Settler Ecology and Natural Rights

Whanganui River. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

 

      This blog entry follows on from my July 31, 2021 blog entry on Environmental Sustainability, Personhood, Legal Rights, and Indigenous Ecological Knowledges. Here I frame the matters under consideration in terms of settler ecology and add some new ideas and information. Elsewhere I’ve written that because natural rights doctrine (the human right to life and liberty) derives from nature, then self-evidently nature possesses these same rights. The counter argument is that human beings are exceptional in having consciousness, agency, language, etc. But this human exceptionalism is under challenge from neurobiologists, behavioral ecologists, and philosophers, not to mention animal rights activists and scientists who study plant intelligence and communication. Take, for instance, the 2012 Cambridge (University) Declaration on Consciousness, in which several prominent scientists declared that “Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.”
    If, then, more than human living creatures have consciousness, agency, language (gestural as well as sonic), and so on, it would appear that Western ways of thinking must grant them at least a moral right to life and liberty. Do other living beings—not only human beings—similarly have a legal right? What are the advantages and disadvantages to positioning animals (and possibly plants, and indeed entire ecoystems) within the modern, Euro-American legal framework of rights and obligations (duties) that largely derive from the social contract and justice theories that began during the Enlightenment? What is the relationship between such a rights regime for the environment and settler ecology? What possibly more desirable alternatives are available?
    At least since Christopher Stone’s provocative book Should Trees Have Standing (originally published in 1972)--that is, legal standing--nature’s natural rights have been invoked in the US to protect environmental features such as endangered species, landforms, and ecosystems against encroachment from developers. That is an application of ecojustice, and it is represented by a dissenting strain, neither colonialist nor extractivist, within US settler ecological thought: one that runs through Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold to contemporary conservation biologists and environmental activists. Town governments in Pennsylvania, for example, have passed ordinances granting legal rights to certain landforms in order to prevent fracking. They argued that if US law grants legal rights based on “personhood” to corporations, which corporate “persons” may have some kind of collective agency and intentionality, but lack consciousness, then landforms and ecosystems may also be considered persons and be granted similar rights. The latest example of such a lawsuit is occurring in Florida, where plaintiffs have gone to court on behalf of a threatened ecosystem, Lake Mary Jane, in an effort to stop work on a nearby housing development. Needless to say, the fracking corporations quickly sued the Pennsylvania town governments, and the judges in the state courts ruled in their favor. Whether the same fate awaits Lake Mary Jane remains to be seen.
    Rights regime suits have been effective in some instances outside the US, however. Ecuador and New Zealand are cases in point, where ecosystems such as the Whanganui River, and mountains have been granted the right to be respected and largely left alone. In those cases, the claims have been made not exclusively within a Euro-American legal framework of rights and personhood, but rather also by giving weight to Indigenous people’s beliefs concerning the rights and sentience of non-human natural beings, which requires thinking of them not as objects (as Western science does) but as subjects—that is, as living beings with their own forms of subjectivity, agency, consciousness, etc. In Ecuador, rights of nature are enshrined in its Constitution. That is not settler ecology. 

Sustainability, Ethnomusicology and Applied Ecology

The history of applied ethnomusicology in the US goes back at least to the New Deal era, when ethnomusicologists were (comparative) musicologists and when Charles Seeger, the first president of the American Musicological Society, argued on behalf of an applied musicology that would be put to practical use in a democratic republic, for the benefit of society as a whole, rather than in service to high culture only. It was also an era of conservation, with the Civilian Conservation Corps, with agricultural conservation efforts underway in the Farm Security Administration, and the Works Progress Administration undertaking cultural conservation by collecting and encouraging popular and folk arts and crafts. The invaluable recordings by folklorists such as Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress were part of this effort. 

         The history of applied ecology goes back at least to the World War I era. The story will be a familiar one to anyone who’s followed the history of applied ethnomusicology. The professional society of ecologists, the Ecological Association of America (ESA), began in 1915, as an offshoot of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It was founded to help unify a science that consisted of plant ecology, animal ecology, and so forth—a series of specialties without a general ecological theory. The ESA hoped to stimulate research and to serve as a place where scientists could share information. One of the ESA’s standing committees was devoted to another goal, using ecological research to advance environmental conservation. This "Committee on the Preservation of Natural Conditions" was led by the ESA’s first president, Victor Shelford (1877-1968), from 1917 to 1938. The next year, 1939, saw the publication of the most important work in general ecology in the first half of the 20th century, Bio-Ecology, co-authored by Shelford and Frederic E. Clements. The book advanced Shelford’s ideas of the biome and ecological succession, which he had introduced as early as 1912. Clements, of course, is known for his idea that ecological succession led to a climax community in a state of dynamic equilibrium.

