Balance of Nature as Ecological Imaginary (AFS presentation)

Tarangire National Park, Tanzania. Courtesty of Zenith 4237, Wikimedia Commons.

 

 On Saturday, November 4, our DERT (Diverse Environmental Research Team) group led a forum at the American Folklore Society annual conference on the subject of Ecological Imaginaries. My brief presentation was on the idea of the balance of nature as a Euro-American ecological imaginary. Here's what I said:

      I want to speak about one of Euro-America’s enduring myths, the ecological imaginary that is called the balance of nature. By myth here I don’t mean something supernatural. I mean a metanarrative that imbues history with teleology; that is, nature exhibits aesthetic and ethical purpose. Nature is said to be balanced in the sense that just as water seeks its own level, nature possesses a kind of economy. In other words, left pretty much to its own devices, nature finds an equilibrium about which it can sustain itself indefinitely. In scientific terms, balanced natural ecosystems are self-regulating, like a pendulum, or like a thermostat moving the temperature about a set point. A corollary is the diversity-stability hypothesis: that ecosystem stability increases with biodiversity.

     Of course, you’ve heard of the virtues of balance in daily life. We’re told to eat a balanced diet. If you’ve streamed television lately you’ve surely seen ads for the dietary supplement called balance of nature, with one pill containing vegetables and the other fruits in powdered form. Talk about ultra-processed foods! and yet they’re advertised as healthful. And surely you know the folkloric expression “don’t keep all your eggs in one basket.” This actually is a proverbial expression of the diversity-stability hypothesis.

     Well, the balance of nature is an old idea that one can find from ancient and medieval European history through the Enlightenment and Modernity. About “the economy of nature” the great naturalist Linnaeus wrote that “Providence not only aimed at sustaining, but also keeping a just proportion amongst all the species.” Darwin’s evolutionary natural selection is but a secular expression of natural balance. In the 20th century, the idea of the ecosystem, with its food chain and food web, its producers, consumers, and decomposers, became the model for ecological study, taken as instances of natural balance. Balance of nature among organisms, populations, communities and ecosystems organized the major ecology textbooks throughout most of the last century.

     Ecology also provided scientific support for the efforts of conservationists and environmentalists in the last century. Some ecological scientists, such as Rachel Carson and Eugene Odom, also became environmentalists and helped bring about the EPA and its public policies that are intended to protect endangered species (including ourselves) from pathogenic industrial civilization and restore ecological balance.

     Probably the most far-reaching contemporary example of natural balance is Gaia. Gaia, as you know, is the name for the hypothesis that the Earth itself is alive—that is, that the Earth considered as a whole, all the plants and animals and geological formations and its atmosphere, is naturally self-regulating and seeks a sustainable equilibrium. In other words, Gaia represents balance of nature and diversity-stability writ large. Gaia theory has been endorsed by environmentalists of all stripes, from practical problem-solvers to so-called deep ecologists.

     There is, however, a problem with balance of nature in the 21st century. Not only do the vast majority of ecological scientists not accept Gaia, balance of nature has been discarded by ecological science. As early as 1973 ecologist Robert May demonstrated that the more diverse was an ecosystem, the more fragile it was. It now seems as if stability does not depend on biodiversity. Other ecologists observed environmental complexity that could only be explained by chaos theory, leading to the current ecosystem paradigm, which indicates that when confronted with significant disturbances, complex ecosystems disintegrate. Today's ecological scientists portray the state of nature not in terms of economy and balance but by its opposite: instability, flux, and complexity (chaos), whether humankind’s hand is present or absent.

     Nevertheless, the myth of a balanced nature persists among environmentalists and in the public mind. It even affects public policy. I don’t have time to get into details here, but consider whether, if and when carbon neutrality or net zero emissions is actually achieved, the Earth’s climate will swing back into its previous, desirable balance point, or remain in its then-current regime and continue to wreak havoc.

