I worry through this Spring, usually the season of glad growth. Amid the familiar joys of burgeoning warmth, the perfume of fresh green shoots, and the welcome sight of deciduous trees getting decently dressed once more, I worry. My feet as always love the rediscovery of resilient dirt beneath them; yet heart and brain fret together, over thoughts no generation has ever thought before.

Hearing that the mason bees are out, I check the nest under the eaves and, sure enough, some have chewn their way out of their adobe condominiums to find a new life. This is joy…but I worry. They live only three weeks. There’s mud for them now in the yard, but no flowers. The ancient apple, the crippled cherry, and the teenage plum slumber on, leaves and blossoms as tightly furled as tomorrow. Nothing yet blooms—how will my bees survive?

I want to cry. I might be wrong; I might be right—it doesn’t matter. My hungry bees are a microcosm of the farmer’s hell—that sinking sense of powerlessness before nature. As climate change wreaks transformations, we stand to face legions of unconquerable alterations in patterns of growth, grueling tests of our ingenuity and endurance, beyond the imaginations of all our forebears.

Spring used to be the season of hope, of renewed confidence in the expansive and forgiving wisdom of the planet. Now we listen anxiously to the news: was the cold snap long enough to kill off the pine beetle? Is the water table back up? Will the snow packs last till August, as they should? Are crops flowering and fruiting as planned? Even members of the Black Thumb Club, like me, figure we’d better try our hands at growing something, even if it’s just potatoes, if we are seriously interested in survival.

Growth is a value for our culture. It seems naturally paired with creativity, hope, patience, and courage. We talk of “boosting” the economy, of “growing” a culture or business, of multiplying, expanding, franchising, globalising. We describe the success of our nations in GNP—Gross National Product—and crow with joy when our money is worth more, when our sales are higher, when we achieve the goal first. Bigger is better. Faster is better. Higher, stronger and longer are better. Every day in every way, we are getting better and better. We are “upwardly mobile”. There need be no end to “smart growth”.

Physics, the implacable science, will slam the door of this linear thinking in our faces faster than any other branch of human thought. Study chaos theory, even just a little, and it dawns on you that everything in existence has a story, a narrative with a development stage, a crisis, and a denouement. Including us, the smart-ass apes who for an embarrassing number of centuries fooled ourselves into thinking we were somehow beyond nature, somehow in control of this little rock sailing crookedly around a minor star.

Oh my goodness! The concept of growth abruptly shrinks to a much smaller concept. Growth is part of the development stage of a story. The alarming part for those of us now alive is that degrowth (new word—get used to it) happens in the denouement, which is always a very short part of any good story.

Consider: other than the Catholic Church, what human culture has taken more than a few centuries to tell its tale? Everything, including human culture, emerges, waxes, wanes, and ends. To pretend to eternity is to cheat oneself of fragile, temporal joys. Remember what Faust says to the present moment, thus inviting the deal with the devil which seals his doom: “Oh, stay! Thou art so fair!” It doesn’t work that way. Love the present moment as you will, you cannot make it last.

It’s instructive to study positive feedback loops in chaos theory. The word positive does not imply anything nice: it means merely that the loop keeps adding to itself to make an even bigger loop next time around. Eventually the positive feedback loop gets so big and heavy, feeding on itself, that it collapses the entire structure from which it sprang and to which it returns. When the structure collapses, all is chaos. It feels like chaos. There is a pattern about to be born but as yet invisible—small comfort to those drowning in a suddenly incomprehensible world.

Whether you are studying economics, politics, literature, or science, you are studying positive feedback loops. The sense of many students now is that of impending climax and chaos. The many might be right, or wrong. The question is the same in every discipline: is this loop the last positive feedback loop before the crash, or can we stave that off for one more cycle?

The cautious recognise that nature is the only timekeeper, and we strange, proud little mammals have problems reading the clock. The cautious among us have already decided that we may as well act as if this feedback loop is the final one, as there is no downside. Indeed, there are comforts to be found in the end of growth. Anyone whose livelihood depends on the philosophy of endless growth, such as trucking, housing, or gas-vehicle manufacture, will suffer until new patterns emerge out of need, such as solar power and local industry and culture.

Stop the linear thinking now and jump ahead. True, things are not getting better and better, but neither need they grow worse and worse. Under all the pain, new patterns are forming. Find a bit that suits you, and drag it into the light of spring…to grow anew.