What is a healthy ecosystem?

When we speak of "healthy" eco-systems, we mean stable eco-systems: that is, both tending toward diversity and not subject to cataclysmic drops in diversity. Such conditions, also called balanced, create relationships--ever more intricate relationships--that increasingly locate the inorganic elements necessary to life in cycles that make those inorganic elements increasingly available to life. The more extensive these relationships, the more consistently available the nutrient-elements will be to the life forms within those relationships. Expanding diversity of life forms is, relatively speaking, a low entropy enterprise. The more diverse the forms of life, the more matter and energy are kept available for use, or "work," and the less they are lost to use or work through either irretrievable dissipation or unresolvable mixing. - Abby Rockefeller

The End of Suburbia

Part One: Interdependency

Ecology as a model of human knowledge. What is 'ecology'? Consider the following definitions:

(a) Ecology as a branch of biological science

“The scientific study of the processes influencing the distribution and abundance of organisms, the interactions among organisms, and the interactions between organisms and the transformation and flux of energy and matter.” Beginning as the study of relationships between organisms, the concept has grown to mean the study of ecosystems: holistic webs of interdependency that link biotic communities to abotic flows of nutrients, energy and geological history. (Institute of Ecosystem Studies)

(b) Life is a property of planets rather than of individual organisms.

“Sustained life is a property of an ecological system rather than a single organism or species. Traditional biology has tended to concentrate on individual organisms rather than on the biological continuum. The origin of life is thus looked for as a unique event in which an organism arises from the surrounding milieu. A more ecologically balanced point of view would examine the proto-ecological cycles and subsequent chemical systems that must have developed and flourished while objects resembling organisms appeared.” (Harold Morowitz, Beginnings of Cellular Life (Yale University Press, 1992), 54.)

(c) Ecology as the economy of nature

‘Who were the early ecologists?’ asked Armbruster.

‘Botanists who became interested in plant communities – groups of plant species who interdependence seemed so similar to economic relationships that the naturalists coined a new word for natural communities of organisms and based it directly on the word economy. That was late in the nineteenth century.’

‘Wait!’ said Armbruster, darting to his unabridged dictionary. ‘Aha, economy is derived from two Greek roots – oiko, meaning ‘house,’ and nomy, meaning ‘management’: house management. Ecology comes from the same root for ‘house’, plus the root logy for ‘logic’ or ‘knowledge.’ So ecology literally means ‘house knowledge.’ Now, that’s strange, isn’t it? Bio, meaning ‘life,’ and nomy, ‘management’ – bionomy, ‘life management,’ would have been more to the point. Victorian scholars were well grounded in Greek. Odd that they embraced jargon as imprecise as ecology.’

‘Not odd when you realize they thought of ecology as ‘the economy of nature,’ said Hiram, ‘a definition still in currency. The very sound of the word tagged it as a twin of economy. That was their point, regardless of literal meaning. They were studying the economy of nature.’ (Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies (Vintage Books, 2000), 10.)

(d) Ecology is not merely science but everyday awareness of place.

“Indigenous peoples know their region. They must know where the food is, where water is available, where firewood is found, where the medicinal plants are, where the trees grow that furnish the poles for their tents or the wood for their fires. Our studies in what we call ecology must lead to such intimacy with our natural surroundings. Only intimacy can save us from our present commitment to a plundering industrial economy.” (Thomas Berry, The Great Work (Bell Tower, 1999), 99.)


Reading for Part One:
1. Handout out on definitions of ecology

Recommended:
1. Millenium Ecosystem Assessment
2. What is deep ecology?

CSOC2601 Syllabus

Wesleyan University
Fall 2006
CSOC2601: Introduction to Ecological Philosophy

5 Monday evenings, 7-9 PM beginning Oct. 16th
Fisk Room 403
Justin Good, Ph.D.
(617) 733-9270

vood@cummings-good.com
http://www.ecoanarchy.com
http://solarclarity.blogspot.com/

Course Description

In a time of staggering, endless industrial growth, new breakthroughs in our scientific understanding of nature, value, meaning, and consciousness are creating a conceptual revolution—a revolution in how we understand and answer the fundamental and timeless questions about human existence: What is true? What is beautiful? What is just? What is wealth? What is real? This course offers an introduction to this revolution. In a friendly but serious, focused but open-ended conversation, we shall make forays into the wondrous thicket of ideas at the vanguard of environmental philosophy. Some of the concepts we shall examine include: ecology as the holistic study of ecosystems, the biosphere and the gaia hypothesis, sustainability and ecological economics, energy geopolitics, systems theory, self-organizing structure, visions of post-industrial society, biocentric ethics, and the ecology of beauty—or whether wind farms are beautiful. Meetings will be in a relaxed, seminar style and weekly readings will be approximately 40 pages.

Course Requirements

As a ‘not-for-credit’ course, there are no required writings, examinations or quizzes. That means that the only requirements there are are self-imposed: to have an open mind, to strive to satisfy your curiosity, to listen to others with an open heart, to heed the nose of your inner instinctive rationality, to transcend your attachment to your past and current beliefs about the existence and essence of nature.

Texts

There is one book assigned for the class, together with a number of short online articles. The main text is Thomas Berry’s The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (Bell Tower, 1999). The online readings, both required and recommended, are listed below in the course schedule and are also posted on the course weblog, http:/ /eco-philosophy.blogspot.com/.

Course Schedule

Our course will meet five times. While touching on a host of ideas, concepts, analyses and philosophical implications, each class will be dedicated to a unifying theme.

(1) 10/16 INTERDEPENDENCY: Ecology as a model of human knowledge

Ecology is the study of interdependency. In our first meeting we will begin our conversation with a look at some definitions of ecology and chart their connections to the basic themes of ecological philosophy.