         Shelford’s credentials as an eminent research scientist were beyond dispute, but when at the end of Roosevelt’s last presidential term he tried to steer the ESA into establishing a new organization, one devoted to conservation, the ESA balked. Its officers decided that as a scientific society they must avoid becoming a political advocacy group, which they feared would happen if they sponsored the conservation organization that Shelford wanted. Going further, they abolished the Committee on the Preservation of Natural Conditions that Shelford had led for its first 21 years. Upset, Shelford left his professorship at the University of Illinois, and in 1946 founded the new organization himself, the Ecologists Union, aligning nature conservation with the goal of preserving entire ecosystems. That organization is known today as The Nature Conservancy.

         It would be interesting to know whether the ESA’s unwillingness to endorse applied ecology during the immediate post-World War II period was part of the general climate of distrust for social engineering that derailed applied ethnomusicology for several decades, a distrust fueled by the social and scientific experiments and the war on academic freedom in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. Universities might offer protection from persecution if academics could establish that science was beyond politics. But applied ecology would not be derailed for nearly so long as applied ethnomusicology. Eugene P. Odum (1913-2002), son of the sociologist and folklorist Howard W. Odum (1884-1954), and a student of Shelford in the 1930s, in 1953 wrote the integrative textbook Fundamentals of Ecology, which laid the foundation of ecological science on the ecosystem, a foundation that would remain for at least three decades. 

        The idea of the ecosystem was not original with Odum--it had been defined as a unit of study by Arthur Tansley in 1935, and tested by G. Evelyn Hutchinson. In the Fundamentals Odum explained ecosystems in the then-novel terms of cybernetic systems theory, in which higher levels of organization have structures and functions as a whole—emergent properties—that can’t be predicted by analyzing their component parts. Yet in that book and increasingly so in its successive editions, Odum also advocated an applied ecology in which scientists would work as consultants in policy matters. He himself did so, in matters of nuclear power (“atoms for peace”) and in opposing pesticides. During the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Odum promoted the idea that ecology was an integrative discipline (much like an ecosystem itself) that served as a bridge between science and society. He always maintained the distinction between ecological science and environmental activism, and lamented that the distinction had blurred as the environmental movement gathered momentum: environmentalists were being labeled as ecologists even though they had no formal training in ecology. Yet he felt that it was most appropriate for ecologists to take a stand for the environment, and for ecological research to ground the environmental movement by providing a scientific basis for sound policies. 

Whole Terrain and the Sound of Climate Change

Whole Terrain, a journal of reflective environmental practice, last month published an author interview in which I discussed my essay, “The Sound of Climate Change.”  The essay may be read on my academia.edu page. The author interview may be read on the Whole Terrain website. 

     I’ve written in an earlier blog entry about how the essay was generated from a question by musicologist Denise Von Glahn. She and Aaron Allen and Mark Pedelty and I were chatting just before the Ecomusicologies conference in September, 2014. We were talking about our upcoming event in the spring of 2015 at the University of Minnesota, on the topic of sustainability and sound. “What is the sound of climate change?” she asked, and immediately we knew we had a theme for the Minnesota event, ultimately titled “Music and Climate Change.” 

     Earlier in 2014, Cherice Bock, editor of Whole Terrain, had invited me to write an essay for their next issue. We discussed my writing on the threats to the environment of mountaintop removal in central Appalachia. I pointed out that blasting off the mountain tops dumps toxic chemicals into the streams that run down the mountain hollows. They poison everything in their path. People, animals, plants, ecosystems are damaged. 

