Human
Ecology
Review
Official Journal
of SHE
A
CONVERGENCE OF CRISES AND A GLIMMER OF HOPE
Plenary, Society for Human Ecology, Oct
19,
2006 College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, Maine
Richard
Levins
Harvard School of Public
Health
Boston MA 02115
and
Instituto
de Ecología y Sistemática Boyeros,
Ciudad Havana, Cuba
Classical physics was the
paradigmatic science for the 19th and early 20th
centuries. It was based on the study of a relatively small number of kinds
of things, each with enormous number of replicates. It bequeathed to all
of science a reductionist strategy that presumed that the smallest objects
are in some sense most “fundamental” and that things can reasonably be
isolated from their contexts to study under controlled conditions without
doing too much violence to their natures, so that when you have understood
the parts well you can reinsert them into the bigger world and understand
the whole from the laws governing the parts.
It projected an aesthetics of simplicity and symmetry. It asserted
the need to quantify and left us with a sense that quantitative methods
are superior to qualitative, the sign of the maturing of a science. I
think it was Rutherford who said that something exists if I can measure
it. Precision, an essential ingredient in solving many scientific
problems, came to stand for science as such. And it was ahistorical: time
enters into classical physics only as the interval between events, not as
when something happened in real time. Physics also developed more general
norms for science: the separation of thinking from feeling, the demand for
publicly verifiable evidence, the imperative that arguments should be
evaluated independently of their source. In an age of high-cost
megaprojects, and military and commercial secrecy, these aspirations can
no longer be implemented. That is, physics grew up with democratic
aspirations that have worn thin along with the low-intensity political
democracy that figures so highly in the self-praise of the dominant world
regimes.
Physics was extraordinarily successful both in understanding the
world of energy and matter and in providing the basis for advances in
technology. Part of its success came from the fact that the instruments of
research in physics are themselves the results of physical science,
creating a rich positive feedback in which the researchers build or
understand thoroughly the apparatus of that research . And it had an
extraordinarily fruitful relationship with mathematics. Its admiring
sibling in social science was classical and neo-classical economics which
also studies the world as a large collection of independent
“individuals” or firms interacting in an ahistorical void with fixed
rules of behavior determined outside that science. It also elaborated on
mathematical methods and created an index, GDP, to stand for progress.
Other fields suffered from what Joel Cohen described as physics envy and
elaborated intricate schemes and techniques for creating indices,
estimating them and comparing them. Biology, nourished by an influx of
physicists who thought that the business of physics had been completed,
also went reductionist. Systematic biology languished, and many a doctoral
student examined tissue homogenates in flasks without ever seeing the
organism it came from in nature. Whole departments “went molecular”.
One Nobel laureate stated that biology is genetics and biochemistry, all
else is stamp collecting.
But the paradigm of physics as a model science also misled. The
great errors of applied science came from a reductionist mode of work that
posed problems too narrowly, removed contexts,
and abstracted away too many essential ingredients. In the
1970’s, epidemiology adopted the doctrine of the epidemiological
transition that asserted that as countries develop infectious disease
would disappear and be replaced by chronic disease. It extrapolated from
the recent history of Euro-North America to predict a future for the whole
world. It ignored the longer sweep of history, the waxing and waning of
epidemics. It did not notice what was happening with animal and plant
disease. It ignored ecology, how for example deforestation or the
expansion of irrigation
create the habitats for mosquito reproduction. It ignored evolution, both
the rapid acquisition of resistance to pesticides and antibiotics that
thwarted the anti-malaria campaign of the 1950’s, and longer range
evolutionary processes by which microbes invade new hosts, especially such
widespread and abundant hosts as we are. The alternative to the
“epidemiological transition” is the proposition that every change in
the ecology, land use, vegetation, economy, demography and politics is
also in principle a change in the epidemiology.
