Robert E. Ulanowicz was appointed professor emeritus after thirty-eight years with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, Maryland. He is author of Growth and Development: Ecosystems Phenomenology and Ecology, the Ascendant Perspective. Ulanowicz was awarded the 2007 Ilya Prigogine Medal from the Wessex Institute and the University of Siena for outstanding research in the field of ecological systems.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

"If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are andwhat other people are has got to be restructured.... If we continueto operate on the premises that were fashionable in the pre-cyberneticera, ... we may have twenty or thirty years before thelogical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us."

—Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind

A Self-Destructive Avenue?

The late Gregory Bateson seemed convinced that society is ona suicidal course and that we can be saved only by eschewingour modernist hubris in favor of "an ecology of mind." In effect,Bateson was arguing that the fundamental assumptions thatsupport how we presume the world to function are categoricallywrong—not simply askew or in need of amplification or clarification—butoutright wrong! His assertion surely will strikemany readers as preposterous. A look in any direction at anytime over the past three centuries reveals major advances andbenefits that have accrued to society from adopting the scientific,rationalist perspective. How could such marvels possiblyhave derived from mistaken foundations? How could continuingto look at the world through the same helpful lens possiblylead us astray? Surely, Bateson was delusional!

But Bateson may seem delusional only because his view ofnature originated from within the scientific community. As C. P.Snow (1963) observed, society is pretty much divided into twocultures with clashing opinions as to whether science affords abeneficial window on reality. Any number of writers, romanticists,and humanists have warned society over the years thatthe scientific viewpoint illumines only the road to perdition,and, for many, the horrors of the twentieth century proved thatpoint. Goethe (1775) even went as far in Urfaustus as to compareplacing one's faith in the Newtonian approach with sellingone's soul to Evil. More recently, this attitude has drawn succorfrom postmodern deconstructivists such as Feyerabend (1978).So Bateson has quite a bit of company, it would seem. Whatdistinguished Bateson from most of his fellow critics, however,was that he set out to construct a rational, alternative picture ofnature.

That ecology played such a prominent role in Bateson's alternativeis highly significant. To be sure, the ever-burgeoning catalogof ecological ills could be taken as part of the very declinethat Bateson had prophesied, and he was grieved by these naturalmaladies. But Bateson made abundantly clear his distancefrom the attitude that "technological thinking caused the problems;technology can solve them." Such would represent whatBateson called a "pathology of epistemology" (Bateson 1972,478). Rather, he was calling for a complete overhaul of how welook at the world, one informed by the image of the ecosystemrather than that of a machine. During his lifetime, he madeprogress toward articulating this new direction by invokingthe nascent science of cybernetics and showing how counterintuitivephenomena could be understood in terms of indirecteffects resulting from feedbacks and the connectedness that ischaracteristic of ecological systems.

Bateson was daring in his suggestion that nature was dualistic,albeit not in the sense of Descartes. Borrowing (perhapsunadvisedly) from Jung's neo-Gnostic vocabulary, Bateson identifiedas pleroma those entities that were homogeneous, continuousand governed by matter and energy—the normal "stuff" ofscience. Living systems and similar physical analogs that werecharacterized more by individual differences (information) andreflexive actions he called "creatura." Although he eschewed thetranscendental, he nonetheless despaired of how the modernmind-set denies one access to the "sacred" in the natural worldaround us (Bateson and Bateson 1987). Despite these contributions,it cannot be said that Bateson achieved a full descriptionof what, for want of a better term, might be called an "ecologicalmetaphysic." It is my aim in this book to continue Bateson'sagenda and to suggest a complete but rational replacement forthose foundations that first initiated and subsequently sustainedthe scientific revolution. This latest revolution is a call to rationalmetanoia, a thoroughgoing conversion of mind.

Bateson sensed that ecology was not merely a derivative science,one wholly dependent on physics and chemistry for itsexplanations. Rather, to him ecology afforded a truly differentway of perceiving reality. Others have sensed that ecology is fundamentallya different endeavor. Arne Naess (1988), for example,emphasized that ecology was "deep," and he purported thatencounters with the ecological affect one's life and perceptionof the natural world in profound and ineffable ways. Jørgensenet al. (2007) likewise point to a number of attributes of ecosystemsthat deviate from the conventional and prefigure the discussionthat will follow. The complexity of ecological dynamicshas prompted some investigators to recognize the necessity forcomplementary narratives of the same phenomena (Jørgensen1992). Even outside the discipline, there are those who recognizethat ecology offers special insights into other natural andeven artificial phenomena: witness, for example, books on the"ecology of computational systems" (Huberman 1988) or theestablishment of institutes devoted to the "ecological study ofperception and action" (Gibson 1979).

Ecology, the Propitious Theater

What, then, is so special about ecology, and is it indeed as ineffableas Naess would have us believe? I hope I am not spoilingthe plot when I state at this early stage that a penetrating readof ecology reveals that it completely inverts the conventionalassumptions about how things happen in the natural world.Furthermore, while recognizing the essential mystery surroundingall things living, I would submit that the reasons that ecologyis so special are nowise as ineffable as Naess contended. It ispossible to identify in perfectly rational fashion where, how, andwhy ecosystems...