There are fundamental disagreements between schools of ecological thought. One school, referred to in earlier posts ^1,2, argues that humans should control nature according to either predictive models or prescriptive 'vision'. Another school, referred to earlier¹ argues that humans must engage with nature and participate rather than control.

In the past the control school, represented here by Donnela Meadows, stated that natural systems could be modelled and manipulated to achieve desired outcomes. A string of failures has prompted them to regroup slightly.

The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can't be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.

The engagement school, represented here by Wendell Berry, states that outcomes aren't predictable or controllable but have faith that intimate engagement will result in acceptable outcomes.

If we want the land to be cared for, then we must have people living on and from the land who are able and willing to care for it.

Steve Talbott of The Nature Institute would seem to agree with the engagement school and advises us to converse with nature, an alternative to the scientific management position of Meadows as well as what seems to be yet another school of thought, the radical inaction of Aldo Leopold.

I would like to think that what all of us, preservationists and managers alike, are really trying to understand is how to conduct an ecological conversation. We cannot predict or control the exact course of a conversation, nor do we feel any such need—not, at least, if we are looking for a good conversation. Revelations and surprises lend our exchanges much of their savor. We don’t want predictability; we want respect, meaning, and coherence. A satisfying conversation is neither rigidly programmed nor chaotic; somewhere between perfect order and total surprise we look for a creative tension, a progressive and mutual deepening of insight, a sense that we are getting somewhere worthwhile.

The movement is essential. This is why we find no conclusive resting place in Aldo Leopold’s famous dictum: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Integrity and beauty, yes. But in what sense stability? Nature, like us, exists—preserves its integrity—only through continual self-transformation. Mere preservation would freeze all existence in an unnatural stasis, denying the creative destruction, the urge toward self-transcendence, at the world’s heart. Scientific management, on the other hand, reduces evolutionary change to arbitrariness by failing to recognize an Other worthy of respect or capable of integral change.

Though the radical inaction school of thought has become more common in recent decades it is no longer entertained by thoughtful or knowledgeable people. It is a superstitious, quasi-religious view. Perhaps suprisingly, so is the 'scientific management' school of thought. It's not actually scientific since it rests on a metaphysical rather than empirical foundation. It's modern day alchemy searching for the key to prediction and control instead of the philosophik mercury, using computerized incantations and rituals rather than mumbled spells; computational alchemy. Both radical inaction and scientific management are superstitious approaches based on beliefs.

The ecological conversations that Talbott advocates are empirical and experimental. They are to scientific management as early chemistry was to alchemy. Once the superstitious assumptions, cherished illusions and lust for control are abandoned a fruitful exchange becomes possible in which oddments of information accumulate, generating ever more useful provisional hypotheses and additional experiments. Perhaps more importantly, it becomes clearer that mutuality rather than control is a more useful paradigm. The obvious and inevitable result of mutuality is not preservation, it is coevolution. All participants are changed.

Conversations are personal and particular. As Talbott says:

I cannot converse with an abstraction or stereotype—a “democrat” or “republican,” an “industrialist” or an “activist,” or, for that matter, a “preservationist” or a “scientific manager.” I can converse only with a specific individual, who puts his own falsifying twist upon every label I apply. Likewise, I cannot converse with a “wetland” or “threatened species.” I may indeed think about such abstractions, but this thinking is not a conversation, just as my discoursing upon children is not a conversation with my son.

What is not clear is that Talbott or The Nature Institute as a whole, which takes the idea of ecological conversation as a guiding principle, have made much progress or gained much natural insight. They seem to still be clinging to the superstitious radical preservationism of Leopold. Talbott says:

“How does de-horning look from the cow’s perspective? That’s the first thing you have to ask,” he [Craig Holdrege, director of The Nature Institute] replied. When you observe the ruminants, he went on, you see that they all lack upper incisors, and they all possess horns or antlers, a four-chambered stomach, and cloven hooves.

If you look carefully at the animals, you begin to sense the significance of these linked elements even before you fully understand the relation between them. They seem to imply each other. Do you understand the nature of the implication? So here already an obligation presses upon you if you want to de-horn cattle: you must investigate how the horns relate to the entire organism.

Given his own observations of the cow and given his discussions with farmers who have noted the different behavior of cows with and without horns—and given also the lack of any compelling reason for de-horning when the cows are raised in a healthy manner—Holdrege’s own conclusion is: “Unusual situations aside, I don’t see how we can responsibly de-horn cows.”

Strange as this stance may seem outside a respectful, conversational context, it is a conclusion that remains natural to us at some half-submerged level of understanding. What artist would represent cattle without horns? (Picture the famous Wall Street bull, de-horned!) The horns, we dimly sense, “belong” to these animals.

What the ecological conversation requires of us is to raise this dim sense, as best we can, to clear understanding. The question of what belongs to an animal or a plant or a habitat is precisely the question of wholeness and integrity. It is a question foreign and inaccessible to conventional thinking simply because we long ago quit asking it. We had to have quit asking it when we began feeding animal remains to herbivores such as cows, and when we began raising chickens, with their beaks cut off, in telephone book-sized spaces.