The Green Revolution was another effort at high power innovation
with a very narrow focus. It promoted an industrial model for agriculture
with high doses of expensive inputs, widespread use of irrigation,
chemical fertilizers and pesticides, mechanization, selection of
high-yielding varieties that replaced local genotypes, and support for the
richer farmers at the expense of the poor. It responded to criticism by
comparing the yields of the Green Revolution to yields if you do nothing.
Therefore it resulted in increased yields per hectare, at least initially,
but new pest problems; increased deforestation (and malaria) and soil
degradation; reduced diversity of crops; increased disparities between
rich and poor in the countryside; promoted rural-urban migration; and
undermined the economic independence of women. None of this fit within the
scope of traditional plant breeding or agronomy.
The paradigmatic sciences of the 21st century will be
evolutionary ecology and organismic biology, including neurobiology.
They arise out of a realization that the major problems we face
now, both in understanding the world and in improving upon it, are
intrinsically complex. They depend on insights from many disciplines on
different levels of organization none of which can be reduced to any
other. They evolve in time, and when things happens is important.
Development in 21st century
Africa cannot be a replay of 18th century England. For one
thing, there is nobody left to enslave and plunder.
The great errors of public health, agriculture, water management
and development came about from construing problems too small, too static,
removed from context and from history. The sources of these errors are
three-fold. First, they come out of the internal development of science,
the reductionist philosophy that has dominated its development in the West
since its origin in the 17th century. From this perspective we
could study these errors as intellectual history, how new experiences and
observations intersected with changing intellectual climates to support
some approaches and dismiss others, to accept some new research claims and
arguments readily and subject others to the most exquisite scrutiny or
simply rule them out of order.
A second perspective is institutional.
The sciences are divided into disciplines under different
chairpersons or deans. Schools of medicine are separated from schools of
agriculture geographically and culturally. Their practitioners go to
different meetings and read different journals with very little overlap. Despite all the service to interdisciplinary,
transdisciplinary, or non-disciplinary scholarship, the structure of
promotions rewards and funding requires people to stay within narrow
guidelines. Students are
encouraged by accumulating debt and uncertain employment to choose a
thesis which may be a subcontract of their advisor’s work.
Therefore it is difficult for academics to step outside of the
bounds that the fields have already defined.
At a national level, reviews of the state-of-the-art are entrusted
to those who created the fields as they are and are therefore least likely
to encourage radical departures. University
presidents consult the recognized leaders in a few in a field in order to
choose their priorities. Therefore
the best that we usually see our programs in the vanguard of the
conventional.
Another view is from the perspective of political economy. It asks
the question, how and why is science produced, who owns it, who is allowed
to do it, how is science rewarded or punished? Then we see that the
dominant philosophy is consistent with the knowledge industry as commodity
production. As with all commodities, objects produced for sale, there is
no necessary relation between the exchange value of a commodity and its
usefulness. For instance not all ideas about health or pest control are
equally marketable. As chemicals they can have an unlimited market, but
ideas such as natural pest management or social determination of disease
cannot be packaged into pills or sprays that have to be repurchased every
year. Some truths have a good market because they are congenial to the
owners of the knowledge industry and support existing prejudices, while
others get you into trouble. Disputes about environmental impacts are
clashes of interests discussed as questions of ecology and physiology.
Legislation about science and funding for science follows the interests
and concerns of the owners of legislatures.
Thus the need for a more complex approach to problems is impelled
both by the internal development of the sciences and by the need to solve
urgent problems, but is resisted by the prevailing philosophical biases
and power interests.
The reductionist, instrumentalist view of science is challenged
from two quite different perspectives. The pre-capitalist views of the
world tended to be holistic. Their proponents were repelled by
“fragmentation” of what had been a coherent universe, the separation
of thinking and feeling, of fact from morality. It was a hierarchical
holism, with a place for everything and everyone, and everyone and thing
in their place. It was also static. Origin stories explained how things
came to be the way they finally are. Even the more dynamic variants seen
in Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism emphasize change but in a sort of steady
state and in any case not especially concerned with the natural world.
