Ecological Civilization: a Premise, a Promise and Perhaps a Prospect

www.ecologicalcitizen.net LONG ARTICLE Ecological civilization: A premise, a promise and perhaps a prospect Two broad approaches to ecological civilization are here distinguished: the reformational Freya Mathews and the transformational. The reformational approach seeks to limit the ecological impact of modern industrial civilization without changing its underlying human/nature dualism. About the author The transformational approach seeks to change that premise by instituting entirely new Freya is an environmental modes of praxis that integrate economic production with ecological functionality: forms of philosopher who lives in economic production are proposed which do not merely limit the impact of production on Australia. the biosphere but contribute positively to its ecological health and functionality. Biomimicry, understood as a principle of design, is considered as an operating principle for such an Citation economy but is rejected in favour of biosynergy, understood as a protocol for engagement. Mathews F (2020) Ecological Defined in terms of the twin principles of conativity and accommodation and least resistance, civilization: A premise, a promise and perhaps a biosynergy is proposed as a fundamental protocol of living systems. Modes of production prospect. The Ecological Citizen guided by biosynergy would not seek to create artificial systems modelled on the design 3(Suppl C): 47–54. features of living systems; rather, they would engage collaboratively with living systems in ways that encouraged them to provide for human needs while simultaneously enhancing Keywords the functionality of those systems. Crucially, this would require us as humans to adapt our Visions ends to those of such systems; in a word, to desire what our ecological-others need us to desire. hat is civilization? By civilization of society but to industrialism, and it is I mean those expansive cultural in this industrial form that civilization W formations established by the dominates the world today.1 sedentary, stratified, usually literate, Members of pre-agrarian societies, by administratively centralized societies that contrast, depended on the affordances originated in the northern hemisphere in of local ecologies for provender, shelter Neolithic times and predominate in the and other requisites. Whether they were world today. Such societies were based true foragers or what I have elsewhere on labour-intensive, agrarian forms called custodials, practising sophisticated of production. Whereas pre-agrarian forms of ecological management, their societies had looked to natural ecologies to cultures reflected a sense of enmeshment furnish their livelihoods, civilised societies in, and responsibility for, an intricate carved out spaces of their own within their set of ecological interdependencies environments, dedicating those spaces (Mathews, 2019). Intimate knowledge of exclusively to human use. They achieved these interdependencies enabled people this, at the cost of great effort, through land to ensure, by way of relatively small clearing, cultivation and domestication – interventions, that ecosystems themselves often of exotic species – and through the would do the work of providing for them. So, construction of permanent settlements. in pre-colonial Australia, for example, just Such cultivated and, eventually, engineered by walking through country with a firestick, scenarios gradually began to replace practising highly selective burning of natural landscapes. Recourse to human plant communities, people could promote effort and artifice rather than reliance on grasslands and so ensure an ongoing nature ultimately gave rise not merely to abundance of game (Gammage, 2011); or, agrarian economies and the urbanization by selectively digging out wild yams, they The Ecological Citizen Vol 3 Suppl C 2020 47 Ecological civilization www.ecologicalcitizen.net could ensure increased propagation of yam to replace them with new parameters daisies in subsequent years (Pascoe, 2014). enabling economies to be re-integrated into Such practices, or forms of praxis, relied ecosystems in such a way that economic not so much on effort as on a sophisticated functionality becomes interdependent understanding of ecological systems, and with ecological functionality – a state on how to tweak them. of affairs that would in turn reconfigure For agrarian peoples, sweating in the inner ideologies of civilization. Since their fields, a knowledge of planting and this latter approach would require a husbandry was of course indispensible, complete overhaul of currently prevailing but otherwise the environment, as a socioeconomic arrangements, we might realm of natural ecologies, was relatively call it a transformational approach to discounted, as outside the sphere of the ecological civilization. praxical and hence ultimately as outside the sphere of the cultural. ‘Nature’ in other The reformational approach words tended to become progressively Examples of the kind of strategies used backgrounded to the sphere of human under the first, reformational approach agency – ignored and little understood, it include the following. was expected to take care of itself. A deep n Current capitalist modes of techno- human–nature dualism thus lies at the industrial and economic organization core of traditional forms of civilization – a are maintained but drastic reductions tendency to construct culture as set apart are effected in either levels of production from nature and as the exclusive focus of and consumption, or levels of human interest and value. population, or both. In the contemporary world, civilization n Current capitalist modes of techno- under its industrial aspect has largely industrial and economic organization overtaken the natural environment. In its are maintained, but areas of land and ignorance and discounting of the processes sea reserved for conservation are vastly “As long as the and principles underpinning the integrity expanded, where this affords space dominant techno- of natural systems, this form of civilization for the recovery and regeneration of has, often with little awareness of what it biosphere processes. industrial modes of is doing, ransacked and ravaged nature, production prevail, with the consequence that the health and An influential example of the latter holding the dualistic integrity of the entire biosphere is now approach can be found in the Ecomodernist ideological core of under grave threat. Manifesto, which seeks further to intensify and centralize industrialism – fully civilization in place, What is ecological civilization? ‘decoupling’ it from nature by restructuring the biosphere will Ecological civilization, a term of great it along circular economy lines – with a continue to be seen significance in contemporary China, is here view to thereby freeing up land currently as subordinate to defined by its aim of rendering civilization, under industrial and urban usage for human interests. as a social formation, consistent with the conservation instead (Asafu-Adjaye et al., ” repair and ongoing renewal of Earth’s life 2015; cf. Wilson, 2016). in all its abundance, beauty and ecological Arguably, however, as long as the diversity. dominant techno-industrial modes of Approaches to ecological civilization production prevail, holding the dualistic have thus far taken two broad forms. The ideological core of civilization in place, first seeks not to overturn the existing the biosphere will continue to be seen as parameters of industrial civilization, nor subordinate to human interests, and the the dualist ideologies that reinforce those biological resources of the planet will parameters from within, but merely to limit continue to be regarded as the rightful their impact on the biosphere. We might call property of humanity, ever available for this the reformational approach. The second new forms of exploitation. The end-point does challenge those parameters, seeking to which such an attitude leads in the long 48 The Ecological Citizen Vol 3 Suppl C 2020 www.ecologicalcitizen.net Ecological civilization run is total exploitation: a biosphere that The first pathway is the approach known retains only those ecological components as bioregionalism. It calls for devolution of with demonstrated utility for human the present global, high-impact, hungrily purposes. Currently such components extractive economy into a multitude of cannot be definitively identified: no one small, local, adaptive and low-impact can determine which of the myriad existing economies. Societies built on this model species, planetary cycles and systems would substitute simpler, decentralized, are truly necessary as underpinnings for ecologically informed, place-identified, human civilization. However, it is already value-rich but technically minimal and clear that many species are dispensable scale-appropriate forms of cultural and, with the development of ever-more- and material life for current regimes elaborate geo-engineering systems that of centralized, de-regionalized, high- may replace natural systems with artificial tech mass production and global ones, it may turn out that most ecosystem distribution and consumption. We might processes will prove dispensable or call this the bioregional version of the substitutable by artificial processes in the transformational approach (Sale, 1985; “No one can future. Snyder, 1995; McGinnis, 1999; Crist, 2019). determine which of Logically then, failure to replace the Although bioregionalism undoubtedly the myriad existing kinds of

Load more