Ecology, Development and Global Policy

Abstract

It is, I suppose, a reductio ad absurdurn to say that all sciences are ultimately co-terminous with the universe and with the total sum of human philosophy. Yet physicists and cosmologists come together to debate the unification of gravitational, electromagnetic and nuclear forces, with chemists absorbed into the convergence well before that point is reached. Theologians have been swept into the process by their debate over openness within the creative process of the universe, and over whether all living beings co-create the future with God (Polkinghorne 1988; Gosling 1992). Ecology, as the branch of science which attempts to define and explain the relationship between living organisms and their environment, cannot avoid being drawn into this process of conceptual unification. Ecology is concerned with all life in the universe, its origins and evolution, its interactions, and its future. It emerges as the natural location for the unifying theory within biology, and between the biological and physical sciences. Ecology is so all-embracing that it is not surprising to find elements of it in many social traditions long before Hlaeckel coined the term in 1866. Indeed, since all sciences are, after all, codifications (and generally simplifications) of observed or inferred systems. its roots are likely to reach way back to the earliest developments of human awareness. Today, it is apparent that the life styles of many indigenous peoples have at least some semblance of sustainable relationship with the natural resources on which they depend, and in this sense follow ecological principles even if they have not codified them. Land management in many agricultural and pastoral societies likewise follows codes of sound practice, based on observation and trial-and-error learning. Foresters, hunters, gardeners. and those who have tried to make laws that guide the use of natural resources have drawn on this codex. But it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century, in Europe, that what we might call 'normative ecology' emerged. It is interesting that very soon after Haeckel first used the term, two strands were apparent: one 'an anti-mechanistic, holistic approach to biology', and the other 'a new approach to economics called energy economics' (Bramwell 1989) (Fig. 1). The science of ecology, which this Society was founded to advance, split off at an early stage from what became political and social processes, but we should not forget those other strands, for in the past two decades there has been a new convergence which provides the context for this lecture. Let me, therefore, at least turn a flashlamp on a few signposts on the political road, even though I do not propose to walk all the way along it. It began with the recognition that the human species was inextricably tangled in the total web of life (in this Haeckel, Darwin, Huxley, Wallace and many others shared overlapping visions). It went on to views about ideal societies that evolved and diversified in many strange ways. The 'back to the land movement' of the 1920s; the Kibbo Kift Kin; the novelist's idealistic visions of the rural past; Marxism and Nazi philosophy; all variously drew from this stem of thought as Anna Bramwell has illustrated in her history of ecology in the twentieth century: a book that reveals an 'ecology' that hardly anyone in this hall will readily identify with the scientific discipline in which we were nurtured. Yet we must not ignore that 'political ecology', for it has had a major influence on the state of the Earth today. It evolved from the initial recognition of holism in nature, through many curious by-ways, to the post-1950 Green Movement, only to converge with 'scientific ecology' in the modern concept of 'sustainable development' and the global political * Thc text of the Second BES Lceture dclivcred during the Wintcr and Annual General Meeting at the University of Stirling, Scotland on 5 January 1994. 201