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?

Ecological Imaginaries 1

The Land of Cockaigne, painting by Pieter Bruegel the elder, 1567

     Our Diverse Environmentalist Research Team faculty seminar will be discussing aspects of the topic “ecological imaginaries” starting in November. Each of us is to prepare some thoughts on this concept which has many possibilities. Here are four that occur to me immediately. There are some others I want to investigate, but this will be a start.

    1. Pastoral as ecological imaginary. This is the Arcadian tradition, in which humans live in harmony with and in nature. Literally of course it evokes shepherds and their flocks in the countryside, but symbolically pastoral does a great deal of work in the Romantic traditions of literature and philosophy, whether in German naturphilosophie or the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Thoreau’s Walden is usually regarded as pastoral, and the ecocritic Leo Marx worked American pastoral into an explanation of American intellectual history and its ambivalence toward industrialism. This Romantic ambivalence is also responsible, of course, for the concept of “folk,” das volk, as an uneasiness with modernism—not just industrialism, but also economic rationality ("economic man") and reductionist Western science.
    2. Related to pastoral and a projection of “folk” is the ecological imaginary of the “Land of Cockaigne,” a medieval alternative universe of pleasure and plenty, a utopian paradise of license. The 13th century French poem portrayed a land where people did not have to work, goods were freely available, game gave itself up to hunters, fish leapt out of the water and into the cooking kettle, and people never aged or died. There are some parallels with visions of the Christian heaven here. A 20th-century song, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” expresses the ecological imaginary of Cockaigne as a hobo’s paradise where hens lay soft-boiled eggs, trees leaf out in cigarettes, and lakewater is whiskey. That song was composed by “Haywire Mac” Harry McClintock around the turn of the 20th century and first recorded by him in 1928. Since that recording it has become widely sung and known in variant forms, even appearing in a 2005 Burger King commercial.
    3. A third ecological imaginary is the idea of untrammeled wilderness, wild nature untouched by human intervention. The Romans had a word for this, res nullius, which they distinguished from res commones (commons, things that by their nature could not be owned, such as the air mantle and the oceans), res publicae (public things, owned by the state, such as roads and bridges), and res privatae (private things). Res nullius (no one's things) was a kind of terra incognita; it was conceived of as that part of the world that had not (yet) been “captured” by human beings. Wild nature is not peaceful nor is it pastoral; as Colonial Governor William Bradford wrote in 1640 of Massachussetts when the first European settlers came, that the land was filled with “wild beasts and wild men.” But this is of course a frontier imaginary; the “wild men” had been transforming the land for millennia by hunting, farming, fishing, burning to clear the land, and so on. Thoreau thought he had experienced “untrammeled nature” when, as he relates in The Maine Woods, he became frightened while descending Maine’s Mt. Katahdin and was surrounded by the rocky landscape that looked to him untouched by humans—it might as well have been the far side of the moon as far as he was concerned.
    4. A fourth ecological imaginary, related to the first two, is the notion of a self-regulating or balanced nature, or the ecosystems of the world as organic wholes, most recently expressed on a planetary scale by Lovelock and Margulis’ concept of Gaia. Although the idea of a balance of nature can be found in Greek thought, Gilbert White’s The History of Selborne, and of course in the Romantic philosophical and literary traditions, as well as pastoral, it has also captivated a number of ecological scientists and is usually expressed in concepts such as “climax” or “equilibrium.” Related to holism and organicism, it is not currently in fashion, but for much of the last century it vied with its opposite, the idea that the normal state of nature was not equilibrium but rather disturbance, flux and change until in the century’s last few decades it was largely abandoned. But this is not to say that balances do not exist in nature; they do: but the idea that nature overall and absent the hand of human intervention (itself as much a fantasy as Hobbes’ idea of a “state of nature”) tends toward balance is not widely believed by ecological scientists today. 

Resilience

    When I was in Portland, Oregon last February at the round table with various musicians, musicologists, acoustic planners and city arts managers I was struck by something one of them, Tim DuRoche, said when he introduced the term “resiliency” and suggested it might be a better way of thinking than “sustainability.” Tim spoke about resiliency in ecological terms, saying that while sustainability implied preservation, he wanted to manage the arts for growth and change. He spoke about improvisation in music (he is a jazz musician as well as an arts administrator) as adaptation, with resiliency a key component. I embraced that idea, commenting that “resiliency” is a term that has emerged in contemporary ecological thought, to describe management strategies for complex systems where mathematical modeling and predictability is difficult if not impossible. I added, though, that in ecological thinking today, sustainability is allied more with adaptation and resiliency than with preservation.

