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?

Conservation, environmentalism, ecology

    A review of a new biography of Rachel Carson, one of the pioneers of modern environmentalism, affords an opportunity to compare and contrast three keywords in my work on music and sustainability—all of which are very much involved in contemporary sustainability discourse here and elsewhere. Those keywords are conservation, environmentalism, and ecology.
    Carson’s book, Silent Spring (1962), with its warnings about agricultural pesticides' effects on bird and other animal life, ushered in the modern era of environmentalism in North America. Carson wrote it while living on a remote island in Maine where she witnessed DDT's impact on bald eagles. Tim Flannery, who reviewed the biography in the New York Review of Books for November 22, 2012, writes that the biography's author, William Souder, argues that Silent Spring “‘marks the birth of the "bitterly divisive" concept of environmentalistm. Before it, environmental politics was characterized, he says, by the ‘gentle, optimistic proposition called “conservation,” which concerns the wise use of resources and has broad appeal across the political spectrum. Environmentalism, in contrast, can be politically polarizing because it involves a clash with vested interests'” (1). Of course, Carson was not the first environmentalist; Thoreau was one in the 19th century, and arguably so was the Englishman Gilbert White in the 18th. One might even make a case for John Bartram, a botanist (in the American Colonies) who lived a generation before White.
    But although we can point to earlier 20th-century North American, science-grounded environmentalists such as Aldo Leopold, Carson was the first to change public consciousness. Indeed, Carson’s work was polarizing: while President Kennedy and the general public took her side, the chemical companies who manufactured pesticides tried to discredit Carson, influence the public debate her book ushered in, and lobby Congress to prevent the eventual ban on DDT. Carson prevailed. Since then, of course, many global corporations have done their best to fight environmentalists in similar ways, adding greenwashing and large campaign contributions to their arsenal.
    At issue here is the distinction between conservation and environmentalism. Among early conservationists in the US, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, and again in the 1930s with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the guiding principle was so-called wise use, which included public recreation and managed extraction of natural resources; the National Parks are examples. But even in the early period, and especially during the CCC era, more radical voices argued for setting wilderness areas aside: not wise use, but either light use or no use at all. The keyword "conservation" still implies a compromise between strict environmentalists who would severely limit or prohibit use, and “wise use” conservationists. In contemporary sustainability discourse, the wise use faction is represented by those who advocate “sustainable development” which, to use the words Flannery quotes from Souder, is a “gentle, optimistic proposition” and one under which certain developers and environmentalists find common ground.
    Besides wise use, conservation also bears another cross as a movement supported by the wealthy at the expense of the poor. The National Parks (Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountain) that were built in the southern Appalachians, for example, were established by eminent domain; that is, the federal government dispossessed the inhabitants (chiefly subsistence farmers) against their will and resettled them elsewhere “for the good of the Nation.” Such dispossession by the law of eminent domain is not exactly a new thing in the US, and there is a shameful history behind it (consider, for example, the treatment of Native Americans).

