The LE Perspective
working paper
Contents
1. Preface
2. Our Blind Spot
2.1 The Shape of Missing Concepts
3. Filling in the Gaps
3.1 Health and the Ecosocial Edge
3.1.1 Permaculture
3.2 Health and the Intrasocial Edge
3.2.1 Undoing Caste
3.3 Scaffolding
4. Refusing to Choose
Preface
I’ve been investigating and strategizing around the relationship between social health and ecological health for about five years now. My interest and love for these questions has only grown in this time. It has become my primary focus. For the past two years, this work has taken the form of an always-evolving workshop called Liberation Ecology. It has become increasingly clear that there is a need for written material that, while necessarily approaching the subject differently than a workshop (driven by experiential small-group work), can serve as a complement for what happens there. What follows is one of the first traces of my ongoing effort to tell this story in writing. This work, from the beginning, has been propelled by the desire to create the conversations, and find the collaborators, that reflect a passion for these neglected relationships. In that light, please consider this piece an invitation to collaborate…
-rafter
8.7.07 High Falls
Our Blind Spot
What are the connections between social health and ecological health? How is the vitality of human communities connected to the way those communities relate to the ecological systems in which they live? Why does it seem as though we have to choose between one or the other of these fundamental needs?
In the world that we live in, there is a deep divide running right down the middle of these basic aspects of our lives. Somehow, it has happened that our society – our whole civilization – views these two landscapes as totally unrelated. We are taught that the challenges we need to address to foster social health have nothing to do with the challenges we need to face to create ecological health. We are taught that the kinds of problems that happen between human communities have nothing to do with the kinds of problems between communities and ecosystems.
This separation has many consequences, but one is particularly awful. When folks come together to work on making the world a better, safer, fairer place, they find themselves in the position of choosing between addressing the challenges of social health, or the challenges of ecological health. You can see this divide at all different scales in our culture: from the overblown conflicts between workers and conservationists, to the healthy organic food that only the affluent can afford, to the not-in-my-backyard activism that tends to shunt toxic waste into the neighborhoods of poor folks, and on and on. What it comes down to is that we lack models of projects and enterprises that address social and ecological health as intimately and functionally related aspects of our lives.
There is a vicious circle here: we lack a vocabulary – a concept-toolbox – that will let us see, discuss, and strategize around these connections, so we don’t create projects that reflect and respond to them, so there are no examples of those projects inform our work and inspire us to take our understanding deeper.
It’s not that people necessarily want this choice. Often enough, folks are just starting to realize that the separation of ecological and social health might not be just the way things are. The awareness that these fundamental problems might actually be deeply connected is already present and growing – it’s only that the ideas of just how they are connected haven’t really emerged yet. And then, there are those individuals and communities for whom it’s already agreed that social health and ecological health are connected. Even when there are some ideas of how those connections work, there can still be an inspiration gap: how can we make something happen that builds on these connections, rather than ignores them?
The Shape of Missing Concepts
Sometimes I like to ask a room full of people:
“Who here has a hunch, at least, that social health and ecological health are connected?”
Generally, everyone in the room will raise a hand. Then I ask:
“OK, so who knows how to act on those connections?”
In a group of 20 or 30 people, I might get three who feebly waggle their hands back and forth at chest level.
And then:
“Who even knows how to talk about the connections?”
In that same group, maybe one or two will give a tentative finger wiggle – sometimes no one at all.
We have on opportunity to learn to refuse to choose between social health and ecological health. This choice that we, as individuals and communities and as a society, have been making, is a lose-lose choice. There are two reasons why: (1) Neither of these kinds of health can be sacrificed, if we want to have a society worth living in; and (2) The system we are part of does not have to make that choice – it does not respect the divide that we are struggling to work around. Our current set-up functions just fine to degrade both social and ecological health, at the same time, with the very same actions, all over planet, without ever having to decide between one and or other.
Filling in the Gaps
In order to begin to fill in the gaps, we need to back up a little bit and figure out what we mean by social health and ecological health, how to tell if we lack them, and how they can be fostered.
