Autonomy at every scale: water, life, and society

[Aboriginal painting of water and rain]

If an organism’s brain tried to run the whole organism it would run into problems, too many things to coordinate. To function it needs modularity, autonomy at different size scales.

The body is a good example. A cell is a small autonomous system inside the larger body. It produces its own energy, builds proteins, transports materials, removes waste, repairs damage, responds to signals, and maintains its internal conditions. There are thousands of processes happening inside a cell at any given moment, and most of them never need to be coordinated by the brain. The brain does not tell a mitochondrion when to produce ATP, or a ribosome when to make a protein, or every cell membrane when to open and close an ion channel. The cell handles these things itself. It receives information from the rest of the body, but it has its own machinery for interpreting that information and responding to it.

This creates a division of responsibility. The body deals with some problems at the multiple levels of both organs and cells. Each level has its own autonomy and some ability to self-maintain and self-repair.

Complex systems function better with modularity. Manlio De Domenico’s recent article in Complexity Thoughts goes into the importance of modularity to living architectures. Modularity gives the system autonomy at different size scales. Each part has the ability to self-adjust, self-repair, and function on its own. It doesn’t have to wait for some global brain to tell it what to do. That would become impossible anyway. There is simply too much to coordinate at the larger level. As a system becomes more complex, the amount of information grows, the number of interactions grows, and the problem of controlling everything from one place becomes enormous. A complex system therefore needs organization at multiple levels, with each level capable of handling some of the problems that arise within it. Autonomy is nested.

Modularity allows a large system to contain smaller systems that can manage their own complexity. Without that, every level would have to constantly communicate with every other level, and the amount of coordination would explode. The system would spend more and more of its energy trying to coordinate itself rather than actually doing anything.

Water, modularly

The water cycle has something similar going on. There is a global water cycle involving the oceans, atmosphere, land, rivers, groundwater, ice, soil, and living organisms, but there isn’t just one water cycle operating at one scale. There are countless smaller water cycles nested inside it. A forest has its own movement of water between soil, vegetation, groundwater, and atmosphere. A watershed has its own dynamics. A wetland has its own dynamics. A groundwater basin has its own dynamics. These smaller cycles are not separate from the global water cycle. They are modules within it.

What makes them modules is not simply that they occupy different places. It is that they have some degree of autonomy. A forest can regulate some of its own water conditions. Soil can retain and release water without the entire watershed having to coordinate every movement. Groundwater can store water and release it according to its own slower dynamics. Vegetation can capture water, move it through roots, and return it to the atmosphere. Each system has its own processes and feedback loops, even though it remains connected to the systems around it.

This is important because a complex water system would be extremely difficult to coordinate if every movement of water had to be determined at the global level. The global water cycle doesn’t tell every plant when to open its stomata or every soil particle when to absorb water. It doesn’t have to. Local systems handle local water problems themselves, while the larger system provides the conditions within which those smaller systems operate and the smaller systems continuously modify the larger one.

The small water cycle and groundwater cycle are an interesting example of how modules can become partnered. The small water cycle moves water between vegetation, soil, and atmosphere. The groundwater system stores water below the surface and moves it through a much slower cycle. They have different structures and different timescales, but they can support one another. Groundwater can sustain vegetation during dry periods, while vegetation and soil processes help water infiltrate and recharge groundwater during wet periods. The groundwater cycle can feed water into the small water cycle, and vice versa.

Their autonomy makes the partnership possible. Groundwater doesn’t need to immediately respond to every change in atmospheric conditions. It can operate on a slower timescale. The small water cycle can respond much more quickly to local conditions. Because the two systems have different dynamics, they can divide the problem between them. One can handle some of the variation while the other handles another part.

This is why a large storm does not necessarily have to become a large flood, and why a drought does not necessarily have to immediately become an ecological collapse. A healthy landscape contains modules that operate at different scales and timescales. Vegetation, soil, wetlands, streams, and groundwater each respond differently to the same event. The water is redistributed among these modules, and the system as a whole becomes less dependent on any single process.

The important point is that redistribution is a consequence of modularity. Water can be stored in groundwater because groundwater is a semi-autonomous subsystem. Water can remain in soil because soil has its own storage dynamics. A forest can retain and recycle moisture because vegetation has its own internal organization. These modules don’t eliminate extremes in the global water cycle, but they prevent every fluctuation at the global or regional level from being transmitted directly through the entire system.

This also gives the water cycle memory. A storm may happen in a few hours, but the groundwater module can retain some of its effects for years. A drought may last for several seasons, but water stored previously in the ground can continue to support vegetation. Different modules therefore take events occurring at one timescale and transform them into processes occurring at another. The system is organizing not just space, but time.

