1) The shrinking of ecology.
It is time to re-launch ecology. That which seemed to many in the 1960s and 1970s to be a whole new way of seeing the world ends the century as a shrinking and under-funded branch of biology. What has brought about its decline is its failure to include most human behaviour in its subject matter, when it is evident that our agriculture and industry are the dominant factors in the biosphere.
A narrow view of ecology was taken at the very outset, when Ernst Haeckel, 1866, proposed kologie as the name for a new science. He conceived it as part of what he called 'relational physiology', which was one of the four branches into which he divided zoology (sic!), the other three being anatomy, morphogenesis and 'conservational physiology' (vol. I, p. 238). He envisaged human ecology and geography as parts of one of the four corresponding branches of anthropology (vol. II, p. 433).
In the event, the ecology of plants developed well before that of animals, so much so that A G Tansley, 1914, in his presidential address to the British Ecological Society, could say: 'We claim for ecology that it is before all things a way of regarding the plant world, that it is par excellence the study of plants for their own sakes as living beings in their natural surroundings, of their vital relations to these surroundings and to one another, of their social life as well as their individual life, and that is why we put it in the forefront of botanical science.' (p. 195).
Animal ecology eventually caught up, but in the process it divided its potential subject matter with another new science - 'ethology'. This division involved splitting an animal's environment into two parts - its fellow species members and the rest - difficult to do in cases like that of the termite, almost the whole of whose immediate environment consists of termites and their works. By implication, the ecology of our species should leave aside our human environment.
Putting together plant and animal ecology, Eugene Odum, 1953, envisaged something much bigger than Haeckel's subdivision of zoology: a scientific framework for studying the whole of life on earth. However, one species was almost absent: our own. The human ecology envisaged by Haeckel had failed to mature, though the term had been in use since the 1920s for a variety of approaches - seven according to Quinn, 1950. It was - and still is - most commonly seen as a branch of human biology, with only timid references, if any, to culture. This makes a tidy little subject, but it is very incomplete, for it leaves out our most characteristic feature. The efforts of Gregory Bateson, 1972, failed to establish an 'ecology of mind'.
It is clear why ecologists ruled us out of their subject matter: we cannot be subjected to their simplifying procedures. They try to study ecosystems that are as far as possible self-contained, and they divide each one into discrete compartments ('strata'), such as the tree canopy, dead wood and soil. They describe successions of plant communities of increasing total biomass, and they group organisms into pyramids of trophic levels such as herbivores, carnivores and parasites. Energy provides the guiding thread as it passes up the food chain.
Modern transport and the growth of the world economy have destroyed the relative isolation of most ecosystems. The splitting of them into different strata breaks down for people even with quite simple technology, for we can climb, dig and swim, our influence reaching up to the treetops and down into soils and rocks, ponds and rivers. With our farms and plantations and gardens we divert the succession of plant communities. We do not fit into any trophic level either, for we belong to every level of the food chain, being not only plant-eaters, meat-eaters and sometimes eaters of meat-eaters, but also decomposers of a sort. Some day we may even learn to mimic the role of plants, using sunlight to make the molecules of life from carbon dioxide and water. Even the unifying flow of energy through the system becomes difficult to apply in the presence of humans, for we inject into living systems great quantities of energy from a wide variety of sources, using non-renewable fuels to promote human survival and multiplication where they would otherwise be limited or impossible.
As if all these difficulties were not enough, there is the central human peculiarity: that our adaptation is primarily not genetic but cultural. With any other species it is possible to take behaviour as something given and constant (though there is such a thing as animal culture), and to proceed with studying how that species interacts with the rest of the ecosystem. In the human case, a few tens of thousands of years of cultural change produced as much diversity as tens of millions of years of mammal evolution, so that the ecology of the Bushman differed as much from that of the Inuit as, say, that of the spotted hyena from that of the polar bear.
Today, such self-sufficient cultures as survive are rapidly being transformed into outliers of a world-wide cultural network, which changes too fast for description and analysis to keep up. Resources of soil and wild plants and animals are shrinking, human numbers are expanding, and technology is changing, so that it is increasingly difficult to assemble data that all relate to the same point in time. It is even hard to know what data are going to be needed for completeness; for example, which of the thousands of chemicals that we produce will prove to have the unforeseen importance of the CFCs that have damaged the world's ozone layer, and where do the viruses of future epidemics lurk?
The almost universal pressure of people on other living things has long since forced ecologists to give up trying to ignore us. Virtually all ecological studies now have to take account of 'anthropogenic factors'. However, these are still usually regarded as being outside the system. The object of study is still plants and animals, and human actions are treated as external influences comparable with, say, volcanos.
In spite of these difficulties, an ecology movement did develop. Aldous Huxley was perhaps the first to articulate its ideas clearly, in his 1959 lectures at Santa Barbara (Huxley, 1978), and in 1963 he entitled an essay 'The Politics of Ecology' (Huxley, 1970). Rachel Carson, 1962, attracted enormous public interest with her warning of the widespread damage done by over-use of pesticides. People became concerned about the effects of growing numbers of increasingly affluent humans on the rest of the planet. By the end of the 1970s, ecology parties had appeared in most western democracies, and some people were forecasting that all political parties would have to become ecological if they were to survive.