This feudal and tributary version of holism was also expressed in the
romantic movement in Europe. It spiritualized nature, gloried in seeing
connections everywhere, condemned the “coldness” of a science that would reduce love to fluxes of molecules. In
biology it looked to vitalism, the doctrine that living things could only
be understood as matter infused with some “élan
vital” to set it in motion. This conservative holism is the
ideological choice of right wing Hindu nationalism and Christian
fundamentalism that seek to make use of modern science without absorbing
its secular rationalist and skeptical spirit. Nazi ideology also advocated
a special holism, the unity of the volk
with the land in a mystical unity of blood and soil which
automatically excluded those who had never been allowed access to the
soil. Nazi romanticism coexisted with a cold modernism and claims to
ultra-scientific rationality.
One Third World variant of anti-science is Third World-ism.
It begins with the truth that Euro North American science came to
the colonies providing the tools of conquest, the means of exploitation of
the colony, the justifications for ruling and the assertions of
superiority. It then goes on
to claim that the criticism of traditional beliefs and practices is racist
and calls for the defense of national science and culture.
In doing so, it fails to examine the conflicting worldviews in the
light of history: how are the beliefs of different societies and classes
within those societies created, how do the conditions of production of
knowledge influence the content of that knowledge, the patterns of
knowledge and ignorance and obfuscation present in all systems of thought?
What determines which ancient ideas are preserved and granted the
aura of wisdom? It takes
cultures as the subjects of history without recognizing the heterogeneity
of each society not only now but also in the past as the defenders of
India's indigenous philosophy present Brahmanic Hinduism as if it were the
only ancient intellectual tradition of India and its defense obligatory
for anti-colonialism.
A materialist approach rejects both the scientism of Euro America
and the obscurantist reactionary nationalism. The struggle for science
against the Bushite attack on reason is a twofold struggle against both
scientism and mystification. By
scientism I mean the illusion that all questions can be solved by
employing some universal scientific method that is fundamentally different
from all other ways of gaining knowledge, but that knowledge is
evidence-based and therefore true, while opposing views are just theory or
ideology, and that only numbers derived from measurement really matter.
Post-capitalist holism is quite another story. With roots in
Marxism, feminism, and ecology it emphasizes wholeness, context, and
change. The notion of integrative levels of existence—processes of
atomic, molecular, cellular, organismic, ecosystemic and social
levels—presumes both the relative autonomy of each level and reciprocal
determination. A “thing” is a snapshot of a process maintained
temporarily as it is through the provisional balance of opposing forces.
But its significance depends very much on its context. Therefore we always
have to ask about things and two fundamental questions, why are things the
way they are instead of a little bit different, and why are things the way
they are instead of very different? The first is the question of
self-regulation, homeostasis, and control. The second is the question of
evolution, development and history. And then we ask also about our asking,
aiming our dialectical perspective at ourselves, our own ideas, why some
questions are now on the agenda and others are dreadfully uninteresting to
mainstream science, in what sense can theory capture reality. The two
critiques of reductionist science sometimes get mixed up together.
In a world of so much uncertainty, a critical view of science
sometimes spills over into anti-science.
Thus the new wave of interest in complexity. If the dominant errors
today come from construing the world too narrowly, abstracting away from
context, the world is more complex than we had imagined. Complexity has
become a new buzz word. There are books on complexity, symposia on
complexity, even whole institutes devoted to the study of complexity. And
there is talk about a “new science of complexity.”
Of course there is not really a new science of complexity. There is
a heightened awareness of the complexity of the world, warnings about the
errors that arise from not taking it into account, appeals for inter-disciplinarity
or non-disciplinarity or trans-disciplinarity, and elegant research into
the mathematics of non-linearity.
There is also a widespread interest in “chaos”, an unfortunate
term to describe some interesting non-linear phenomena. “Linear” has
two quite different meanings. It may refer to a unidirectional sequence of
causal steps, AàBàCàD.
