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Living in the Earth Ecosystem

The notion of nature as the source of harmony is deeply rooted in the ecological movement. Do we now need new stories about our species to survive?




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Notwithstanding that a hungry crocodile lay in the mud and waited, well-known Australian ecologist Val Plumwood one day paddled in a canoe down the wide river Kakadu National Park. The crocodile attacked, overturned the canoe and got a hold of her. Then Plumwood understood that, from the crocodile's perspective, she was only a piece of meat, pure food.

The needs we have control our ideas, including how we perceive our position in the ecosystem. Many of us live in the belief that we are at the top of the system. It's wrong. In an ecosystem, everyone is interdependent. Plumwood got a cast, but continued to defend the species diversity throughout his life.

Life has a soul

Val Plumwood's entrance into ecology, in an Australia characterized by the dominance of white, western men, was romantic and feminist: Nature, animals and plants were exploited in the same way as the Australian worker, woman and indigenous people. But liberation – and harmonious cohabitation – was possible. Despite the knowledge that nature is not particularly harmonious, the dream of living in pact with it has remained a significant impetus for the ecological movement in Australia.

Arne Næs and the eco-philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen have a natural romantic starting point.

Also Freya Mathews, another Australian eco-philosopher with sharp analyzes of how the West's thinking and natural abuse has led the Earth's ecosystem to a turning point, has an idealized natural experience as a starting point for its philosophy. Her description of herself as a seven-year-old, where in the early morning, before the others in the house have risen, takes her pony and rides into a dewy nature that is about to come to life, making this highly understandable. Mathews' need to relive the child's scathing experience of being virtually unmediated in nature also guides her solution to the problem: Life has soul, everything is life, and we are all part of this self-communicating psyche, nature: It is with this basically we have to act.

eco-philosophy

The notion of nature as the source of harmony is deeply rooted in the ecological movement, wherever we turn. For pioneer Arne Næs, whose deep ecology has left a marked mark on ecological thinking worldwide, it is the mountain flowers around Tvergastein, the hut where he sits and philosophizes 1500 meters above sea level, that become the image of life that must be protected. In the delicate white-violet flower, where it is beautiful and vulnerable clinging to the rock, he reads life's vulnerability and immediately understands that all life has intrinsic value and must be protected.

The eco-philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen also has a natural romantic point of view. In his book The Denial of Nature he takes an admirable settlement with his role models, the blind rationalists of the Frankfurt School, who regard nature as a dead object for free exploitation of man. A meeting with a big bird in the woods and meeting with the son in the cabin will be the impetus that sets it all going – the experience that leads to Vetlesen's break with his predecessors and his philosophical turn; Further down in the text we glimpse the need for a deeper connection to life.

In the United States alone, 180 families live off the grid, in ecological communities.

We find the backdrop for this view of nature in the romance and of the great, pioneering American conservationists John Muir (1838-1914) and Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), who were inspired by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Muir and Leopold saw deep contact with nature as the solution to man's inner turmoil in the face of modernity. With a deep and lifelong commitment to nature, against the devastation of industry and highways, they defended the livelihoods of animals and humans.

There is nothing wrong with this. All of the aforementioned thinkers – and many more could be named – have provided invaluable inspiration to preserve the globe, the biotope we have inherited and that we share with everything living. The early ecological movement is born, so to speak, of the longing to live in harmony with nature, a metaphysical longing with roots in human religious past. The duration of the ecologist for the violence of modern society has also been important.

enlightenment

From the 1700th century onwards, a new force enters the religiously rooted human culture – a force, a regime that will slowly break with the notion of nature as godly and harmonious. This power is the natural science.

Ecology as research sees the light of day in the 1800th century, and just before and after the First World War there are systematic – albeit immature – studies of ecosystems. Anton Kerner von Marilaun's study of the vegetation in the Danube basin and Arthur Tansley's exploration of the English fauna are two examples. Not only did Von Marilaun and Tansley see beautiful scenery, they also saw that nature was organized in complex systems, and developed thinking around it. The flirtation of Nazism with nature and ecology, as well as a demanding rebuilding of Europe after World War II, would put a temporary halt to the research and the grants of this science.

It is, paradoxically, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the previous explosions on American soil – in American nature – that will take the ecosystem's research to a whole new level.

The nature of nature

How is nature affected when exposed to radiation? What happens when pesticides are thrown out on a field, or when sulphates are discharged into a river? With heavily funded American and later international research programs, American scientists were to bring understanding of the Earth's ecosystem out of romance and into a scientific and – some would say – enchanted phase. (Those interested in the history of research are referred to Frank Benjamin Golleys A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology from 1993. A lot of groundbreaking research has also come to the side.)