     Summing up, then: balance of nature is a powerful ecological imaginary. Balance of nature is also a national myth, the kind of myth that folklorists such as Alan Dundes wrote about in Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded (the Horatio Alger myth) or Dick Dorson wrote about, such as the frontier myth, when his topic was folklore in America versus American folklore. The expressive culture of balance of nature offers a fertile field for folkloric exploration, whether the subject is dietary supplements or climate change. Many of us are going to end with a question for everyone in the room. Mine is this: how does balance of nature figure in your ecological imaginary, and how does it figure in the ecological imaginaries of the people who are your field partners?

Biodiversity, the Sound Commons, and the Great Chain of Being

    One of the pillars of the argument for a sound commons is biodiversity. It is in a commonwealth of sound, with every living being communicating in their acoustic niche, that biodiversity is best expressed and maintained. Biodiversity is so well entrenched an idea within ecological theory and environmentalist thought that it comes as a surprise to learn that the word itself, derived from the phrase biological diversity, was coined only about 25 years ago, in 1985.[1] It is usually understood to mean life forms in all their variety. It has become axiomatic that biodiversity is an index to ecosystem health; the greater the diversity, the healthier the ecosystem. This holistic approach to biological variation also provides a rationale for conservation.

One kind of diversity

    I am curious about the rapid acceptance of this concept despite its imprecise character. Where, after all, is biodiversity located? We hear of biodiverse ecosystems, or biodiverse communities, or biodiverse species, or of a biodiversity of species traits and functions, or of biodiversity at the gene level. In fact, biodiversity embraces all levels and puts them in a “full hierarchy of variation."[2] But then, how to measure biodiversity, and how to maintain it overall, becomes more difficult. At what level of the hierarchy should the conservationist, who does not have unlimited powers or resources, intervene? Besides, interventions at one level may have unintended and harmful consequences at another. But leaving these problems aside for the moment, why has the idea of biodiversity become so pervasive, and why has it been almost universally accepted, not only among ecologists, but also environmentalists and the general public?
    One of the reasons for biodiversity’s appeal is that it distills common sense: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Many baskets, more chances. “Hedge your bets.” That is, the idea behind biodiversity, the comparative advantage of many different investments, so to speak, rather than one single large investment, aids in successful adaptation and resilience against misfortune, whether, for example, in farming (mixed farming as opposed to monoculture) or in buying lottery tickets. The commonsense advantages of diversifying have been known for centuries, if not millennia.
    Another reason for biodiversity’s appeal is less obvious but no less powerful: its congruence with a very old and pervasive worldview in Euro-American thought, the great chain of being, turning on the twin concepts of plenitude (fullness, plenty) and continuity. Plentitude and continuity are at the heart of that metaphor which intellectual historian Arthur Lovejoy traced nearly a century ago in the William James Lectures at Harvard: “The result was the plan and structure of the world which, through the Middle Ages and down to the late 18th century, many philosophers, most men of science, and, indeed, most educated men, were to accept without question—the conception of the universe as a Great Chain of Being, composed by an immense . . . number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents, which barely escape non-existence, through every possible grade . . . up to the highest possible creature. . . “[3]
    This worldview centered in a hierarchical chain of creation, with its roots in Plato, Aristotle, and particularly in Neoplatonism, bears an obvious resemblance to the “hierarchy of variation” in contemporary ecological thought, not only in terms of plenitude, continuity, and hierarchy, but also in its bias toward holism. Of course, the chain of being is also notably different from biodiversity in the sense that sitting atop the chain was the Creator. Nevertheless, the resemblance is so striking as to suggest an important reason for the rapid and general acceptance of biodiversity; if biodiversity somehow “seems right,” it is in part because of the residue of this once most powerful worldview.