    Resiliency planning is a strategy for protection against unpredictable disturbances in (and to) nature and against the law of unintended consequences. It arose from a critique of the ecosystem paradigm, a way of thinking about natural worlds that stood at the center of ecological thought from 1935 when Arthur Tansley coined the term "ecosystem" until about 1970 when the critique gained traction. In my 2009 essay “Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Approach” I had noted the part of this critique that is directed at equilibrium theory in ecosystems, but I maintained that four principles from conservation biology/ecology, the principles of limits to growth, diversity, interconnectedness, and stewardship, should guide cultural policy planning for music cultures. After all, conservation biology/ecology developed beginning in the 1970s, just as the critique was making its force felt. What I had not done was explore the extent to which that critique affects those principles, nor why that critique made me think of a kind of sustainability that tilts away from preservation of cultural heritage and towards adaptation and change, the same conception that Tim DuRoche alluded to when he spoke about resiliency. And since that conversation with Tim and the others in Oregon it nagged at me that I had not done so, and that perhaps I had not yet gotten it quite right, either. I resolved to take up this line of research again this summer after the teaching semester was over. As I did so, a number of questions resurfaced, ones that I want to explore further in blog entries during the next several months.

    First, the critique. Two of the linchpins of twentieth-century ecological theory were challenged beginning in the 1970s and are largely discredited by ecologists today. One is the idea, associated with Frederick Clements in the first decades of the 20th century, that forests and other natural units, when left alone as “wild nature,” pass through successive stages toward a diverse, stable, mature, and final or “climax” stage. The second is the idea, implied by Clements’s notion of succession and climax, and associated with the influential mid-twentieth century work of ecological scientists Howard and Eugene Odum, that mature ecosystems are those in which organisms, populations, and communities exist in a dynamic equilibrium characterized by energy flows and cycles (modeled mathematically) governing birth, growth, decay, and regeneration. These two ideas not only constituted the scientific discipline of ecology but also guided conservation efforts and environmental management in the last half of the twentieth century, and provided scientific grounding for what those who write for the general public sometimes term “nature’s way” or, more often, “the balance of (wild) nature.” But today's ecological scientists no longer believe in climax theory, nor in ecosystems whose normal state is dynamic equilibrium, nor in a balance of nature.

   I make a distinction between ecological science and environmentalism. The latter is an outgrowth of the conservation movement, and it involves many stakeholders besides ecological scientists: naturalists, conservationists, eco-tourists, policy makers, organic farmers, ecocritics, landowners, and those within the extractive industries such as mining, forestry, and agriculture that wish to use and renew natural resources, not use them up. Indeed, ecological scientists are not necessarily part of the environmental movement and many have strong reservations about it. Conservation biology is a branch of ecology that is very much a part of the environmental movement, but most ecological scientists are not conservation biologists. Most lay environmentalists today still believe that nature “naturally” moves towards balance; but ecologists no longer share that belief, while their research also questions the basis for correspondence between diversity and stability in ecosystems. Indeed, the ecosystem concept itself, which once ruled ecology, is no longer at the center of the discipline. How did this happen, why did it happen, and what does it mean, for ecology, environmentalism, and sustainability? Where do conservation biologists stand on the matter? Where has ecological science moved in response to this critique, what is the center of the discipline today, and what are the implications of this change for musical and cultural sustainability? Have the four sustainability principles from conservation biology/ecology been undermined or strengthened by this paradigm shift, and how might they be modified to suit the brave new ecological world?

    A number of other questions relate to the changing nature of ecological science. How, for example, has the post-structuralist, postmodern critique of science impacted contemporary ecological thought? Is a post-normal science of ecology possible? Is it desirable? What might it be like, and is it worth doing and worth wanting? And how, for example, has the new type of literary criticism, called ecocriticism, impacted literary theory? What is the relation between ecocriticism and deconstruction, and what are their implications for ecological science, environmentalism, and musical and cultural sustainability? What is the relation between the “balance of nature” and “nature’s economy?” What is the history of these ideas and how old are they—how did they develop and when did they take their present form? Does the pastoral tradition (in literature, art, and the humanities), a genre of nature writing and representation, involve a “balance of (i.e., in) wild nature” or is it, rather, directed more toward a harmonious relationship between nature and humankind? What are the implications of chaos theory and complex systems analysis for ecology, ecosystem management and, by extension, for cultural management and sustainability? How has the “evolutionary turn,” the return to Darwin and his principle of natural selection, impacted contemporary ecological thought; is there a place for evolution in ecosystem thinking today? And what is the place of ecosystem ecology in contemporary ecology? Finally, what can we learn from developments in soundscape theory about acoustic ecology? What does contemporary research in the sounds made by insects, birds, and whales, for example, tell us about all of these things, about sustainability and nature’s economy, balance, evolution, music, language, ecocriticism, antirealism, the natural world, and the human? These are some of the questions I’m anxious to explore in the near future.

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.