     But a few weeks after I returned from the Ecomusicologies conference, a violent, early-season snowstorm compelled my attention. As I stood outside on my porch taking it all in, I realized I was hearing the sounds of climate change in the great wind and the crashing of toppled spruce and apple trees. I felt I was eavesdropping on nature’s alarm calls. I knew then that I must write about this experience, instead of mountaintop removal, for Whole Terrain. By the end of 2014 I’d finished my essay on the sound of climate change and sent it off to Cherice. In 2015 I spoke on the same subject in Minneapolis. That issue of Whole Terrain was published in the spring of 2016. The following summer Cherice interviewed me, transcribed the interview, and produced the short, edited version that was published on their site in April, 2017.

     I told Cherice in the interview, “. . . I heard the sound of climate change for myself in this . . . storm, and something compelled me to write about that topic for you instead. Of course, I’d read about climate change. I was very much interested in it. But it’s one thing to give assent to it as a threat or an idea, and it’s another thing to experience it for oneself. I heard it . . . [and] I could no longer walk out in the woods and be in nature the way I had been . . . I felt like . . . the land had been raped. These were very powerful feelings. I wondered how the other animals who lived on that land experienced it. I wanted to write about this. When you experience it for yourself, finding language that might be adequate to express your feelings is difficult but important to do. . . . Telling my personal story of loss also required telling a larger story of sound and climate change. . . We learn to trust our senses, attuned to our habitat, indoors and out. When familiar sounds leave, we become anxious. . . .”
     I was struck once again by the way personal experience compelled me to write about sustainability. A 2004 invitation to play neighborly music at the Common Ground Fair, a celebration of sustainable living, started me thinking about music and sustainability in the first place. Ten years of writing, mostly theory, about music, sound, and sustainability followed, with an environmental turn in 2011. I was prepared to hear the sound of climate change in the violent storm of 2014, compelled to write about it, and to theorize a sound ecology with a new urgency.

Endangering Classical Music by Dumbing It Down

    Nearly three years ago, I posted an entry on classical music as an endangered ecosystem. I’ve also posted, in years past, on how public radio’s commitment to classical music has declined in our new—not really so new anymore—century, viewing this as a symptom of endangerment. There have been others, none greater than the decline in funding for classical music teaching in the schools, at all levels: K-12 predominantly, but also at the college and university level. But that is a topic for a different post.
    As 2016 comes to an end, I want to return to one of my old topics in this subject, classical music on public radio—specifically, public radio in the state of Maine. Two momentous changes occurred this year. One is that the Maine Public Broadcasting Network (MPBN) changed its name to Maine Public (MP). That’s it—Maine Public. The new name could mean anything—a water or gas or electric public utility, for example, or perhaps the state’s public library system, or the state public relations council, or the public health commission, or any of several other public entities. To the network, it’s a bit of a brag: we are the public, the name seems to be saying, no need for further identification. To any public employee in the state, the name could be confusing, even off-putting. Two was the creation of a second radio channel, Maine Public Classical. Whereas it had been possible to stream classical music 24/7 from the MPBN website, the new channel also broadcasts over the air, both on the FM band and on HD radio. This certainly increases the availability of classical music on the radio in the state, and suggests that it may not be so endangered after all.
    In fact, Maine has more classical radio stations than this. Some of the college and university radio stations play a bit of it, but there is another full-time station, WBACH, which can be heard from two stations in the state, one in the largest city, Portland, and the other in mid-coastal Maine. They stream the “world classical network,” from Cape Classical 107.5. It’s not exclusively Bach, although his music is well represented, and most of what’s heard is from the 18th and 19th centuries. Maine Public Classical’s station, which can be heard over the air in most but not all sections of the state, now programs the few shows that were left after years of classical music’s gradual shrinkage, the morning classical program from 9 to noon, the 8 pm hour’s symphony broadcasts from New York, Boston, Chicago, etc. and one weekly broadcast from a chamber music concert in the state of Maine, and Saturday afternoon opera. The Maine Public station, the same over-the-air station that reaches the whole state and has done so for decades, is now mostly talk, plus a couple of hours of music in the evenings and a little more on weekends that is difficult to categorize—more on that in another post, perhaps—but at any rate it’s meant to appeal to an under-40 audience. The same repertoire of talk shows one hears on most public radio stations today can be heard here in Maine, most of the time—BBC news all night, Morning Edition, All Things Considered, news talk shows like those hosted by Diane Rehm, and Tom Ashbrook; politics and the arts shows like those hosted by Terri Gross; and so on, along with a re-configuration and reduction in local news reporting.
    One would think that with WBACH and Maine Public Classical, the audience for Western art music was being better served than before. Certainly more classical music is more easily available over the air now than it was three, six, ten years ago. But what classical music is it? Is it the same classical music that was available in earlier years? No. There’s a much higher proportion of pop classics, and easy pieces—almost nothing that is atonal, for example. There’s a much higher percentage of short pieces. Strings predominate. Vocal music is in short supply. On “Classical 24,” the out-sourced service that Maine Public Classical uses for several hours a day, most pieces played are 20 minutes or less in length. If a piece is longer, then one movement from it is played, without apology. Composers, beware: if your compositions are longer than 20 minutes, they won’t be played in their entirety. Maine Public Classical does broadcast one other syndicated show, Performance Today, that is more varied than the others, in the sense that the host offers biographical tidbits about the composers, interviews performers, even offers listeners a little quiz--all in the name of educating the public and making classical music more attractive. A wider variety of pieces, and much more modern music, is played on Performance Today; yet most of them are, still, short.
    It was the polymath musicologist Charles Seeger who made fun of one of the synonyms for classical music—“serious music”—calling the name preposterous, as if no other music could stake the same claim. Had Seeger lived to hear the dumbing down of classical music on radio, he wouldn’t have needed to comment. Altogether, this dumbing down of classical music endangers it as much as, if not more than, its absence on radio.

