Around 1887, near the end of his short life, the British writer and naturalist Richard Jefferies penned a precocious observation on the tension between the paradigms of balance and chaos, which he called “The Absence of Design in Nature”:
When at last I had disabused my mind of the enormous imposture of a design, an object, and an end, a purpose or a system, I began to see dimly how much more grandeur, beauty, and hope there is in a divine chaos—not chaos in the sense of disorder or confusion but simply the absence of order—than there is in a universe made by pattern. This draught-board universe my mind had laid out: this machine-made world and piece of mechanism; what a petty, despicable, microcosmos I had substituted for the reality. Logically, that which has a design or a purpose has a limit. The very idea of a design or a purpose has since grown repulsive to me, on account of its littleness. I do not venture, for a moment, even to attempt to supply a reason to take the place of the exploded plan. I simply deliberately deny, or, rather, I have now advanced to that stage that to my own mind even the admission of the subject to discussion is impossible. I look at the sunshine and feel that there is no contracted order: there is divine chaos, and, in it, limitless hope and possibilities. (Old House at Coate 163)
This passage, vehement and celebratory, lays out the organizing principle of the present study. Jefferies’s divine chaos recovers hope from Victorian angst by substituting the sublime splendor of infinite creativity for a preordained mechanistic cosmos. To be designed or purposeful, as he calls the “microcosmos,” is to be static, inorganic, regulated. Critiquing at once the religious conviction of divine Providence and the Enlightenment predilection to see nature as a grand machine, Jefferies asserts that the “absence of order” is a larger, liberating view of an organic natural world. Machines for industrial tasks are what humans sketch out on their drawing boards, but, by analogy, to reduce the earth to a “piece of mechanism” is to leech away the lifeblood of the vital, chaotic cosmos. Microcosms that model ecological processes occur in both literature and science. They serve to reduce the complexity of open natural systems to simplified, intelligible model systems. What is often sacrificed is the creativity, the serendipity, the breaking down of borders and limits enabled by the paradigm of a chance-driven and design-free nature.
In art theory, randomness has taken on positive connotations of serendipity, complexity, and unscripted authenticity. Akiko Busch describes the serendipity of craft, where artists cannot totally control the chaos of the wheel and the glaze colors that emerge from the kiln, and woodworkers seek out the unique grains and shapes that weather and climate impose on their medium. The reconciliation of randomness, of chaos, with design and control is an essential source of artistic creativity (75). Environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy crafts his pieces within the happenstance conditions of open settings, so that unpredictably changing winds, stream flows, light, and temperature play an essential role in the formation and dissolution of his work; he welcomes the chanciness of art al fresco. The poet Gary Snyder has written on the chaotic reciprocity between nature and language. Complexity in evolved wild systems, Snyder writes, “eludes the descriptive attempts of the rational mind. ‘Wild’ alludes to a process of self-organization that generates systems and organisms, all of which are within the constraints of—and constitute components of—larger systems that are again wild, such as major ecosystems or the water cycle in the biosphere. Wildness can be said to be the essential nature of nature. [. . .] So language does not impose order on a chaotic universe, but reflects its own wildness back” (174). Jefferies, Busch, Goldsworthy, and Snyder all celebrate randomness for its capacity to rupture the comfortable quotidian, one of art’s signal intents. They prefer portraits of nature in chaotic dress, where our human dominion within the elements may at any moment be challenged or overthrown, and where the pastoral idyll falls away to reveal a creative unknown. Postmodern nature introduces art and design theory to the chaotic muse. It is the radical denouncement of Ecclesiastes 1:9: “That which has been is that which will be, and that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun.”
Resolving Opposition
In the spirit of disciplinary unity, this book is about the literature of ecological reconciliation. Chaos and the microcosm are complementary figures of thought that help us understand the dynamics of our disheveled home, or oikos. One is a temporal narrative of chaotic change; the other is a spatial model of balanced exchange. At a surface level, the two tropes appear as aesthetic complements whose relationship is based on this essential contrast. To a certain extent, they are just that. The microcosm contains; chaos overflows. Microcosms are Quaker hymns of self-sufficient simplicity; chaotic systems conduct matter and energy in the mode of postmodern symphonies. Microcosms are domesticated pets; chaos is a beast in a looming shadow. But if we plunge a little deeper into the conceptual pool, we find strange currents that confuse and conjoin these tropes. Microcosms in ecology, as simple and closed systems, are always susceptible to major shifts if certain players gain greater dominion. By virtue of their diminutive size and simple composition, they often lack the chemical and biological buffers that tend to keep systems stable through small fluctuations. A shallow lake, the classic microcosm in nature, can shift from pellucid clarity to a plankton-choked morass if the water receives just a bit more sun or nitrogen. An aquarium will be overcome by algae when its detritus-eating snail dies. Delicate balances, while provisionally self-sustaining, are perilously close to dissolution; both balance and rapid degeneration are vying fates in microcosmic systems. While we may not find aesthetic pleasure in the slimy aquarium or the weedy pool, an ecologist can show how this microcosm has spontaneously evolved into an alternative stable state, where a new clutch of species controls the system. Ecological microcosms are subject to chaotic fluctuation.
Chaotic dynamics, by contrast, connote higher organization and eventual coherence based on minute, unpredictable variations in an initial system. This spontaneous new order emerges from newly discovered affinities among components and the power of initial conditions to organize the emergent structure at higher levels. The study of chaos need not be cloistered in the esoteric symbol languages of mathematics. Chaos theorist Ilya Prigogine enriches history by describing how technological innovations such as the advent of steamships in the nineteenth century can create their own niches in the ecology of economics. Innovations that provide major practical advantages can “transform the environment in which they appear, and as they spread, they create the conditions necessary for their own multiplication, their ‘niche’” (Prigogine and Stegners 196). Chaotic modeling can demonstrate how patterns of urbanization and rural depopulation are directed by positive feedback and nonlinear dynamics; the city grows out of the general store where two roads once happened to cross. Chance factors break the bland symmetry of population distribution based purely on diffusion, but chaos replenishes pattern by providing strange attractors at the crossroads. Small historical events like when and where the steam engine was invented (1712, England) have the power to revolutionize global society along a new set of parameters in only three centuries. Urban settlement, industrial work time, fossil fuel consumption, new class dynamics, population booms, mass transportation, the modern economic imperative of expansion, and most of the ecological disturbances we face today are downstream of this historical happenstance. One small trickle of technology found favorable conditions and nudged into motion this major ontological shift from the long established environments of human evolution to this strange state of global industrialism.
With any progressive history, there is a danger of retrospective bias awarding destiny to a “chosen” or “superior” culture. Such is the bent of most heroic histories of imperial Britain, and of some of the more shameful interpretations of evolutionary theory. But this false telos involves inadequate factoring of the chancy initial conditions, what John Keats saw as the vanguard of circumstance into which a seed of future events happens to be sown. A less celebratory narrative of chaotic dynamics emerges from the epidemiology of measles and cholera in London, another offspring of industrial and colonial dominion.
In these literary readings of ecological chaos, there is no intention to claim that they achieve formal mathematical chaos, discovered in the 1960s. The vogue of chaos theory as a new way to read patterns in many disciplines—from the fine arts, to literature, to law—has caused some grumpiness among mathematicians who would like to sequester chaos theory within