Reading:
1. Handout out on definitions of ecology

Recommended:
1. Millenium Ecosystem Assessment
2. What is deep ecology?

(2) 10/23 FORM: Wholeness, cosmology and the unfolding structure of life

In the course of the development of western thought and civilization, the concept of life has taken on forms which led directly to an antagonistic, exploitative relation between human beings and the earth. Modern cosmological views of the universe continue to present to us the world of nature as a place which is mechanical, irrational, lacking in meaning and intrinsic value, indifferent to human purposes, and fundamentally devoid of consciousness or mind. The new science of life, echoing ancient indigenous wisdom, is showing each of these views to be fundamentally false.

Reading:
1. Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, pp. 1-47.

Recommended:
1. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, “The Gaia Hypothesis”
2. Connecticut Council on Environmental Quality 2005 Annual Report
3. Connecticut College Arboretum
4. News and history on Connecticut Ecosystems

(3) 10/30 VALUE: Humanism, biocentrism and the ecology of freedom

Theoretically and psychologically motivated self-centeredness in western accounts of value and ethical significance has tended to blind thinkers to the reality that value and ethical meaning are intrinsic to the natural world itself, albeit in ways which are deeper and more mysterious than human experience often assumes.

Reading:
1. The Great Work, pp. 48-106.

Recommended:
1. Chief Seattle’s “Letter to All”
2. Arousing Biophilia: A Conversation with E.O. Wilson
3. Justin Good, “What is Beauty Or, On the Aesthetics of Wind Farms”
4. Radicalizing Democracy: An Interview with Murray Bookchin

(4) 11/6 WEALTH: Energy, money and post-industrial politics

The political and economic debates of twentieth century industrial society were often blind to the ecologically-irrational founding premises of the industrial system itself. The restoration of political life requires that we confront these deeply problematic assumptions into order to correct the design failures of our economic and political structures.

Reading:
1. The Great Work, pp. 107-158.

Recommended:
1. E. F. Schumacher, “Buddhist Economics”
2. Sarah van Gelder, “Beyond Greed and Scarcity: An interview with Bernard Lietaer”
3. Ecological Footprint Quiz
4. The Oil Depletion Protocol
5. Richard Heinberg, “Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply”

(5) 11/13 WORK: Sustainability, localism, evolution and the promise of the ecozoic

So-called optimism and pessimism are both abstractions which conceal the unpredictable and manifold diversity of consequences that follow from the endless complexity of ordinary daily life on planet earth. Individuals and communities, empowered by reliable information feedback from the environment are agents of change capable of having unpredictably vast, non-linear effects on the world for the better.

Reading:
1. The Great Work, pp. 159-201.

Recommended:
1. Helena Norberg-Hodge, “Moving Toward Community: from Global Dependence to Local Interdependence”
2. Bob Swann and Susan Witt, “Local Currencies: Catalysts for Sustainable Regional Economics”
3. Rocky Mountain Institute’s Economic Renewal Program
4. SolarClarity
5. The Community Solution

What is a conceptual ecosystem?

What is a conceptual ecosystem and how do you walk through one?

The idea of a conceptual ecosystem is a picture for understanding – a tool for understanding – how our ideas about the world and about ourselves relate to and interact with how we live our lives.

It is a way to see how ideas are not just ideas, but parts of our reality, as real as stones and persons are helium, in the sense that they cause and shape and interact with, and even make up the very fabric of reality.

Generally speaking, ecology is the science of interdependency. It studies life as a system of living systems, all of which shape and are shaped by their relations with all other systems. As a hard, biological science, ecology studies biological ecosystems: dynamically organized, kinetic arrangements of organisms and flows of energy and nutrients. Originally beginning as the empirical study of how one organism’s life and behavior depends upon the life and behavior of another organism, ecology has become the name for a whole universe of disciplines and subdisciplines: all of which are pursuing their own cognitive niche to study one of the infinite implications of holistic interdependency.

Human ecology studies interdependency of all live insofar as it pertains to the existence of human beings and their mysterious, deeply troubled, but also hopeful and divine, condition on planet earth. Human ecology is itself a vast interdisciplinary project because of all the complicated problems and questions that our ways of living are currently throwing up at us to respond to.

This book is a work of philosophical ecology, which is a kind of human ecology concerned with how our concepts about how we live are themselves parts of how we live. Philosophical ecology studies conceptual ecosystems, as structural aspects of our environment which serve to transmit, interpret, codify, relate, synthesize, reject and ignore, or illuminate, the flow of information through ecosystems.

All organisms, in order to maintain in the world as biological-thermodynamic survival machines, need to exchange energy and nutrients continuously, in order to resist the force of entropic heat death. Not only nutrients, to rebuild cellular structure, and energy, to metabolize continuity of form which marks the essence of all living beings, but also information is essential to the manifesting of life. To be alive is to be self-organizing, which means to have an inside and an outside – that is, to have a skin. To have a skin is to be semipermeable, which all life must necessarily be, insofar as all life needs to get energy from the larger environs and to release digested energy back into it. But to be semi-permeable is to let some things in and to shut other things out.

The ability to be selective about that process is the seed of perception, hence perception is synonymous with life. As life intensifies – and it is the essence of life to do so – perception also intensifies, by extending itself, internally and externally, and temporally, into the past and the future. At some point concepts appear as particular ways that perception and reality coalesce into deeper levels of unity. And like all living things, concepts develop as systems of concepts which relate and interact with each other and with the non-conceptual, material world, again, in order to intensify life.

Information implies knowledge, which coentails meaning and along with purpose. The ancient and eternal questions of philosophy – what is truth? what is goodness? What is beautiful? – are forever refracted through the dazzling infinite implications of the flow of information through your body, your community, your economy, your planet, your cosmos.