As noted in my June 10 entry, I’ve been doing some reading lately about whether our industrialized / “civilized” world, which most everyone who might read this blog lives in and depends upon in order to stay alive, is fragile and vulnerable to collapse. There was a good article on this in the NY Times on April 30 called It’s Complicated: Making Sense of Complexity.

In a nutshell, the term “complexity” formerly signified progress such as advances in technology and innovative government structures. Today, when all of our economic, governmental, communication and social systems are strongly tied together by technology and performance management, the complexity of it all is running into the law of unintended consequences. There was an article two years ago in New Scientist called “Are We Doomed?” This kind of thinking is becoming typical amidst the techno-intellectuals in academia; even the more reserved professorial types ponder “end-of-civilization” scenarios these days.

A good academic summary on techno-fragility is “The Hidden Fragility of Complex Systems — Consequences of Change, Changing Consequences”, written by complexity expert James P. Crutchfield. In his abstract, Crutchfield says that short-term efficiency considerations are generating a new kind of unintended consequence—hidden fragility. This is a direct effect of the sophistication and structural complexity of the socio-technical systems that we humans create. In sum, Crutchfield warns that we had better put more effort into understanding and predicting what these complex systems can do, and about the social dynamics surrounding them.

Hey, imagine if BP had taken this to heart when the Macondo well first started getting wacky, earlier this year.

Here’s another example, less noted by the press but still of much importance, regarding how modern systems meant to squeeze the most benefit manage to trip up over themselves. It regards agriculture, growing the food that we eat. The widespread use of the weedkiller Roundup by American farmers has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds. Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water. “It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.

It turns out that Monsanto had 60% of the 2008 corn seed market and 62% of the soy seed market in the USA. Monsanto’s genetically engineered seeds are planted on more than 80 percent of all U.S. corn acres and more than 90 percent of all U.S. soybean acres. A big portion of these seeds are linked to the use of Roundup. Monsanto turned its herbicide Roundup into a SYSTEM, by marketing specific seeds that are genetically engineered to depend on Roundup (i.e, “Roundup Ready”). Given the huge market share that Monsanto gained, this made non-Roundup seeds harder to get (as they were increasingly seen as obsolete and thus not produced and offered by seed providers). Thus, there is a lack of genetic diversity on farmlands.

The use of glyphosate (Roundup) has enabled the emergence of several glyphosate-resistant weeds, and there isn’t much incentive or money within the herbicide industry to begin development of formulas to combat them. Monsanto turned Roundup and genetically modified crop seeds into a complex system, one that brought wonderful results for a while. But then mother nature turned the tables with those pesky resistant weeds. So we’re going to grow less food in a world where population is skyrocketing, and it is becoming more expensive.

But this isn’t new. Possible problems from the “Roundup-ready” system were discussed in a 1998 Washington Post article. In that article, Thomas Nickson, an ecological technology coordinator for Monsanto, said that “the risk of creating a superweed is truly an insignificant one” . That just goes to show how wrong we all can be. Complexity has a way of blindsiding the human race especially when our viewpoints are biased by short-term thinking and immediate profits.