    Are we dealing with mere resemblances, or was there a period in the history of Euro-American ideas when the great chain turned into biodiversity; and if the latter, how did that occur? Of course, certain underlying assumptions about the universe, that it is patterned and rational, as well as that its laws are humanly discoverable, helped. But I would suggest that as the great chain began to lose force in the late Enlightenment and early Romantic eras, it was gradually replaced by the ideas of diversity and the balance of nature; and that biodiversity was coined much later on to foreground the already-understood idea of biological diversity.
    We have already encountered ideas of “Nature’s economy” and balance in many earlier blog entries; suffice it to say here that Gilbert White was marveling, in his letters from Selborne in the 1770s, over plenitude and balance in nature—balance conceived not so much as equilibrium but as economy, of Nature taking care of its own. In other words, for White, Nature’s economy was an expression of the great chain, just as it was for natural historians such as Linnaeus. Although for White, a cleric, God was at the head of the chain, a Creator is not a requirement for the concept. Natural theology in the early 19th century was an attempt to reconcile those incongruities. Darwin himself wrestled with that problem, of course, as did many scientists in the mid-19th century. Notable among them in the US were Louis Agassiz (who would not abandon the idea of God at the head and separate creations to explain the variety in nature) and Asa Gray (who eventually came around to the more secular view). Even the naturalist Thoreau embraced Darwin’s idea of evolution. Upon examination, Darwin’s idea of evolution retains the concepts of plenitude and continuity.
     What about diversity? Again, Lovejoy is helpful. He broadly characterizes the Enlightenment as a period in Euro-American intellectual history when classic ideals prevailed, “controlled by the assumption that, in each phase of his activity, man should conform as nearly as possible to a standard conceived as universal, uncomplicated, immutable, uniform for every rational being."[4] The single classic ideal began to be displaced, in the late eighteenth century, by diversity. Again, Lovejoy: “It came to be believed not only that in many, or in all, phases of human life there are diverse excellences, but that diversity itself is of the essence of excellence; and that in art, in particular, the objective is neither the attainment of some single ideal perfection of form in a small number of fixed genres nor the gratification of that least common denominator of aesthetic susceptibility which is shared by all mankind and all ages, but rather the fullest possible expression of the abundance of differentness that there is, actually and potentially, in nature and human nature, and – for the function of the artist in relation to his public – the invocation of capacities for understanding, sympathy, enjoyment, which are as yet latent in most men, and perhaps never capable of universalization. And these assumptions, though assuredly not the only important, are one of the common, factors in a number of otherwise diverse tendencies which, by one or another critic or historian, have been termed ‘Romantic’. . .”[5]
    Lovejoy is writing here chiefly in reference to art, not science; but we must remember that the divisions between the two were not so great in the eighteenth century as they are today. In short, although biodiversity and the acoustic niche hypothesis are current, they are an expression of very old and pervasive ideas about nature in Euro-American intellectual history, plenitude and continuity; and on such a foundation do they rest—a foundation that is under a twin challenge. One challenge comes from ecologists, who no longer believe in Nature’s economy or a balance of nature, but who nevertheless retain a belief in interdependence and biodiversity. Are those beliefs incompatible? And a second challenge comes from those deconstructionists who hold that the Romantic idea of nature is only that—an idea, and that it must be abandoned if we are to achieve a postmodern ecology worth wanting. We shall see.

Notes

1. "Biodiversity," in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/biodiversity/
2. Ibid.
3. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Harvard University Press, 1964 [1933]), p. 59.
4. Ibid., p. 292.
5. Ibid., p. 293.

Photograph: Crowd listening at a festival, 2010, Bangor, Maine. Photo by Jeff Todd Titon.

