Natural Selection and the Invisible Hand

   

Invisible path to Oxford, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

     My sound ecology project led me to study animal sound communication, from three points of view: the modern science of behavioral ecology; indigenous ecological knowledges; and poetics, including zoomusicology. Zoomusicologists are especially interested in birdsong, from an aesthetic point of view. Sound functions for indigenous peoples as an indicator of nature: weather and climate, for example, and the locations and activities of animals, as well as spirit-persons. Behavioral ecologists study sound communication as part of the science of animal behavior: they are interested in understanding how, what, and why animals (and plants) signal information to one another by means of sound. Music may be understood as a special form of communication among human animals. Of course, compared with other animal sound communication, human music is thought to be complex in structure, to have aesthetic qualities, and to operate as part of the cultural matrix—that is, it varies among different peoples, it is learned and transmitted from one group and generation to the next, it is creative, and so on, making it different in degree (if not in kind) from the croaks of frogs and the chirps of crickets. And yet, I’ve wondered whether insights from the study of animal sound communication have bearing on music and sustainability, on the one hand, and on the place of sound and music in the contemporary environmental and cultural crisis, on the other.

     In reviewing the literature of behavioral ecology, I found that explanations of animal sound communication were based in the neo-Darwinian paradigm of fitness combined with modern gene theory. That is, individual animals communicated (in sound and by other means) in a struggle for survival with the result that those better adapted to their ecological niche would have the best chance of living longer, mating more often, and contributing their genetic inheritance to the ongoing gene pool of their species. Those better adapted exhibited advantageous variations compared with other members of their species: bigger, stronger, “smarter,” more flexible, and so on; or in the realm of sound communication they could vocalize louder, or longer, or in a more elaborate way, or more often, or when there was less interference from other sounds. As Darwin’s theory of natural selection proposed, then, the animals who were better at vocalizing (all other things equal) would gradually comprise a greater percentage of their species, and over very long (geological) periods of time, would “transmute” (or mutate) into new species. 

     One of the things that struck me immediately about Darwin’s theory of natural selection was that its evolutionary algorithm operated like Adam Smith’s "invisible hand." In both, individuals acting in their self interest—that is, selfishly—were said to produce an overall outcome for the common, or public, good: whether for the better adaptation of a species, or the benefit of society (the market economy, with opportunities and benefits for more individuals). Darwin himself credited the genesis of natural selection to his reading of Malthus on population: “In October 1838 I happened to read . . . Malthus . . . and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.” 

    But recently in reading Silvan Schweber’s detailed examination of Darwin’s reading during the period that led up to his eureka moment, I found confirmation that Smith's "invisible hand" had also been an influence. With natural selection, as in the free market, there was no external intervention or regulation; things were said to work out for the best naturally, and of their own accord, as if guided by an invisible hand. Also, in reading Stephen Jay Gould’s summary of Darwin’s “middle road” the other day, I ran across a similar reaction to Darwin’s theory from none other than Karl Marx. Writing to Engels shortly after reading Darwin, Marx put it this way: “It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘invention,’ and the Malthusian ’struggle for existence.’” Nature, in other words, operated in the plant and animal kingdoms as the free market did in the sphere of human economics.

     Gould himself had come to the same conclusion after reading Schweber’s 1977 essay. He wrote, “I believe the theory of natural selection should be viewed as an extended analogy—whether conscious or unconscious on Darwin’s part I do not know—to the laissez faire economics of Adam Smith. The essence of Smith’s argument is a paradox of sorts: if you want an ordered economy providing maximum benefits to all, then let individuals compete and struggle for their own advantages. The result, after appropriate sorting and elimination of the inefficient, will be a stable and harmonious polity. Apparent order arises naturally from the struggle among individuals, not from predestined principles or higher control." Gould was quick to demur from Smith's classical economic theory: laissez-faire economics leads to oligopoly and inequality, not a stable and harmonious society. 

     Gould also went on to point out that just because natural selection and laissez-faire economics were analogous, that in itself did not mean they were wrong. Even so, I believe there are reasons to be skeptical. For one thing, it is also possible that Marx was right, in that natural selection is anthropogenic, projecting our human understanding of behavior onto the animal kingdom because we have no alternative: we can’t comprehend what it is to be a nonhuman animal. And for another, as I learned just recently, from a 2011 essay by Peter Harrison in the history of ideas, Adam Smith didn’t mean what Marx, Schweber, Gould, and I thought he meant by the invisible hand. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” was understood, by Smith and others at the time he was writing, as deliberate intervention, “higher control” —in fact, it was taken to be the hand of God, hidden and invisible, yet working for the good of mankind. In other words, Smith’s free market was not free from the direction of God’s invisible hand. The irony is that Darwin’s natural selection was free from it. And so in this important aspect, Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the classical economic theory of Adam Smith are quite the opposite. Darwin himself would have liked to believe that God’s invisible hand was operating in the natural world, but could not bring himself to that faith, for various reasons that can be found in the voluminous literature about Darwin.

