|
|
|
|
THE ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY page 5 |
|
|
What is the politics that is meant to regulate all this. This is meant to be the politics of awareness. Cybernetic regulation in ecology, the way I understand it, happens in two different ways. The first is that the general processes of community development, such as general structure and function, will be known before they will happen. You can go to an area of bare ground in a terrestrial ecosystem and from the neighbouring plant and animal communities, you can say what I in general have just described above, in terms of those general development processes, that this area of bare ground will be colonised in the same way. That the early processes will be to do with quantity and later to do with quality. The early energy and material activities will be open, but as time goes on these processes will shorten and tighten and close. In other words, definite general processes are happening and can be predicted. The developing ecological community knows what it is doing. Whereas in modern society there are no definite structural and functional characteristics and these are not really known. In the ecological community the general characteristics are known before it is developed. In modern living an engineer will understand what the engineer is going to build before he or she goes and builds it. With the ecological community it is the same. The community in general understands what is being done before it starts to happen. It is the detail that progressively occurs as time goes on. In a human community we can say that we are going to develop a community and in this community we are going to do these and these things. We are going to develop certain types of sports and activities etc. The different community that you might be thinking of might be going up over there. And a different one over there. They are planned to start with these general activities. What I am saying is that the more we know about the developing community before we do it in detail, then like minded compatible people can get together. Here is the first characteristic of cybernetic political regulation. In general we have a plan and are aware and understand what we are doing before we go and do it. In capitalism we may have people who are like minded in that they want to live in a capitalist society, but within that general context, we may live next door to people who are tremendously antagonistic to each other. Just because people move into an ecological community, it does not mean that they are compatible. They may be like minded only in that they want to live in a close community, but they may have very different ideas about what they would want to see developed. Different communities are appropriate for different people. We should never assume that the first community that we move into will be the community that we will still be living in in five years time. It might or might not be. Transition of people between communities needs to be well understood. The second part of cybernetic regulation is to do with day-to-day regulation, week-to-week, year-to-year regulation that goes on. In the plant and animal community this is similar to the immediate regulation carried out by two possums growling at each other in the night, or the leader of a wolf pack, or the immediate decisions of where to get the materials to build a nest. (The first characteristic of ecological political regulation is so poorly understood in modern society. The second characteristic is also weak.) This essay has tried to show that in ecology we can find a model for successful living. Ecology is a holistic discipline and it is only now that we are developing a holisitic understanding of the way the world works. It is only now that we can head to the holistically aware community and the real ecological community. Is the aware community the ecological community or is the ecological community the aware community? They are one and the same. |
|
|
|
|
|
Contact: Ian Mason |
|