Local forest path

     And if one looks around today at the various conservation heritage trusts, the ones that receive charitable contributions from the wealthy to buy up land and turn it into preserves for nature trails, ocean access, farmland preservation, and the like, the question arises as to who uses these preserves. In my part of the US, as in many others, they're for those with money, leisure and an aesthetic interest in nature--in short, for environmentalists. The heritage trusts do not set aside land for trailer parks and RV campgrounds or for ATV and snowmobile use. Local naturalists in my part of Maine host a series of “walks and talks” through these forest and coastal preserves during the warmer months, for tourists and interested residents; subjects include local bird and animal life, geological formations, and other aspects of natural history. These rural preserves do not host visits from inner city residents who are below the poverty line; not only do the urban poor have no means of getting to them, but nature walks aren't high on their list of priorities.
    When conservation was first coupled with the word “cultural” beginning in the 1970s, the historic preservation model was applied to culture. Managed and wise use was the watchword, as federal and state agencies, historical societies, and NGOs got into the act. Cultural conservationists tried to manage cultural flow so that traditional expressive culture was not crowded out by what were felt to be the fads and fashions of modern, media-driven, popular culture. (I’ve written recently that those of us involved in cultural conservation and cultural sustainability need to be aware not only of cultural threats but also economic and environmental ones; I needn’t repeat that here.) Yet there was, in the early decades of cultural conservation, a kind of top-down, wise-use mentality in operation, one which has gradually and unevenly been giving way to cultural partnerships, participatory action research, and bottom-up management.
    As a keyword, environmentalism is usually distinguished from ecology in that the former is a political movement while the latter is a science. The distinction can be made clearer by saying that the science of ecology, like all science, aims to be objective and apolitical, or politically neutral; whereas environmentalism advocates in the political arena with its agenda to protect and preserve the natural environment. In this sense, it is plain that the conservation land trusts, with an ideology of environmentalism, ought to prohibit snowmobiles and ATVs from their nature trails if these tear up the land and bother the nearby animal inhabitants (human and otherwise) with their noise and fill the air with their carbon exhaust. Sometimes, of course, in popular discourse the word "ecology" is used when "environmentalism" is meant; people sometimes refer to “the ecology movement” as if they were referring to the environmental movement and at other times use the two words interchangeably. Indeed, even the word "ecosystem" is becoming common in public parlance.
    Yet in some instances this distinction between ecology and environmentalism is hard to maintain. For example, the science known as conservation biology (sometimes called conservation ecology) can be regarded as an applied ecology: environmentalism based on ecological principles.
    Just which ecological paradigm should rule, though, is a crucial question. Returning to the new book about Carson, Flannery reveals his own ecology-informed environmentalism. Concluding, he writes, “After recently rereading Silent Spring, I discussed Carson with an Indian friend, who put a question to me: ‘What is more orderly, a jungle or a garden?’ After a moment’s thought the answer became obvious. Of course it is the jungle, where the invisible laws of ecology dictate the relative abundance of plants and animals, and where they occur. The very shape and position of every leaf abides by those eternal rules” (p. 23). When Professor Flannery invokes the “invisible laws” and “eternal rules” of ecology he is thinking of the ecosystem paradigm in which nature in relatively pristine areas such as a jungle achieves a “balance” or equilibrium (the “relative abundance,” “shape and position of every leaf”) that it tends toward elsewhere, except when the balance is upset by human intervention (or as Joni Mitchell sang, “They paved paradise and they put up a parking lot”).
    The only problem with a balance of nature is that most ecologists—that is, the scientific ones—no longer believe in it. Beginning around the same time that cultural conservation arose in the public arena—the 1970s—ecologists began seriously to challenge such concepts as stable ecosystems, climax forests, and the balance of nature, arguing that the evidence indicates the opposite: that left undisturbed by humankind, the natural world does not move inevitably toward balance but is, rather, characterized by frequent perturbation, disturbance, and merely temporary equilibria—indeed, many different equilibrium points, one in which the relative abundance of plants and animals is always changing, as is the shape and position of every leaf.
     It is not accidental that ecologists were abandoning the balance of nature theory at about the same time that scientists were advancing chaos theory, a view of an uncertain universe that aligns with the new ecological paradigm of a natural world consisting not of ecosystems but of “patches” moving, in response to disturbing forces beyond their control, from one state toward another. How conservation biologists and environmentalists, let alone cultural conservationists and sustainability advocates, react today to this changed ecological paradigm depends on their awareness of it and how seriously they take it. Like a number of environmentalists, the reviewer for the New York Review of Books appears unaware of this paradigm shift. But to those who are aware, a concept like “resilience” is one way of responding—and I have blogged about resilience in this space before (please see the entry for July 21, 2011: "Sustainable Music: Resilience"). That is, resilience is the ability to resist or recombine in the face of perturbation or disturbance; management for resilience is one way to think about conservation under the new ecological paradigm.
     But there are other “downers” at work against environmentalism and musical and cultural sustainability. These include some of the obvious, such as the ideology of global corporate capitalism and neoliberalism; but it also includes powerful critiques (from critical theory) of science as privileged truth, and of environmentalists’ concepts of nature. It can even be supposed that environmentalism and sustainability efforts are themselves responses to the changed intellectual climate of the past forty years. In order to understand music and sustainability in its contemporary context, it’s important to view it not simply as a response to the changing natural and sociocultural environments, but also as a response to various currents in contemporary Theory which undermine old ideas of nature and culture. Some of the environmentalist response is, predictably, reactionary; but some of it attempts to think along with critical theory. I will be writing from and about this perspective in the coming months as I try to organize my thoughts on this music and sustainability project.

(1) Tim Flannery, review of William Souder, On a Farther Shore, New York Review of Books, Nov. 22, 2012, p. 21.

Photo "Local Forest Path" by Jeff Todd Titon, East Penobscot Bay, Maine, December 2005. 

The limits of green

What is the relation of music and sustainability to the humanities? I’ve been thinking about this subject for a few months now in preparation for a lecture in the University of New Hampshire’s Saul O. Sidore Lecture Series (March 21-22, 2012). The theme of this year’s series is “Sustainability Unbound” — unbound, that is, from “the limits of green,” as their poster puts it. (Go to http://www.sustainableunh.unh.edu/sustainabilityunbound#.TtV7NkyCbQw for information on this event.)

The context is this: the University of New Hampshire has a Sustainability Academy with faculty and outside fellows; it funds programs and curricular initiatives, monitors sustainability research, and tracks various UNH programs, centers, and institutes related to sustainability. Along with the UNH Center for the Humanities, they are sponsoring this lecture series. Five of us are to lecture at this two-day event which is open to the university community and the general public, and we are to explore the relation between sustainability and the humanities. We are, besides myself: Melissa Lane, a professor in the department of politics at Princeton, who is concerned with sustainability in ancient Greece and has focused attention on Plato's Republic; Lewis Hyde, whose work I’ve mentioned before in this blog, a professor at Kenyon and Harvard and a Macarthur Fellow. His book The Gift (1983) takes up many of the themes I’ve been concerned with over the decades in my own research; his most recent book, Common As Air, is a defense of our cultural commons. The other lecturers are Enrique Leff, a Mexican philosopher, economist and environmentalist; and Carol Mansour, a Lebanese/Palestinian filmmaker. I will be very interested in sharing ideas with them and with the UNH faculty, students, and general public.

