A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 29 – Push-Pull Dynamics

They have been a key aspect of life on Earth and the human journey.

When investigating why events happened and what motivated the actors, push-pull dynamics are often considered. Were the participants pushed out or pulled out into their new activities and environments? When fish migrated to land, lobe-finned fish were losing out to ray-finned fish for oceanic dominance. The thinking today is that lobe-finned fish were pushed to the margins of the marine environment, and some that were pushed to the shoreline evolved their lobes into feet and migrated onto land. It was a serendipitous opportunity, and that act led to humanity. It seems that some marginal monkeys were pushed from the tropical canopies in a drying world, migrated to the ground and became apes, in another act of being pushed that led to humanity. Today, gorillas reside in the easy-living heart of the rainforest, smaller chimps (which may have originally been marginal gorillas) live more on the periphery and have to travel farther than gorillas each day to forage, and it seems that some marginal chimps (or something like them) were pushed farther from the heart of the shrinking rainforest and into the dryer woodlands, learned to walk upright, and that push event helped led to humanity.

But in all of those instances, the pull of opportunities may have also come into play, although likely later than the push events. While it seems that the push of coercion and survival was the primary impetus, at some stage, the opportunities of the new activities and environments may have pulled those pioneers along. Similar push-pull dynamics are considered in key events in the human journey. A relatively small group of behaviorally modern humans, on the order of a few thousand at most, left Africa around 50-60 thousand years ago, and all humans that did not stay behind in sub-Saharan Africa are descended from that founder group, which amounts to nearly all of humanity today. That founder group was likely pushed by survival needs more than pulled by opportunity. They did not know that there was an Earth to conquer. Few leave their homelands unless they have to.

Those events presented above are all prehistoric and the subject of scientific investigation, but such dynamics can also be seen in historical human events. In medieval England, elites and landowners broke feudal political-economic customs and began pushing the peasantry off of the land with Game and Enclosure laws, and the peasantry often rioted against their treatment. Those dispossessed peasants ended up working in deforested England’s coal mines and populating the cities, eking out their existences in medieval England’s hellish conditions. The coal-mining phenomenon was a key dynamic in increasing the class divisions in English society. Some early miners were even slaves, wearing collars that denoted their status, but a new energy source was exploited on Earth like never before, which led to the Industrial Revolution. Unprecedented levels of real wealth were created, from the energy surplus delivered by fossil fuels and used by machines, which could greatly outperform humans and led to the end of slavery as an institution. England was already part of a Western European trend of using the power of water in its watermills, which began during the rise of Rome, but the practice flourished during the High Middle Ages. The first factories of the Industrial Revolution were in the countryside where the water power was, but as coal began to dominate energy production, industry moved to cities, which caused small towns such as Manchester to grow explosively. Early on, the mills and factories of the Industrial Revolution acted as a pull dynamic for peasants, and they left the farms for the opportunities of the cities and factories. So, what was originally a push dynamic became a predominantly pull dynamic.

I saw that push-pull dynamic in my own family and the families of my fellow travelers. My direct ancestor migrated from Scotland in the 1730s to Pennsylvania, a decade before the final Jacobite uprising in 1745, which Clan Fraser was a prominent participant in. Life was not easy under English domination, and the push pressure was accompanied by the pull opportunity of life in the New World, as Earth’s richest unplundered continent was there for the taking, once the natives were eradicated. Although my family-name line was Quaker from the earliest days (being on the losing end of numerous futile uprisings against the English seems to have turned my family-name line into pacifists), and as such, they were among the first Abolitionists. However, they also took advantage of the dispossession of Native Americans, happily “settling” the free land that was to be had once the Indians were eliminated, and my ancestors eventually migrated to Kansas in 1879, where my grandfather was born in 1907.

Life as a homesteader was not easy, and my grandfather lived in a sod hut while young. He married my grandmother in 1927 and had their first child in 1929, just as the USA’s economy began to collapse. Homesteader farming on the Great Plains was environmentally disastrous and led to the Dust Bowl, which drove my grandparents and much of their extended family from Kansas in 1933. After years of migrating, Grapes-of-Wrath style, they ended up in Bellingham, Washington, in 1936, when my father was born. The family lived on a farm in Bellingham’s hinterland. They were desperately poor (losing a dime was a family hardship), and my grandfather walked all over Bellingham, looking for work. He joined the Navy as a Seabee in World War II. After the war, he worked in Alaska and sent money home to the family. He became a painter in World War II, was elected the president of the local painter’s union, and eventually moved to Seattle. I lived with them for several months in their last years atop Queen Anne Hill, in their comfortable retirement. The push of survival and the pull of opportunity was my family’s constant companion, and my father was part of the move from the farm to the city and the opportunities of industrial society. In my own lifetime, I saw that transition from farm to city, as the home where I spent most of my years growing up had a huge backyard that my parents turned into a little farm, and I was a farmhand. We raised chickens, grew crops, and even built a worm farm in that yard, which was my father’s failed bid to leave the Navy.

My partner in the energy business grew up as a migrant farmworker, was ejected from his home at age 13, as his family could no longer afford to feed him (not unusual in that culture), and his adventures began. He never went back to the farm. Similarly, my best teacher ever was raised on the family farm in North Dakota, but also escaped the farm, largely pulled by opportunity (and pushed by the lack of opportunity in farm life), and eventually became a college professor. As my family and fellow travelers migrated from agrarian to industrial life, many agrarian trappings also fell to the wayside, such as organized religion. None of my father’s family regularly attends church, to my knowledge.

In summary, push-pull dynamics likely go back billions of years in the journey of life on Earth. Both are evident in the human journey and recent history.

In my free-energy work, my motivation can be seen as the push dynamic of avoiding a global catastrophe and the pull dynamic of the greatest prosperity that humanity has ever known, which would avert the catastrophe as a mere side effect.