Life is deeply involved in creating these modules. Plants change the soil. Roots create pathways for water. Microbes change soil chemistry and structure. Vegetation changes evaporation and transpiration. Animals dig, move nutrients, create ponds, alter vegetation, and change where water can move. Over long periods of time, these biological processes can create increasingly distinct local water systems with their own feedback loops.

This suggests that modularity itself can evolve. A plant that can access groundwater has a different relationship with drought from a plant that depends entirely on rainfall. A forest that can maintain its own local moisture has a different relationship with the surrounding climate from bare ground. An ecosystem with deep soils and groundwater connections has a different degree of autonomy from one in which rainfall immediately becomes runoff. The more an organism participates in creating and maintaining a local water module, the more its evolutionary trajectory becomes tied to that module.

This creates the feedback between modularity and evolution. Organisms modify water flows. Those modified flows create local environments. Those environments change selection pressures. Organisms then adapt to those conditions and modify them further. Over generations, the biological and hydrological systems become increasingly coupled.

I believe theres a gap in current evolutionary theory in that it misses the co-evolution of life and the regional small water cycle-groundwater cycle-river cycle system. Life is affecting that local water cycle. The local water cycle affects life. Evolution selects certain life forms that then affects that co-evolution of the life-local water cycle. Evolution is not happening against a fixed water cycle. It is happening within water systems that organisms are continually helping to construct. A plant changes its environment, that environment changes the conditions for the next generation, and the next generation inherits not only genes but a modified ecological context.

Over millions of years, life and water may have coevolved toward greater modularity, with more organization and autonomy appearing at different spatial and temporal scales. The global water cycle contains regional cycles. Regional cycles contain watersheds. Watersheds contain ecosystems. Ecosystems contain soil, groundwater, plants, and microbial systems. Each has its own dynamics, while remaining connected to the others.

The same pattern exists in time. A storm operates over hours. Soil moisture operates over weeks and months. Groundwater can operate over years or centuries. Forests change over decades. Evolution operates over generations. Geological systems operate over millions of years. Each timescale can absorb, transform, and pass information from the timescales around it, so that an event occurring quickly can have effects that persist for much longer.

The system becomes a kind of nested temporal machine. A fast event does not necessarily have to remain a fast event. A storm can become groundwater. Groundwater can become plant growth. Plant growth can become soil. Soil can affect future water infiltration. Those changes can persist into future generations. In this way, the different modules don’t just move water around. They transform the effects of events as those effects pass between scales.

The resilience of the planetary life and water system emerges from the fact that water has been organized into many partially autonomous subsystems, each with its own storage, flows, feedbacks, and timescales. And life may have played a larger role in facilitating that organization.

Relating societally to water, modularly

People change rivers, groundwater, irrigation, floodplains, vegetation, and watersheds, while those changing water systems in turn change where people live, what they grow, how they organize, and what kinds of institutions they develop. These are hydrosocial systems.

Modularity can be a lens to understand these systems. Instead of looking only at the feedback between one large social system and one large hydrological system, we can ask how those feedbacks operate at different scales. A household interacts with its immediate water environment. A neighborhood interacts with a local drainage system. A farming community interacts with soil moisture and groundwater. A city interacts with a watershed, while a region interacts with river basins that cross many communities. Each social system is connected to a corresponding hydrological system, and each can have some degree of autonomy while still being nested inside larger systems.

A complex water system wants to be more modular. Our approach to water management should reflect it. We often try to manage water at the largest practical scale, through national or state policy, centralized agencies, large infrastructure, and enormous engineering projects. Some of this is necessary. Rivers cross political boundaries, groundwater basins span communities, and major infrastructure requires resources and coordination that a single community cannot provide. But it does not follow that the larger level should be responsible for everything.

A community knows things that a state government cannot easily know. It knows which parts of the neighborhood flood first, which drainage channels have become blocked, which gardens are drying out, where water tends to pool, which soils hold moisture, and which people are willing to organize around a particular problem. A gardener knows something different from a shopkeeper. A school knows something different from a farmer. Someone maintaining a local stream may see subtle changes that never appear in a government report.

This is where modularity becomes useful as an organizing principle. The community can become a module within the larger watershed, with enough autonomy to respond to its own conditions while remaining connected to neighboring communities and larger institutions. It doesn’t have to wait for a distant state agency to notice that a particular drainage channel is failing. It can respond locally, experiment, learn, and then communicate what it has learned to the larger system.

