• Back Issues
• About SGI Quarterly

Contributors

See complete list of contributors

Creative Transformations By Maxine Hong Kingston

When Rivers Run Dry By Fred Pearce

The Creative Struggle By Julie Burstein

SHARE | PRINT | TEXT SIZE: ＋ － | RSS

The Human Condition at the Dawn of the 21st Century

As the century draws to a close, we are facing a whole series of global problems which are harming the biosphere and human life in alarming ways that may soon become irreversible. Concern with the environment is no longer one of many "single issues." It is the context of everything else--of our lives, our businesses, our politics. The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities--social, cultural and physical environments in which we can satisfy our needs and aspirations without diminishing the chances of future generations.

Since its introduction in the early 1980s, the concept of sustainability has often been distorted, co-opted and even trivialized by being used without the ecological context that gives it its proper meaning. So it is worthwhile to reflect for a moment about what "sustainability" really means.

What is sustained in a sustainable community is not economic growth or development, but the entire web of life on which our long-term survival depends. In other words, a sustainable community is designed in such a way that its ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures and technologies do not interfere with nature's inherent ability to sustain life.

The first step in this endeavor, naturally, must be to become "ecologically literate," i.e., to understand the principles of organization that ecosystems have developed to sustain the web of life. In the new century, ecological literacy will be a critical skill for politicians, business leaders and professionals in all spheres. More than that, it will be critical for the survival of humanity as a whole, and therefore will be the most important component of education at all levels--from schools to colleges and universities and the continuing education and training of professionals.

At the Center for Ecoliteracy (www.ecoliteracy.org), we concentrate on schools. Our mission is to foster experience and understanding of the natural world in primary and secondary education. Being ecologically literate, or "ecoliterate," means, in our view, understanding the basic principles of ecology and being able to embody them in the daily life of human communities. In particular, we believe that the principles of ecology should be the guiding principles for creating sustainable learning communities. In other words, ecoliteracy offers an ecological framework for educational reform.

Systems Thinking

When you ask yourself how ecosystems work, and when you study them in detail, you will find out very soon that their basic principles of organization are the principles of organization of all living systems.

So the most appropriate theoretical framework for ecology is the theory of living systems. This theory is only now fully emerging, but it has its roots in several scientific fields that were developed during the first half of the 20th century--organismic biology, Gestalt psychology, ecology, general systems theory and cybernetics.

In all these fields scientists explored living systems, integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts.

Systems theory entails a new way of seeing the world and a new way of thinking, known as "systems thinking," or "systemic thinking." It means thinking in terms of context, relationships, patterns and processes.

Systems thinking was raised to a new level during the past 20 years with the development of a new science of complexity, including a whole new mathematical language and a new set of concepts to describe the complexity of living systems. So systems thinking is now at the very forefront of science. But although this intellectual tradition is almost 100 years old, it has still not taken hold in the mainstream culture of Western, developed countries.

On investigating why people in the West find systems thinking so difficult, I have come to the conclusion that there are two main reasons. One is that living systems are nonlinear--they are networks--while our whole scientific tradition is based on linear thinking: linear chains of cause and effect; when you do something that works, more of the same will work even better; a healthy economy is one that shows strong, indefinite growth; and so on.

Ecological thinking, or systemic thinking, is completely different. Ecosystems, like all living systems, are highly nonlinear. They don't maximize their variables but optimize them. When something is good, then more of the same will not necessarily be better, because things go in cycles, not along straight lines. The point is not to be efficient, but to be sustainable; it's not quantity that counts, but quality.

The second reason why Western culture finds systems thinking difficult is that we live in a materialist culture--both in terms of its values and its fundamental worldview. Most biologists today would tell you that in order to really understand living organisms, you have to understand their molecules--their DNA, their enzymes, their material structures.

However, systems theory tells us that the essence of life does not lie in the molecules, but in the patterns and processes in which these molecules are involved. The basic patterns of life are configurations of relationships between biological processes, and these relationships and processes are nonmaterial. They involve matter, of course, but a relationship is something nonmaterial; a process is something nonmaterial. You can't take a photograph of the web of life, because it is a network of functional, nonmaterial relationships.

This is the crux of the matter. The essence of ecology and of systems thinking is the understanding of nonlinear, nonmaterial entities--something that mainstream Western culture finds it very hard to deal with.

Ecoliteracy and Ecodesign

When systems thinking is applied to the study of the earth household--which is the literal meaning of "ecology"--we discover that the principles of organization of ecosystems are the basic patterns of life. For example, we observe:

--that an ecosystem generates no waste, the waste of one species being the food of another;

--that matter cycles continually through the web of life;

--that the energy driving these ecological cycles flows from the sun;

--that diversity increases resilience;

--that life, from its beginning more than three billion years ago, did not take over the planet by combat, but by cooperation, partnership and networking.

The main task in the new century will be to apply our ecological knowledge and systemic thinking to the fundamental redesign of our technologies and social institutions, so as to bridge the current gap between human design and the ecologically sustainable systems of nature. Fortunately, this is already taking place. In recent years, there has been a burst of optimism about the dramatic rise of ecologically-oriented design practices. The best recent overall documentation of these is the book Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins.

Design, in the broadest sense, consists in shaping flows of energy and materials for human purposes. Ecodesign is a design process in which our human purposes are carefully meshed with the larger patterns and flows of the natural world.

