Sat April 10, 2010
Re-modeling the world the challenge of this century
Posted By: Paul Hanley

“What we do in the world flows from how we interpret the world,” said the late, great ecologist Charles Birch. The global environmental crisis, he said, can be traced to the models, paradigms or worldviews we use collectively, often unconsciously, to guide the way we do things. These models are built from our understanding of the world and our role in it.

It is increasingly obvious to a growing number of observers that currently dominant worldviews are contributing to unsustainable behaviour that, if unchecked, must inevitably lead to the collapse of civilization.

“Nothing less than the current logic of world civilization” runs counter to the wellbeing of the earth, writes Al Gore. For Thomas Homer-Dixon, “A value system that makes endless growth the primary source of our social stability and spiritual well being will destroy us.” A literature scan yields hundreds of similar statements that come round to a need to shift “the collection of values and assumptions that determines our basic understanding of how we fit into the universe.”

What are the worldviews or models by which civilization operates? Though they vary from place to place and over time, there appear to be two main models, which might be described as ecocentric and anthropocentric.

The currently dominant, anthropocentric worldview boils down to the idea that the earth exists primarily to support human development. Humankind is the most important species, having established itself as such in the struggle for existence. Since its rights supersede those of all others, it can assign to itself whatever portion of the planet it needs to survive and prosper, at the expense of other species.

In contrast, ecocentrism is a worldview in which humans are seen as encompassed by their world, as a child in the womb of its mother. We are children of Mother Earth and our mandate is to inhabit our world as members of a family of living things. The priority is to do nothing to upset the world’s equilibrium.

Both models/worldviews have strengths and weaknesses.

The weakness of the anthropocentric model is increasingly obvious with the emergence of increasingly complex local and global environmental impacts. We are coming to realize the present way of doing things is ultimately unsustainable. Without acknowledging and accommodating the rights, needs and intrinsic value of the other players in the ecosphere, the ecological balance of the planet is destabilized to the point where it is incapable of supporting civilization, at least in anything like its present form.

At the same time, we should not discount the strengths or positive outcomes of the antropocentric model. This way of seeing ourselves has been conducive to rapid cultural evolution, including the development of philosophies, arts, sciences, religions and technologies that have allowed our species to form complex and diverse cultures that support human development in myriad ways. Civilization may have outstripped the bounds of moderation, but who among us would opt for a world without its benefits?

Ecocentrism is a very attractive worldview, but it also has shortcomings. Chiefly, the eco-model cannot accommodate the new reality our species has created. People have essentially reconstructed the world: it is now a hybrid of the ecosphere and civilization. We have gone so far down the path of civilization that the traditional ecocentric model doesn’t work. Living strictly by the limits of the earth’s “carrying capacity” implies that we need to drastically reduce our ecological footprint. While much can be achieved through conservation, efficiency and harnessing renewable forms of power, to live strictly by the ethics of the ecocentric worldview is essentially impossible: radical ecologists estimate we would have to reduce the world’s population to 1 billion or less.

So we cannot go back to Mother Earth and yet pushing our way forward using the dominant worldview seems equally challenging. What we may need is a new model of human-nature interaction that facilitates both further human development and the healthy, sustainable functioning of the ecosphere. Can we be neither the masters of our world nor its subjects?


Sun March 08, 2009
Urban people should be concerned about agriculture
Posted By: Paul Hanley

The singer Antony of Antony and the Johnsons is a remarkable artist in many ways. While much of his songwriting has focused on gender, more recently he has begun to write on the human-nature relationship.

Asked in a recent interview why a big city artist cares about nature, he pointed out that people in cities are as dependent on the natural world as any farmer, or hunter-gatherer for that matter. Ultimately everyone owes their breathing, eating, drinking—their life—to the natural world.

True, rural people have a more obvious connection to nature than those living in human-built environments. Some 40 percent of the people on the planet, for example, rely on wood, charcoal, straw or dung as their main source of energy (and 50 to 60 percent for at least some of their energy needs.) A billion people rely on fishing for a large part of their protein requirements. Some 3.5 billion people in developing countries continue to rely on plant-based medicine for their primary health care—as do more and more people in the developed world.

Paradoxically, urban people are even more dependent on the natural world and especially agriculture than rural people. Methods of production that rely on nature have not diminished in the industrial era but increased. Humans now control 25 percent of the primary productivity, i.e. the plant growth, on the planet’s land surface. We use more of the products of nature than ever before, and because of higher levels of consumption, we are more dependent than ever on them.

During the last 100 years, per capita resource consumption rose fourfold; the production of goods and services now requires, on average, for each person, over 80 tons of natural resources annually. And by 2050 the level of consumption of natural resources is expected to rise by an additional factor of three. Our use and dependence on nature, especially through agriculture, actually goes up as the world becomes more urban.

“The central place in every culture should be occupied by agriculture,” says environmental historian Colin Duncan in his book The Centrality of Agriculture—Between Humankind and the Rest of Nature. This may seem naïve or heretical to most living economists, but it was not so in the past. In his influential Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Adam Smith called the modern order in which industry and foreign trade take precedence over domestic agriculture “unnatural and retrograde.”

Obviously, there have been benefits to this arrangement, but Duncan and others argue that—viewed globally and with an eye to the future—many social and most environmental consequences of this sea change have been negative. Duncan believes no sustainable human future can be conceived unless and until the centrality of agriculture is properly recognized and new economic institutions are developed that will encourage people to take care of their lands.

Strictly speaking, agriculture refers to cultivating plants and rearing livestock. There are of course various branches of agriculture—field-cropping, horticulture, floriculture, apiculture, aquaculture, sericulture, animal agriculture, the production of medicinal plants or fibres such as cotton, and so on. To understand the centrality of agriculture, it helps to broaden our definition to include many other activities in which people work with natural systems to produce products, such as fishing, forestry, silviculture and other means of managing renewable resources.

Agriculture is a unique activity. In agriculture we make products mainly by working collaboratively with living systems and renewable resources. In other industries, we mainly use “dead” non-renewable materials. Agriculture works primarily with plants, the only primary producers of products we can consume directly, or indirectly through the consumption of animal products.

Since agriculture—in the full sense of the word—will continue to play its central role in civilization as urbanization intensifies, one of the most important things that can be done in a sustainable society is to raise its status. Agriculture, and how it is practiced, must become again an important concern for everyone, urban as well as rural.

- Originally in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix February 24, 2009