# Macro-Culture Thesis

## NotebookLM source collection

This collection develops the **Macro-Culture** hypothesis: human societies are shaped not only by political borders, but by recurring environmental, energetic, hydrological, technological, and informational conditions distributed across climate corridors.

The collection is designed for import into Gemini NotebookLM and separates four layers:

1. **Thesis** — the conceptual claim we are exploring.
2. **Operational model** — variables, grids, scores, and historical comparisons that could test the claim.
3. **Current evidence** — what has actually been assembled in the workspace so far.
4. **Open work** — what remains incomplete or needs independent validation.

## Reading order

1. `01-core-thesis.md` — the central argument and the two directional pressures.
2. `02-invariants-and-sector-model.md` — the environmental variables and sector representation.
3. `03-constraint-comprehension-quadrants.md` — the four-quadrant model.
4. `04-empire-cycle-and-historical-model.md` — energy regimes and historical trajectories.
5. `05-great-lakes-test-sector.md` — the first concrete regional case.
6. `06-methodology-and-validation.md` — how to make the project more rigorous.
7. `07-implementation-status-and-open-questions.md` — what exists, what does not, and the next build sequence.
8. `index.html` — visual collection overview.

## Evidence key

- **Grounded:** directly observed, measured, documented, or supported by a cited source.
- **Operational:** a proposed variable, algorithm, data structure, or test procedure.
- **Hypothesized:** a claim the project is proposing for investigation.
- **Interpretive:** a useful analogy or synthesis that should not be mistaken for mechanism.
- **Incomplete:** not yet tested, fully sourced, or implemented.

## Important boundary

The thesis does **not** claim that climate mechanically determines culture, that latitude predicts moral character, or that historical outcomes can be read directly from a map. It proposes that environmental and energetic constraints create recurring pressures and opportunities, while institutions, technologies, knowledge, power, migration, and contingency shape what societies do with them.

**Working thesis:**

> Environmental and energetic conditions create recurring opportunity and pressure fields. Societies interpret, organize, exploit, resist, repair, or misunderstand those fields. Macro-culture is the historical pattern produced by that interaction.