Animal Rights and the Sound Commons

Animal Rights Demonstration

     I have argued in favor of a sound commons for all living beings, not just humans. All species, I claim, ought to be able to exist and communicate in their acoustic niches. On what basis might I make such a claim? Is it necessary in this case to claim that animals have rights? And if so, of what kind?
    I have observed three main lines of argument in favor of animal rights. One, which is many centuries old and is generally accepted in the West, is the argument that because animals have feelings and can suffer pain, they must not be treated cruelly. Indeed, in Europe and North America laws against animal cruelty have been enforced since the 17th century. The second line of argument makes a more radical claim, that animals (at least, the higher ones) are like human beings in that they can think, learn, feel joy as well as pain, and act altruistically as well as selfishly. Therefore, the argument runs, like humans, they possess natural rights to be able to live their lives to the fullest extent possible. This more radical argument gained momentum in the past forty years or so, as the environmental movement has embraced “wildness,” and animal rights groups have formed to advocate on their behalf. A third argument claims that animals should be granted rights because the consequences of doing so are beneficial to all living creatures, including human beings.

Animal cooperation

     Of course, many people oppose extending rights to animals. Some of these arguments are familiar: animals are dangerous to human beings; humans need to use animals for food and medical experiments, and thus our need for animals trumps any rights they may have; or domestic animals are property and property cannot possess rights. Some philosophers argue that animals cannot possess natural rights because they lack moral agency. “Rights and liberty are political concepts applicable to human beings because human beings are moral agents [who act in a] sphere of moral jurisdiction where their authority to act is respected and protected so it is they, not intruders, who govern themselves and either succeed or fail in their moral tasks. . . No animal rights theorist proposes that animals be tried for crimes and blamed for moral wrongs.” (Tibor R. Machan, “Do Animals Have Rights?” Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 5, no. 2, April 1991, pp. 163-4). Yet, humans sometimes punish domestic animals when they misbehave, as if they did know right from wrong. And some scientists have questioned the assumption that animals lack moral agency, citing instances of animal altruism and cooperation as evidence that animals can understand the difference between right and wrong, and therefore they are moral beings and have natural rights.
    Another argument against natural rights for animals is made on the grounds that rights carry duties or obligations. A tenant in an apartment has certain legal rights. One of these is the right to reasonable privacy; the landlord must not invade that privacy without due notice and cause. A tenant also has certain duties to the landlord, such as treating the apartment with care and keeping it in good condition. However, the tenant has the right to working heat, plumbing, and so forth, while the landlord has the duty to provide it. Rights and duties are reciprocal in this way. Others have a duty not to interfere unreasonably with my right to liberty, and I have a similar duty not to interfere with theirs. Rights cannot function without reciprocal duties, but the reciprocity also involves an ethical dimension presumed to be absent in non-humans.
    Indeed, even some of Locke’s near-contemporaries thought that the natural rights argument was weak, and that other arguments, based not on unprovable assumptions about inherent rights but, rather, based on favorable (and testable) consequences if rights were granted, made a stronger case. These instrumental arguments included utilitarianism, pragmatism, and so forth. The cultural equity argument, for example, turns not only on the idea of natural (cultural) rights but also instrumentality in those instances when it is argued that cultural diversity represents a kind of bank of various distinct knowledges and practices, all of which contribute (and may in the future contribute) to humankind. The usual example is cultural knowledge of medicinal plants; however, there are many other cultural adaptations. The argument for cultural diversity is similar in this sense to the biodiversity argument against species extinction and is partly derived from it.
    It does not seem to me to be necessary to grant full natural rights to animals in order to make a case for a sound commons for all living beings. One does not need to consider moral agency, or rights and duties. It is sufficient to grant animals a right to life. Although the argument in favor of biodiversity is an instrumentalist argument, while the animal rights argument is based on premise and deduction, both agree that animals must live; and if they must live, then they must do the things that enable them to live: eat, reproduce, and so forth. And one of the things animals must do in order to keep themselves alive is communicate with one another—with potential and actual mates; with members of their own species; and with predators.
     Animals communicate in several ways, but the most frequent are through sight, smell, and sound. Everyone has observed dogs marking territory with their scents, or cats puffing up their fur and making themselves look bigger to a potential enemy. And everyone has heard birds singing and other animals communicating through sound. But noise pollution does not affect humans only, as our example with the helicopters, caribou, and Innu people showed. Increasingly we are learning that noise interferes with animal communication generally, and diminishes animal capacity for survival. Animal communication through sound (zoosemiotics) is an interdisciplinary science that has come into its own in the last helf-century. We now know far more about animal communication than we did in the past. I will be exploring some of this knowledge concerning zoosemiotics and its implications for music, sound, and sustainability in future blog entries.