What then, I wonder, do they mean by the limits of green? What first comes to mind is this: that there is more to living “green” than doing one’s part in conserving energy and recycling, which I suppose is how most people think of being "green." My university has a “Brown is Green” program which concentrates those two activities. Many colleges and universities have sustainability initiatives ranging from this sort of thing to attempts at making the entire campus sustainable in terms of energy use, with solar and wind power supplying all the electricity for example. Berea College, where I taught as Goode Visiting Professor of Appalachian Studies back in 1990, moved early in this direction, not only "greening" their campus but establishing an eco-village within the College featuring a permaculture forest, edible landscapes, ecologically designed buildings, and so forth. I find this interesting in that when I was a professor there, the College owned the oil-fired power plant which generated electricity for the entire city of Berea, Kentucky. If you lived in Berea, you paid your electric bill to the College. Your sewer and water bill, too. A quick check on the Internet reveals that Berea College Utilities is still in business, having merged with the city government only a few years ago. I could not find how much renewable energy the utility used to generate its power. Perhaps someone connected to the College will read this and let me know.

Another way to think about the “limits of green” is by considering what the humanities can add to a discourse that has been informed chiefly by the natural sciences (ecology) and the social sciences (economics). But one needs to recognize immediately that humanities thinking is already on board. Conserving endangered species, for example, is often justified both on instrumental and ethical grounds--and ethics is a traditional concern of the humanities. Here, it may be helpful to separate out two strands of “green” science. One is the ecological study of the natural world using objective and value-free empirical methods. (I will leave aside for the moment the powerful critique of scientific objectivity that arose in the second half of the twentieth century.) The other is the ecological study of the natural world guided explicitly by principles of justice, applying them to all species (including humans). This latter is a kind of applied ecology, putting ecology to practical use, and is usually termed conservation biology or conservation ecology. It provides a scientific basis for the ideology of environmentalism and “living green.” But it is also deeply grounded in the values of the humanities.

Systems and sustainability at the EPA

The federal Environmental Protection Agency “is undertaking what some call a ‘seismic shift in the way it works: making ‘sustainability’ its central goal,” said Bruce Gellerman on this morning’s public radio broadcast of Living on Earth. Jeff Young interviewed the new head of the EPA, Paul Anastas, who explained that instead of targeting for specific interventions, he “wants his scientists to think more broadly about systems and sustainability.” Anastas explained using climate change as an example: “Climate is inextricably linked to energy, energy inextricably linked to water, water to agriculture, agriculture to health, and we could go on and on. If we start saying that the entirety of our approach to sustainability is simply to reduce our carbon footprint or to look at any one aspect, then we will not be getting the power and potential of the synergies of looking from a systems approach.”

Anastas’ adoption of the systems approach indeed represents that shift from conservation thinking, in which particular problems such as endangered species are addressed by specific interventions, to ecological thinking, in which the principle of interconnectedness guides policy makers to look at the consequences of specific interventions in the context of the interdependence of the whole system or ecosystem. This is precisely the shift in thinking that I have been proposing for cultural interventions, based on the principle of interconnectedness, one of the four principles I’ve been speaking and writing about. I explain it most thoroughly in my essay, "Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint," in The World of Music, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2009), pp. 119-138.

 This kind of thinking underlies my proposals to feed the cultural soil, so to speak, rather than the particular arts or genres; in other words, to concentrate efforts in musical and cultural sustainability on improving the conditions that give a life to traditional music and expressive culture, rather than simply targeting endangered musical cultures for support, as UNESCO (the major institution involved in cultural sustainability throughout the world) has been doing in its efforts to safeguard intangible cultural heritage. I would hope that the same kind of shift in strategy that the new EPA head is espousing would translate to the institutions that are making cultural policy—not only UNESCO, but national agencies as well, such as arts councils, museums, historical societies, and traffickers in cultural and musical heritage.

But I’d add a word of caution. This kind of holistic thinking, which Anastas is adopting at the EPA, envisions a paradigmatic environmental system, one that claims that large ecosystems move through a succession of stages towards a balanced state in dynamic equilibrium. The climax forest concept is the usual example. But some contemporary ecologists have discarded this model of a balance of Nature in favor of one based in evolutionary biology, with blind chance and mutation as the driving factors over the (very) long term. This newer paradigm challenges Nature's economy (a concept that, incidentally, Darwin himself believed) and posits disturbance and disequilibrium as the new normal. Climate change on Earth, as it has occurred over hundreds of millions of years, is taken as the usual example. Because my thinking here is informed by ecology, it would be irresponsible not to consider this newer paradigm—welcomed in some quarters, damned in others—and its consequences, for music, cultural policy, and sustainability. I intend to do so in a number of future posts, particularly as I examine the role of music and sound in evolution. Evolution, as I wrote here many months ago, was once a forbidden topic among ethnomusicologists, but climate change effects ideas as well as temperature.