Then we can use familiar statistical techniques, making A an
independent variable and the others successively dependent on it. The
opposite of this kind of linearity is a network with feedback, in which A
can act on B but B also acts on A. The
familiar two-species predator/prey interactions are examples of this
non-linearity (figure 1). As soon as we take the feedback loop rather than
unidirectional causation as our object of study, several very powerful
conclusions become almost obvious: First, predator and prey have different
structural positions in the system. It can be understood as follows:
suppose that a pesticide poisons both predator and prey. Then the predator
is harmed by two pathways: the direct effect of the pesticide and the
indirect effect of having its food poisoned. But the prey species is
harmed by direct poisoning and benefits indirectly from the poisoning of
its predator. These pathways
conflict. Therefore pesticides have a stronger impact on the predator,
while the prey may actually increase. This result has been observed often.
It is not that predators are more sensitive to pesticides but that the
predator species is in a more vulnerable position in the community
structure. A second observation is that if environmental impact of any
kind varies geographically it generates correlation between predator and
prey. If it impacts directly on the prey then it changes the abundance of
the two species in the same direction (increases in the prey increase the
predator, decreases in the prey decrease the predator.)
But if the environment impacts directly on the predator, an
increase in the predator decreases the prey. This generates a negative
correlation between the two species. Thus the same causal network can give
either positive or negative correlations (or even zero!) depending on
where the environment enters the system. Slightly more complicated
networks give even more unexpected results. Impacts may accumulate in
variables far from the point of entry, a variable which is impacted
directly may not change at all, a variable may change in the opposite
direction from what common sense would suggest. All of this is apparent
from the qualitative examination of the network of interactions without
having to know the exact equations for their interactions, just their
structural relations.
The second meaning of non-linearity refers to the kind of equation.
If a relation is linear in this sense, the distributive law of arithmetic
holds: c(a+b)= ac+cb. If equations are of this type all sorts of easy
conclusions can be derived. But if the equation is non-linear once again
there are surprises. If a process is bounded between limits, as all finite
processes are, then a process may lead to an equilibrium in which a
population remains the same size because births exactly balance deaths,
production balances consumption, etc. The first complication is that there
may be more than one equilibrium, depending on where you start from. In
one range a species may not be abundant enough to persist and goes to
extinction, but beyond some threshold it can persist.
An illustration of multiple equilibria is as follows: suppose that
you are dropping tennis balls on a peaked roof of a house. The balls land
on the roof and roll off to one side or another depending on which side of
the roof they landed on. The peak of the roof is an unstable equilibrium
while there is a stable equilibrium on the ground on each side of the
roof.
But not all processes lead to equilibrium. A second outcome of a
process may be periodic motion and this motion may be rapid or slow, and
with big or small amplitude. The variable may oscillate periodically as
does the moon or the menstrual cycle. These are the normal outcomes of the
processes that were familiar. But something else could happen. Edward
Lorenz , working at MIT, set up three equations on his computer
representing atmospheric conditions. He set it to calculating in the
expectation that the variables would reach an equilibrium. But they
didn’t. He went to lunch and returned. The calculations hadn’t
finished. He left the computer on over night, and the next the variables
still hadn’t reached equilibrium. They were not even oscillating in a
regular way. And if he started it over again from a different initial
state it still oscillated, but not in quite the same pattern. Even if the
initial conditions were similar, the outcomes diverged quickly. Li and
Yorke (1976) analyzed difference equations. They found three
characteristics that occur together in some equations: the equation has
periodic solutions of every period; it has non-periodic solutions, and it
shows extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. They gave this phenomenon
the unfortunate designation of “chaos”.
