There are no closed systems

Walking composition

“The word ‘economics’ makes me hiss like Gollum in Tolkien’s The Hobbit: ‘I hates it, I hates it, I hates it forever.’ For I believe classical economic theory, and all the theories it presupposes, is destroying the magic ring of life.” —The Abstract Wild, Jack Turner

At the beginning of this school year, when both my kids were enrolled back in school, I made a slight shift in my life. Since I was almost guaranteed a 25-minute walk to school, and at least the same back home, I decided to give myself permission to walk for one hour per day without listening to podcasts. As someone who’s chronically overcommitted and overwhelmed, walking and listening is one of the ways I get stuff done. It also, though, contributes to the feelings of overwhelm and burnout. Something needed to shift.

I failed almost immediately—there is so much work to get back to! and relatives to phone! and Taylor Swift to listen to!—but have definitely been walking more often, most days, without listening to anything, and finding myself more relaxed after a walk, as well as more focused. (I’m also getting through far fewer podcasts. And essays, too, since I use the Curio app to catch up on many of those.)

Even though I live in a small town and rarely find anywhere to walk that my feet haven’t been before, it’s been a bit of a relief to nudge attention more into the lake, the treetops, the eagle that just flew by, the paucity of chokecherries in my usual foraging spots, the irritation of increased traffic and larger vehicles, the only time I have ever seen a muskrat in the river.

Being connected to the world around us as deeply as we’re able is one of the reasons I care about walking so much. “At its core, this book is about deep human connection,” I wrote in the introduction to A Walking Life. I still believe that, but believe even more that everything is about deep connection. Or should be. And that same connection extends far beyond the human.

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In her book Doughnut Economics, economist Kate Raworth laid out a model for a different, more realistic economic system—one that meets human needs within local and planetary ecological boundaries. To do so, she first had to dismantle the models and convictions that have become hardened in economists’ (and laypeople’s minds), beginning with the idea of any economy as a closed, self-reliant system.

She started with a 1948 book by Paul Samuelson, titled Economics, and its iconic Circular Flow diagram, which was an inspiration for engineer Bill Phillips to build a hydraulic machine called the MONIAC machine (Monetary National Income Analog Computer) that generations of economics students have believed to be a perfect model of economic flow.

But it was missing something.

“The classical economists, led by Smith and Ricardo, had recognized labour, land and capital as three distinct factors of production. But by the late twentieth century, mainstream economics had reduced the focus to just two: labour and capital—and if ever land did get a mention, it was just another form of capital, interchangeable with all the rest. . . . So let’s restore sense from the outset and recognize that, far from being a closed, circular loop, the economy is an open system with constant inflows and outflows of matter and energy. The economy depends upon Earth as a source—extracting finite resources such as oil, clay, cobalt and copper, and harvesting renewable ones such as timber, crops, fish and fresh water. The economy likewise depends upon Earth as a sink for its wastes. . . .

The economy’s fundamental resource flow is not a roundabout of money, but, rather, a one-way street of energy.”

Raworth went on to detail the major flaw in Phillips’s MONIAC machine:

“While brilliantly describing the economy’s circular flow of income, it completely overlooked its throughflow of energy. To make his hydraulic computer start up, Phillips had to flip a switch on the back of it to turn on its electric pump. Like any real economy, it relied upon an external source of energy to make it run, but neither Phillips nor his contemporaries spotted that the machine’s power source was a critical part of what made the model work.” (Emphasis added.)

It’s such a simple oversight, and yet so fundamental. The system doesn’t work unless energy in various forms is drawn into it. And that consumption of energy isn’t reciprocal. It doesn’t give back.

By tricking societies into thinking that the circular flow was a model for human lives, economists tricked far too many—especially people with access to power—not only that our actions are separated from the world, but that we are, too. And that we can somehow keep that system going forever.

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In his book Enlivenment, German philosopher Andreas Weber made a point that I’ve been sitting with a while. He said that in the enclosure of the commons, it wasn’t just that common people were suddenly denied access to land and water and other means of sustaining themselves (I should say ourselves; we still live with these consequences), but that they were also denied a relationship with the land that is fundamental to feeling fully human, to a sense of belonging.

To begin to grasp what that means, how much has been lost, forces me, at least, to question the basic underlying structures of almost every part of the culture I live under, which is probably why I’m so obsessed with the realities and injustices of land ownership. We are all of the earth, all part of it. When our relationship with it as well as our access to its gifts and sustenance are taken away, fenced off, privatized, every one of us loses far more than the dominant culture is ever willing to admit.

