----- Original Message -----
From: Geoffrey Patton
To: Wayne Tyson
Sent: Friday, July 09, 2010 3:25 PM
Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Humans in the definition of ecosystems
So, how does one change culture?
Cordially yours,
Geoff Patton, Ph.D.
2208 Parker Ave., Wheaton, MD 20902 301.221.9536
From: Wayne Tyson <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Humans in the definition of ecosystems
To: "Geoffrey Patton" <[email protected]>
Date: Friday, July 9, 2010, 7:40 PM
THAT is the question! I don't have any answers, but I
suspect that "we" can't, at least not by any direct action or "plan."
First, we recognize that culture is a sociopathological phenomenon. I
suspect that culture arose out of cooperation scaled up by the
organism's success and colonizing of marginal habitats, which led to
scarcities and the development of survival strategies such as caching
which led to hoarding which led to theft and acquisition, then
"domestication," then to coercion, settlement, hierarchy and
conquest. Hierarchy demands a "bottom" for support, and that bottom
must consist of a cooperative-minded (not coercive-minded) population
upon which the top can "feed" at leisure. We can see this writ larger
and larger through history, with blood feuds and wars marking
attempts to fight coercive hierarchies with coercion.
Right now, I'm of the mind that simple non-cooperation
with hierarchies and emphasis upon lateral cooperation is the best
option, but it is a gradual process and may be too little too late.
At the biological level, the population will either have to crash or
be taken down gradually through intelligence; this will require the
adoption of a concept of what I call "frugal luxury" to replace
poverty (extreme wealth will no doubt continue, but as the "customer
base" declines, the wealth will aggregate into smaller and smaller
subpopulations as people decide to do things for each other rather
than consume on a larger and larger scale) but I am under no illusion
that that will happen without a clear demonstration of it as a
superior alternative. Intelligence has been defined (I think it may
have been Maslow or possibly Boulding) as the ability to distinguish
the superior from the inferior alternative.
In any case, if the behavior is not adaptive in the long
run, the species employing that strategy is unlikely to survive, at
least not thrive. I don't know enough about extinctions to know
whether or not overconsumption always results in a crash, and how
often such crashes end in extinction, but in the case of humans
culture is such a wild card I don't think such a prediction is
possible. Que sera, sera. That is, if culture continues on its
present path, and humans do nothing to change it, degradation of
resources will continue and so-called negative and positive feedback
loops will continue their dance around our destiny (not to motion
that of other species and concentrations and distributions of
non-living resources. But that's just a guess.
WT
"We have only two choices, really. We can have an 'I beat
you down, you beat me down, I beat you down' society [culture] or we
can have an 'I lift you up, you lift me up, I lift you up' society."
--Kenneth Boulding