A visit to Portland, Oregon

    I'm just back from an exciting trip to Portland, Oregon, one of the most environmentally conscious areas of the U.S. Professor Darrell Grant, of the music department at Portland State University, invited me to speak on how music might take a seat at the table where sustainability was under discussion. He'd told me that sustainability was an important topic of conversation in his city, and that much good work was being done; but people were puzzled about how music fit into the civic dialogue. Darrell Grant is an active member of the university and the Portland community, a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, a highly regarded teacher and jazz pianist, and a citizen concerned with the health of the music community and the Portland soundscape. Last fall, out of the blue, he invited me to kick off a series of lectures on music and sustainability sponsored by the music department as part of the university's sustainability initiative. He'd run into this blog, read it, and hoped I'd be willing to share some of my thoughts with the Portland community.

    In addition to the lecture, Darrell arranged a 90-minute morning round table to which he'd invited not only members of the music department and the university at large who were interested in the topic, professors from sociology and English, for example, but also several people involved with the city's soundscape, including urban planners, acoustic ecologists, arts administrators, architects, and the president of the local musicians' union, all for a dialogue around music's place in the city's ongoing efforts at sustainability.

    On Friday morning while eating breakfast I read the city paper, The Oregonian, and found an entire section devoted to "How We Live: Sustainability." The lead article was on Oregon State University's new green energy center; other articles discussed an exhibit of Whale Island petroglyphs from the Wampanum tribe, a documentary film entitled The Economics of Happiness, sponsored by Portland's Center for Earth Leadership, a public symposium on policy planning for the Williamette River watershed, a tree plantation repair work project, meant to improve stream health and restore wildlife habitat, and seeking volunteers; a film about the vanishing bees; and more. Writer Carrie Sturrock's column, "PDX Green" (PDX is the abbreviation for Portland), quoted Dick Roy, of the Center for Earth Leadership: "If everyone became a naturalist and understood the geology of the region and the history of the region and had a commitment to place, then the place we are isn't just a commodity. Then you have a foundation of people living in place who accept deep responsibility for it." Sturrock concluded that "Consequently, it becomes more easy and natural to support local businesses and farmers rooted in place." I felt grateful to be in such an environmentally-conscious place as Portland, with like-minded people.


    The music department representatives spoke about the mission statement they'd drafted concerning music and sustainability, in the process discovering many different interests and voices. I likened this, and the additional voices at the table, to the acoustic ecology of the tropical rain forest, where the voices of birds, reptiles, insects (yes, they make sounds by rubbing parts of their bodies together), and other animals all can be heard, not in a cacophony but each species with their particular acoustic niche, and where they can communicate with one another. A sociology professor picked up on this idea, saying that in her work she's very much concerned with the role of music in the health and solidarity of human communities.

    One of the Portland city community members spoke about music's quality of resilience, both in preference to the term sustainability, and as a supplement to it. He was speaking about the resilience of musical cultures and musicians as well, and instanced resilience as a quality that enabled music to survive in the face of change. This stimulated me to suggest to the group that resilience was one of the more important ecological concepts. A few of the people at the round table were aware that in the last  forty years or so the idea that ecosystems tend toward a state of dynamic equilibrium, exemplified in the climax forest, has been severely challenged by an opposite hypothesis, namely that disturbance rather than equilibrium is the natural tendency, that the ecosystem is no system at all, and that entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics characterize the natural world. Against this movement toward disorder, randomness, and chaos, however, I said that the natural world does exhibit resilience; and certainly the resilience of musical cultures is analogous.

    After everyone had a chance to speak and introduce themselves and their concerns, I noted that their concerns fell broadly into two topics: (1) the sustainability of music into the future, and (2) the role of music in the sustainability of life on planet Earth. These concerns, I said, lead us to formulate cultural policy in regard to music. Sustainability is a new word, but cultural policy has been concerned with the sustainability of music for a very long time. For example, music education has been going on for centuries; its goal is the sustainability of music and musical cultures. Beginning in the nineteenth century, efforts were under way to preserve musical artifacts in museums; before that, in private collections. Conservation was another form of cultural policy, ancient in regard to patronage, such as music supported by courts and governments throughout the world; but in the last part of the 20th century, cultural policy involving conservation began to target endangered musics for support, just as conservation efforts in the natural world were targeting endangered species.

