Dear Earth Carer, your thirst for optimisation may be impacting your sustainability.

Dear Earth Carer,

It is no secret that I am heavily inspired by natural history and ecological principles when it comes to managing my own well-being. I am a former ecologist with a passion for caring for Earth Carers, so it’s only natural that I’d be inclined to indulge in a little ecological self-help, as I have christened it. Smattered through these letters, I have taken ecological frameworks such as the formation of islands from volcanoes, seasonal changes, or even the humble medium disturbance theory, and have used them as inspirations for how I can better care for myself and those around me.

Given this character trait of mine, it is not surprising that when my trusty colleague presented me with a socio-ecological read this week, I found it to be the most validating piece of literature that I have consumed in a while. Little did she know, my colleague was handing me a well-thought-out framework that had perfectly encapsulated the disjointed fragments of thought that I have been mosaicing away with, both personally and professionally, for most of this year.

In a project meeting a couple of months ago, I was struck with a lightbulb moment. I said to my colleagues, “I am starting to think that what is optimal may not be optimal, if you know what I mean.”

“Do you mean”, one colleague clarified, “that what is optimal may not be sustainable?” 

“Thats exactly right,” I said.

Without knowing of this interaction, a totally different person handed me Resilience Thinking, Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World by Brian Walker and David Salt. This academic reference book beautifully applied language and a framework to the concept of optimisation working against sustainability. As I read, I felt a wave of excitement that there was a legitimate body of work to validate my thinking, and I devoured the pages like a delicious treat.

You may have noticed that humans love to optimise. There are so many lifestyle influencers out there making inconceivable amounts of money by selling us the “most optimal” products, diets, workouts, financial strategies, and morning routines. Taking it further, they also sell optimisation strategy aids such as apps, trackers, books, and courses to help you use these optimised facets of your life in the most optimal combination of ways. Businesses have professional optimisers to streamline the efficiency of production and to maximise profit, and these optimal strategies form the foundation of business plans. We want to be sleek, high-performing, and profitable because it brings social credibility to appear this way. Optimal is often read as “the best,” but of course, with anything that seems too good to be true, a monkey’s foot is always lurking ominously in the shadows.

Ecosystems, the book stresses, are fluctuating systems that ebb and flow, with no optimal state. For this reason, they advise that it would not be advantageous to attempt to optimise isolated components of any system. For instance, deciduous trees lose their leaves to conserve energy in winter, but come spring, if they had their optimal winter baldness, they would not be able to regain more energy through photosynthetic new growth. The ability to change in accordance with shifting environmental conditions allows deciduous forests to absorb disturbance and prosper. Similarly, resilience in systems comes from diversity, interconnectedness, and the ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions.

We understand this inherently about nature, but as a society, there is a notion that our systems are static rather than cyclical, and thus can be optimised for our benefit. For example, workouts are rarely promoted according to one’s position in their menstrual cycle, but rather, they are more likely recommended to optimise specific muscle groups, cardio output, or weight loss. In reality, different stages in a menstruating human’s cycle could vastly impact their energy output, energy consumption needs, water retention, tolerance for pain and discomfort, and will to exercise at all. Each stage of their cycle would likely alter which type of exercise would be most optimal at each given time. Adapting the exercise in relation to how our bodies feel is more sustainable over time if we alternate between HIIT workouts on good days and flow yoga on hard days. If we declare that HIIT is the optimal workout that should be done as the one true form of optimal exercise, one low-energy day could be enough to decide that exercise is just not for us anymore.

The seven resilience thinking principles incorporate some of my core values, including increasing diversity, connectivity, participation, and learning. These principles offer further resilience because they increase your points of engagement when challenges or disturbances arise. For instance, as in the menstruation example, a diversity of exercises to choose from allows us to modify the type of exercise according to our energy levels. Different points of connectivity with exercise mean that we could drive to the gym, or if we can’t be bothered, a walk around our local area is also an option. In times of laziness, commitments to exercise with other people will likely make us want to participate, especially if the exercise is also a social activity. Learning techniques by following fitness influencers or watching fitness content may also increase our investment in participating, leaving us eager to try out new forms or positions. Increasing the resilience of a system is important in nature, but also important in our own lives if we want to foster and maintain sustainability.

Adaptive cycles play into resilience too, with periods of rapid growth, followed by conservation, release, and finally, re-organisation. This has reflected what I have experienced with my community, Lonely Conservationists. In the beginning, we had a surge of growth, a plethora of blog submissions and frustrated conservationists finding me and joining me in my plight. Then, we entered a conservation phase where weekly blogs were regularly submitted and published every single Wednesday for several years. Following this, I entered a period of letting go of the old ways of the community. The blog submissions waned, and the community became too large for intimate chat groups or communal collaborations to naturally arise. Further to this, I found myself in a community of thousands of conservationists, with a full-time job, leaving me feeling detached from what it meant to truly be a Lonely Conservationist. Re-organising the community and its deliverables meant that I could add Earth Carer Care to the mix, focus on producing workshops and presentations, and shift alignment to my new stage of life and interests. This process is cyclical, so it has and will continue to evolve through time.

If I forced the initial growth and production of Lonely Conservationists to keep accumulating indefinitely, I would have burnt out and given up on it entirely by now. This adaptive cycles framework allows me to relish in the validity of my fluctuations and the changes that occur as I transition into different stages of investment and enthusiasm. Variations, adaptations, and diversity are normal in healthy systems, but are often questioned in human systems. Looking at the rapid and sustained growth of weeds and cancers, I have decided that they aren’t the best role models for me. Sorry, high-growth tech companies.

The last thing I will note is the book’s point on control. As well as optimising, humans absolutely love to control as much as we can. Just look at all the ways we have tried to control natural systems to garner a continuously high yield for extraction. When production wanes, we try to add artificial components, like fertiliser in soils, to regain our handle on the situation. Haven’t we realised that millions of years of evolutionary trial and error have probably worked out how to best manage these systems by now?!

I, too, have been slowly letting go of my need for control, like prying my hands open that have been clutched in tight fists for too long. My husband will attest that I have been getting better at relinquishing control, much to his relief. At one stage, I will ashamedly admit to you, dear Earth Carer, that my desire for control was so intense that I wouldn’t let him unpack the vegetables in case he put them in the wrong parts of the fridge. Another sign of my embarrassing need for control was not using cruise control in the car until this month, noting that I have driven to my hometown, which is 10 hours away, on many occasions over the past eight years. I don’t know what happened, but thanks to some miracle, this year, a wave of zen has passed over me. Suddenly, I can see that all of my former needs for control, like determining the precise location of vegetables or adopting a more reactive pedal-foot, don’t actually matter. Releasing this need for control has dramatically improved my well-being and the well-being of the people around me. Now, instead of worrying about silly things like where the zucchinis are, I can focus on other important things, like wondering why the Brits call them corguettes.

So there you have it, another socio-ecology book that influences the way I walk through the world, ebbing and flowing, waxing and waning. Never optimising, always adapting. I will likely realise again and again, hundreds of times over throughout my life, that healthy ecosystems are my biggest inspirations. Fostering diversity, interconnectedness, resilience, and adaptability- these will forever be essential to thriving and nurturing ourselves. In caring for ourselves and each other, healthy ecosystems have really paved the way, and I still have so much to learn from them.

Tell your local ecosystem I said hi,

Jessie