There was a multiplication of 'eco-' words, mostly of questionable usefulness: 'ecocentric', 'ecocide', 'eco-friendly', 'eco-feminism', 'eco-tourism', 'eco-terrorism', 'eco-dynamics', 'eco-ethics', eco-logic, 'eco-mystic', 'eco-psychology', 'eco-philosophy' or 'ecosophy', even 'Eco-Nomics'... Enemies very understandably retaliated with 'eco-nutter' and 'eco-freak'.
Two decades later the word 'ecological' has practically disappeared from politics, replaced in popular discourse by 'green' or 'environmental'. What went wrong? A first approximation to the answer is that leadership of the ecology movement fell naturally to plant and animal ecologists, most of whom saw people as a negative factor, interfering with the functioning of natural ecosystems. Many of them adopted an anti-human political stance, describing human population growth as 'popollution', advocating the introduction of breeding licences to stop people having too many children, and even welcoming famines as 'Nature's way of restoring the balance'. These were not ideas around which to unite voters. At the same time that some professional ecologists were busy giving the ecology parties a bad name, others were barricading themselves into their academic fastnesses, gruffly rejecting any suggestion that their pure science might be relevant to the messy world of politics.
At a deeper level the problem was intellectual. By failing to address human culture and mentality, ecologists had renounced the study of most of the activity of the dominant organism on the planet. The emergence of Homo sapiens is the biggest event in the biosphere for many millions of years, comparable in importance with the development of an oxygen-rich atmosphere, the appearance of multi-cellular organisms and the colonisation of land. The current wave of extinctions can be compared with only two or three previous ones. A science that cannot fully integrate humans is not a true science of the biosphere. No wonder ecology has contracted into a minor academic discipline.
The synthesis of plant and animal ecology is often inappropriately termed 'general ecology'; it will be referred to below as 'natural ecology', without any intention to imply that humans are not part of 'Nature'. The truly general system yet to be developed, in which humans will be completely integrated, will here be called 'universal ecology'.
2) The environmentalist takeover.
Frustration with the narrowness of academic ecology helped to promote the popularity of concern with 'the environment'. Since the 1960s the words 'environmentalism', 'environmentalist' and 'environmental' have increasingly replaced 'ecology', 'ecologist' and 'ecological' in popular usage. Given that 'environment' is just one concept in ecology, this is an extraordinary shift. It is as if people tried to talk about marriage by referring only to husbands.
The term usually translated as 'environment' in Haeckel's definition of ecology, was 'die umgebende Aussenwelt (the surrounding outside world)', by which he conceived a set of conditions, both organic and inorganic, existing independently of the organism. Jakob von Uexkll, 1909, introduced the word Umwelt to express the fact that each animal species lives in its 'own world' (not the literal meaning of Umwelt, but never mind), defined by those factors that its nervous and motor systems enable it to interact with. The concept can be extended to plants and micro-organisms. Thus, for example, a cow, an owl and an earthworm find totally different own-worlds in the same field, as do an oak, a moss and an amoeba. Each in this sense can be said to 'internalise' a different environment and to be largely blind to that of the others, though they are all inter-linked.
Human culture has enabled us to create a huge variety of social and individual own-worlds, to the extent that no two people interact with exactly the same range of factors. We have also introduced into the own-worlds of other organisms all sorts of factors with which they are not adapted to cope, for example antibiotics, oestrogen-like chemicals, and new radio-active materials.
No sharp frontier can be drawn between an organism and its environment or own-world. It is customary to take the surface of an organism as its boundary, but for most multicellular organisms this is largely internal: the lining of guts and breathing organs is several magnitudes greater in extent than the external skin or cuticle of an animal, and the same is true of the intercellular spaces on to which plant stomata open. On land, the only major exchange surfaces that are external are root hairs, and they are often encased in or replaced by mycorrhizae. The content of the gut is not strictly part either of 'the organism' or of 'its environment', but rather is a transition between them, and it is itself the environment of the gut microflora.
Outside of organisms, in the conventional sense of 'outside', there are equally important transitions in the form of solids, liquids and gases that they have produced or modified. A spider's web or a beaver's dam is part of the unit that survives as well as being part of the world in which the animal survives. On a larger scale, Earth's atmosphere, water and soil owe their composition to the activity of living things, and even the climates and rocks would not be what they are if life had not constantly released carbon dioxide and oxygen. The biosphere is an intimate mixture of the living and the non-living, and there is no sharp boundary between those physical systems that are modified by life and those that would be the same on a dead Earth - least of all for our species, with the enormous ramifications of its products, by-products and waste products.
Universities are supposed to be the guardians of intellectual rigour, but the vagueness of things 'environmental' has not deterred them from following fashion. For example, in the United Kingdom in 1999, 115 university-level institutions offer some 417 honours degree courses with 'environment(al)' in the title, and these can also be taken as part of literally thousands of combined degrees. There is even 'environmental biology', which is in effect another name for ecology. Only 45 institutions offer honours courses in ecology, and only 3 of these allow it to be taken as part of a variety of combined degrees. Three institutions offer degrees in human ecology.
People may ask: does it matter whether we call things 'ecological' or 'environmental' as long as we pay attention to them? Do not the two words mean virtually the same thing? Alas, they do not. Ecology is the study of multiple relationships. Our environment is the sum total of things to which we can relate. One word suggests a reality of which we are part and of which the essence is our taking part; the other a reality that is, at least potentially, independent of our existence.