    After critiquing targeted interventions, I pointed out that in the last decade or two, cultural policy has moved from conservation efforts in support of music to a view of music as an arm of economic policy, and I mentioned the ways in which cultural policymakers were bringing music and the arts into what was being termed the creative economy, as a spur to technological innovation and economic growth. It was interesting to see some resistance at the round table to the creative economy argument, as if there were something crass about it. Instead, as one of the community members put it, cultural policy should view music as an important component of happiness and well-being. I told them that music, art, gift, commodity, and the creative economy is an area I will be exploring in invited lectures later this winter and spring.

    Toward the end of the long and productive discussion, the talk turned toward the influence of the Internet on the future of music. Professional musicians, indeed the profession of music itself, was going to have to change, said the president of the musicians' union. How would it be possible for professional composers and musicians to continue earning a living, if society was moving away from the idea that musical product and performance is intellectual property that should be protected by copyright? Some felt that it would be difficult for older musicians to adapt, and that the future would see more musicians making less money. Some of the younger people at the table pointed out that while the Internet was moving toward free delivery of recordings, the circulation possibilities for music and access for musicians were increasing enormously, to the point that more musicians would be making more money in the future, not from music available on the Internet, but from concerts and recordings sold at concerts (which were not available on the Internet). Afterward many of the participants mentioned that they had been reading this blog with pleasure and were glad to meet the author; some had been reading it for more than a year or two.

    Friday evening’s lecture concentrated on the implications of the Four Principles from conservation biology (diversity, interdependence, limits to growth, and stewardship) for cultural policy regarding music. I spoke about these, thinking that in such an ecologically-conscious community, this aspect of the topic would be of more interest than others. I spoke about stewardship and partnership, had them sing an Old Regular Baptist lined hymn with me, and then talked at length about how the Old Regular Baptists had been able to conserve and revitalize their 425-year-old singing tradition.

    I was going to conclude by talking about the Lilley Cornett Woods, the only old-growth forest left in eastern Kentucky, but I ran out of time. The Lilley Cornett Woods is located in the same southeastern part of the state as the Old Regular Baptists. In fact, the hymn we listened to, and then sang, was one that I recorded in a church not more than a few miles away from the Lilley Cornett Woods. So I will leave for another time the story of Lilley Cornett and the 500 acres of original growth forest he bought after World War I on his miner’s wages, and preserved because he wouldn’t sell out to the timber cutters and the coal companies. Nor would the Old Regular Baptists sell out to the musical reformers, whether the purveyors of music literacy, shaped notes and gospel music in the 19th century, or the dominance of gospel music (what some of them call "radio songs") in the 20th. It’s not a coincidence that the Old Regular Baptists and the Lilley Cornett Woods inhabit the same geographical and cultural space.

Nature's Economy at the Ethnomusicology Conference

At the annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Nov. 11-14, 2010, in Los Angeles, I read a paper similar to the one I presented at the folklore conference (see my blog entry for October 26, 2010), but I framed it differently, aiming it at an audience of ethnomusicologists. I wrote about the way my pursuit of music and sustainability is an effort to theorize one aspect of applied ethnomusicology. And because the panel was entitled “Revisioning Science,” I summarized a few things about the historical development of the idea of "Nature's economy," and its relation to natural philosophy (the analytical and experimental side of what we now call science) and to the beginnings of ethnomusicology in the science of comparative musicology. The historical development of economics and, to a lesser degree, ecology also occupied some of my attention.

Rather than reproduce the entire paper here, I will simply reproduce the additional paragraphs, which can be read along with the paper for the folklore conference:

***

"For the past five years I've been speaking and writing on the topic of music and sustainability. In so doing I am theorizing one aspect of applied ethnomusicology, that aspect which concerns applied ethnomusicologists’ desires to give back something to our friends and acquaintances in the musical communities we study, those who have given so much to us, in order to help them sustain their musical practices and move confidently into musical futures of their own choosing.

"Today the “sustainability” concept is omnipresent. If one aspect of sustainability is preservation, then it could be argued that ethnomusicologists got interested in sustainability more than 100 years ago, in their efforts to preserve and display musical documents in archives and museums. But today’s sustainability efforts are attempts to sustain music cultures in situ, rather than only in archives, museums, and on the internet. UNESCO’s international treaty for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage is perhaps the best known contemporary effort at sustaining music cultures, but only the latest in a series of efforts that gathered momentum in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

"Musical sustainability is vastly under-theorized. The most powerful contemporary sustainability discourses occur in the sciences; that is, in the science of ecology and in the science of economics. And so I have been visiting in these sciences to learn how conservation ecologists and developmental economists are thinking about sustainability, with a view both towards critiquing their discourses and gaining insights that might be helpful in theorizing musical-cultural sustainability. Interdisciplinarity, of course, is an old habit in ethnomusicology, for we are both by name and by nature interdisciplinary. We need not apologize for it; it is who we are and what we do….

