simultaneously transform their ecosystem into extensive wetlands. This occurs because Beaver dams not only form a deepwater refuge, but by stabilizing river flow, forming ponds, and increasing watershed capacity, they increase the breadth and depth of the water table. This makes the ecosystem more drought resistant, while enhancing biodiversity and helping mitigate flooding.
While wetlands alone are considered the most biodiverse of all ecosystems and provide critical ecosystem services, beaver dams and ponds provide cascades of supplementary benefits. Contrary to earlier scientific opinion, not only is the presence of beavers and their constructed environment good for fish populations such as wild salmon and trout, but even the average size of those fish increases in the presence of beaver ponds. The mixture of deepwater refuges and wetlands is a special combination because it creates conditions which attract aquatic plants, insects, fish, birds, and other wildlife, while simultaneously creating a more resilient ecosystem which can better resist drought, flooding, and wildfires.
In terms of riverine biogeochemistry, constructed beaver niches tend to have powerful effects on sediment flows and water quality. An instance of this is when water enters the pond from the river, it slows and spreads allowing sediments rich in organic material and nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus to settle out. This process of sediment trapping builds up creating a rich new soil layer, which serves many species. While extracting these nutrients from the river flow, beaver ponds prevent them from building up in potential eutrophication (algal blooms and oxygen depletion) processes downstream. Additionally, the dam, pond, and surrounding wetland, create a natural biofilter for toxins and pollutants.
As clearly evidenced, the beaver deserves its reputation as a sacred center, keystone species, and ecosystems engineer. If you go further, zoom out and take the bigger picture view, you can factor in another macro-ecosystemic variable. A single lotic (river-like) system will oftentimes be broken up by various beaver ponds, or even a beaver dam cascade. By replicating all of the previously mentioned effects across a potentially singular lotic system, beavers create complex pathworks of lentic (lake-like) and lotic (river-like) systems, architecting biodiverse and resilient ecosystems.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson an Anishnaabe scholar, writer, and artist discusses the significance of the beaver - Amikwage - in a 2020 lecture aired on CBC Ideas. She shares that while for colonists, beavers symbolized industry and a source of wealth, for the Anishnaabe, Amikwage “embodies the politics and ethical practices of wisdom.” She says, “Amik is a world builder. Amik is the one that brings the water. Amik is the one that brings forth more life. Amik is the one that works continuously with water and land and plant and animal nations and consent and diplomacy to create worlds. To create shared worlds.”
Towards an Integral Science
While my point in part might be to say that the future of hydropower ought to implement amikwag biomimicry in future designs, that’s just a function of the point we’re discussing. The juxtaposed ecologies of the Hydropower and Beavers is an analogy for the deeper process occurring at the level of the human paradigm.
Instead of trying to implement quick solutions, we might ask ourselves how it could be possible for all of our actions to be embedded in a way of life which blends together the reductive approach within a holistic vision? How can sustainable development and climate finance embed themselves in a more complex process of coupling the advancements of our energy supply with the increasing vitality of the entire ecosphere? How can each investment we make not only serve the needs of our economy but also the integrity of our ecology?
This fusion of the reductive mode and the holistic vision is capable of producing an integral science. The holistic vision shouldn’t be seen as an opportunity cost for the reductive mode, instead, it complements it and makes it more meaningful and valuable. The holistic vision doesn’t necessarily mean we account for every single atom in an environment, rather it means that we begin fostering a way of life that corresponds with the cosmos as a whole.
In the words of Paul Ruskin, founding president of the Tellus Institute and lead author of the Great Transition essay,
““The linkages between human and biophysical systems require the unification of knowledge. The reduction of whole systems to their constituent components was an important methodological advance of the scientific revolution. The division into separate disciplines of inquiry was essential for focus and rigor. These are necessary for addressing the complex problems of transition—but they are insufficient. An interdisciplinary focus on holistic models must now complement the reductionist program.””
