Peacocks and Nitrogen Cycles at Royal Roads

A few of us arrived early to prepare for the first west coast ALIA program--on the extraordinary campus of Royal Roads University. Where else in the world would you find a castle bordered by groomed Japanese, English, and Italian gardens as well as old growth cedar forest, marshlands, a lagoon and wildlife sanctuary, bogs, a stream fed by natural springs, and an ocean vista that reaches to the snow-capped mountains in the distance. At what other North American university do you get woken in the morning by the mating calls of peacocks--a sound reminiscent of cats in heat.

Today I took a walk into the forest with Keith Webb, a "business ecologist" and outdoorsman who teaches at the Banff Leadership Centre, and who also arrived on campus early. Keith will co-facilitate one of the program modules (tracks), with Tom Hurley, on leading in networked organizations and systems.

As we stood in the forest I was mesmerized by the depth of Keith's knowledge, which was both scientific and deeply intuitive. He pointed to some of the invisible interdependencies around us--among the trees and below the soil, where sugar molecules are freely exchanged, and in the stream that was making its way to a nearby estuary. The salmon that used to spawn and die in this stream were consumed, recycled, and spread through the forest by bears and eagles. This brought nitrogen into the forest which allowed the cedars and douglas fir to grow so tall. Those same trees sheltered the stream, and their fallen trunks created the pools that were freshwater nurseries for the baby salmon fry, which would have been quickly consumed by bigger fish if they had hatched in the open ocean.

I suddenly saw past the sense of futility I had always experienced as a child when watching salmon spawn in Goldstream Park, not far away. The fish worked so hard, and were so battered and disfigured by the time they reached the place where they would lay their eggs and then die, that it had all seemed somehow pointless. But standing now among the giant firs and cedars, there was a different sense of time, of slow cycles constantly moving from life to death to life.

And then there were the peacocks. Why would nature ever invest in such a flamboyant and impractical display? Was it really all just about impressing the girls? And didn't those long and heavy tails leave these birds extremely vulnerable to predators? Keith explained that the male peacock that is able to produce the most showy, vibrant display gets the mates, and this is the bird that that is the healthiest and that carries the strongest genes. Nature doesn't need many male peacocks. The best spread their genes, the rest are expendable.

Nature, like business, is fiercely competitive, and individuals are driven to survive and thrive on behalf of their species (or organization). Individuals enact the drama of life and death in short visible cycles. There are winners and losers. When there is runaway growth (as in the introduction of a new species that has no predators, or cancer cells, or an economic model that wrongly assumes limitless growth) the system eventually crashes. And then it reboots with a sudden surge of innovation. It can do this because of the slower, less visible cycles of interdependence and cooperation that provide nutrients for new life and new systems. In that bigger picture, everybody eventually wins. Unless, of course, the bigger picture is forgotten and inadvertently destroyed.

None of this is news. At least not intellectually. Keith and I talked about how nature and wisdom traditions can both provide ways to start recovering longer-term memory. As a culture, we have become caught up in narrow, short-term, individualistic realities. We think that we see nature, but it is usually "out there," as something to appreciate like a painting, or to preserve like a novelty or an artifact. What is our true place, as humans, in the natural world? What can a forest, a peacock, or our vegetable garden teach us that we need to learn? How can that learning penetrate the noise and habitual assumptions of our overactive minds?