Save perhaps love, there is nothing more ubiquitous in the universe than cycles. They come in every size, from microscopic to celestial, and move at every speed, completing in moments to millennia.

We live our lives within cycles: night and day, lunar cycles, seasonal cycles, and multi-decadal climate cycles. Cycles play out in our bodies, such as the vitamin C cycle; cycles also abound on the land around us, for example in the tightly coupled populational cycles of predator and prey. And cycles occur at scales so large they are hard to conceptualize, like the water cycle, the successional cycle of forests, or the millennia-long rock cycle.

Likewise, cycles have been, and continue to be, so important to humanity that numerous cultures have used them to reckon time, organize their livelihoods, and guide their spirituality. Growth, decay, regrowth. Birth, death, and rebirth. We see cycles in the philosophy of the Tao, and in the stories of Buddha and Jesus. We may not be able to explain why there are so many cycles in the world, but we cannot deny their presence as an ordering force, a process that provides chaos with structure.

Cycles offer us a single essential lesson: that change must always happen. As the Tao says, for all things, there is a time to be up, and a time to be down. Stability is merely an illusion, an artifact of the scale at which we’re seeing the world. Wherever we, as humans, believe we see stability, we are in fact seeing a product of change happening at smaller and larger scales.

I call this lesson the Conservation of Change principle.

If we wish to live sustainably. we must emulate cycles, listen to them and learn to embody them in our own lives and practices.

The Conservation of Change principle derives from the basic principles of thermodynamics, specifically the second law, or “law of entropy,” which establishes the tendency of energy to move from more useful to less useful forms. Energy becomes less useful as it is used, but living systems are adapted to work against this general trend, using fast and slow cycles of change to reconfigure used energy into more ordered, and hence more usable, forms.

Change must always be conserved, lest the regenerative capacity of the living systems we interact with be gradually eroded. Human activities that resist natural variability to create highly structured and uniform outcomes, for example monocultures managed for one or a few crop varieties or fisheries that emphasize a single species, cause degeneration and degradation because they disrupt adaptive change. The longer we manage such systems for stability and uniformity, the more we diminish the capacity of that system to return energy from less useful to more useful forms. By comparison, human activities that are organized around diversity and that embody change through flexible strategies have high regenerative potential (Ikerd 2021). Shifting cultivation, and to a lesser extent crop rotation, are examples of cultural systems that work with rather than against the regenerative potential of agroecosystems.

I discuss these and other examples in greater detail in my book, Finding Our Niche.

Ecosystems are not factories

Our contemporary industrial mindset and market-oriented goals work at cross purposes with the second law of thermodynamics, in that we are intolerant to the vagaries of natural variability and change. We seek ways to engineer nature into standardized and consistent systems of production rather than looking for ways to integrate our lives and lifestyles within the diverse and ever changing patterns of the world around us. But whether we like it or not, ecosystems are not machines. If we treat them as machines, they will break.

Maine Lobster Fisheries provide an excellent, while also tragic, case in point. Scientist Bob Steneck and his colleagues have explored this in the context of the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery. They don't explicitly reference the language of entropy and the conservation of change, but instead they use the language of resilience thinking, a framework of sustainability heuristics that derive from the conservation of change. 

Lobster fisheries in Downeast Maine have long been considered sustainability success stories, and they are frequently invoked as a testament to the efficacy of bottom-up institutions for parametric (as opposed to quantitative) fisheries management. Practices like not harvesting reproducing females, and the maintenance of strictly delineated fishing territories, have sustained these lobster fisheries for decades and actually enhanced them to the point where, according to Steneck and colleagues, the Gulf of Maine ecosystem has become a veritable lobster monoculture. 

Stability, in this case of a very abundant and uniform population of lobster, has come at the great cost of simplification of the surrounding food web; stability of lobster as a lucrative commodity has likewise resulted in simplification of the regional economy. Both, argue Steneck and colleagues, make the ecosystems and the communities that rely on them extremely vulnerable. 

The conservation of change principle helps us recognize the inherent costs of this obsession with standardization and uniformity, and suggests that a more sustainable approach is to relax our expectations regarding what ecosystems can provide in terms of stability. Rather than doing everything in our power to foster uniformity in a fishery or other resource, we can take control of entropy by embracing it, by embodying change in our own lives and livelihoods. I'm not saying that we need to become slaves to environmental variability and change, but that as in the quote that introduces this section, we simply need to learn to bend if we wish to remain whole.