Health and the Ecosocial Edge
The boundary between human community and its environment is what I call the ecosocial edge – the edge between the ecosystem and society. It’s not a stable boundary like a mountain chain or lines on a map (which aren’t all that stable themselves, depending on your perspective in time). The ecosocial edge is a moving line that marks the places where energy and resources are moving into human hands out of the environment, or passing from human hands back into the environment. Whenever something moves from being a product of non-human processes, to being an object of human labor, or moves from human control back into the ecosystem, it’s crossing this boundary – the ecosocial edge. Gardening, logging, mining of all kinds, hunting, farming, fishing, foraging… even wind-power harvesting! are all examples of energy and resources crossing this boundary.
Everything that we have, and everything that we do, is made from the energy and resources that cross that edge. After all, where else could anything come from? Unless we are making things out of thin air, they must be coming from somewhere outside of us, from our environment. Because of this relationship of total dependency, I say that the ecosystem is upstream from society – everything that we have, flows from it. The whole biosphere is upstream from the whole human race.
The situation we face now is that, for every bit of energy and resources we take in across the ecosocial edge in order to meet human needs, we are damaging the health of the ecosystem. In this society, meeting human needs = damaging ecosystems. We make our life out of what we take from ecosystems, and we give back very little of value.
One way of looking at this is that we import energy and export entropy. Entropy, used in this context, simply means dysfunction and disorganization. The ecosystems we are part of are composed of complex, and often delicate, webs of relationships. When we disrupt those relationships, through adding too much of something (pollution, agri-chemicals) or taking away too much of something else (clearing land, overfishing), the relationships are broken or distorted, and ecosystem health is degraded. Ecosystems are generally quite resilient – that is, they bounce back from disturbance – but we often interrupt their ability to repair and rebuild by disturbing them continually. We extract energy from them – as food, as oil, as materials - as fast as we can, and export more entropy, faster than they can regenerate. We are damaging the living systems that are upstream from us.
Of course, we are not only exporting simple disorganization. We are often imposing an entirely new organization – a tree farm, a grid of streets, a fishery. We impose a form of organization that serves our short-term need for quick energy extraction, and in doing so remove the capacity of the ecosystem to self-organize – to respond and repair, to be resilient.
Permaculture
There is no question that this has been a fast - maybe the fastest - way to build a complex civilization. It just so happens that the fastest route may not be one in which the ecosystems that support us will prosper. And as their vitality declines – or crashes – so goes our own well-being. Declining quality of life may well be the least of our worries.Fortunately, the way things are is not the way they have to be. We can design landscapes that mimic the dynamics of healthy, resilient, wild ecosystems, such that they maintain a capacity to self-organize and produce yields for human use. In terms of the relationships at the ecosocial edge, it’s possible that while we import energy, we could foster health in the upstream ecosystem, instead of exporting dysfunction and disorganization.
This is the other, slower route to building and maintaining a complex civilization. What would this route look like? Well, it would look very different in different places, in different cultures and climates and bioregions. There is a movement of movements in the world today, composed of millions of people and projects trying to discover just what that other route would look like. Of those movements, the one that I feel closest to, for its flexibility and range and accessibility and power, is called permaculture. There are nearly as many definitions of it as there are teachers (and there are a lot), but the one that I use is this:
Permaculture: meeting human needs while increasing ecosystem health.
Ecosystem health can be assessed with a number of measures: biodiversity, energy capture, nutrient flow, resilience, presence/absence of top predators, and so on. The most popular measures in the permaculture community seems to be biodiversity and energy capture. The particular measure used is not as important as meeting the double criterion of (1) Creating a yield to meet human needs, and (2) Amplifying the health of the ecosystem, by whatever measure. Doing both of these at once represents a profound and dynamic contradiction to the trajectory our civilization has been on for the past 10,000 years.
The philosophy, techniques, and design perspective of permaculture are actually capable of achieving this. This has been demonstrated again and again in on-the-ground projects – very few of which, interestingly enough, are in the US. What it will take to make the above definition true broadly – that is, true of the sum of human needs – is not piecemeal “sustainable” technologies, or a new, total, overarching design, but a myriad of holistic, interdependent design programs and projects, operating at local, regional, and continental scales. The social networks and communication infrastructure are mostly in place – our challenge is to make available the information, energy, and material resources that are needed. Luckily, we are not starting from scratch, and we aren’t alone.