Once a class of problems has been labelled 'environmental', their solution becomes a specialist matter, just one of the various types of problem competing for attention and resources. Most countries now have a 'Ministry of the Environment', with a small share of the budget to deal with a rag-bag of matters that do not fit easily into the brief of other ministries. This gives the impression that the problems are being dealt with on our behalf, and that there are not too many of them.
If it became generally accepted that our ecological relationships have gone wrong, it would be evident that this affects every aspect of life, that it concerns everyone and that changes are needed in the life of each of us. Appropriate responses would be required from all branches of government, and if any agency were to be created to coordinate them it would have to be above all ministries - at prime ministerial level.
One would not have expected a four-syllabled technical term like 'environment' to become popular. What seems to have happened is that 'the Environment' (with at least a notional capital E) has largely replaced 'Nature' as that with which westerners contrast humanity. For the general public, it is essentially the countryside - 'the Great Big Green Thing Out There' - as witness the adoption of 'green' as a virtual synonym of 'environmental'. 'Humans versus the Environment' has taken over from 'Man against Nature', itself the successor of 'Spirit over Flesh'. In this history there has been a reversal of signs, from the 'good' Spirit and the 'bad' Flesh, through the ambivalent Man and Nature to 'bad' Humans and the 'good' Environment, but essentially it is the same old battle.
This opposition between humans and everything else has its roots deep in western cultural history. Plato taught, 24 centuries ago, that humans alone have an immortal psyche, the seat of reason, which belongs to an eternal world of perfect forms or ideas. This he contrasted with the mortal parts of psyche concerned with emotion and animal drives. His pupil Aristotle endorsed the uniqueness of the human rational soul, though he stressed the embodiment of psyche and the presence of simpler forms throughout the living world.
Plato's doctrine eventually became the popular dualism of Christianity, according to which the immortal human soul is exiled or imprisoned in the fleshly body and will return to a heavenly union with the divine - or to separation from it in Hell. It is true that the creeds say a resurrected body is required for the afterlife, but something without needs, desires, ageing or suffering can hardly be called a body. It was only when Aristotle was rediscovered in Western Europe and made acceptable to Christians by Aquinas (1224-74), that the Renaissance became possible, with its exuberant development of physical interests and achievements.
In popular dualism, the spirit world can interfere in the material world, and many physical events are seen as acts of God or the work of the Devil, often mediated by angels or demons. The special contribution of Ren Descartes (1596-1650) was not that he invented the idea of two kinds of reality, but that he separated them rigorously, accepting only material causes for material events and mental causes for mental events, the two worlds meeting only in humans.
Knowledge came to be divided along Cartesian lines into the sciences, which dealt with the physical world, and the arts or humanities, which were concerned with the psychic or spiritual. The former were objective, the latter subjective. Knowledge about inanimate objects all fell on one side of the divide, and the West has become very good at it; but the study of humans was split apart, with knowledge about our bodies on one side of the divide and knowledge of our minds on the other, which gravely damaged our ability to understand either (cf. Damasio, 1994).
Eventually, to bridge the gap, there was created a third category: the social sciences, which natural scientists regard as being little more objective than the humanities, and which arts people regard as little less remote from subjective experience than the hard sciences. Knowledge about humans is now split between three domains, with, for example, medicine and human biology in one, sociology, psychology and economics in the second, and the study of culture, history and religion in the third. This threefold division will here be called 'neo-Cartesian'.
More than anyone else, Descartes may be said to have brought about the demise of 'Renaissance man', who combined arts and sciences, ushering in the age of the specialist. There have been many gains, but at great cost. One of the most serious consequences has been the divorce of philosophy from science, which for two thousand years had been known as 'natural philosophy'. Since the Cartesian revolution, neither scientists nor philosophers have been expected to know anything of each other's work. For the reputation of Descartes, who was both scientist and philosopher, this had the happy effect that for a long time few people felt qualified to question his wisdom. New sciences could be slotted into his framework without any thought about the nature of their knowledge or about their means of reaching it.
The popular concept of knowledge and the structure of our institutions of teaching and research have been divided along these lines for more than three hundred years. Universities and research funds classify faculties and institutes into the three neo-Cartesian categories and treat them quite differently. Most universities do not allow students - still less teachers and researchers - to combine subjects across the frontiers. Within each category, knowledge has been further fragmented into ever more specializations, with boundaries that are only a little less rigid.
Attempts have been made to overcome the division of knowledge by assimilating one kind to the other. Materialists claim that mind can be explained in terms of the workings of neurons and molecules, and that the social sciences and the humanities should be absorbed into the physical sciences. Some even suggest - though they do not behave as if they believe it - that consciousness is an illusion. Defenders of the autonomy of mind go to the opposite extreme, claiming that science is just a 'social construct', though they seem happy to enjoy its benefits. Meanwhile, for want of rigorous ways to view the relations of mental and physical, the general public seems increasingly tempted to blur the boundaries by reverting to popular dualism, whether in the religious form of fundamentalism or in the secular form of belief in ghosts, telepathy, clairvoyance, astrology and so on. This is a hostile intellectual environment for a universal ecology.
3) Philosophical foundations for a universal ecology
The assumption that underlies most aspects of western culture in all its branches, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim or secular, is that the world consists of discrete entities (from late Latin ens, 'being'). These may be simple or composite and short- or long-lived and they may or may not interact. Examples are atoms and molecules, organisms and species, individuals and nations, souls and spirits, self and environment.
