Cultural ecology is a commentary on the Marxist
model of society.
The Marxist model may be expressed as the
‘Economic Base supporting an Idealogical
Superstructure’.
The economic base of a society determines the
ideas that define the organisations and individual behaviours that
express its culture.
Everything in the superstructure is reducible to,
or is determined by, the economic forces of the
base. From this perspective, things in the
superstructure, such as politics, literature or religion, which at
first glance do not seem to have much to do with economics, are
ultimately best grasped in terms of identifiable economic
causes.
The Economic Base is the primary
element in any society and may be subdivided
into:
-
the means of
production, that is to say the geographical
circumstances, the raw materials and the technology available at a
given stage of history. For example, ‘plough and
land’ was the means of production and survival during the
Middle Ages. A century ago it was ‘minerals and
factories’;
-
the forces of
production, were the nature of the producers
involved in the production of the means of survival. For
example, production mostly involved men as opposed to women, or
educated as opposed to uneducated, or rural peasants as opposed to
the urban proletariat;
-
and the social
relations of production, involved the division of the
society in question into economic classes. For example, some
people, were wealthy because they owned the land or the factories
(the term for this is capital) as opposed to others who
merely worked for these owners. This resulted in the
asymmetrical distribution of economic wealth and, thus,
power.
The Superstructure, on the other hand,
is secondary in that it is derived from the primary Economic Base
and is comprised of various social institutions, such as some form
of political administration, a legal system, religious
organisations an educational system a particular philosophical
world view, a moral code, and specific artistic and cultural
practices, and the political, legal, religious, philosophical,
moral, and aesthetic ideologies that predominate within these
institutions.
The Marxist model was proposed in the 1840s to
deal with the capitalist economics of the urbanising societies that
were then coming into being through industrialisation. These
days it is clear that the global economy has to be aligned with
Earth’s limited supply of renewable resources.
From this viewpoint ecological limitations on human production
require a change in the economic base to define a society that is
disciplined to balance the organisation of people for production
(political economy) and the organisation of nature for production
(natural economy).
The
economic base of cultural ecology consists of five behavioural
pillars, which support a superstructure consisting of nine sets of
ideas which define living sustainably. This structure is presented
in the following two diagrams.
Together, the modern base and infrastructure
model, expressed as cultural ecology, defines the cross-curricular
framework necessary to promote the new economics of living
sustainably. The strategy for environmental management to
achieve these ends is set out in Agenda 21 of the 1992 Rio
Environment Summit.
Cultural ecology
defines the webs of perception and action that lock individuals
together in geographical space as societies. They are focused
on balancing the exploitation of environmental resources for
production with the conservation of resources to ensure survival of
the community. This balancing act involves technological,
sociological and ideological management systems.
The technological aspect
of management is concerned with tools, materials and
machines. The sociological aspect involves the
relationships into which people enter especially in work and at
home in the family. These two aspects encompass topics that deal
respectively with the exploitation of resources
through production and demand.
The ideological aspect comprises
beliefs, rituals, magical practices, art, ethics, religious
practices and myths. These define the permissible and acceptable
relationships with nature, and more often than not, are part of a
local system for conserving resources. In developed civilisations
the ideological package includes the philosophies and legal systems
of the society. Changes in technology and social organisation will
bring forth changes in the ideas and beliefs that connect people
with local and planetary resources, and also define humans in the
wider cosmos, but such ideas will always feed back on the social
organisation, which moves forward.
The ideological
aspects of the conservation of resources are
expressed
-
through ideas about 'nature' and
'place', as these have developed historically to provide
philosophical, artistic and spiritual values for defining present
day environmentalism;
-
through science, as applied
ecology, which underlies farming and wildlife
conservation;
-
and through living in
nature using traditional ecological knowledge to realise
global and local strategies of resource management.
All these aspects define the two major routes of
Western reasoning about nature. On the one hand, since the 18th
century, there has been a ready acceptance of the scientific drive
for the domination of nature. On the other hand, the environmental
outcomes of this mode of activity has precipitated the ecological
search for intrinsic value in nature and its preservation.
These two rival
views of the relationship between humans and nature define cultural
ecology as a fluid mind-map to steer a global society toward
sustainability.The rivalry comes from fragmentation of civil
society in the pursuit of profit and status. Only as conscious
agents of cultural revolution that promotes a balanced synthesis of
the exploitative and conserving segments of society can we harness
our species' ecological potential for a sustainable
future.
The twentieth
century opened with a revolution in our attitude to the world about
us. It sprang spontaneously from all branches of culture and from
all countries across a Europe which stretches from Russia to
Spain.
The discoveries of
Einstein in outer space corresponded with those of Jung into the
inner subconscious. Ecology began to shape the modern perspective
of our place in nature. The arts themselves exploded into a
new environmental dimension. No longer was the inquiring mind
satisfied with appearance, scientists and artists became travellers
in the subconscious to define the relationship between people and
environment that was more comprehensive than the search for natural
resources. Thus the artist set out to combine the invisible with
the visible, the abstract with the figurative. Foremost among the
artists was Paul Klee, who dug deep into the subconscious to pull
out images that puzzle, delight and unaccountably
exhilarate.
The literature of
man’s relationship to environment is prolific and diverse,
yet it is an amazing fact that there is no single publication
currently available that offers a comprehensive survey of the range
of elements and their component parts which today we recognise as
constituting the cultural environment. No compendium exists
which views all these realities both in their physical and their
inspirational aspects to describe and examine the phenomena of the
earth's surface that we include in the concept of cultural
ecology.
We are part of
nature from birth, and thus inside it, and nevertheless look at it
from the outside, as an alien world. This double position
leads to a lack of clarity. The biologist Jean Dausset writes:
'Nature does not speak, it is man who speaks. Man is unique in
assembling and transmitting through words and pictures, the message
of nature. Man gives nature a voice'.
Hans Ddieter Schaal
says we are at one and the same time inhabitants, observers, users,
spokesmen, admirers, consumers and destroyers of nature. Nature is
visible and invisible at the same time.
“The
visible outer skin is available to the eye, the forces of nature
work largely invisibly. Life and death occur in silence,
reservedly. The heart beats, the lungs breathe, thoughts come and
go, blood circulates, the digestive system works away - everything
is part of nature. A crack runs through the middle of the ego, a
crack dividing inside from outside, subject from object, ego from
nature, consciousness from the world”.
All structures and
compositions that result from the use of natural resources are
ecological bridges across the cracks in the cultural space between
object and subject.
“Processes
of confrontation, interconnection, superimposition, intensification
and encirclement are triggered. Windows and doors acquire the
function of ways through, paths and squares become areas of
encounter and greater closeness for man and
nature”.