For example, the principle "waste equals food" means that all the products and materials manufactured by industry, as well as the wastes generated in manufacturing processes, must eventually provide nourishment for something new. A sustainable business organization would be embedded in an "ecology of organizations," in which the waste of any one organization would be a resource for another. In such a sustainable industrial system, the total outflow of each organization--its products and wastes--would be perceived and treated as resources cycling through the system. Such "ecological clusters" of industries have recently been initiated in several parts of the world by an organization called the "Zero Emissions Research Initiative" (www.zeri.org).

Two Kinds of Metabolism

Ecodesigners now speak of two kinds of metabolism--a biological metabolism and a "technical metabolism." Things that are part of the biological metabolism--agriculture and food systems, clothing, cosmetics, etc.--should not contain persistent toxic substances. Things that go into the technical metabolism--machines, physical structures, etc.--should be kept well apart from the biological metabolism.

Eventually, all products, materials and wastes will be either biological or "technical" nutrients. Biological nutrients will be designed to return to the ecological cycles--to be literally consumed by microorganisms and other creatures in the soil. Technical nutrients will be designed to go back into "technical cycles." This means that customers will not own these products but will merely buy their services. When they have finished with the products, the manufacturer will take them back, break them down and use their complex materials in new products.

Service and Flow

This shift from a product-oriented economy to a "service and flow" economy is no longer pure theory. For example, one of the largest U.S. carpet manufacturers has begun the transition from selling carpets to leasing carpeting services. The basic idea is that people want to walk on and look at a carpet, not own it.

Today, the obstacles that stand in the way of ecological sustainability are no longer conceptual or technical. They lie in our dominant values, and in particular in the dominant corporate values. Corporate values and choices are determined to a large extent by flows of information, power and wealth in the global financial networks that shape societies today.

During the past three decades, the information technology revolution has given rise to a new type of global capitalism, which is structured around networks of financial flows. Manuel Castells, professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, has extensively analyzed and documented this new economic system in a three-volume work titled The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture.

Because of the ability of financial capital to relentlessly scan the entire planet for investment opportunities, and to move from one option to another in a matter of seconds, profit margins are generally much higher in the global financial markets than in most direct investments. And, therefore, profits from all sources ultimately converge into the meta-network of financial flows.

The movements of this electronically operated global casino do not follow a market logic. The market is twisted, manipulated and transformed by a combination of computer-enacted strategic maneuvers and unexpected turbulences, caused by the complex interactions between capital flows in a highly nonlinear system.

The Network Society

Information technology has played a decisive role in the rise of networking as a new form of organization of human activity, which goes far beyond economics. In our "Network Society," as Castells calls it, the core processes of knowledge generation, economic productivity, political and military power and media communication have been deeply transformed by information technology, and are connected to global networks of wealth and power. The dominant social functions and processes are increasingly organized around networks. Presence or absence in the network is a critical source of power.

The impact of this new Network Society on human well-being has been mostly negative so far. In the global networks of financial flows, money is almost entirely independent of production and services. Thus labor has become disaggregated in its performance, fragmented in its organization and divided in its collective action. Consequently, the rise of global capitalism is intertwined with rising social inequality, polarization and social exclusion. "The struggle between capitalists and working classes," writes Castells, "is subsumed into the more fundamental opposition between the logic of capital flows and the cultural values of human experience."

The resistance to global capitalism is taking the form of a new politics of identity, which, according to Castells, was the distinctive social and political trend of the 1990s. Social action and politics are being constructed around primary identities, "either rooted in history and geography, or newly built in an anxious search for meaning and spirituality." There is a search for new connectedness around shared, reconstructed identity.

The most powerful shifts of identity have been initiated by the feminist and environmental movements, the former involving a redefinition of gender relationships, the latter a redefinition of relationships between humans and nature. Much of the success of the environmental movement comes from the fact that, more than any other social force, it has been able to adapt to the conditions of communication and mobilization in the new technological paradigm. On the one hand, the movement relies on grassroots organizations (i.e., living human networks); on the other hand, it has been at the leading edge of using new communication technologies (i.e., electronic networks) as organizing and mobilizing tools. In this way, the environmental movement has created a unique link between electronic and ecological networks.

Two Scenarios

At the dawn of the 21st century, then, we can observe two developments that will have major impact on the well-being and ways of life of humanity. Both of these developments have to do with networks, and both involve radically new technologies. One of them is the rise of global capitalism and the Network Society; the other is the creation of sustainable communities, involving ecoliteracy and ecodesign practices. Whereas global capitalism is concerned with electronic networks of financial and informational flows, ecoliteracy and ecodesign are concerned with ecological networks of energy and material flows. The goal of the global economy is to maximize the wealth and power of the elites in the Network Society; the goal of ecodesign, to maximize the sustainability of the web of life.

These two scenarios, each involving complex networks and special advanced technologies, are currently on a collision course. The Network Society is destructive of the natural world and of local communities and thus inherently unsustainable. It is based on the central value of capitalism--money-making for the sake of making money--at the exclusion of other values.

However, human values can change; they are not natural laws. The same electronic networks of financial and informational flows could have other values built into them. Because of the great versatility and accuracy of the new information and communication technologies, effective regulation of global capitalism according to humanistic and ecological principles and values is technically feasible today. Our challenge in the 21st century will be to change the value system of the global economy so as to make it compatible with human dignity and ecological sustainability.

This is an enterprise that transcends all our differences of race, culture or class. The Earth is our common home, and creating a sustainable world for our children and for future generations is our common task.

• Site Feedback
• FAQ
• Related Links
• Site Map