Ecosystem as descriptor

     One of the key concepts in the argument for a sound commons for all living beings is the ecosystem, an ecological paradigm that stresses the interconnectedness of animals, plants, and minerals within a bounded geographical area. Interconnectedness is also one of the four principles I identified in my work on musical and cultural sustainability.[1] Of course, there is much more to an ecosystem than interconnectedness; and fifty years ago when the concept governed ecological science, ecologists worked with mathematical models to determine the flow of energy among the components of ecosystems. Nowadays, the word ecosystem is cropping up all over the place. I began to notice this a while ago, in the phrase “the Apple ecosystem.” Today it’s difficult to find an article about a new Apple or Google product that doesn’t speak metaphorically of their ecosystems. Now that I’m watching for it, I also see the term to describe the financial ecosystem, the urban ecosystem, and the digital ecosystem. Ecosystem hasn’t yet become as ubiquitous as the word sustainable, but it won’t be long before it does.
    What can ecosystem mean outside of its ecological science context? I’ve seen it used, first, as a synonym for system where “eco” appears to add value but doesn’t because “system” will do just as well by itself. Second, it's used as a synonym for an integrated but closed system. Third, it appears as a descriptor for an open, interdependent, co-evolving community, a complex system with a degree of uncertainty--predictions of its behavior cannot be more than probable. It is this last usage that is of particular interest to me. Tellingly, although they imply opposite kinds of systems (closed vs. open), both the second and third usages arose from interpretations of Apple’s business model.
     As a synonym for an integrated but closed system, it comes up in phrases such as “locked into the Apple ecosystem.” Here it refers to how Apple components (hardware, software and media) work with one another but not with non-Apple components.  For example, writing in The Guardian (UK), Benjamin Cohen reviewed the new iPhone 5: “. . . the real reason this device will still be a success and why I upgraded to another iPhone recently, is that all the applications and content I've purchased over the past four years will only work on an Apple product. I'm locked into the Apple ecosystem just like tens of millions of others. That's the true magic of Apple, luring us into using their pieces of technology and then selling us applications, music and video that are locked to their proprietary formats and products. It's a clever tactic and one that looks like it'll keep us hooked for a years to come.” [2]
    Such descriptions of the Apple ecosystem emphasize the pleasure as well as the pain of the tender trap. Here is another: “Every couple of months articles crop up on the Internet calling Apple’s ecosystem a ‘walled garden’ or a ‘golden cage.’ These articles usually try to convince the reader that Apple has lured users into a trap using design/popularity/marketing, shut the door behind them and thrown away the key.” [3]
    The third contemporary usage of “ecosystem” also describes an integrated system, but one that is open rather than closed. Interdependence and evolution are emphasized. A recent book review is a case in point: ”Might DNA be likened to a digital program, and might computer programs themselves evolve within our complex ecosystem of information technology and assume virtual life?” [4] The ideal digital ecosystem is similar: an open, collaborative platform.
    James F. Moore, a systems theorist, applied this open system ecological model to business communities. In a 1993 article, Moore argued that successful contemporary corporations were changing from traditional, vertically integrated, competitive organizations to innovative, collaborative institutions working with partner organizations (suppliers, distributors, accessory-makers) as well as customers in co-evolving communities of common interest and purpose. In his view, successful corporations did not compete with each other so much as build business ecosystems. For an illustration he compared Apple's successful computer community with the older logic of the Tandy organization. Readers born before 1975 might remember the Tandy TRS-80, a popular personal computer from the mid-1980s that ceased manufacture. By contrast, Steve Jobs was said to have built not just computers but the business equivalent of a surviving ecological community. [5]
    Moore’s 1996 book, The Death of Competition, elaborates the business ecosystem analogy explicitly and in great detail. He defines a business ecosystem as follows: “An economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organizations and individuals—the organisms of the business world. This economic community produces goods and services of value to consumers, who are themselves members of the ecosystem. The member organisms also include suppliers, lead producers, competitors [sic] and other stakeholders. Over time, they co-evolve their capabilities and roles . . ." [6].
    As I pointed out earlier in this blog, back in 1984 I published my thoughts on how music cultures were ecosystems, with music in a musical community circulating like energy in an ecological community. [7] But although I made a comparison to a biological ecosystem to describe worlds of musical activity, as Moore used it ten years later to describe worlds of business activity, I did not publish an article and a book elaborating the concept. Ten years later, Moore did, and his remarkable work deserves further attention, which I will reserve for the next blog entry.
     Suffice it to say now that while Moore views business ecosystems as politically revolutionary, progressive and positive, those who think of them as closed systems regard them as dangerous manifestations of late capitalism. For another, as the word ecosystem becomes increasingly ubiquitous in public discourse, its meaning diffuses outside of its original and precise context in ecological science; and this must be taken into account in descriptions of communication among creatures—perhaps “ecological community” rather than ecosystem is a more worthy term, though the word “community” has problems of its own.
     Finally, of course, whereas ecosystem as a concept can fairly be said to have organized the discipline of ecology for most of the 20th century, challenges eventually arose to the idea that nature behaved systematically at all. Ecosystem’s association with the increasingly problematic paradigm of stability, climax, holism and the balance of nature seemed too teleological, lessened its usefulness, and after about 1980 displaced it from the center of ecological science, even as it was gaining ground as a metaphor elsewhere. Yet despite its lowered status, other aspects associated with ecosystem, such as biodiversity and interdependence, retain their central importance in contemporary ecological science.