     Metaphors and analogies are necessary in scientific theories. Mathematical formulas represent ideas; Newton’s f=ma and Einstein’s e=mc squared are meaningless until the concepts are explained in words. “Relativity” is both a fact and a metaphor. Smith's "invisible hand" is a metaphor. In The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote that he used the phrase “struggle for existence” in a “large and metaphorical sense including the dependence of one being on another.” And this is to say that for Darwin the “struggle for life” involved not only selfishness, but also interdependence and cooperation, something that is sometimes forgotten by contemporary neo-Darwinians fixated on what Richard Dawkins famously called “selfish gene theory.” Interdependence, after all, is the cornerstone principle of ecological science—the study of the relationships among organisms and to their environments—and one of the four principles of an ecological approach to musical and cultural sustainability. 

Amateuring at Sustainability

   There was far more to the ecomusicologies 2014 conference last October than the two presentations I reported on. In many ways it reminded me of the cultural sustainability conference at Sterling College a year and a half ago, in that unlike the usual conferences I go to, which are sponsored by professional academic societies, the people attending came together out of a common interest in ideas. Scientists, humanists, artists, musicians, and political activists, some employed in colleges and universities and some not, gathered to share ideas and, to an extent, music. At this conference I heard ecomusicologists speak about folksingers who championed environmental causes, philosophers who speculated on whether animals responded to human music, activists working with indigenous communities to sustain local knowledge about sound and the environment, composers who took their inspiration from listening to the sounds of the earth and its inhabitants while sleeping out in the desert, scientists reporting on the responses of birds and plants to sound, and musicologists who applied ecocritical perspectives to the environmental compositions of contemporary composers. And that is still just scratching the surface: we heard music, we took an environmental soundwalk, we watched and discussed a documentary film about wood used in building guitars that had become endangered, and many other things. Among many surprises, I found myself listening without warning to my own recordings of hermit thrushes, played back in a presentation by David Rothenberg, whereupon he took out his clarinet and played along. He used the thrush recordings from Worlds of Music, where since the 4th edition (2002) they've helped stimulate readers to think about the continuum (or boundary) between sound and music. I was fortunate to have been invited to deliver a keynote address, and I spoke to them about my belief that ecomusicology could make a fundamental difference in a period of global climate crisis. It could do this by re-orienting humans to relationships based in sound interactions among living beings—in more technical terms, what I’ve written and spoken about over the last few years as a relational ontology and epistemology, based in the recognition of co-presence, through the medium of sound vibration. In other words, ecomusicology may help bring about the revolution in consciousness required for a human commitment to interdependence and its full environmental implications.
    I am not used to such conferences these days. The spirit of amateurism is in them, where most participants temporarily put career considerations aside in favor of a willingness to admit ignorance, a desire to contribute to a common project, and an interest in adventuring outside one’s area of expertise to learn different ideas and ways of thinking about them. Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) conferences from the 1970s were closer to these in spirit, while the Modern Language Association (MLA) conferences, which I also attended back then, were not. I had an advanced degree in English and my academic appointment was in Tufts University’s English department, so the MLA was my professional association; but I held the doctorate in American studies with a dissertation in ethnomusicology, so I attended SEM out of interest. I didn’t know, then, that in a few years I would be holding a joint academic appointment in English and ethnomusicology, or that I’d eventually move to another university (Brown) to direct their doctoral program in ethnomusicology.
    The MLA conference was huge—perhaps ten thousand in attendance, compared with a few hundred at SEM—and like a smaller class size, the smaller SEM conference size encouraged a fuller exchange of ideas. Besides, a major part of MLA was devoted to career-building and job interviews. Newly-minted Ph.Ds and other young unemployed or underemployed English professors met with teams of interviewers in small, stuffy hotel rooms for roughly fifteen minutes at a time, with offers, careers and lives hanging in the balance. I recall that this aspect of MLA was called the “meat market,” likening the interviewers to buyers inspecting meat in a butcher shop, and the job candidates to cuts of meat, some prime, some choice, some not so favored—not a happy comparison. We all hated the superficiality of it—inspectors and “meat” alike; but in the name of efficiency we did it.
    In top and second-tier colleges and universities at that time, English department life was almost deliberately inefficient by comparison, and anything but professional—sometimes (for me, then) maddeningly so. The English gentleman amateur was the unspoken ideal. The drudgery of professionalization—“Grub Street”—was out of character for those inclined toward a contemplative, literary life. For example, we didn’t try to coach doctoral students in the ways of the world that would help them get a good teaching job, something that seemed to me irresponsible even then, and certainly now. The literary life had its pleasures and rewards; but in those days I thought this ideal of the amateur went a little too far. Let me offer an example. Our university faculty, filled with scientists, engineers and other practical-minded people, decided to institute a Grievance Committee, charged to hear and to give informed and objective advice in response to complaints from any faculty member against others, including colleagues, department chairs, administrators, and so forth. I was elected to be a member of this university committee. After a year of hearing enough grievances to plot a dozen academic novels, I went to my department chairman and told him I’d been impressed with the work that this committee was doing. Before I could go any further, he asked whether I myself had a grievance with our department. No, I said, I did not; but I added that I thought it might be a good idea if our department established a grievance committee among ourselves, a departmental version of the larger one. “I don’t think that would be wise,” the chairman told me, “because then we would have grievances!”
    At the time, I thought he was joking; but later I realized he was quite serious—and speaking from the position of the literary culture he’d adopted. I should have known—I did know—that in English departments in those days, informed by the spirit of an idealized English aristocracy, one kept one's grievances private. Gentlemanly it was, because this was in fact a male society; but it was not long before this male dominance and its accompanying sexism was challenged and, thank heavens, overturned within the English profession. But back then the gentleman amateur prevailed, and while at times I enjoyed imagining myself a part of it, chiefly I felt myself surrounded by departmental colleagues as quaint as Lord Grantham of Downton Abbey.
    Now I look back on those colleagues, and those days, with a lot more tolerance and, I hope, understanding. I don’t miss the men’s club or the sexism, but I do miss the spirit of amateurism. I've written often about amateuring here before; it's one of the themes of this blog. Today’s young professors have undergone, in their graduate education, a great deal of what is called professional development, another word for systematic advice on building a career. This is useful advice for competing on the job market, which has become far more difficult to navigate than it was forty years ago. But it is not, I think, useful advice for encouraging the free flow of creative ideas among those whose real work isn’t to advance a career but to educate, to contribute to knowledge and understanding, and see to it that this helps make a difference in the world. This is what tenure is supposed to convey on professors—academic freedom—but with a much smaller percentage of tenured appointments today, with more job competition, and with more need for professional development, conferences like those on cultural sustainability, and ecomusicology, are now fewer and farther between.
    I would not leave this topic by endorsing amateurism as an end in itself. We want master surgeons, not amateurs, doing heart and brain surgery—any kind of surgery. But master surgeons, like all good professionals, keep learning. What I’m endorsing here is the spirit of amateurism—being willing to admit that one doesn’t know; to share, rather than own, ideas; to take intellectual risks; and to change one’s mind. These qualities were all on display in abundance at those conferences, while the excitement of learning and sharing ideas was contagious.