Most dramatically, we had to have quit asking it by the time genetic engineers, borrowing from the philosophy of the assembly line, began treating organisms as arbitrary collections of interchangeable mechanisms. There is no conversing with a random assemblage of parts. So it is hardly surprising, even if morally debilitating, that the engineer is not required to live alongside the organisms whose destiny he casually scrambles. He is engaged, not in a conversation, but a mad, free-associating soliloquy.

What is missing here is empirical knowledge of nature. Some cattle don't have horns. They are called "polled" and are preferred by cattlemen and dairymen because polled cattle injure one another less. Holdrege has failed to accurately observe the linked elements of the human-cattle conversational environment. Horns are not useful in this conversation. They don't protect the cattle from predators or assist them in contests for sexual access. They are redundant. Breeding for polled cattle rather than burning or nipping the horn buds of calves is preferable from a number of perspectives. Perhaps if Holdrege and Talbott learn and think more about the subject, converse further with cattle, they too will see this?

Similarly, cattle eat some animal remains when they have an opportunity. They have no trouble digesting meat and recognize it as a food source. They even eat their own dead under some circumstances. But as noted above, they aren't equipped to be carnivores, they don't even have upper incisors. They don't even bite grasses, they wrap their long, rough tongues around a clump and slice/tear it off across their lower incisors. To eat meat it has to come in bite sized chunks such as mice or more frequently as insects. Pastured cattle get protein and fat from such sources. What is unbalanced is feeding large amounts of animal protein to cattle in confinement, but it is no more unbalanced than feeding them large amounts of grain, a food they naturally consume in small quantities on a seasonal basis. Perhaps if Holdrege and Talbott learn and think more about the subject, converse further with cattle, they too will see this?

Similarly, genetic engineers do nothing that is not an ancient part of the conversation between humans and their foods. Domestication of crops and livestock is accomplished by selective breeding, genetic change. There is no difference in principle between controlled breeding and direct genetic manipulation. There is a difference in technique, but even the technique has long been part of the conversation, an activity practiced by common soil bacteria [agrobacterium tumefaciens] which use it to coopt the photosynthetic machinery of plants for their own benefit and sometimes even inject their DNA into people. It isn't the techniques that are questionable it is each particular genetic change. Perhaps if Holdrege and Talbott learn and think more about the subject, converse further with nature, they will remember their own principles that one cannot converse with an abstraction, that each particular genetic change however accomplished is a proper conversational concern.

I think that Holdrege and Talbott are right that everything is permissible so long as we accept responsibility for our actions.

How, then, shall we act? There will be many rules of thumb, useful in different circumstances. But I’m convinced that, under pressure of intense application, they will all converge upon the most frightful, because most exalted, principle of all. It’s a principle voiced, albeit with more than a little trepidation, by my colleague at The Nature Institute, Craig Holdrege:

You can do anything as long as you take responsibility for it.

Frightful? Yes. The first thing to strike most hearers will be that impossibly permissive anything. What environmentalist would dare speak these words at a convention of American industrialists?

But hold on a minute. How could this principle sound so irresponsibly permissive when its whole point is to frame permission in terms of responsibility? Apparently, the idea of responsibility doesn’t carry that much gravity for us—and isn’t this precisely because we are less accustomed to think of nature in the context of responsible conversation than of technological manipulation? Must we yield in this to the mindset of the managers?

If we do take our responsibility seriously, then we have to live with it. It means that a great deal depends on us—which also means that a great power of abuse rests with us. Holdrege’s formulation gives us exactly what any sound principle must give us: the possibility of a catastrophic misreading in either of two opposite directions. We can accept the permission without the responsibility, or we can view the responsibility as denying us the permission. Both misreadings pronounce disaster. The only way to get at any balanced rule of behavior, any principle of organic wholeness, is to enter into conversation with it, preventing its diverse movements from running off in opposite directions, but allowing them to weave their dynamic and tensive unity through our own flexible thinking.

“You can do anything if you take responsibility for it.” An ill-intentioned one-sidedness can certainly make of this a mere permission without responsibility. But, then, too, as we have seen, taking on the burden of responsibility without the permission (“First, do no harm—never, under any circumstance; do not even risk it”) renders us catatonic.

We must change natural systems to exist. All living things do so. In turn, natural systems change us, they created us. Stasis is not just undesirable, it is unnatural, impossible. Control is just as impossible. What we can do is converse, listen as well as speak, and take responsibility for our words and deeds.

» Conservation or Conversation? from Crumb Trail
See this meditation, or perhaps better this rumination, about ecological schools of thought. Though the radical inaction school of thought has become more common in recent decades it is no longer entertained by thoughtful or knowledgeable people. It i......[read more]
Tracked: April 14, 2004 11:36 AM