This connects closely to the work of Elinor Ostrom, the political economist who studied how communities around the world manage shared resources such as forests, fisheries, grazing land, and water. She challenged the idea that common resources must either be privatized or controlled by a centralized government. Communities can create their own rules and institutions for managing a commons, often in ways that are closely adapted to local conditions. Her idea of polycentricity extends this further: complex problems can be governed through multiple centers of organization operating at different scales rather than through one central authority.

A household can manage some things. A neighborhood can manage others. A watershed organization can deal with problems that cross neighborhoods. A regional or national government can handle problems that require still larger coordination. These levels are connected, but they can retain their own autonomy. The larger system doesn’t have to know everything because the smaller systems are capable of sensing and responding for themselves.

A community knows things that a state government cannot easily know. It knows which parts of the neighborhood flood first, which drainage channels have become blocked, which gardens are drying out, where water tends to pool, which soils hold moisture, and which people are willing to organize around a particular problem. A gardener knows something different from a shopkeeper. A school knows something different from a farmer. Someone maintaining a local stream may see subtle changes that never appear in a government report.

Rob Hopkins, one of the founders of the Transition movement, brings this idea of modularity into the question of community resilience. He argues that resilience is not simply about recovering from shocks, but about how a system is organized before the shock occurs. As he puts it, “Resilience runs much deeper: it is about building modularity”, describing the need to build “surge breakers” into the basic systems that support us. A community becomes more resilient when it has local capacities that can respond to problems without everything having to be coordinated from the center.

Facilitation can be helpful here. Facilitation helps to bring different parts of a community connected together, the various sectors to hear each other, understand each others language and work together.

One of the things we can build from the ground-up is a network of water nodes around the world, with ability to work autonomously on its own issues, while also coordinating and learning from each other. Michel Bauwen’s calls this organization structure cosmo-local.

Our society has made water systems more centralized and less modular. Huge dams, channels, levees, and drainage systems can take water that once moved through many connected pathways and force it into a smaller number of controlled pathways. A river that once overflowed onto a floodplain could recharge groundwater, support wetlands, refill soils, and provide water for plants whose roots then fed back into the small water cycle. When those connections are cut off, the different modules of the water system become less connected and less able to support one another. The result can be a system that is more efficient at moving water in one particular direction, but less capable of adapting to extremes.

Part of the task of water management now is to make these systems more modular again, so both the larger whole and smaller parts function better. We can restore groundwater cycles, reconnect rivers with floodplains, rebuild wetlands and soils, and restore the small water cycle through vegetation and landscape management. Instead of seeing these as separate environmental projects, we can see them as ways of rebuilding the modular structure of the water cycle, giving water more pathways to store, move, and recycle itself. Humans have already reshaped the water system enormously. We can use that same capacity to help restore the connections between its smaller modules.

This also means thinking about the economics surrounding water management. We have overdone globalization in the same way that we have overdone centralized water management. Global markets in our current extreme form disconnect economic activity from the ecological systems that sustain it. A community can make decisions about land and water according to prices coming from somewhere else, while the actual consequences are experienced locally.

If we are reorganizing around water, we therefore need community economics as well as community water management. A watershed is not only a hydrological system. It is an economic system. People farm there, build there, run businesses there, maintain forests there, use water there, and depend on the condition of the land around them. The economic organization should reflect some of that local interdependence.

We want more economic activity rooted in the communities and ecosystems where the consequences occur. A community might have businesses, farms, schools, cooperatives, land trusts, and community gardens that have a direct interest in maintaining the health of the local commons. The economy becomes connected to the ecological system rather than existing as something separate from it.

This is where the community commons becomes important. Land, water, forests, grazing areas, and community gardens can sometimes be managed as commons rather than being treated simply as commodities or resources controlled entirely by distant institutions. Community land management gives people an ongoing relationship with the places they depend on. They have a reason to maintain the soil, preserve groundwater, manage vegetation, and think about what the landscape will look like decades from now.

The commons also introduces another timescale into the economic system. A business concerned only with the next quarter has little reason to care about an aquifer fifty years from now. A community that expects its children and grandchildren to remain on the land has a different calculation. It has a reason to preserve the resource because it expects to live with the consequences.

A community economy can become a module within the larger economy. It has some autonomy, but it is not isolated. It trades with other communities and participates in regional, national, and global markets, while retaining enough local organization to respond to local conditions and maintain some of the commons on which its economy depends.

There is also an advantage to having many communities experimenting at once. One might develop a better way of managing groundwater, another a successful community land trust, another a system for coordinating farmers around watershed restoration. They can learn from one another without every community having to follow exactly the same model. The larger system becomes more adaptive because it contains many smaller places where experimentation can happen. This is the cosmo-local network of water nodes learning from each other, and adapting together at multiple scales, evolving hydrosocially into the future.

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