"This concept (Nature’s economy) may be traced to the ancient Greeks. It became commonplace in eighteenth-century Europe to speak of “the oeconomie of Nature.” The natural and economic realms were governed in the same way, with wealth and commerce explained by natural law. But beginning in the late eighteenth century, in the field of natural philosophy, Nature and the economy parted ways, with the de-naturalization of economics and its emergence as an area subject not to natural law but to human institutions and agency. In the study of Nature, however, the idea of Nature’s economy persisted well into the nineteenth century, although the Deism which justified Linnaeus’s vision of the “oeconomie of Nature” had all but disappeared for Darwin, though “Nature’s economy” remained an important concept for him and he did write about it. After about 1860, however, with the rise of biology and various specialized biological pursuits, “Nature’s economy” lost its force in natural philosophy. Instead, the idea became a mainstay of the conservation movements, which were arising at that time in Europe and a bit later in the United States…..

"Natural history and the idea of “Nature’s economy” will appear quaint to many contemporary scientists. But in order for ethnomusicologists to think interdisciplinarily with science (rather than just do science) it’s important to pay attention to the history of scientific ideas and the history of science as social practice. Michel Foucault famously claimed that the study of Nature had undergone a profound shift around 1800, when the observational, formal, descriptive, classificatory and historical orientation of natural history gave way to an increasing analysis of the inner structures of things and their functions, gradually leading to biological science in the nineteenth century along with the development of various specialties such as experimental morphology, a subject I studied while in college. This is a narrative in which natural philosophy triumphs over natural history to become modern science.

"However, at the risk of disagreeing with Foucault, I believe that the descriptive, classificatory, and historical orientation of natural history was just as useful to those nineteenth century sciences that were most influential on comparative musicology, namely linguistics and Darwinian evolution, as was the analytical orientation of natural philosophy, which could be found in the young scientific specialties embryology and comparative anatomy. I regard natural philosophy and natural history as complementary orientations that have been simultaneously available in the Western world from the Renaissance onward. In the early eighteenth century the Royal Society was run by both the natural philosopher Isaac Newton (its president) and the natural historian Peter Collinson; and as far as I know, they got along. And natural history courses such as botany were normal offerings in American colleges and universities as late as the middle of the twentieth century, after which time they both changed character (to a concentration on the natural history object as an organism) and quickly declined in popularity.

"Not surprisingly, the comparative musicologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on the orientations of both natural history and natural philosophy. In their fascination with scales and intervals, their transcriptions, analyses, and comparative work Stumpf and Hornbostel and the others were operating as natural philosophers, while in their descriptive, classificatory and historical work (for example, in the Sachs-Hornbostel classification of musical instruments) they were operating as natural historians. Natural history and natural philosophy are always available, just as scientific and humanistic standpoints are always available; and ethnomusicologists will embrace their interdisciplinary perspectives and methods insofar as they answer the questions that ethnomusicologists wish to ask…"

***

After presenting the paper there was an interesting discussion and some critique. One ethnomusicologist took issue with my portrait of economics, saying that I had unfairly “demonized” it. She pointed to environmental economics as a field where the practitioners were taking the natural world into account. I responded that it was the field of developmental economics that I was critiquing most severely. Environmental economics would include Herman E. Daly’s ecological economics, which I acknowledge as an important corrective to neoclassical economics. But I can't give full assent to “sustainable development,” and if environmental economists embrace that concept, then I part ways with them because I don't think they understand all its consequences.

I was asked, also, about transferring management techniques from conservation ecology to cultural sustainability, and given the example of what to do in the face of a forest fire. I replied that forest fires are managed, if possible, considering sometimes contradictory principles; on one hand, when they threaten human settlements, they are fought; on the other, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that small, controlled fires will burn up the understory and prevent larger, catastrophic ones. Biomimicry would advise the controlled burn, but  when human lives and property are threatened, compassion trumps strict biomimicry and decrees that the fire be fought. There had been interesting critique at the folklore conference, also; and I am emailing with a colleague about the issues he raised. I look forward to discussing them in a future entry.

At the folklore conference, about 50 people had come to hear my paper, so for the ethnomusicology conference I imagined the interest would be at the same level. I made 50 handouts for distribution. To my great surprise, about 300 people came to listen to my paper. I was embarrassed and apologetic over having too few handouts. In cases like this, a blog where people can go to read the paper is a great blessing, and so I pointed them here.

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. 

America's Best Idea?

News that an old colleague, Chuck Perdue, is near death prompted me to think about sustainability, conservation, and the US National Parks, the subject of a recent film series by the enormously popular documentarian Ken Burns, who calls the Parks "America's Best Idea." Not yet having seen this film series, I won't comment on it except to say that for the folks living back in the 1920s on the land that became the Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the Park wasn't America's best idea; it wasn't even a good one. The federal government forcibly removed and resettled the inhabitants to make way for the Park. Chuck and Nan Perdue's research into the Park removals overlapped with my research in the early 1980s on the families that lived in that region and who were the ancestors of the church congregation that became the core of my book, Powerhouse for God. I wanted to explore the relation between land and life, husbandry and religion, the ecology and human ecology of the region, and how lived traditions enter community life.