Classical music as an endangered ecosystem

Henry Doktorski performs with philharmonic orchestra

     I thought it would be fitting to start off the new year with an old topic. I’ve been reading about animal communication (zoosemiotics) and animal rights lately, with a view to filling out certain parts of my argument in favor of a sound commons for all living beings; but I wanted to finish up the ecosystem as descriptor thread, looking again at business ecosystems, with some more attention to James F. Moore’s notions of innovation, cooperation, and co-evolution as the new paradigm for successful business corporations. One argument for animal rights extends the principles of human rights to all animals; and of course the argument for cultural equity extends these rights to all cultures, as I’ve mentioned in earlier entries when discussing the benefits of cultural diversity (again, modeled on biodiversity). The idea of the acoustic niche combined with cultural equity suggests that in the social world all music cultures have inherent rights to survive. I’ve raised the issue before, also, about the periodic sounding of the death-knell for classical music. These days it’s hard to read about classical music without coming across an essay nostalgic for the good old days when people went to symphony and bought recordings and made sure their children had music lessons and when everyone knew that classical music was the best music in the world. But today, these essayists opine, classical music has fallen on hard times: it’s endangered, it’s lost most of its audience, kids don’t want to take piano lessons any more, music education is fast disappearing from the schools, and unless we do something about it, classical music won’t survive.
    Classical music is one of several case studies in music and sustainability. When the rhetoric of the periodic death-knells uses words like “endangered,” it’s helpful to think of the classical music culture as an ecosystem. Picking up the thread from the previous blog entry, this is another instance of ecosystem as descriptor. The classical music culture consists of composers and performers, amateur and professional; it includes music educators and music schools (conservatories, music in K-12 education, music in the colleges and universities, courses and teachers and students and all the music performance ensembles); it includes music institutions such as symphony orchestras and string quartets, early music ensembles, opera companies and town bands, as well as patrons (whether private donors, corporations, or government funded organizations such as arts councils); and of course it includes the listeners who get their music and the places where they find it, in concerts and tours, media products including recordings, television and film, advertising, various venues where music is performed and heard, as well as distribution channels such as the Internet. Music is the central idea, activity, and product; it is the energy that flows through the classical music ecosystem, as through all worlds of music.
    When back in 1984 I wrote that music cultures behaved as ecosystems, what I had in mind was that they could be studied as complex systems much in the same way that ecologists were studying ecosystems: in terms of adaptation, musical energy flowing through the system, and cycles of birth, growth, decay, and rebirth or revival. Most ethnomusicologists then (myself included) were still bound to the culture area idea, borrowed from anthropology, thinking of musics as characteristic sound structures, activities and ideas about music attached to peoples (usually regional, ethnic and/or occupational groups) living in particular places. In this way, ethnomusicologists could conceive of Native America, let us say, as a whole music culture area, and also as the differing music cultures of several indigenous tribal groups, such as Kiowa or Zuni or Passamaquoddy. Beyond description and comparison, the question was why was this people’s music over here as it was, and different from that people’s music over there.
       But younger ethnomusicologists were challenging the usefulness of the notion that each cultural group had its own characteristic music. If instead of looking at music as process, the way ethnomusicologists liked to do, we started looking at the way people actually consumed music as product, then it was apparent that music moved as easily from one group to another in the marketplace as any other product--more easily than most. Soon, ethnomusicologists were studying popular musics and the music industry, all over the world—including so-called world music, an industry marketing category. In a globalizing world, it seemed a little musty to concentrate on the older, traditional layer of music in a given culture when most people were involved with newer, popular musics, marketed as recordings, much (but not all) of it made in the West--a situation that has changed with the rise of indigenous popular music production throughout the world.