This is the frame in which I understand ecological health – as a design perspective, in which we are not simply limiting our slowing the damage we are doing to non-human living systems, but creating alternative ways of getting our needs met, that regenerate the vitality of the ecosystems upstream from us – and thus our own health and vitality as well.
Health and the Intrasocial Edge
If the ecosocial edge is the interface between human society and an ecosystem, then the interface between human communities can be called the intrasocial edge. The first draws a boundary around humankind, the second consists of the boundaries within humankind. There are many ways that a community can be marked as distinct: cultural, linguistic, ethnic/racial, socioeconomic, physical (including gender, sexuality, ability/disability, and more), and geographic, are a few particularly significant ones. Each of these possible differences draws a different boundary around a community of people, and distinguishes them from their neighbors, near and far.
I want to draw attention to the patterns of activity that happen at the interface between these communities. In particular, to apply the same lens we used to examine the ecosocial edge – that is, the flow of energy, resources, and entropy – to understand the relationships across the intrasocial edge.
Virtually any time that energy and resources are moving through society, they are crossing one or more intrasocial edges. Everything that we have, and everything that we do, is made from energy and resources that have crossed many such boundaries. After all, where else could anything be coming from? Unless the members of our own community are all getting all of our needs met directly at the ecosocial edge, our necessities must be coming to us through other communities. (This is the case no matter which distinction one uses to define a community – linguistic, socioeconomic, et al.) Because of this relationship of total dependency, I say that – much like ecosystems – other human communities are upstream from us. Everything that we have, every tool we use and object we touch, every bit of energy that fuels our bodies and our buildings and vehicles, flows to us from them.
A thoughtful look at our current social system reveals that, as energy and resources move across intrasocial edges, they tend to move from communities with less power and freedom to communities with more power and freedom. Each time some quantity of energy or material resource travels across an intrasocial edge, it is most likely to be moving from a community with less and to a community with more. And the further it travels, the more intrasocial edges it crosses, the greater the disparity in basic social conditions that its route will encompass. This pattern applies to all scales of community – from very local to global. Because contemporary human communities are so richly interconnected by networks of energy and resource flow, I regard all communities (within the global system) with less power and freedom as upstream from all communities with more.
Of course, some energy flows in the other direction as well, from more empowered communities to less empowered communities. But, unsurprisingly, the global balance of exchange is weighted far in favor of communities that already have more power and freedom. It is basic to the workings of our current society that those with more power and freedom are able to define the terms of exchange with those who have less. So the condition of unequal exchange stubbornly maintains its trajectory: resources flow from those communities who already have less, to those that already have more. I use the term caste to refer to the relationship between communities with different levels of power and freedom, that are connected within a network of unequal exchange.
Human communities are very different from ecosystems, but in this they are the same: when energy is extracted from them at a higher rate than their self-organization allows, then the health of the community is degraded. In human communities, though, self-organization means self-determination. Here is another vicious circle: intense extraction of resources from a community requires first that their capacity for self-determination be diminished or sidelined; and then, the consequences of that extraction are such that self-determination is that much more difficult. As the dependency of the more-powerful community on the less-powerful deepens, any suggestion of self-determination on the part of less-powerful becomes more and more threatening to their “partner” in unequal exchange.
And so it is with our upstream communities, as it is with upstream ecosystems: meeting needs = damaging human communities. We import energy from our upstream neighbors, export entropy to them, and diminish their capacity to self-organize. This is the sad and persistent trajectory of our whole civilization. And our own position in this process is not simple, for must of us: while we are the “beneficiaries” of unequal exchange in one direction, it’s most likely that each of our home communities has been damaged or destroyed at some point in our family histories, as we or our forebears were integrated into this society. Unless we are part of tiny minority of the world’s population, we ourselves, and our communities, lack real opportunities for self-determination.
Undoing Caste
There is no question that this has been the fastest way to build a complex civilization. It just so happens that the fastest route may not be one in which humankind will prosper. Even from a purely self-interested perspective: as the vitality of communities with less power and freedom than us - our upstream neighbors - declines or crashes, so declines our own quality of life. And really, declining quality of life may well be the least of our worries. Maybe the very fastest way to build a complex civilization is not actually the smartest way, or the most desirable.Fortunately, there are other ways to build and maintain complex society. There are other ways to get our needs met – without dictating terms of unequal exchange with other communities. In terms of the dynamics at the intrasocial edge, isn’t it possible that we could import energy, while fostering health in human communities, instead of exporting dysfunction and disorganization? The name of this other possible dynamic of interaction between communities is anti-caste.
