Nate Hagens

But importantly, we can impact the how and when a lake ages depending on how we interact with it.

There are regenerative techniques that can expand a lake's lifespan by increasing water filtering wildlife and reducing sediment and nutrients that would naturally run off into the water.

These techniques require intention and planning and energy, but are quite effective.

Conversely, we can also accelerate and distort this systemic degradation by adding even more nutrient runoff like fertilizer from farms or sewage or phosphorus, causing the lake to become murkier more quickly.

and the lake might even flip via algal blooms.

The water then becomes thick and cloudy with the suspended sediment, and light can now no longer reach the bottom.

Most of the plants die, the oxygen then drops, then the fish die, and the unnatural aging of this system has also tipped the lake into a new stable state, a new valley, a murky, algae-dominated lake.

So this is now a deep, self-reinforcing, stable valley because the conditions that maintain cloudy, lifeless murkiness are now in a self-perpetuating loop.

So here's the interesting and relevant, and in my opinion, important thing.

These are both examples of systemic processes.

But the transition between the dynamic life perpetuating system and the dead zone is profoundly asymmetric.

Flipping a clear lake to a murky one might take a few years of excess nutrient loading.

even after you completely stop that nutrient runoff, might take decades or much longer.

Because you don't just need to remove the offending pollutant or stressor, you would need to rebuild the entire ecosystem that was lost, the plants, the oxygen, the fish populations.

and the nutrient cycles and the ecological webs.

So the system settled into a new valley and getting it back out requires climbing a ridge that didn't exist before.

This pattern that I just described for lakes shows up everywhere in complex systems.

And it shows up in human societies too, in lots of ways.

Think about a society that transitions from democratic governance to authoritarian control during a crisis.

Maybe there's a war or an economic collapse.