    Studying the music industry in this way suggests another use for ecology, the business ecosystem, which as I wrote in my last blog entry is a concept pioneered by James F. Moore. Although the people involved with classical music in the West take great pains to distinguish it from popular music, and although they are often reluctant to view it as a business—seeing it instead as art rather than commerce, its purpose enlightenment and pleasure rather than profit—in many ways it functions as an industry. What happens when we think of it it as a business ecosystem in Moore’s sense of the term?
    Central to Moore’s idea of a business ecosystem is the corporation. Although the classical music ecosystem has its corporations (music publishers, private colleges and universities, media companies, etc.) it is useful to conceive not only of business corporations but also cultural institutions run increasingly as businesses, ones that compete and cooperate, and that adapt and co-evolve (or not). In his most recent essay on the topic, Moore writes that “the term 'business ecosystem' and its plural, 'business ecosystems,' refer to intentional communities of economic actors whose individual business activities share in some large measure the fate of the whole community. . . . [Corporations] must dialogue closely with customers,” Moore continues, “so that what is created is what the customer wants and is willing to pay for. Mastering these challenges, of what might be called 'distributed creativity,' is the aim of the ecosystem organizational form. The conventional hierarchical firm does not effectively address the breadth and importance of inter-firm relationships. The unaided market is not able to achieve inter-firm coordination sufficient to justify players aligning their dreams, plans, and product road maps" ("Business Ecosystems and the View from the Firm," The Antitrust Bulletin, Vol. 51, no. 1, Spring 2006, pp. 33-34).
    It’s not hard to map the classical music industry onto Moore’s idea of ecosystems. Doing so suggests one reason why it’s endangered: it is out of touch with the market. The people involved with classical music surely form an intentional community with an awareness of a shared fate, more like European aristocrats powerless against the rise of the merchant class, than like the community of producers, designers, marketers, evangelists, and consumers surrounding Apple (Moore’s favorite illustration of a thriving business ecosystem). Despite the fierce competition among composers, performers, conductors and orchestras, recording companies and so forth, they know that they’re all in this together, struggling against what they regard as the cheap thrills of non-classical musics.
     But one place where they fail is in dialoguing with customers. Instead, they speak in a top-down monologue, starting with classical music educators who transmit elitism and professionalism, with little respect for the musical amateur. The virtues of its structural complexity, the intellectual experience of apprehending the beauty of its formal characteristics, the virtuoso skills of its finest performers, the notion that being involved with classical music will make someone a more civilized, more refined, and better person—these are not virtues that came out of focus-group dialogues between corporations and customers, or in this case classical music institutions and, broadly speaking, the classical music consumers who support the industry. Instead, they came from cultural leaders in Victorian-era Europe, 150 years ago. In a culture that prized amateurism, particularly the gentleman amateur, and might even have been said to have invented that tradition, this emphasis on professionalism may appear contradictory. However, the skills of the gentleman amateur were at least as well-developed as that of the professional; the difference was that he didn't do it for the money. To be sure, classical music consumers can and do parrot these virtues; but seldom do they originate with them.