Notes

[1] Jeff Todd Titon, “Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint,” The World of Music, Vol. 51, no. 1 (2009), pp. 119-137.
[2] Benjamin Cohen, “Caught in an Apple World,” The Guardian (UK), Sept. 13, 2012, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/13/iphone-5-caught-in-apple-world
[3]  “The state of Apple’s Ecosystem lock-in, and where we’re at today,” Macgasm essay (no author named),  Feb. 9, 2012, at http://www.macgasm.net/2012/02/09/state-apples-ecosystem-lockin/
[4] Michael Saler, review of George Dyson, Turning’s Cathedral, Times Literary Supplement, nos. 5725 & 5726, Dec. 21 and 28, 2012, p. 31.
[5] James F. Moore, “Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition,” Harvard Business Review, May-June, 1993, pp. 76-85.
[6] James F. Moore, The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems, New York, HarperCollins, 1996, p. 26.
[7] Jeff Todd Titon, Worlds of Music, New York, Schirmer Books, 1984, p. 9.

The photo at the beginning of this entry shows new growth of skunk cabbages arising from roots in the fall as the old spring growth decays. The new, green spaeths and decaying, blackened spadices are apparent. Click on the photo to enlarge it for better viewing. Photograph by Jeff Todd Titon, East Penobscot Bay, September, 2012.