The mountain farmers did not leave their land willingly. Park supporters argued that their lifestyle, scratching out a subsistence living from scraggly mountain crops and from pigs running wild in the forest, was outdated and used the land badly. It was a poor adaptation, and the mountain poverty of the people was the result. They could be resettled in modern towns in clean, small houses with garden plots and indoor plumbing. Yet somehow those who were resettled in those modern circumstances felt claustrophobic and did not thrive. They longed for their unbound life in the mountains.

In the name of conservation, then, a Park was created chiefly for recreational purposes, to serve (as it was then argued) the population of Washington, DC who might travel to the Park for a weekend and come back to government work refreshed by experiencing the natural world. Of course, the Park had to be transformed back to Nature; it had been badly used, it was said, by the farmers. Today scarcely a trace beyond an old cellar hole remains. At Big Meadows, a natural clearing in the center of the Park, and a feature that was noted by travelers as early as the 1700s, stands an Interpretive Center, where the history of the land is told. When I last visited it fifteen years ago, there was no mention of the removals.

Today it is the mountaintops themselves that are being removed, for coal. Such removal is consistent with the ideology that Nature is a resource to be used. Wisely used, but used. This was the ideology that drove the Conservation Movement in the US during most of the 20th century; its champions were Theodore Roosevelt, and the Yale man Gifford Pinchot. Of course, along the way, compromises need to be made for the greater good. If a local population must be removed, or if its way of life must become as polluted as the mountain streams after the giant machines slice off the mountain tops, the damage is slight compared to the greater good that comes from the cheap energy of coal that heats the power plants that give us all so much electricity--and if they contribute to global warming, why, technology will give us "clean coal," whatever that may be, at some point before the planet warms beyond saving. So goes the rationalization and justification, but it rings hollow.

In my thinking about music and sustainability, I have wondered to what extent music should be regarded as a resource--a renewable human resource, of course, not a finite natural resource like coal. Does resource thinking about music inevitably put us on the same path as resource thinking regarding natural resources? When heritage and cultural tourism are the outcomes of musical and cultural conservation movements, must heritage organizations inevitably exploit resources? To what extent are people and cultures objectified in these constructions? How are those resources constructed and given value, and in what would their exploitation consist?

An Ecological Approach to Cultural Sustainability, pt. 1

I've neglected this blog for a couple of months on account of preparing for the new semester and then teaching. But music, culture, and sustainability have not been idle. I reproduce below a paper that I read in front of the annual conference of the American Folklore Society, on Oct. 24, only a few days ago. In a couple of days I fly to Beijing to deliver some invited lectures on music and sustainability to the musicology department of the Central Conservatory of Music. I'll have more to say about this trip as it goes. But now, here is a copy of my AFS paper:

[Paper delivered at the 2009 conference of the American Folklore Society, Boise, ID]

For several years I’ve been trying to think through ways that the discourse on sustainability might be brought helpfully to bear for folklorists and ethnomusicologists working in cultural conservation. Sustainability, if we think about it for a moment, operates chiefly in two realms: the environment and the economy. Of course, the two are closely linked, but there is a good deal of tension between those who are working to sustain the biosphere and those whose goal is sustainable economic development. Today, when even Monsanto claims to be all about sustainable agriculture, and when we have Wall Street bailouts while the U.S. unemployment rate is ten percent and rising, we can ask the question who and what is to be sustained.

Some of us interested in cultural conservation, or in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage as UNESCO has phrased it, have struggled with this tension between conservation and commerce. We promote cultural tourism at heritage sites, while our non-profit cultural conservation organizations engage in strategic planning and adopt a business mentality in order to thrive in the world of commerce. Some of us are uneasy with this business model in which folk cultures are displayed at festivals, in museums, interpretive centers, heritage sites, and so forth, and tourists are both educated and treated as consumers who walk away with product from the gift shops: CDs, folk art objects, that sort of thing. Advanced consumerism leads to connoisseurship and collections; some of the finest collections are bought by museums, which can be seen as model cultural consumers. We have faith that cultural tourism raises consciousness and promotes cultural conservation and renewal. As the Old Regular Baptists say of their faith, we have a “lively hope.” But some of us who decry global corporate capitalism remain uneasy with this tension between cultural conservation and commerce. Let’s explore some sources of that tension briefly now by contrasting the way sustainability works in the two worlds of ecology and economy.


Conservation ecologists target endangered species; they intervene through conservation to protect and sustain populations. Economists target resources; they intervene through development to manage sustainable economic growth. Conservation ecologists value diversity; economists value efficiency. Both are engaged in policy-making, but conservation ecologists proceed from the principle of human co-existence with the natural world, whereas economists consider the natural world in terms of resources for human welfare. Economists are driven to think of their world in terms of property, commodities and exchange, whereas conservation ecologists are filled with wonder and consider the natural world a gift. We could say that economists look forward to a world of prosperity while ecologists hope for a world of equilibrium with its connotations of justice and equity.