    At certain periods in the twentieth century, the classical music industry was able to gain significant market share through recordings, often on the basis of these virtues, but coupled with another, namely connoisseurship. The earliest major record companies, Victor and Columbia, marketing 78s, offered as much classical music as any other kind, and not only priced those records higher but advertised them with much more fanfare. As I’ve written earlier on this blog, connoisseurship in music (whether classical music or any other kind) can lead to the accumulation of social capital, to be spent at appropriate occasions among like-minded people. Accumulating a record collection, for example, carried with it the possibility of connoisseurship even for those who lacked musical talent. Classical music critics such as Irving Kolodin wrote guides to recorded music (the first was published in 1941) that enabled one not only to own the best performances but to be able to say why they were the best. In the 1960s, budget-priced LPs on labels like Nonesuch as Turnabout made a much wider repertoire available, including early music, and the more expensive labels followed suit. Recording techniques improved, and with the higher fidelity of the LP recordings a concert-hall like experience in one’s own apartment or home became possible. More, higher fidelity records led some listeners to buy fine stereo playback systems. Connoisseurship flourished among hi-fi enthusiasts as well in the quest for an absolute sound that was indistinguishable from that of the concert hall.
    The connoisseur’s search for high fidelity in classical music extended to fidelity in performance, leading to the idea of historically-informed performance, and the feeling that it was somehow better to listen to the classical music of the past as the audience would have heard it when it was first composed—and that meant period instruments instead of technologically improved ones, and fidelity to the score whenever possible in preference to traditions that had been handed down in practice from one generation of performers to the next. Today the majority of early music on recordings is performed on period instruments or their reproductions. Just as an aside, it would be interesting to see a revival with period instruments and just about everything else except fidelity to the original score – which would become fidelity to the original recording – in, say, early rock 'n roll. Why not? Such revivals have existed in many kinds of music for decades – blues, jazz, old-time string band music, and Irish traditional music to name a few.
    Historically-informed performance and its alleged authenticity fascinates me. In the introduction to ethnomusicology course that I’ve taught to undergraduates at Brown—it is one of the courses required for the music major—I ask them to think about this aspect of the classical music culture. One year I played an audio recording of an orchestral piece from the 18th century as performed on period instruments by a historically-informed group, then followed it with the same piece as performed in the early 1960s by the non-historically informed Berlin Philharmonic. The students preferred the lush sound of the latter, commenting on the dry timbres and occasional out-of-tune harmonies of the former. The next year I did the same experiment, but this time I showed them a video of the same two orchestras playing the same piece. Now the students responded positively to the historically-minded group, commenting on the clearly differentiated instrumental texture and the enthusiasm of the performers, who were young people dressed like themselves and who moved around and showed emotion as they played. The Berlin Philharmonic became for them a parody of musical fogeyism, and instead of a lush sound the music was perceived as “muddy” and undifferentiated, while the performers’ formal outfits and stiff postures were ridiculed. However, ten years later when I showed the video again—this was in the twenty-first century—some students found the “hippies” playing the period instruments, gesturing and moving about, to be the ridiculous ones, while the Berliners, whose performance style and sound had become remote and exotic, were intriguing.
    Returning to classical music as a business ecosystem, we see another area where there is room for improvement if classical music is to come off the endangered species list. That is what Moore calls inter-firm cooperation. Instead of competing for an ever-dwindling group of classical music composers, performers, and listeners, classical music's businesses could consider how the feeling that they are all in this together can lead toward a common goal benefitting all. This has in fact been happening for many decades, but not intensely enough to make over the ecosystem in terms of Moore's principles of innovation, cooperation, and co-evolution. His ideas might help the classical music culture take steps to make its ecosystem more resilient; but this would require visionary leadership, combined efforts, and changed attitudes.