I don’t fully know what to do about that, except to advocate for giving land back everywhere in the world it’s been stolen and colonized—which, the further back one goes, seems to be pretty much everywhere—and to keep encouraging all of us to walk the world, to be present, to open ourselves a little to how this living planet can change perception of our own lives and the lives of everything around us. Walking isn’t just an evolved bipedalism, I once wrote:

“I have come to think of walking as more than a form of transportation; it is a manifestation of being as fully present in the world as is possible for each individual.”

I’m still learning what that means, to be fully present, to be in the world, of the world. More importantly, learning the ways in which we’re prevented from doing so, the ways in which we’re bombarded with beliefs in closed systems of life and energy whose existence is actually impossible. With beliefs that this way of living is inevitable. Because it isn’t.

It’ll be a life of learning, and unlearning, and whenever that life is over I’ll hardly have begun.

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Kaitlin Smith in Orion on Octavia Butler and learning to forage and cook with acorns: “When we speak of apocalypse and how to survive its present and future demands, it is crucial that we broaden our vision, and I have found the acorn to be a heuristic that offers abundant food for thought.” (I really hope Smith and the editors here were unaware of Charles Eisenstein’s shift into extreme, uh, let’s just call it “weirdness,” over the past few years, because the paragraph devoted to him was jarring in an otherwise thoughtful piece.)

• Eric Nuzum had an interesting short piece in Nieman Lab, sent to me by a journalist friend, on what people want out of local journalism: “In all four cities, citizens wanted local news to tell stories of people, not stories about power. In their view, besides tragedy and crime, all current local news media does is tell the stories of people in power, not about people like them nor stories that directly (or clearly) impact their lives. . . . Politicians, government officials, and the wealthy have power, of course, but even interviewing book authors was seen as focusing on those with power.”

• In Reader’s Digest, Emma Taubenfeld on why taking sand home from some beaches is illegal, and the reality that industries are using up more sand than the planet can produce. (The piece doesn’t mention fracking, which is a big consumer of sand, but it does mention concrete—if you’re interested, this piece from Hakai magazine is an excellent deep-dive into that.)

• Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery podcast, Episode 4, with Dr. Sally Roesch on the links between the Doctrine of Discovery and the related 15th-century papal bulls that were directed at eradicating witchcraft and the ways in which Christianity is entirely founded on oppressing women: “If the church was to control spirit, it had to destroy Indigeneity, because Indigenous connection to the spirit was real, and the church’s connection to spirituality was power. In order to entrench power, these women had to be destroyed.” (There are a lot of interesting insights in this episode, like “[The church] would single out women who had wealth. The wealth of those women would then go to the church. John Mohawk had a really interesting analysis. He said that it was the wealth of witches that bankrolled the invasion of the Americas.” I’m going to be reading more of Roesch’s research.)

• (After that I went looking up John Mohawk, whom I hadn’t heard of before, and found a number of different article, essay, and video outlets and ended up ordering this collection from Birchbark Books.)

• In the Threadable reading circle Water Politics and the World, leader Varsha Venkatasubramanian shared Arundhati Roy’s longform essay “The Greater Common Good” (which I found riveting and enraging and educational in turn), paired with an interview with Roy on the same topic—massive dam projects in India that displace millions of people from lands they rely on with little benefit: “This is what is happening, because you don’t respect the dignity of the ordinary citizen. At the end of the day supposing we keep on talking about is it all right for 400,000 people to pay for the benefit of 40 million? You tell me. If the government today were to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to freeze the bank accounts of 400,000 of India’s richest industrialists and richest people and take that money and re-distribute it to the poor,’ what will happen? There’d be, ‘Oh, democracy has broken down.’ ‘This is you know a terrible thing.’ ‘Anarchy—’ So it’s all about who’s being pushed around.”

• Photographer Vivek Muthuramalingam with “The Slow Pleasures of Analog” in Dark ‘n’ Light magazine on rediscovering analog photography: “Personally, it was about slowing down, and making time for rumination as I went about coating the sensitizer over deckle-edged papers, and making myself a cup of tea while I waited for them to dry. I could choose cyanotypes if my theme dealt with memory, or perhaps, loss.”

• Yevgenia Belorusets’s most recent war diary from Kyiv in isolarii on the raw, painful complexity of identity, language, and responsibility in a time of war: “My father, a German-language literary translator, calls this void ‘dead empire.’ An empire that no longer lives, and cannot live, strikes, kills in the name of its impossible return.”