Creating a Sustainable Sunshine Coast - Nambour to Mooloolah

One of the "buzz-words" flying around a lot of blogs (but not yet the mainstream media) is the idea and reality of exponential growth. You may have also heard of "positive-feedback loops". These loops are related to exponential growth. It has been said that one of our failures as humans is to properly understand what exponential growth is. Let alone to understand what it can mean or how it can manifest; or to comprehend the wide range of natural and economic phenomena that follow such growth patterns.

Let us consider growth then for a minute. What does that mean to you? It is commonly viewed as "getting bigger", or "getting larger". Perhaps think of that in the context of a seed that transforms into a fully fruiting paw-paw (or choose your own fruit) tree. First the seed. Then a sprout, followed by a stem, leaves, branches (well, pseudo-branches in the case of the paw-paw), all the way to a set of lovely oblong green and yellowing fruit hanging from the upper trunk of a tree with leaves of a variety of colour of greens. OK. That is one reconciling of growth.

Let us now consider not just the SIZE of the tree. Let us also consider the size of the tree as time marches steadily on. You might now ask, how quickly does the tree grow? Trees take a while to grow from a seed to when the point when they actually fruit. So, the changes in the tree happen in a way that can seem slow to us humans, but perceptibly slow. As time goes on, we might notice that the tree is now taller than the bird-bath, or has a flower, or a new branch, or is shading the tomato plant. This conception that the tree is taking a while to grow is one of a LINEAR GROWTH conception (not quite a reality, as the early growth of many organisms is actually exponential).

Let us now consider the 4 fruit on that paw-paw tree. Within the deep orange and red flesh of the paw-paw are the black seeds of the future of the paw-paw population. After eating the flesh of a few paw-paws, some animal discarded the seeds into a heap. Lo and behold, twleve weeks later, new paw-paw plants. But not one paw-paw plant. 150 paw-paw plants!

THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF EXPONENTIAL GROWTH. You might barely notice one paw-paw plant growin in your garden, but the transformation of a garden landscape with 150 paw-paw seedlings is very quick, and is very dramatic (GASP!!).

So, each of those new 150 trees produced 4 paw-paw fruits after about 40 weeks. The seeds of the fruit were discarded by a bunch of animals who were now sharing (GASP) paw-paw and paw-paw seedlings with other animals. These animals tossed their seeds in a number of different places. 12 weeks passed by. Wow, all over the countryside, 22,500 paw-paw seedlings popped up out of the ground! Why 22,500? One paw-paw tree (call it the first generation) gave rise to 150 new trees in the second "generation". These 150 second generation trees EACH gave rise to 150 new trees in the third "generation".

150 x 150 = 22,500.

Now to finish the exponential growth lesson. The third generation trees gave rise to the fourth generation - an astronomical 3 million-plus (22,500 x 150, or 150 to the power of 3 generations) number of paw-paw seedlings! Sadly, the third generation had tapped out a lot of the soil's nutrients. Furthermore all of the generations were growing in a place surrounded by ocean on all sides, and so got crowded. The fourth generation didn't bear any fruit, in fact, a lot of them withered away before anyone noticed.

This illustrates the FINITENESS (an endpoint) of exponential growth, at least in the biological realm.

In another posting, I would like to reflect on one of the characteristics of exponential growth. That is, that actual growth can be imperceptible for a long time, and then suddenly explode upwards.

Peace in our community.