Driving is my yoga. It has a way of loosening up my mind. Like most people I am sure, I have wonderful ideas pop into my head while I am driving. Long ago I had to endure the frantic effort to find a place to pull over so that I could write an idea down. I was successful about half the time. The other half left me cursing at being left only with the feeling of having had a good idea.

I think of this while I am driving and dictating a note to my car/phone. The note was in reference to Frederic Clements, who, interestingly, may have had an assistant drive him around the forest while he sat in the backseat taking notes on a typewriter. Or, my memory is bad and that was another ecologist, but that is not why I was thinking of him. Clements was an ecologist famous for what we call Clementsian Succession.

Clementsian Succession is the theory that if we have a healthy balanced ecosystem that is disturbed, by fire for example, the ecosystem will return to that healthy balanced state through a series of successive stages. Each stage preparing the environment for the following stage. For example, here in the northeast an Eastern White Pine forest is considered a “Climax” ecosystem. If that Climax ecosystem is disturbed by fire, insects, or disease, it will not grow back directly. The land will have to go through a series of “Seral” ecosystems; first grasses and sedges, then small plants and shrubs, followed by small deciduous trees, then taller deciduous trees, and finally White Pine.

Everything evolves. Place a group of people who are complete strangers to one another in a wilderness and they will slowly learn to work together in order to survive. They will slowly evolve a social structure, and that social structure will go through stages of development. It will be brutal and unfair at first, but stage by stage it will become more just and egalitarian. Unless, of course, it is disturbed by war, or disease. Then the progression will be stymied. 

An economy is an ecosystem. Over time, people adapt and learn to organize and work with one another. A culture or nation that finds itself alone in an economic wilderness and is left to its own determination will slowly become, stage by stage, more and more socialist, until they arrive at the structure that is sustainable for them. And with there being so many different environments on this Earth, each sustainable solution that a nation arrives at will be unique. No different from the widely varied coloration of all the birds on Earth.

The trick is that even Clementsian Succession does not work with all ecosystems. It is evident only in some ecosystems, but that does not make it wrong or useless. What it highlights is how little we really know about how sustainable systems work and evolve. We all believe we are clever until nature reminds us that we are not. Fighting for what we think is true, more often than not, only maintains the condition of the fight; never allowing us to achieve what we are fighting for. Thus, the best way for a nation and culture to become more socialist and sustainable is to not fight for socialism, but to simply resist disturbance.