Belief in entities seems like common sense in any culture since it reflects the universal nature of human language, in which there are 'things' (substantives) that have 'qualities' (adjectives) and 'enter into processes' (verbs). This in turn reflects the nature of perception, which selects out that with which we can interact from that with which we cannot, and which sees that which changes rapidly as the figure standing out against the ground of that which changes more slowly. The naive view is that language represents the world and that the structure of the world is therefore like the structure of language.
Western science has been a long and largely successful endeavour to analyze complex objects and processes into simple constituents and to discover the enduring properties of these and the way they interact. It worked remarkably well for a long time, but difficulties arose when the supposed entities were obviously without clear boundaries, for example anticyclones or schools of fish or ecosystems.
Western religion has traditionally made the same fundamental assumption: there are discrete entities such as souls, angels and devils. Indeed, there are religions. There is one soul per person, and a creature either is human and has a soul or it is not and does not. In the popular view, a soul is bound up with an identity, a personality, a bundle of memories, and it will carry these into eternal life.
An entity-based view of reality is concerned with delimitation, definition, classification, isolation and analysis (cf. Lakoff, 1987). Attention is focussed on entities rather that on the larger wholes to which they belong. Knowledge is sought in the form of essences, norms, constants and laws of combination. Contradiction is seen as conflict between truth and untruth. This approach has been enormously successful in the management of non-living things, much less so in the organization of human society. Concern centers on the individual, on the nuclear family, on the firm, on the social class and on the nation, at the expense of wider solidarity with humanity and with life on earth.
There is an alternative view: reality is a single vast flow in which eddies and cascades of eddies form and re-form, never quite the same, yet some lasting so long as to seem permanent. They have no existence separate from the overall flux, which gives birth to them and which swallows them up, and they acquire their character from their interactions. Effects feed back into their own causes, and causation loops and spirals and tangles. The whole explains the parts as much as the parts explain the whole.
This view may be said to be counter-intuitive in that it does not arise naturally from the structure of language or perception, and it has been arrived at and maintained relatively rarely in the history of ideas. It was anticipated two and a half thousand years ago by the Greek philosopher Heracleitus, but it has only lately entered the mainstream of western culture. It has spread out from two focal areas at opposite ends of the sciences: from physics and from ecology, aided by developments in mathematics. Modern physics has produced some shockingly counter-intuitive ideas. Fundamental 'particles' are not precisely located but are 'smeared' through space; 'particles' that have interacted continue to be 'entangled', however far apart they are; whole atoms have wave functions which are not just the sum of those of the constituent particles; and the properties of the very small depend on those of the whole universe, and vice versa. It is even suggested by some that the wave-functions of 'particles' collapse only when they are observed by consciousness.
Ecology started out with some similarly radical ideas. The nature of an organism is not fixed but depends on its interaction with its environment; an assemblage of organisms develops a behaviour of its own, which is not simply the sum of the individual behaviours; flows of matter, energy and information join communities of living things together into a dynamic web; life and the inorganic systems of the biosphere influence each other and evolve together.
The affinity between these two revolutions has led some physicists to make creative contributions to ecological thought. Feinberg and Shapiro, 1980, proposed that life be defined as 'the activity of a biosphere', and they envisaged all sorts of possible biospheres without carbon or water. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1978, proposed that life is the product of the whole Universe. As for this world, one of the best ecological accounts was written by a physicist, Fritjof Capra, 1982.
There is no reason why a flow-based view should not be adopted by a society. At the core of Buddhism is the doctrine of interdependent origination (pratitya samutpada): that each thing exists only in relation to everything else, which is virtually the same as the founding principle of ecology. This is bound up with the anatma doctrine: that there is no permanent, independent atman - 'self' or 'soul'. Many aspects of Buddhist cultures are to be understood in these terms, including diet and agriculture.
The Chinese classic Tao Te Ching is the purest expression of the view that common sense entities have no independent reality. By the powerful use of a few thousand words, this remarkable book undermines the power of words and points to a way that 'one who speaks does not know, one who knows does not speak'. Its starting point is that 'naming is the mother of the myriad things', which in the present context might be translated as 'using nouns is the origin of innumerable entities'. The wise person seeks to live in accordance with the nature (zi-ran) of things and to avoid forcing them (wu-wei). Although not the dominant element in Chinese culture, Taoism contributed to the development of various arts and techniques, most notably the world's oldest tradition of landscape painting.
It looked for a while as though a new understanding of reality would spread from physics and ecology to all areas of western culture; however, when it came to including our own species in ecology, radical thinking failed, and humans and 'the Environment' reverted to being separate. The trouble was that the very basis for the separation of sciences and arts was being called into question. Our relations with our environments of soil, water, plants and animals can be seen as part of human biology, but our relations with our social environment of houses, neighbourhoods, markets, transport systems and so on looks like the subject matter of a social science. As for relations with what may be called our cultural environment of knowledge and belief, fashion and tradition, that looks like an arts subject. Faced with the prospect of ceasing to be a 'proper science', ecology shrank back into an increasingly mechanistic biology.
It is no solution to cordon off an area and call it 'human ecology', for the same neo-Cartesian frontiers will prevent that from being unified either within itself or with the rest of ecology. Nor is it enough to say that ecologists can study the physical interaction between people and other species, while sociologists and economists look at socio-economic aspects, and psychologists and historians of ideas search for people's motivation. If the findings of these specialists are to be put together coherently, a framework will be needed. It will have to be one in which mind and matter can both be accommodated. The concept of pattern is potentially the basis for such a unification.