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.

Sustainable Futures

        As noted in the previous entry, at the 2011 SEM conference I was at last able to meet and speak with the music educator Huib Schippers, the founder and director of the remarkable Australian-based international project entitled "Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures." This ambitious project happens to rest partly on concepts that were introduced more than 25 years ago in the first chapter of my book, Worlds of Music (1984; and in four more editions since): the concept of the music culture (brought to the chapter by Mark Slobin), and an idea which as far as I know I was the first to conceive, namely that a music culture functions as an ecological system, or ecosytem. Sustainable Futures "acknowledges that there are serious challenges to many music cultures that are the result of recent changes in 'musical ecosystems.' Based also on a commonly-voiced analogy from cultural conservation work, that certain music cultures constitute endangered resources, it 'seeks to counteract the loss of music cultures by identifying the key factors in musical sustainability, and making this knowledge available to communities across the world. In this way it aims to empower communities to forge musical futures on their own terms'" (http://musecology.griffith.edu.au/).

    The project acknowledges continuity with earlier attempts at musical and cultural conservation, and "aims to identify ways to promote cultural diversity and ensure vibrant musical futures in line with those called for by organizations like UNESCO" (Ibid.) Such aims have, of course, been under discussion in this blog since I began it in 2008; but in the US they go back at least to the 1970s which saw the creation of three major federal agencies devoted to cultural conservation: the office of folklife studies at the Smithsonian Institution, with its festival of American folklife; the National Endowment for the Arts, with its folk arts division, and the American Folklife Center, at the Library of Congress. Where the Sustainable Futures project appears to differ from the earlier conservation efforts, though, is in methodology. Rather than direct action in the form of either support to artists, or funneling funds into projects meant to help communities maintain musical traditions; rather than supporting heritage spaces such as festivals where those musical traditions are presented for communities and tourists alike, and rather than forging direct partnerships between ethnomusicologists and other culture workers with communities to work toward mutual goals of a sustainable future for music, this project is a study meant to produce a cultural resource for communities who wish to take command of their own musical futures. It is devoted, first, to studying a select number of music cultures with a focus on aspects thought crucial for sustainability; and second, to establishing a template or set of suggestions, based on that study, that would be shared with communities seeking a sustainable future for their music.

    Another of the distinguishing aspects of the Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures project is its systematic approach to problem-solving. Schippers has designed the study so that the music cultures are being examined in five overlapping areas: musical content and structure; learning and transmission of music; social and cultural contexts of musical traditions; the infrastructure including those "spaces" where music is made, real and virtual, as well as various laws and regulations that affect music within the culture; and finally, the audiences, media and markets, for "most musicians and musical styles depend on communities, audiences and/or markets for their survival." Each of the music cultures under examination constitutes a case study, and of course they will differ in regards to the way they populate each of the five areas; nonetheless, this systematic approach is meant to yield information and a template that will be broadly applicable. The outcome is meant to be both an on-line space and a book or manual. Using the website, communities wishing to take action would be able to do a self-assessment to see where they fall in terms of those five areas, and then learn strategies for musical survival in specific circumstances that relate to their own. The book or manual would guide culture workers and help inform partnerships between them and community members seeking sustainable futures for their music cultures.

    This summary just scratches the surface of the project, which has been running since 2009 and will conclude in 2013. It is generously funded by the Australian government, but the case studies examine music cultures not just in Australia, but all over the world (none, however, in the US, perhaps because the US is not a signatory to the UNESCO treaty on safeguarding intangible cultural heritage) and they involve partnerships with researchers, consultants, universities and organizations in several different nations.

    In conceiving the project, Huib Schippers sought guidance from ethnomusicologists Tony Seeger,  one of the prime movers of the UNESCO initiatives; Deborah Wong, then president of the Society for Ethnomusicology; and a number of others active in the International Council on Traditional Music, which is the strongest organization of its kind outside of the US. He learned about my work and in the summer of 2009 he contacted me, saying that he was going to be at the 2009 SEM conference and would like to discuss the project with me. Unfortunately, our meeting had to wait until last month, because I had accepted an invitation to lecture in Beijing on music and sustainability at around the same time as the 2009 SEM conference, so I could not attend it. But he sent me information about the project, and then when we did meet we had an opportunity to discuss it.

   Huib Schippers and I confirmed that we had many thoughts in common, and that for me it has been exciting to see some of them implemented in such an ambitious way. He asked me if I would like to serve on their advisory board, and I said I would be glad to do so--albeit that the project had already been underway for 2 years--and then, after I returned from the conference, we continued our conversation by email. He invited me to come to Australia at some point next fall to spend a week or so consulting on the project, and in principle I accepted, although we must still work out a mutually convenient time. I told him that I was already contextualizing it within my own knowledge of related initiatives (in the US) in musical and cultural conservation and their history, unable to help myself in making comparisons. I reiterated that after spending a few decades doing applied ethnomusicology I was now at the stage where I wished to draw back and attempt to theorize it; as he knew, my thinking had since 2005 been focused on music and sustainability. I said that I was apt to be critical of certain aspects of the Sustainable Futures project, and was that what he wanted? He affirmed that he did, and that constructive criticism was always welcome. To me this is a promising development; and I look forward to contributing in whatever way I can, while undoubtedly learning a great deal to put to use in working out a theory of music and sustainability, within the field of applied ethnomusicology.
   

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?