With scientific methodology, measurement of energy inflow and outflow in the ecosystem of a pond, a forest or a river, studies of nutrients, carbon, biomass and temperatures, a knowledge of nature's way of being and acting is growing. The ecosystem is not the harmonious nature the Romans dreamed of living in pact with. The ecosystem is the way nature organizes itself to sustain and reproduce itself. Nature does so by exchanging energy between its living and non-living matter. The globe as a whole is a huge ecosystem made up of billions of small and large ecosystems that in turn exchange energy and matter. The exchange of death and living matter takes place regardless of whether plankton, plants, amoebas, animals or humans are needed to maintain the system. The ecosystem itself has no "inherent meaning". Much indicates that the living biomass – the human precursor, the animals – arose to act as a temperature and carbon regulator for plant growth in the system. The ecosystem also has no direction. It is in fierce competition with itself. And it is constantly changing: It is changing to withstand change.

With the sun as an energy source, chlorophyll as a power plant and water and carbon as building blocks, the ecosystem exchanges energy to ensure its own self-preservation and biomass reproduction. From a human point of view, we are witnessing blind coercion, to an unstoppable, perverse cannibalism in which the continuous death of living matter is the prerequisite for the maintenance of the system. In this system man constitutes a local, temporary pocket of self-represented order.

Critical Thresholds

Every ecosystem is exposed at all times to small and large shocks, from the outside and from the inside. The system seeks stability, but is always unstable. It passes thresholds and it changes shape. When the instability increases and a threshold is exceeded, the system enters a new phase, it gets a new behavior and a new identity, which when algae causes a pond to grow again and the pond becomes an ant; such as when a sea current turns, a human dies after a short life, or a new, fast-growing species emerges.

All ecosystems, short-lived or long-lived – whether it is a single amoeba, a pond, a regional biotope, a human body or a large economic organization – undergo roughly the same development (Gunderson and Holling 2001; Walker and Salt 2006). It starts with an intense growth phase (Rapid Growth Phase) with great diversity, diversity, profits and resilience. During this phase, the system can withstand major changes: external and internal shocks. When this wild growth phase is over – it can take minutes, and it can take thousands of years – the system will gradually simplify and start conserving energy (Conservation Phase, "k-phase") to become more efficient. The efficiency enhancement makes the system vulnerable. Only small shocks, from the outside or from the inside, on a large or small scale in the system (you do not see it until it has happened), can at this stage cause the system to "break down" to release energy (Release Phase, "omega phase"). »). When the system releases energy, its old way of life breaks down – it changes identity. The system becomes chaotic and reorganizes into a new behavior (Reorganization Phase, "alpha phase"). In this very labile phase, creativity at the micro level can have major consequences at the macro level. Something brand new may arise. But the system may just as well go back to its former form and start over again, or it could switch to a form of lower complexity, to start again from there. The system can also solve the "crisis" by assuming an even more complex form, which in turn will "break down" to release energy. The order of phases the system undergoes varies. The planet's ecosystem is self-creating and self-regulating, and constantly changing. Today, humans are part of the Earth ecosystem. But it is not as obvious that we are there tomorrow.

The rise of the Sapiens

Life on the planet arose randomly 3,5 billion years ago. There have been many phases. In Cambrian, from about 540 to about 490 million years ago, the great diversity of species occurred in a short time. In its approximate present form, life on the globe has existed for approximately 65 million years. The species Homo sapiens was a very late-coming, but extremely fast-developing species at the end of this period. The species was "shaped" in a few short million years, when a four-legged animal, the monkey, rose at two and gradually became human. Over the past 70 years, the number of sapiens has gone from 000 to nearly 50 – eight – billions. It's a huge spread. From the agricultural revolution 000 years ago, the human species began to intervene in the ecosystem it was part of, by growing biomass, and production increased radically. With industrialism, the species found an efficient way of producing energy, with the result that the species has increased its number in explosive speed over the last 8 years. No one knows the consequences of this development. Such is nature.

Without evolution we would not have been here. Without the ecosystem we would not have existed. All life is connected through the ecosystems that sustain it, and all the elements of the system are interconnected. Without the microbes, for example, the mammal would die out in a few days. There are no free zones in the ecosystem – only thresholds and change. The ecosystem can withstand shocks and changes best when it consists of many small, agile units, great diversity and energy surplus. The less agility, diversity and profit an ecosystem has, the more vulnerable it becomes to the system of external and internal change.

