What the Cyanobacteria Said
"Belief, overshoot, and the peculiar art of collapsing with dignity"
Recently, a teenage engineer, Natalie Muro, built a device to kill harmful algal blooms. She had discovered that hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) kills cyanobacteria, the toxic algae that grows in oxygen-free conditions and tries to recreate those conditions in lakes and rivers. Unfortunately, the chemicals commonly used to fight algal blooms, such as copper sulfate, kill beneficial aquatic life and can poison people, too. Hydrogen peroxide breaks down to form just water and oxygen. The oxygen kills the cyanobacteria. According to Science News, “Her algae-killing gizmo also contains a porous charcoal-like material called biochar. It collects dead microbes. That way, other bacteria can’t dine on their dead brethren for nutrients.”
There is a certain grim comedy in the spectacle of Homo sapiens — that precocious, tool-wielding primate — congratulating itself on having defeated cyanobacteria, an organism that made life possible for air-breathing mammals like us, and for photosynthesizing plants.
Of course, we have achieved much more. We’ve achieved what no other multicellular organism ever quite managed: the ability to destabilize the entire planetary operating system in a geological eyeblink. William Catton called it overshoot, that cheerful condition in which a species draws down its ecological capital faster than nature can replenish it and mistakes the spending for wealth.
We are not the first species to pull this trick, of course. The cyanobacteria beat us to it by about 2.4 billion years, when they converted the planet’s CO₂-rich atmosphere into the oxygen-saturated one we air-breathers depend upon. They did not intend to commit the Great Oxygenation Event. They were just doing what cyanobacteria do. We, on the other hand, have the advantage of knowing exactly what we are doing. Whether that counts as progress remains, as they say, an open question.
The Club of Rome told us about this in 1972, in terms so clear and methodical that we spent the next fifty years finding reasons to disbelieve them. Dennis and Donella Meadows’ Limits to Growth model was not, it turned out, wrong. It was merely inconvenient. The standard World-3 run — business as usual, growth forever, depleting resources treated as income — predicted industrial collapse sometime around the 2020s. Here we are in the 2020s. Do take a moment to look around.
The Belief Problem
Systems theorists have a useful framework for thinking about why civilizations persist or dissolve. They distinguish between systems that exist independently of human belief — forest ecosystems, immune systems, the subduction of tectonic plates — and systems that exist only because enough people agree they do. Fiat currencies. Corporate hierarchies. MAGA. The rule about driving on the right side of the road. The rule of law. What the KOSMOS Institute of Systems Theory calls the Observer’s Collapse Function operates with pitiless elegance here: withdraw enough agreement, and poof — no more system.
Democracy is belief-dependent. So, refreshingly, is autocracy. Dictatorships are just social contracts with worse catering and no exit parachute.
The neurobiological machinery behind all of this is not flattering to our species. When the prefrontal cortex detects a widening gap between what we believe and what we observe — when, say, a self-styled anti-war populist discovers that the tariffs are crashing his 401(k) rather than rebuilding American manufacturing — the amygdala begins doing what amygdalae do, which is to treat the cognitive dissonance as a threat requiring immediate, preferably violent, resolution. Critical mass of disillusioned amygdalae produces the conditions for what historians sanitize as “civil unrest” and what it actually feels like to live through: Tulsa, 1921. Srebrenica, 1995. The gnawing hunger and rising anger of a society discovering, too late, that the social contract it thought it had signed was printed in disappearing ink.
The progression toward collapse can become self-reinforcing in a way that should make engineers uncomfortable. Once the withdrawal of belief gains momentum, it functions less like a slow leak and more like a dam failure. Paradigm flips are not gentle. Even monarchs cannot keep their heads.
Green Walls and Vanishing Aid
Consider, as a case study in institutional hubris and its aftermath, the Great Green Wall. Announced in 2007 with appropriate fanfare, it proposed to halt the Sahara’s southward advance by planting an 8,000-kilometer belt of trees and vegetation across eleven African nations from Dakar to Djibouti. By 2030, the project was to have restored 100 million hectares of degraded land, sequestered 250 million tonnes of carbon, and created 10 million jobs. A vision as grand as it was sincerely meant.
As of this writing, approximately four percent of the intended area has been restored. This is not nothing — four percent of an ambitious vision is still hundreds of thousands of hectares of recovered Sahelian scrubland, real acacia trees providing real shade for real people and their livestock. But it is also a parable about the difference between announcing a system and actually building one, and about the particular cruelty of well-intentioned interventions that solve the visible problem while manufacturing a larger invisible one. UN- and World-Bank-funded boreholes punched through the desert floor and struck water, as intended. What followed was not, perhaps, as intended. Water in a waterless place is a magnet of extraordinary power. Families arrived. Then families of families. The oasis that had supported a seasonal handful found itself host to a permanent and growing settlement, because that is what water does to people who have been without it — it invites them to stay, to plant, to multiply, to build, to attract others with what they have built. In 1920, Las Vegas was just a railroad water stop.
Aquifers, ancient and finite, know nothing of five-year development plans. When the drought came — and in the Sahel, the drought always comes — and the boreholes ran dry, as boreholes fed by fossil water must eventually do, the catastrophe that followed was not merely the original catastrophe restored. It was geometrically worse because the population that now depended on that water was geometrically larger than the one that had managed without it.