'Matter' is an ancient name for that which can be made into visible or tangible patterns, but it has itself proved to owe its character to pattern; for example, diamond and graphite differ only in the arrangement of their atoms. At a still deeper level, patterns of energy and of matter interweave, and the two are interconvertible. When pursued down to levels of sufficient smallness, the distinction between pattern and thing patterned breaks down; the entities in the strange world of quantum physics can behave either like particles or like waves, and they appear to be best described as patterns of excitation in 'fields'. Pattern seems to be more fundamental than matter. (Or are they two aspects of but one 'parent'? After all, the words derive from Latin pater and mater - 'father' and 'mother'.)
'Mind' is an ancient word for all the patterns of which we can become conscious, in the form that consciousness gives them - Aristotle's 'form of forms'. The English word is related to 'meaning' and is cognate with Latin mens and Sanskrit manas, suggesting an origin at least six thousand years old. Its history has intertwined with that of other words such as 'soul' and 'spirit', whose Latin, Greek and Hebrew homologues derived from roots meaning 'breath' or 'breeze' and referred to that which gives life to breathing things. The restriction of mind or soul to humans is a later development; our word 'animal' is Latin, meaning a thing possessed of anima, 'soul'.
In Christian popular dualism, and in its tidied-up Cartesian version, English-speakers use the word 'mind' in secular contexts and 'soul' in religious ones, though both are equally vague. French-speakers can use esprit for both. A mind/soul is conceived as a sort of 'thing' that a person 'has', and as, at any rate in principle, detachable from the body; it is a bit like a pocket handkerchief - very private and with nasty bits. People take seriously the prospect of one day being able to 'download' the contents of their minds into a computer. When the members of the Heaven's Gate cult killed themselves, it was in the belief that their minds or souls would be 'beamed up' into the space-ship that they believed to be following Comet Hale-Bopp.
For the purpose of exact thinking it might be better to avoid the words 'mind' and 'soul' altogether. The true bipolarity of the world is between consciousness and the patterns of which it is conscious. Consciousness is not a 'thing', with characteristics that can be examined, yet it is that by which all things are known. Nor is it 'something' that an organism either 'has' or does not 'have'. There are degrees of consciousness, from the edge of sleep to the alertness of crisis, from infancy or senility to healthy maturity, and - why not - from animals whose nervous systems can present only simple alternatives, to our own big-brained species (cf. Dawkins, 1993, and Walker, 1983).
Since Freud, there has been a widespread belief in 'the Unconscious' - a part of mind of which we are not conscious - but the whole point of Freudian analysis is to bring the contents of this 'Unconscious' into consciousness, which makes them no different in principle from any of the other things of which we are not currently conscious. As for recovered memory, perhaps it takes a therapist to persuade people that 'remembering' something they never knew is the same as remembering something they had forgotten (see Pendergrast, 1995). It will be assumed here that what we cannot become conscious of is not part of mind.
Consciousness will here be accepted simply as a reality known to all, in no need of explanation. In a sense it is the very source of reality, since without it no reality can be known. However, it is not a separate or separable realm but an integral part of the life of bodies with nervous systems of a certain complexity. The Indian concept of advaita - non-duality - expresses very well the relationship; consciousness and the patterns of matter and energy in bodies and nervous systems are not one and the same, but neither are they separable.
The patterns perceived by consciousness are not simple copies of patterns of events in the world or in the nervous system. Indeed tastes and smells do not seem like patterns at all; the flavour of a banana is neither like the pattern of firings in the neurons of tongue and nose, nor like the pattern of atoms in the molecules contained in the banana. For an organism to interact with its environment, there is no need for such complexities; nervous systems have evolved to present simple sensations to consciousness. However, even apparently patternless sensations come together with other sensations to form patterns - for example, the smell, taste, shape and colour of banana, perceived together.
The concept that unifies mind and matter, then, is form or pattern. The latter word has been preferred here, because 'form' tends to be thought of as a static pattern in space, and 'pattern' is more easily understood as extending also in time. Indeed, every static form is the product of the pattern of events by which it is produced. All knowledge is consciousness of patterns, and there is no fundamental division between consciousness of simple, concrete patterns, such as the motion of pendulums, and consciousness of complex abstract patterns, such as the movements of symphonies. The mathematics of complexity offers a basis on which to unify our understanding of all pattern (cf Kauffman, 1993).
Seeing the world in terms of pattern is different from seeing it in terms of the enduring entities of western tradition. Patterns ebb and flow, spread and merge, part and fade away. Figure can become ground and ground become figure. Repeating motifs can all be subtly different and yet be reckoned as repetitions. The boundaries of motifs can be variously drawn or can shift backwards and forwards. With a change of scale, what seemed to be a motif becomes a pattern of yet smaller motifs, or what seemed to be a pattern becomes a motif in a larger pattern. This can be illustrated in many ways: by examining a tree from different distances, by studying certain designs by M C Escher, by listening to the later work of Jean Sibelius, by playing with the Mandelbrot set, or simply by lying down and watching white clouds drifting in a blue sky. A number of recent books have proposed impressive schemes for unifying what is known of brain and mind: see particularly Clark, 1997, Damasio, 1994, Edelman, 1994, and Varela et al., 1991.