Extreme sensitivity to initial conditions can be understood as
follows: Returning to the balls dropped on a roof, if two balls start near
each other on the same side of the peak then they end up near each other
on that side run. But if they are on opposite sides of the roof, no matter
how close, they will diverge. Now imagine a crazy roof with peaks,
turrets, domes and spires all over the place so that any two points are
always on opposite sides of some peak. Then there will be the “extreme
sensitivity to initial conditions”.
The discovery and publication of mathematical chaos was a bombshell
in the scientific community. Extreme sensitivity to initial conditions
meant that no matter how precise your measurement of the state of a
system, you are always a little off and that means
that predictions will be way off after a short time. Peter
Carruthers, an astronomer, said on National Public Radio that chaos
overturned the whole basis of science.
Deepak Chopra used chaos and nonlinearity to identify a spiritual
domain below the “Newtonian table”, where chaos, quantum leaps and
irrationality hold sway. The idea of science as giving us progressively
more precise prediction collapsed. The
unexpectedness of some of the outcomes of non-linear processes is really
their deviation from linear expectations.
They demand respect for the complexity of dynamics in order to
study it not to despair.
Nowhere is a complex view of things more important than when you look at the ecosystem and the dangers to it. Ecology is intrinsically a science of complexity, and all the complexities of ecosystems, geological cycles, evolution, and human activity come together in the eco-social distress syndrome.
The Eco-social Distress Syndrome is a multidimensional pervasive
dysfunctional relation between our species and the rest of nature, and
between members of our species. All
of us are familiar with some of the manifestations of that crisis:
►
Decline in the major life support systems for our
species
(agricultural land, forestry, fisheries and
rangeland);
►
Exhaustion of non-renewable resources;
►
Pervasive pollution of our environment, with more
than 100,000 historically new molecules released into a
moist medium and energized by sunlight to open up
possibilities for recombining in zillions of new ways with
still unimagined consequences for life;
►
Disruption of our relations with the microbial world
leading to the
emergences of new infectious disease and
the reemergence of some such as
malaria, tuberculosis
and cholera that were thought to have been
conquered;
►
Destruction of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity;
►
Global warming and changing climatic patterns with
increased
variability;
►
Growing gap between rich and poor both within and
among countries;
►
War, previously regarded as an anomaly, has become
a more normal
mode of existence, with much ingenuity
and resources invested in
developing more tools for killing
and controlling people;
► Nationalist (mis-described
as ethnic or racial)
conflicts;
►
An imbalance between the immensity and urgency of
the problems we
confront as a species and the incapacity
or unwillingness of our science
to confront them;
►
Widespread corruption and the crisis of governance.
This last one requires
some explanation since superficially there seems to be an extension of
democracy in the world. However much of this is illusory.
While formal electoral democracy is widespread it is undermined in
several important ways. More
and more decisions affecting our lives are taken out of the hands of
elected bodies and a settled within the boardrooms of private
corporations. Others are
passed to non-elected international bodies such as the IMF, WTO, and the
World Bank. Within
governments, power passes to nearly royal executives who bypass the
legislative bodies in the public sphere and will boast of taking their
countries into war despite the opposition of the public. The right of
government to lie, repress, spy on citizens, and ignore its own legal
framework is praised as statesmanship and world leadership.
Government office is increasingly a commodity and investment in
future plunder or access to influence. Thus corruption represents both the
deviation from the social norms and their extreme expression.
This crisis is one more of many in the history of humanity but is
more profound than the previous ones. It reaches higher into the
atmosphere and deeper into the crust of the earth. It affects more aspects
of our life. It is more widespread geographically so that we cannot evade
the problems by moving someplace else.
The individual elements of this crisis are by now familiar to all
of us. But it is useful to examine how they fit together, the network of
feedbacks that give the whole a temporary persistence and threatening
instability.
When non renewable resources are depleted, the search goes on for
more distant and inaccessible deposits that require greater expenditure of
energy and leave greater residues of pollutants.
Once renewable resources are diminished, their economic value
increases, encouraging a more frantic race to exhaust them before somebody
else does.