Emergency aid arrived, as it must, to address an emergency that the aid itself had helped to engineer. The gap between declaration and delivery has many fathers: insufficient funding, coordination failures among sovereign nations, the discovery that “planting trees” and “restoring ecosystem function” are not quite synonymous. But perhaps the least acknowledged factor was the failure to reckon with the oldest equation in ecology — that carrying capacity is not a suggestion, and that population, given resources, will expand to meet and exceed it.
Into this already complicated picture strode Marco Rubio’s State Department in 2025, wielding the chainsaw of USAID dismantlement with the cheerful purposefulness of someone who has never heard of the Sahel and does not intend to start. USAID had been, for all its considerable flaws, one of the primary funding mechanisms for on-the-ground restoration work across the African drylands. Its elimination did not merely defund programs. It erased the institutional memory, the local partnerships and the supply chains for seed stock and water-harvesting infrastructure that had been painstakingly assembled over decades. You can rebuild a bureaucracy. Rebuilding trust between communities and distant governments is rather harder.
This is what Catton’s overshoot looks like in administrative form: spending down institutional capital accumulated over generations, booking it as savings.
The Provisional Ape
Catton’s original observation — that Homo sapiens is perhaps best understood not as a natural species or an artificial one, but as a provisional one, Homo colosus — strikes me as exactly right, and underappreciated. We have been sustainable for a while. Like a teenager with a new credit card, we can engage in impressive consumption in the short term. The question the Club of Rome posed, which Catton elaborated, which the collapsing Great Green Wall illustrates, is not whether the credit line ends but what we choose to do with the remaining balance.
The KOSMOS framework’s notion of the social contract as belief-dependent infrastructure suggests something hopeful, however counterintuitive: if the systems we inhabit exist only because we collectively agree they do, then we retain, at least in principle, the power to agree differently. John Locke’s insight was that individuals trade absolute freedom for security; the trade is renegotiable. We have renegotiated it before — abolition, suffrage, the construction of international law from the ruins of two world wars. These were not inevitable. They were manufactured, slowly and imperfectly, through something the KOSMOS framework calls institutionalism: the unglamorous work of science, law, distributed review, fact-checking, the painstaking construction of systems that correct themselves rather than simply reinforce whoever currently holds power.
The repair mechanism is, fittingly, biomimetic. Mycorrhizal networks rebuild degraded forest soils not through central planning but through decentralized exchange — nutrient sharing, signal propagation, the quiet recolonization of dead zones by organisms with no apparent agenda beyond their own metabolic persistence. Social permaculture, as a design discipline, asks what that looks like at the scale of human institutions. The answer involves bringing outsiders into the tent. It involves listening to the communities on the degraded edge — the Sahelian farmer watching her soil blow away, the Bosnian elder who remembers what comes after the social contract dissolves — rather than designing solutions for them from air-conditioned offices.
A Positive Vision, With Cacti
Here is what actually getting this right might look like: a world in which the slow disciplines — science, law, gradualism, transparent deliberation — are reinvigorated precisely because enough people have lived through the consequences of abandoning them. A world in which the Great Green Wall’s four percent becomes forty, not through a single grand announcement but through ten thousand unglamorous local agreements between farmers, herders, hydrologists and seed banks, energized by Ecosystem Regeneration Camps that enlist a billion willing workers in organic ecovillages. A world in which institutional memory is treated as the non-renewable resource it actually is, and bureaucracies are not defunded like coal mines on an ideological timetable.
A world in which we recognize, as Clinton Alden and the KOSMOS Institute have observed, that the planet survived worse than us and will survive our extinction. The question is whether we can restructure ourselves to meet the planet’s standards, rather than the other way around.
The cyanobacteria, you’ll remember, did not survive their own success. Their oxygen was poisonous to almost everything that came before them. They thrived for a while in an atmosphere of their own making and then retreated into the anoxic niches where they persist today — stromatolites in Shark Bay, floating gardens on Natalie Muro’s Colorado lake, anaerobic mats in the deep mud at the bottom of my constructed wetland.
Today, they are easily defeated by hydrogen peroxide-saturated biochar. Humans will not give up that easily.
We are unlike the cyanobacteria in another material respect: we can read the instruments. We can run the models. We can look at the Club of Rome’s 1972 graphs, Climate in Crisis temperature projection from 1992, and Hubbert’s Curve (revised, updated) and recognize our current position in that milieu. We can notice that the Observer’s Collapse Function is operating, that belief in certain artificial constructs is draining away, and choose to redirect that energy of collapse—the energy of reinvigoration—toward building systems that are antifragile, less belief-dependent, more deeply rooted in the actual biophysical economics of a living planet.
We can, if we choose, be the generation that noticed.
Whether we will is, as a cyanobacteria might have told you, our destiny.
Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in Iran, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to end the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We have a pipeline to aid in the West Bank that may only last a short time, so we appreciate immediate donations—right now.
We support Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road, and we work to heal collective trauma worldwide through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). I appreciate your support.
Could you help me get my blog posted every week? All Patreon donations and subscriptions to Blogger, Substack, and Medium are welcome. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions can be made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! Donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.
#RestorationGeneration.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize rather than destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion,
Comments