A Sound Commons for All Living Beings

Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904): Orchids, Nesting Hummingbirds, and a Butterfly

     Human beings should attempt to manage the soundscape as a sound commons to permit all creatures to communicate with one another in their acoustic niches. That is my thesis, but it requires elaborating and defending. Besides, these questions regarding the sound environment are part of a larger public discourse concerning whether and how to manage the natural environment, a discourse that historically has been bound up with economics in a variety of important ways. Recall that ecology and economics come from the same Greek root, oikos, meaning household.
    Elaborating this argument requires discussion of several concepts and resolution of a number of questions and objections. For example, while the law recognizes that you and I can own and exchange the fruits of our labor, whether goods or ideas, what sense can it possibly make to say that the chickadees that visit your bird feeder own their songs? Yet without song they could not signal one another and without communication they could not live. Commons, animal communication, soundscape, sound-world, acoustic niche, sound interference, biophony, geophony, anthrophony, soundscape ecology, property, cultural, intellectual, and natural property rights, ownership, stewardship, commodification, exchange, biodiversity, deep ecology, exploitation, regulation, management, wilderness, resources, set-asides, non-use—these are only some of the concepts that need to be explored and put into relation. In addition, of course, as the subject of this blog is music and sustainability, it’s important to locate the place of music (humanly organized sound) in soundscapes and sound-worlds.
    Among the questions and objections to a sound commons for all living beings are these: Must a commons be regarded as a resource to be used, propertized, regulated and, eventually, commodified? If “nature” is unknowable to us except through historically changing human constructions of it, is there a verifiably true basis for claiming a relationship between sound, communication, biodiversity, and a resilient planet? And why are all creatures, not just humans, entitled to their acoustic spaces, bats and snakes and locusts as well as you and I? In such a case, what would it mean to model management of the sound commons on nature’s economy? And why have any confidence in human ability to manage at all, when humans have gotten us into this predicament in the first place? I’ve been exploring many of these concepts and questions in this blog since 2008, and now it is time to run a bit of order through them and place them in relation to make the larger argument.
    In my previous entry I suggested that while the acoustic ecology movement’s efforts to eliminate noise pollution from the soundscape were laudable, the human-centeredness of this approach was too narrow. Those of us who exclaim “I can’t hear myself think!” are responding to sound pollution. But noise interference affects all creatures who communicate using sound, whether humans, whales, or spadefoot toads. Communication is basic to life, but like many other aspects of the environment it is under threat, chiefly from human activity. The helicopter noise impacts communication among caribou which in turn impacts the Innu way of life. A more dramatic example of interdependence among all living creatures would be difficult to find. Developing this argument will not be simple, but summary of the argument is clear enough: human beings should do what we can to manage, not damage, the soundscape, and do so to enable all creatures, not just humans, to communicate in their acoustic niches. If we are able to do so, the music of all living beings will flourish, and sound communication will contribute to sustaining a healthy, biodiverse planet.

In print

The special issue of the journal The World of Music has just been published--the one on music and sustainability, with outstanding essays from scholars Tom Turino, Mark DeWitt, Lois Wilcken, Janet Topp-Fargion, and Tom Faux, along with my essay on an ecological approach to musical sustainability, and my editor's introduction to the entire volume. The wheels of publication turn slowly, but they do turn; now we shall wait to see what response is forthcoming.

In the meantime, a seminar during the current semester on music and cultural policy has helped inform me on what some others have been saying about these issues. I've refrained from commenting on the seminar here because, of course, the students know about this research blog, and I would prefer that they formulate their own ideas in response to the topic and weekly assignments. Still, it's plain that much of the discourse revolving around heritage and cultural tourism and engines of sustainability is based in economics; some is based in cultural studies. To date ecology has contributed only a little, by way of the concepts of biodiversity and conservation; my hope is that others will begin to think about how conservation works (and does not work) in ecology, and not simply borrow the concepts. For example, there is an interesting values-based critique of biodiversity that I hope will be the subject of a future post here.

Obviously, one of the things that fascinates me is the way these two discourses, economics and ecology, employ the concept of sustainability. I began to write about this in the paper for the American Folklore Society last fall--printed in its entirety in this blog a few months ago--and now I wish to explore it further. And so I've been reading not just in economics but in the field of ecological economics, to see what is out there.