At the moment, the cultural conservation model that public folklorists employ tilts in the direction of the economists. The latest issue of NEA Arts arrived on my doorstep a few days ago, with its lead article entitled “The Business of Culture.” But what would it mean to tilt in the direction of conservation ecology instead? What would it mean for us in our cultural conservation efforts to follow nature’s economy? Nature’s economy values diversity for adaptation, and puts natural limits on growth as ecosystems move toward equilibrium; nature’s economy is built on the principle of interconnectedness, that everything in the ecosystem is connected to everything else, and that, to take a most famous example, the so-called butterfly effect, the flap of a butterfly’s wings in a park in China can transform the storm systems the following month over a city in North America. In addition to the principles of diversity, limits to growth, and interconnectedness, we add to nature’s economy the human equation of stewardship, or good caretaking, as a trustee acts in the interest of the trust, not him or herself. These four principles form the core of what we might learn by following nature’s economy.

I am returning in my recent work to an older way of thinking; twenty-five years ago in the first edition of Worlds of Music I asked readers to consider musical cultures as analogous to ecosystems, interconnected, with diversity advantageous for sustainable adaptation. Just as conservation ecologists look beyond targeted species to whole ecosystems, so those of us interested in cultural sustainability must look beyond expressive culture to the social, political, and most important, the economic aspects of the folk cultures we hope to help sustain. As the organic gardeners say, for the health of the plant look to the health of the soil. And beyond those aspects we must look at the ways in which these folk cultures interact with and are impacted by changes in the natural environment, as many of those we prize have been and are being marginalized by changes in the natural environment driven by economic desires, sometimes purely exploitative, sometimes exploitation cloaked in greenwash, and sometimes offered for sustainable development. When we put these expressive cultures on display we are offering little more than life support if we do not also work with the people in their communities, not only to conserve the expressive aspects of folk cultures, but also to confront the social, political, and economic props that keep these folk cultures going well or going badly. I turn now to two case studies illustrating these principles of nature’s economy in the world of cultural conservation. [continued in next entry]

The new conservation

The generation of scientific conservationists that came of age in the 1970s and the following decades responded to the growing environmental movement by proclaiming a new direction. From now on conservation would be based on ecology, which itself was undergoing a paradigm shift. Whereas for most of the twentieth century ecologists had subscribed to the view that nature, left to its own devices, moved toward equilibrium, as in the succession of forest species moving to a stable, climax forest, the new view posited that change, sometimes disturbing change, rather than equilibrium and stability, was nature's norm. In the face of this uncertainty, management rather than control was the best that could be hoped for.

The new movement was at first called conservation biology. Today it is called both conservation biology and conservation ecology. In trying to characterize their field, they distinguished it from earlier conservation practice. Where endangered, single species had been the focus of earlier conservation policy, now the emphasis would be on managing the ecosystem as a whole. Earlier conservationists had attempted to control nature, but conservation ecologists understood that control was impossible because nature was subject to uncertainty. The fact that some conservation control efforts had fallen victim to the law of unintended consequences and produced results that, while aiding certain species, had harmed others, was taken as a sign that policy needed flexibility in the face of uncertainty and changing conditions. Thus management, rather than control, was the aim, and thus the revolution led away from conservation of targeted endangered species and toward what was termed ecosystem management.

What, then, is ecosystem management? What is management? How does one manage without attempting to control?

Folkdeath and folklife

The earliest European folklorists were nostalgic for ruins and popular antiquities. As they roved the countryside viewing monuments and inquiring about the odd, old peasant customs, they realized these were in danger of being lost, even to memory when they had fallen from use. Noting them down, writing about them, drawing them, was a way of collecting and preserving the specimens. Material objects could be collected and stored, if not at home then in a building set aside for such a purpose, a museum, a historical society. The imminent disappearance of the artifact, custom, song, or tale came to be a necessary condition for folklore: if it wasn't near to vanishing (or vanished), it wasn't folklore. I call this nostalgic, romantic vision folkdeath. But inevitably the nineteenth-century European conservation movement affected folklorists. Was it possible to conserve folklore in its natural state? Was it possible to preserve, not by collecting and archiving, but by sustaining aspects of folklife within genuine folk cultural settings? Was it possible, in a kind of Frankenstein-like movement, to generate folklife from folkdeath?

Passing it on

Every society passes music along as part of its culture. People learn by hearing, watching, and imitating. In some societies learning is more formalized, through apprenticeship arrangements, and even more formalized through what we in the West know as music education, with teachers and students and a written system of notation. In this way music is sustained as part of the normal cultural work that people in families and communities and societies do in bringing up the next generation. And yet music, or rather certain kinds of music, are regarded as endangered, as the cultural resources and the ways of life that would normally pass it on are threatened, sometimes toward extinction. Just as languages have become extinct, so have musics. The argument is made that just as biodiversity is adaptationally advantageous for life on earth, so is biocultural diversity (and hence musical diversity). For that reason, music should be conserved. Conservation is one means toward sustainability.