What would this slower, smarter route look like? Like that other slower route – the one that fosters ecological health – the route that fosters social health would look very different in different places, in different cultures and climates and bioregions. There is a movement of movements in the world today, composed of millions of people and projects trying to discover just what that other route would look like. Though I’m not aware of one single self-identified movement that is calling for and doing the things that I look for, it is the case that little slices of this movement and that one are acting in ways that are relevant to these questions. Some international aid projects, some permaculture, some workplace democracy, some community development, some health care reform, some environmental justice projects, are doing anti-caste work. I define this undefined movement in this way:
Anti-caste: meeting needs while increasing social health.
Social health is fostered when power differences between communities are decreased, and when the capacity for self-determination is increased. This statement correlates with the findings of the population health movement, which finds that not only do various measures of health vary with socioeconomic status, but that the greater the income disparity in a given sample, the worse off the whole sample is. A definition that comes from the population health movement, that could easily be applied to social health as I’m using it, is “the capacity of people to adapt to, respond to, or control life’s challenges and changes.” In other words: the capacity to self-organize.
The question remains: how does one go about fostering health in this sense? There are two criteria that are useful, in tandem, to figure out if any project is fostering social health.
Criterion 1: Systematically seek out leadership, influence, direction, and/or accountability from the projects of communities with less power and freedom.
Criterion 2: In the context of that influence, allocate resources into new channels, from communities with more power and freedom, to the projects of communities with less.
The latter criterion is indented to show that it is nested within the former – to show that the first is broader and more important. Criterion 2, on it’s own, could describe the sort of charity work that maintains current relationships of unequal exchange, rather than fostering real health. In the context of Criterion 1, it becomes a dramatic contradiction to our current set-up. In a system of unequal exchange like our own, energy and resources flow in one direction, and control flows in the other. To reverse the direction of both of these flows, as the above criteria ask, is to turn the dynamics of our current system upside down. We have the opportunity to move from a trajectory of always-increasing inequality to always-lessening. Because projects that are actually doing this can easily fall outside of how we generally understand political work and social transformation, they can seem quite innocuous. I propose that, however mild-mannered, they are altogether revolutionary.
These criteria, and the definition above that they support, make up a pattern of behavior that I call cascading democracy. This is quite distinct from the pulse democracy that would be the norm in the Western industrial nations, if democracy was working as advertised. Rather than a big surge of “leadership” from “below” every two, four, or more years – i.e. elections – cascading democracy involves a regular, if not constant, search for leadership from upstream, on the part of projects of all sizes and scales. This is not a recipe for instant-mix social utopia, but rather a design constraint that can serve to get us from our current situation to someplace altogether more desirable.
This movement of social movements – those people and projects that are trying to find a different, slower, healthier path for global society to follow – represent an immense resource bank of fellow travelers, strategies, maps, tools, and technologies, that we will need in the pursuit of cascading democracy. It is one thing to propose the above criteria, and it’s another thing to implement them. What it will take to meet these criteria is not piecemeal “development” projects, or a new, total, overarching design, but a mosaic of holistic, interdependent design programs and projects, operating at local, regional, and continental scales. Lucky for us, we are not starting from scratch, and we aren’t alone.
This is the frame in which I want to talk about social health – as a design perspective, in which we are not simply limiting or slowing the damage we are doing to society, but creating alternative ways of getting our needs met, that foster the vitality and resilience of the human communities upstream from us – and thus our own.
Scaffolding
I’ve shown that there are parallels between ecological and social health issues, but does the relationship go any deeper than that? The patterns in behavior across the intrasocial and ecosocial edges are so fundamental to the way that our society is organized, it begs the question: what is the functional relationship between these dynamics?