It is easy enough to produce a series of paired examples to show the seamless transition from the patterns of the non-human to those of human culture: guarding of aphids by ants and of cattle by people; dams constructed by beavers and by people; tools made by chimpanzees and by people; docile wolves living as camp-followers and people hunting with dogs... Some philosophers will say - though as the series goes on it gets harder and harder to do so - that in each case the second example shows intentionality; humans know what they are aiming to do and animals do not. However, for the ecological consequences, all that matters is that behaviours that increase survival are promoted, whether the patterns between which selection is made are genotypes or imagined futures.
An ecology that includes conscious humans will not be different in kind from one that includes conscious chimpanzees or wolves or elephants. The position taken here is that human mind differs from animal mind only in three ways: in the number and variety of patterns that human consciousness can view (including imagined futures), in the ability to communicate them, and in the capacity for abstracting patterns of patterns and patterns of patterns of patterns. These are all matters of degree, but they have created the increasingly vast, complex, interconnected and fast-changing own-worlds of human cultures.
4) Principles of a universal ecology.
The foundation of natural ecology is the notion of adaptation between, on the one hand, the patterns of development and behaviour of organisms and, on the other, the patterns of events in their living and non-living environments. Adaptation is also the foundation of evolution by natural selection, and 'coevolution' is a reasonable alternative term for universal ecology. All that is needed is to add the adaptation between the patterns perceived by consciousness and their physical, biological and cultural environments. This has already been achieved to some extent in theories of gene-culture coevolution and evolutionary psychology, (cf Durham, 1991, Barkow et al., 1992)
In going from the organisms of natural ecology to the ideas or mental patterns that enter into a universal ecology, there is no sudden leap. Many ideas belong in a biological 'habitat'; they are part of patterns of human behaviour that interact with patterns of plant growth and animal behaviour. Obvious examples are the thoughts of farmers, hunters or campers about their activities, but it should also be obvious that everybody's ideas about food fall into this category. However lofty our ideals, it is primarily by the use of our teeth and stomachs and those of our domestic animals that we shape the planet.
There is no difference in kind between this fit of ideas in their biological 'habitat' and their relationship with what has been made by humans. Examples include ideas about clothing, housing, transport, manufacturing and most activities in an urban setting. Through the economic system, these are translated into demands for resources that either come from the biosphere or impinge on it, and into an output of waste products that are returned to planet-wide systems. Again, gene-culture coevolution provides examples.
These two categories contain a large part of what goes on 'in the mind', but they are dwarfed by the volume of thoughts about relations between people. These too have a physical 'habitat' in the patterns of activity that bring people into contact with each other - the human equivalent of the subject matter of ethology. They too have economic consequences that feed through into the rest of the biosphere. In the form of ideas about relations between the sexes, they also have a direct impact on birth rates and population growth rates.Ideas about relations between adults and children affect the fidelity with which a culture is transmitted between generations.
The kinds of ideas so far mentioned are abstractions from experience of patterns in the world. There remains the category of abstractions from abstractions. These are the ones that seem to be evoked by the term coined by Sir Geoffrey Vickers, 1968: 'ecology of ideas'. The concept of Cartesianism, for example, can exist only in an 'ecosystem of ideas' that includes concepts such as matter, mind, reality, logic and so on. The remarkable thing is that some of the highest-order abstractions are the patterns with the greatest power to influence practical action. They provide the criteria according to which a wide range of lower-order patterns are accepted or rejected.
One of the fundamental ideas in ecology is that no one species controls an ecosystem; causation is cyclical. For example, carnivores regulate the numbers of herbivores, which determine the numbers of carnivores..., and some little microbe may change the balance by devastating the population of either. Anyone who supposes that humans can control the biosphere or manage 'the Environment' has failed to learn this lesson, but it should be applied also to the ecology of ideas: no idea can securely dominate the planet.
Although no species controls an ecosystem, a few may have a preponderant influence, by virtue of their combined biomass, individual longevity, range of activity or some other factor. A population of trees, for example, creates a forest soil, moderates the local climate and provides the food and the habitat for a great range of creatures. Deforestation radically changes the whole community. One of the tasks for a universal ecology is to identify sets of ideas or behaviours that have an equivalent influence. To do so they need to be sufficiently faithfully transmitted to continue to affect a wide area over a long time period.
A preponderant set of ideas and behaviours seems to require a number of essential components, including the idea that its components belong together, the idea of its own importance and ideas of the rewards for maintaining it and the punishment for deserting it. There is also what may be called a 'demography' of ideas, which includes both the ability to promote the birth and delay the death of adherents, the ability to be transmitted faithfully between generations and the ability to spread to new adherents and to hold on to them. Any long-lasting set of ideas, like any enduring life form, must combine enough flexibility to adapt to changing conditions with enough constancy to preserve existing adaptations (cf. Stewart, in Jones and Reynolds, 1995).
A key feature of successful ideologies is the capacity to give meaning to existence, relating the acts and artifacts in individual lives to the overall pattern of the world. The human desire for meaning can be even stronger than the desire to live. Throughout history there have been examples of martyrdom, in which healthy people in the prime of life have died willingly, even joyfully, making their death the final symbolic act. Conversely, those who fail to fit their life to a larger pattern may live miserably or even kill themselves, seeing their existence as 'meaningless'. A meaningful death can thus be preferred to a meaningless life.