Several have stipulated the number of people the globe can naturally carry, to somewhere between one and three billion – then with low energy consumption. Freya Mathews believes that we must give nature back to all the species we have displaced, to ensure continued life on the biotope and the ecosystem of Earth. The well-known American scientist Edward O. Wilson has determined that we must deliver over half the Earth back, should we have any hope of recovery. Such views are, of course, controversial – but they need not be wrong for that reason.

One thing, however, science agrees with itself: The storm of streamlining and monocultures, with which the human species is well underway, is a storm of a safe exit.

irreversibly

The last 50 years of knowledge about the Earth as an ecosystem has brought us into a new situation. We find ourselves in a silence, similar to what man must have been facing when it gained self-awareness thousands of years ago and began to create religions to explain to itself what it did here and why it displaced, killed and burned all other life around them. Stories that "put the Earth under you and become many" know we are wrong now. They work against their purpose. We live today on a globe we are forced to reinterpret – give a new story, a new language – if we are to survive here. Maybe we need to create new religions, new ways of living, to achieve this.

Measurement of energy inflow and outflow in the ecosystem of a pond, forest or river,
studies of nutrients, carbon, biomass and temperatures…

Despite the robustness of the Earth's biotope, mankind has, among other things by outperforming species diversity, already pushed Earth's ecosystem over a crucial threshold and irreversibly altered the system's identity. We do not yet know how the planet will respond to this. Continued heating of the atmosphere and emissions of sulfates and acids on land and in the oceans will lead the system over new irreversible thresholds. Today, factors we do not overlook, completely unknown factors, can be fatal tomorrow.

The human brain is so constructed that it "defends" the body's actions to give the body the feeling of mastering the situation. This is necessary for the individual, the small family, the herd to survive. We are genetically coded to survive as groups in competition with the environment and other groups, but we have no experience of, nor good tools for, surviving as a self-limiting species. Many, nevertheless, based on insights into the ecosystem of the Earth's behavior, have taken the step from a "head understanding" of the problems of practicing a less harmful behavior than that of predation and efficiency.

Types of resistance

By examining an ecosystem resiliens - what a pasture or fishing field can withstand without the system tipping – and scaling production accordingly, the resilience practitioner, as many in the administration, choose to work within existing population regimes and community structures. It may sound sensible, but quickly go wrong: The whole is and will be bigger than us – we are only an incomprehensible part of it.

The Off the Grid movement (grid = "system, network") therefore goes the opposite way. The OtG practitioner disconnects from society's infrastructure and predation on nature to form communities where self-rescue, exchange of goods, family forms and technology are experimented with that reduce the ecological footprint. In the United States alone, 180 families live like this today. The ecovillage Hurdal in Norway is a milder variant of this.

In many of the world's metropolitan areas, various forms of urban ecology are being tried, such as re-use, cultivation of small areas and protection of wild species – but here much remains of both theory and practice for the movement to be powerful and the projects to yield results. And unfortunately, thinkers like the god-awaited Object Oriented Ontology-inspired philosopher Timothy Morton put the urban project together. With his Dark Ecology and abstract Great Gray Mesh mysticism – everything in the world is equal, fluid matter – he has become the favorite of literature and art students and, with himself as the supreme priest of urban melancholy, has created a no-holds-barred speculation room instead of inspiring to changed behavior.

Many, such as the Greens and Nature and Youth, choose to work purely politically to force changes in management, while movements such as the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front see militant pressure and actionism as the only way out. Also, individual individuals who fly less, recycle and downscale consumption and hence their CO2footprint, contributes in the right direction.

At the beginning of the journey

Living with change is not easy for anyone. Living in a constantly changing world is demanding. Adaptations require great wisdom and insight. Regardless of practice, there is therefore no need to completely renounce the more religious sense of the early ecofilosophy; That dimension can be useful in the process of giving the biotope Earth a new language. Science needs a sky – an ethic to work within. The idealists, the romantics, in turn, need the hard facts of science. An adequate language for the ecosystem The Earth must therefore hold both the insights of the brain and the heart, and it must, most of all, have room for what we do not know.

In the way we describe the world, we at the same time unfold our way of understanding it and being in it. Every word we utter is like the first words: Each time we linguistic the world, we show ourselves and others how we are and live in it.

New freedoms and challenges await anyone who dares to break out of the imagined security created by nature-destroying consumption, to seek real security and safeguard a globe in transformation.

Our understanding of what it means to be human on a living planet is changing. We are at the beginning of the journey; we are about to understand our own body as an ecosystem in the ecosystem. Everything we do from now on will matter.

Erland Kiøsterud
Erland Kiøsterud
Author and essayist. Residing in Oslo. See also his website or Wikipedia

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