Erosion increases the demand for fertilizer and irrigation, both
increasing energy demand and pollution load and intensifies the factors of
climate change.
More energy-efficient means of transportation would encourage
longer distance commuting and make it easier to ship goods to and from the
furthest reaches of the earth. But
in order to reduce the increased use of energy it would be necessary to
reduce commuting by locating residents closer to employment.
However this would cause greater health hazards unless we also
transform the production process to eliminate pollution.
It would also increase traffic congestion.
As long as human settlement patterns are determined by real estate
values, energy-efficient cars will not protect our atmosphere.
Until we reduce the wage disparities between the capitalist
heartland and the periphery the incentives will remain for the
long-distance shipping of raw materials, partly finished, and finished
goods.
As long as the status of women is determined in the labor market
that alternately lures them into remunerated employment and pushes them
back into unpaid domestic employment, and as long as the allocation of
women's labor between production and reproduction is determined in the
marketplace, the equality of women will remain an epiphenomena of
commerce. An aging population
in the industrial countries creates a labor shortage, and this is
ameliorated by luring workers from the periphery and urging women to have
more babies. Then the media
push a culture of family values, the joys of staying at home, and sexist
divisions of labor. An
alternative solution to an aging population might be to extend the working
years of people. But this
would be inhuman unless work were redesigned to become life fulfilling.
The undermining of job security increases people's mobility and
undercuts the formation of community.
Isolated individuals then seek purely individual goals either
through aggrandizement or religious fundamentalisms or both.
At one level, the eco-social distress syndrome is a generic crisis
of the human species that has emerged almost instantaneously in the
evolutionary time framework from a local omnivorous primate of East Africa
to a worldwide colonizing and dominant species. Perhaps we are a weed, a
successional species that is already destroying the conditions for its own
persistence. Perhaps in that case we should set up a nominating committee
to interview potential successor species.
But since most of the processes of the EDS have emerged during the
last few centuries of capitalism, it is more particularly a crisis of
world capitalism as a successional stage in our social evolution.
Every kind of society has its own ecology, its own patterns of
relations with the rest of nature and internally with itself.
Therefore we have to examine the ecology of capitalism.
Most production of goods and services under capitalism takes the
form of commodities, that is, things made for sale, and the exchange of
economic values. This is so
obvious and widespread that is taken for granted.
But it has tremendous consequences for our lives and in particular
for our ecology. There is no
necessary relationship between the usefulness of a commodity and its
economic value. The long-term trend is for more and more kinds of things to
become commodities: knowledge, art, emotional support, other organisms of
all kinds, healing care, violence, body parts, or public office, or
recreation turned into entertainment.
Once things are commodities the question of what is produced, how
much of it is produced, how it is made, where it is manufactured, by whom,
with what technology, and where it goes to are determined not by any
decisions about usefulness, need, or potential harm but only by
profitability. The freer the
market, and the easier it is for investment to move from one activity to
another, the more commodities are interchangeable.
It is a matter of indifference to a company whether it produces
grain, educational materials, soft drinks, porn, computer games or cars,
or runs a chain of nursing homes or sports teams.
They all meet and are measured against each other at the bottom
line. Since other companies
can also move in on anything that looks profitable, there is a race for
competitiveness. Each
enterprise strives to improve profits by controlling resources, squeezing
the workers more, hiding harmful impacts on the environment or human
health, creating new needs and convincing people to buy them, expanding
into new markets and buying up existing companies. Some innovations in
production may actually be beneficial to the environment, but these are
side effects. An honest logo
from a corporation would be “profit is our only product”.
Land may be uncultivated even in the face of hunger, markets may be
open next door to perfectly satisfactory existing markets, research may be
suppressed or announced with fanfare according to how it might affect
profits. It is a matter of
indifference whether money is invested in more efficient engineering,
union busting, researching new products, electing or renting a Senator,
increased sales effort and public relations, or hiring lawyers to delay
the removal of products from sale when dangerous effects on people's
lives, water quality, or the ozone layer can no longer be hidden.