It is this combination of qualities, rather than any concern with a 'supreme being', possession of a priesthood or whatever, that characterizes what European languages call a 'religion'. There is however one of the traditional criteria that applies: possession of a sacred text, which helps to ensure constancy from generation to generation. The Jewish Torah and the Muslim Koran are good examples, containing explicit references to most of the main features of their respective religions (Stewart, 1994). The Christian Bible is a rather poor example, given the doctrine that the Old Testament laws have been superseded, and given the primacy of the Church as the source of authority.
There should be no doubting the ecological significance of religions (Callicott, 1994). Most of them pay considerable attention to sexual behaviour and family responsibility, with consequences for population growth (Reynolds and Tanner, 1995). There has been a process of natural selection, according to which the most numerous societies are those with the most strongly pro-natalist religions, while anti-natalist and weakly pro-natalist religions such as those of the Jains and the Parsees have condemned their followings to dwindle.
Most religions concern themselves also with what their followers eat and how their food is produced, and there may also be animal sacrifice. Christianity is an exception in this respect, having deliberately rejected the food laws of Judaism. Religions may also lay down laws on land ownership and inheritance. All of this influences land use and hence the availability of rural resources for other species and ecosystems
A third kind of interaction between religion and the rest of the biosphere comes from ideas about relations between humans and other living things, ranging from the extreme human-centredness of Christianity to the universal non-violence of Jainism. Ideas about the 'souls' of animals and in some cases plants have practical importance for the way they are treated. Many religions attach particular value to particular species, for example the sacred cows of Hinduism and the sacrificial rams of Islam.
Secular ideologies have generally failed to achieve enduring preponderance, partly because they lack any core of ideas of supposedly permanent importance for individuals, partly because they do not propose sufficient rewards or punishments for accepting or rejecting them, partly because they do not make life meaningful. It will be interesting to see how long the current phase of western culture will last. By undervaluing children, who are neither producers nor significant consumers, and by giving production priority over parenthood, it risks bringing about a demographic collapse as dangerously rapid as the previous - and in many places current - expansion.
5) Propagating a universal ecology.
sacred cows of Hinduism and the sacrificial rams of Islam.
Other chapters in this book describe what must be called the present ecological crisis. Action is urgently needed, but human actions are shaped by beliefs and feelings. It has been argued above that the neo-Cartesian world view promotes false beliefs and undervalues feelings, with grave ecological consequences, and that it should be replaced by a universal ecology.
The demise of Descartes' ideas has been announced many times (see for example Lovejoy, 1930, and more recently Capra, 1982), yet they remain preponderant, for the very reason that makes them wrong: mental and physical cannot be separated, and Cartesianism is not just an abstract philosophy but also a way of living and thinking, followed by hundreds of millions of people and embodied in all sorts of artifacts and structures. Universal ecology therefore faces a very ecological problem: how to take over the territory of a highly successful rival.
Newly introduced organisms spread opportunistically, first lodging themselves wherever a patch of suitable habitat appears, then moving outwards to oust rival species. So with ideas, they must first establish themselves in the way of life of individuals and small groups, then expand to those around them. Young people, having the least vested interest in existing ideas, are the most likely to adopt new ones, so parents and teachers - and school-friends - are in a privileged position.
In the Cartesian system of education, knowledge is broken up into subjects taught by specialists, and there is no explicit over-arching framework that includes all branches of knowledge; at the most there is mathematics, which serves all the sciences. The usual way to introduce a new set of ideas is to insert a new subject into the curriculum. If universal ecology is a framework for knowledge rather than a subject, then it will not fit into this scheme at all. Rather than be taught explicitly, it will need to be conveyed through the teaching of whatever is taught.
Young children certainly do not divide their knowledge of the world into compartments. The separation of subjects begins in primary school, but it is very incomplete, if only because one or two teachers cover them all. The separation of mental and physical learning too is only partial. An ecologically minded teacher should have no difficulty in helping pupils to see that each of them is part of everything that happens around them.
It is in secondary schools and institutions of higher education that the fragmentation of knowledge is completed. To set them free from the legacy of Descartes, we should perhaps return to something like the system that preceded him. The medieval university had a 'foundation course' for all students. It was referred to indiscriminately as 'the seven arts' or 'the seven sciences', and consisted of the Trivium - grammar, rhetoric and logic - and the Quadrivium - arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. This was a wonderfully balanced combination of 'arts' and 'sciences', of verbal and physical skills, and of human and universal.
A modern equivalent of the Trivium and Quadrivium could provide the integrating element missing from subject-based teaching, in other words it should be ecological in the broadest sense. Many schools and some universities already have a space in their timetable for some form of 'general studies'. However, it should be a matter not of teaching vague generalities, but of taking specific topics, looking at them from widely different points of view, and relating them to action that students can take in their everyday lives.
In the longer term, the spread of a universal ecology, if it comes about, will put an end to the division of knowledge into subjects. People will instead start from centres of interest and will seek out all the relevant knowledge in widening and overlapping circles. Natural ecology will become the ecological approach to living things and to the biosphere.
An essential part of knowledge is research - the quest for new knowledge. In the neo-Cartesian scheme, scientific and technological research is virtually sacred, with its promise of ever greater productivity, efficiency and prosperity. Lured by such prospects, governments and firms spend huge sums of taxpayers' and shareholders' money on research and development. In the competition between nation-states, the proportion of national income spent in this way is a key statistic.
