Of the many insights for conservation and sustainability initiatives found in the work of ecologists, perhaps the most valuable is not a particular concept or principle, but the guidance provided by the discipline itself for a new way of thinking about how we interact with the natural world. The principles of ecology share in a philosophy of interconnectedness that weighs the form and function of a system together, capturing both inner dynamics as well as the phenomena that emerge from the system’s operation as a whole. To think ecologically, guided by its principles and examples, offers a great many benefits to people as we decide to how best interact with the world. Aldo Leopold called this “thinking like a mountain.” By revealing complexity and interconnectedness within and between places, ecological thinking forces us to assume that same level of complexity and interconnectedness in the outcomes of our behavior. Thinking ecologically also suggests a set of goals, such as diversity and resilience, by which managed ecosystems can thrive and persist over time. And perhaps most importantly, thinking in this way insists that people admit their residence within ecosystems, contrary to the too-long-held human vs. nature dichotomy, transforming conquerors of nature into potential managers of and entrenched participants in ecosystems.

Humanism, to address the last point first, is the quite prevalent perspective that people are separate from or superior to the rest of nature, capable of mastering nature with science and technology. Humanism pits human innovation against the perceived challenges, inconveniences, and shortcomings of nature, whether the variability of wild food supplies, the unpredictability of extreme weather, or the limits of non-renewable resources. To think like a humanist is to believe in both the primacy and the inevitability of human technology as the solution to these challenges. Currents of this ecological imperialism can be traced through the histories of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and are widely recognized as fundamental to world-wide examples of anthropogenic environmental degradation. “Better living through chemistry,” was just a modern, now-notorious version what Thomas Hobbes called “reason’s liberation from the natural condition,” which itself was just a newer version of Platonic formalism.

When thinking ecologically it becomes possible to conceive of people as participants working within, rather than outsiders working against the natural world. And as anyone who has witnessed an example of the grace and diversity of biotic communities across the world knows, this is a change in perception that increases, rather than restricts our options. Dynamics governing the abundance, distribution and interactions of flora and fauna on a landscape seem simultaneously governed by the forces of probability and serendipity; for every example of seemingly cutthroat competition, another can be found of the most intricately-choreographed mutualism. Our responsibility as willful agents acting within ecosystems is to explore constructive possibilities for meeting our human needs, and to focus on making contributions through our actions rather than merely minimizing our impacts. It is to us to craft our institutions such that they can accommodate the balance of healthy landscapes, and stabilize, repair and/or reverse the imbalances of degraded ones.

Thinking ecologically, in part, means finding lessons and guidelines in the study of ecosystem dynamics for achieving a more sustainable presence on this planet. Ecology excels at capturing the complex inner-workings of ecosystems, and our ecosystems are truly textbooks in design just waiting to be read. The decomposer food web, as one example, offers a world of practical insights as societies try to craft more responsible energy and waste-management technologies. Similarly, mimicking highly-efficient prairie ecosystems may provide a template for the future of agricultural systems. Thinking ecologically about these systems is to derive their lessons, such as an understanding of interactive controls and feedbacks – processes that stabilize or destabilize an ecosystem’s functioning – such that we can inform our own actions in order to act proactively but with precaution. And with the variety of benchmarks ecology provides for measuring ecosystem health and stability, from resilience to biodiversity to net ecosystem exchange, our ecosystems provide us not just with prototypes for action but also with yardsticks for success.

Ecological thinking differs from paradigms of the other physical sciences in that ecology is not just a reductive science; ecology as a discipline is capable of simultaneously pursing abstract principles while not rejecting the importance of uniqueness and specificity in ecosystem configuration. Ecologists pay special attention to how uniqueness gives rise to emergent properties, where the behavior of the whole system is not equal to behaviors of the sum of its parts. An example of this is resilience, the ability of a system to absorb and recover from disturbance. Resilience, though a commonly understood and portable principle, is a place-based phenomenon: a product of the combination of specific system properties like connectedness, redundancy and diversity of form and function. Each example we see of resilience is both unified by our abstract understanding of it and fastened to the non-reducible uniqueness of its place, whether stream, riparian habitat, grassland, tundra, or urban center.

This dualism in the discipline, where abstracted principles complement our ability to observe the specificity of places in time, is at the core of thinking ecologically. It has led ecology to be the first of the physical sciences to formally experiment with frameworks that bring together the spaces of the so-called social and natural sciences. This “linking” of social-ecological systems at very least reflects the consideration that these spaces must be studied together, though with a dramatically different set of tools. This is the discipline’s frontier, and it reflects the humility of those on the frontier who do not dogmatically pursue some unified, or “consilient” theory of everything (to borrow a term from E.O Wilson). So far the progress here has been slow but heartening; what remains to be seen is whether thinking ecologically can move beyond the tools of economics and sociology and begin to comfortably include the ‘emergent properties’ of human systems: art, poetry, music, spirituality, even morality.

Wendell Berry wrote “explanation is reductive, not comprehensive. … what we know about creatures and lives must [also] be pictured or told or sung or danced.” If we can think ecologically, fitting all of these disparate modes of knowing into the same picture, we can only increase our ability to envision a healthy planet with healthy ecosystems, healthy cultures, healthy communities, and healthy individuals.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 4:13 pm by Philip Loring and is filed under Research, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.