I use the metaphor of scaffolding to describe that relationship. Scaffolding is a structure that is built just to stand on top of it, so that you can reach something that you couldn’t reach otherwise. Here is how it applies:
The disparity at intrasocial edges is expensive, in that it requires a tremendous input of energy in order to create, maintain, and intensify. The more dramatic the disparity, the more energy must be brought to bear to regulate it. Relationships of unequal exchange would be unable to develop and grow if there were not an increasingly elaborate infrastructure of armed forces and bureaucracies to ensure their continuation. That infrastructure all eats up vast quantities of energy, in otherwise unproductive activity (i.e. no energy is produced) – where does all that energy come from? Caste infrastructure depends on the support of intense extraction at the ecosocial edge.
Extraction at the ecosocial edge is extremely complicated, in that it requires the coordination of diverse and specialized labor, spread out in space and time. And the more intense the extraction, the greater the complexity. What’s more, much of the labor is difficult, unpleasant, dangerous, or downright lethal for the people doing it, or for the people who live nearby. It’s not an easy thing for a society to coordinate broad-scale, complex, undesirable tasks. The quick and easy shortcut is to do it through top-down, coercive command structures. We’ve already discussed the nature of the “solution” that our civilization has deployed to resolve this dilemma. The intense extraction at the ecosocial edge depends on the support of the caste infrastructure.
The dynamics at each edge depend utterly on the dynamics at the other. They each provide the support necessary for the maintenance and intensification of the other. From a deep historical perspective, one can see that caste and extraction develop incrementally and in tandem. They are woven together through the history of what we call civilization. Since the advent of domestication, they have each in turn created the conditions for the existence of the other. This pendulum has swung back and forth –> intensify extraction –> intensify caste –> intensify extraction – for the last 10,000 years. We face now the question of whether we will address our desires for change to one or the other, piecemeal, or to the relationship between them – to the scaffolding itself.
Refusing to Choose
The above parallel discussions, of actual and possible relationships across ecosocial and intrasocial edges, constitute the frame for what I consider legitimate discussion of ecological and social health. What would it mean to refuse to choose between them – to insist on bringing both sets of criteria with us to the conversations, projects, and enterprises we involve ourselves with? Here is the joined-up definition for what I call liberation ecology.
Liberation ecology: Meeting needs while fostering the health of all upstream systems.
Why do these formulations all take the form of “meeting needs while…?” Because when we are degrading the health of upstream systems, there is nothing out of the ordinary happening – it’s just how our system works. We don’t have to do anything special to participate in that process, we just have to participate in daily life. The tricky business of our system is that it links the meeting of our everyday needs and desires with participation in destructive processes that don’t serve our long term needs or desires. We face an opportunity now to redesign and recreate business-as-usual. System-change that must be sustained by ongoing heroic sacrifice and stark departures from the details of living, will probably not prove a viable option for substantive and long-term transformation. Not that heroic departures from the everyday aren’t called for – they are! – rather, they are called for in the context of a design process that allows us to connect the meeting of our everyday needs and desires with participation in creative and constructive processes, enhancing upstream health rather than destroying it.
We are in moment of opportunity and danger. It’s not necessary to discuss here the dramatic political and ecological instability that we currently face as our global environment. I’m not proposing a top-down re-design of our civilization. We are part of a system whose complexity surpasses the abilities of the most brilliant design team that humanity could muster – if we could ever even agree who would be on it! And at the same time, the system in all its complexity is composed of the things that we do, and we could be doing things quite differently. In complex systems of all kinds, small changes wrought in moments of instability can effect vast changes downstream.
Even so, most of us don’t seem to have much leverage as individuals – it’s at the scale of projects, of all sizes, that the opportunity appears to design interventions into larger systems. Projects, with smart design criteria, can function as interventions into the contemporary flow of business-as-usual. Any kind of project, of any size, can potentially present dramatic contradictions to the way that energy, resources, information, and control move through our society. If we design our projects well, with thoughtfulness and daring and care, we can shake our unstable system out of its current trajectory. The system is much bigger than us, but we are collectively much smarter, and in many ways much faster. By collaborating as individuals, as projects, as communities and movements and movements-of-movements, we stand a chance to trigger a cascade of changes through our richly interconnected global landscape. We may not bring about utopia (this week, anyway), but there is no reason to doubt that we can navigate a path that reverses and transforms the ill trajectory that we are following, and connects the meeting of our own needs indelibly with the fostering of health through the whole system.