Judged by comparison with this norm of 'real' research, much of what goes on in the arts and social sciences is regarded as hardly research at all. The work of the solitary scholar in the library, or of the research assistant administering questionnaires, is seen as personal, subjective and incapable of being verified. It never seems to reach any final answers, and there is always room for new studies of old topics. Fortunately for its survival, it is not usually very expensive, though if it cost more it would no doubt be taken more seriously.
The modern notion that proper research is expensive work for experts has moved the word a long way from its original meaning. It comes via old French from the Low Latin recircare 'to go round and round [looking for something]', from circa 'around'. It should simply mean to search persistently and intently, and it should not be limited to meaning teams using costly equipment to solve abstruse problems.
One of the effects of the cult of expensive science has been to destroy people's confidence in personal research. If reliable knowledge has to be handed down by experts, the ordinary person becomes a passive receiver with no control over the advancement of knowledge. If a large part of the fruits of costly research is the confidential property of the businesses or military establishments that financed it, the alienation of the public is made still worse.
Whatever the apparatus and the expense, the ultimate judge in all research is always the person. Whether the topic is the interaction of sub-atomic particles or the effect of a food on one's feelings of well-being, patterns of events have to be detected by the human nervous system so that a judgement can be made as to whether a belief 'feels' right or wrong. The word 'expert' means simply 'experienced', and everyone can hope to become expert in living his or her own life and making judgements about new knowledge relevant to it. It is not even a matter of high intelligence; every bird or mammal that survives is expert in how to live.
The kind of knowledge that has come to be known as scientific differs not in dispensing with feeling but in demanding ruthless honesty in discriminating between those feelings of rightness that are based on the evidence and those that come from a comfortable fit with other beliefs, from social approval and so on. If the result feels right in the first sense it must be defended even though it contradicts some cherished theory, upsets the director of the laboratory, or clashes with the editorial policy of a learned journal. Some 'science' in fact falls short of this ideal, and much of what is not counted as science lives up to it.
If personal research is to produce valid results, it needs the honesty of science. In the example of choosing healthy food, it is important to discount feeling that it is right because an advertisement says so, or because it is the fashion among your friends, or because you saw an article in the paper saying that scientific research has proved that it is good; ultimately it must feel right to you. It is equally important to resist the temptation to pick the food that others say is wrong just to prove that you are independent. The ability to feel your own feelings confidently is not something trivial that can be taken for granted; on the contrary, it is a skill that needs to be patiently developed and sturdily defended.
Universal ecology has been presented here as a framework for knowledge. Its essential ideas are integration, context and relevance. Whatever expensive knowledge has to be integrated is already being generated by the various disciplines. Research in universal ecology is essentially personal: the individual's attempt to integrate all the knowledge available. This does not mean that it has to be private. As in the natural sciences, one of the safeguards against error and bias is readiness to open results to public inspection and criticism. Indeed, given that no one person can possess more than a fraction of all the knowledge that is to be integrated, collaboration is of the greatest value, provided that at the end each person remains loyal to his or her own judgement.
'Integration' is from Latin integer, whole, from the same root as 'intact' - untouched, unspoilt. Another derivative, 'integrity', has come to have the moral sense of being whole, pure or honest (in French entier, entire, from Latin integer). The English 'whole', cognate with Greek holos, from which 'holistic', is at the root of the word 'health'. It is appropriate that the integration of knowledge should awaken all these echoes. Its effect should be to enable the knower to relate to life as a whole, to achieve health and integrity, and to give meaning to actions.
It is common experience that wholeness is very difficult to achieve. We muddle through from one thing to another, not so much borne along on a stream of consciousness as groping our way between the irregular flashes of a strobe of consciousness. We waste thought on trivia and casually allow important decisions to take themselves. We are overwhelmed by present circumstances and ignore what is out of sight. Most comically, we thread together scattered beads of memory to make a life story that we fancy holds together. Yet on this precious self, whose unity is so doubtful, we lavish extraordinary generosity, thinking it worthy of far more than its share of the world's riches.
Collectively we muddle along in the same way, creating group selves out of the accidents of kinship, geography and history, persuading ourselves that there is something fundamental and enduring about being British or French, Serb or Croat, 'white' or 'black', helping these group selves to pursue their interests at the expense of the interests of the human and non-human world that surrounds them. At a higher level of abstraction, we fancy that our species has unique claims on the rest of the biosphere, that human life alone is sacred, and that all manner of destruction is justified in the interests of humanity.
If we are to understand our place in the whole, there has to be a fiercely honest critique of the selves that create frontiers across the unity of the world. Where does my self end and the rest of the world begin? What does my self really need from the world? What does the world need from me? Is there any difference in kind between my being and the being of the world? Does the self have any permanent and separable existence at all? These questions are posed not for abstract philosophical speculation, but for careful self-observation in the business of everyday living.
Out of personal research into such questions, we may hope to achieve a heightened consciousness, becoming aware of more of the processes in which we are involved, and of our interactions with the human and non-human world, moving towards greater wholeness in our personal lives. We may hope to adapt and re-adapt ourselves, balancing flexibility and constancy, realizing in personal evolution our membership of the living planet, finding and creating a wealth of pattern, and preparing eventually to let go of self in death. If a universal ecology provides people with a framework in which to fulfil themselves in such ways, it can indeed be said to open the way to a new Renaissance.
Acknowledgements. I am grateful to Christopher Stewart and Ulrich Loening for many helpful comments, but they must not be held responsible for any shortcomings.
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