A particularly noxious growing industry is the manufacture of
consent. Another option is that companies may step away altogether from
production of any sort and trade in financial papers.
Business is and must be insatiable.
Individual entrepreneurs may be concerned about people or the
environment, but once they are successful enough the big boys move in and
the personal concerns of the founders of an enterprise are erased in the
impersonal imperatives of the corporate and financial world. Ben &
Jerry's, Horizon dairies, Cascadian and Muir Glen organic foods have all
been swallowed up by the giant food corporations, starting at their green
tails and eventually leaving only the ecological grin behind.
People are also increasingly treated as things, human capital,
investments to be rented and discarded as the market dictates.
The competitive individualistic mode of existence of business
becomes a model for all of life, isolating people from each other,
reducing living to relations with things and quest for individual
meaningfulness. Thus, despite efforts such as antitrust laws, a competitive
market evolves toward monopoly and with the power. Crime and corruption in every society are caricatures of
their respective virtues and therefore are both condemned and tolerated.
Of all of its defects, it is the insatiability of capitalism that in the
long run makes it incompatible with sustainability.
As a species we confront the dilemma that a rising standard of
living is incompatible with sustainability and equity as long as we
interpret that rising standard of living as an unlimited increase in the
consumption of matter and energy. But if we understand the rising standard
of living to mean improvement in the quality of life, the care of people,
and the creation of opportunities for people to develop a full capacity,
then a whole new range of possibilities open up.
The trouble is that these are incompatible with commodity
production. We can bribe, coerce, and con industries into doing the decent
thing as far as some recycling technologies, energy efficiency or even
alternative energy is concerned; we can promote organic foods and
establish national parks. But
sooner or later we come against the immovable stone wall of the imperative
to expand. It is here that ecology movements must confront the reality
that commodity production is at least equal in environmental importance as
global warming in threatening our survival.
The refusal to do so has led to the death by domestication of the
German Green party and those environmental movements that draw back from
finger-pointing.
This awareness is spreading in the world.
We see the bumper stickers: Food for people not for profit!
Health is a right not a privilege! Owls do not destroy jobs, greed
destroys both! The demands of
indigenous peoples for the control of their own natural resources is also
a demand to nurture those resources and to protect them from that
cost/benefit calculation which can decide when using up a species or a
habitat is more profitable than keeping them alive for the long haul.
We see conflicts between real estate values and humane habitats,
between educating children for rich lives as active citizens and training
them for docile performance in the new industries.
In Latin America especially we see movements against the
privatization of water and energy and for community level control of what
happens in the community, and the invention of new forms of participatory
grassroots democracy derived from the traditional forms of consultation
still surviving in the indigenous cultures.
In the world social forum we see a glimmering of convergence of
these various movements. What is still missing is a coherent program.
Many of the ingredients are already present but often in different
movements. What makes this
scary is that if we put it all together and insist that goods are produced
only insofar as they enhance life and the rest of nature, if we value all
human lives and offer opportunities for their fullest development, if we
insist that people be treated as intrinsically valuable rather than as
human capital, if we treat governing as a moment in the division of labor
where we pool our brains to solve shared problems, if we evaluate the
total impact of our activities on ourselves and on the future in making
decisions, then whoops! That would be socialism! Perhaps we had better
convene that nominating committee.
Copyright 2001, The Society for Human Ecology
The Society for Human Ecology (SHE) is an
international interdisciplinary professional society that promotes
the use of an ecological perspective in both research and
application. The Society holds regular conferences, conducts workshops and symposia, and
co-sponsors a variety of related activities to further integrate work among professionals in fields
pertaining to human ecology.
For membership information contact:
Barbara Carter, Executive Assistant
College of the Atlantic
105 Eden Street
Bar Harbor, ME 04609, USA.
or use the online contact form