Managing for Musical and Cultural Resilience?

     By now, faithful readers of this blog won’t need to be reminded of the “four principles” (diversity, interdependence, limits to growth, stewardship) that I’ve been advocating for cultural policy. At the ABET workshop on music and sustainability, I proposed those four for discussion. Indeed, some of the speakers at the ABET conference were acquainted with them from my essays in The World of Music.[1]  As these principles were developed by conservation ecologists, not cultural policymakers, one might ask what are the grounds for guiding cultural policy by principles derived from attempts to manage the natural world. What does it mean, in other words, to apply an ecological or environmental (they are not the same) way of thinking to cultural policy? And what would such a way of reasoning be? If conservation ecology applies ecological thinking to managing the environment, how would this translate into the world of cultural policy? What is an ecological cultural policy that would enable musical sustainability? It’s important to try to frame these questions carefully, because the nuances in the way they are framed will suggest alternative routes for answering them.

    And so it’s important to ask, first, whether cultural engineering is likely to do more good than harm. Why not let culture take its course, as one would manage nature by letting it alone, to be as wild and “natural” as possible? After all, if plants and animals have natural cycles of birth, growth, decline, death and decay; if species rise and fall, adapt and sometimes become extinct; if ecological communities themselves change beyond recognition, why not simply let nature (and culture) be? Why manage nature, or culture, at all? Isn’t it, perhaps, un-natural to try to intervene? And why presume to manage for sustainability using ecological thinking, when the components of ecosystems die natural deaths? Why shouldn’t musics, languages, and other aspects of culture also die natural deaths? Isn’t that ecological?

    To which we may ask, what is a natural death, if it is caused by human interventions that wreak havoc on individuals, populations, communities, and ecosystems? How many species have gone extinct within the past two hundred years—roughly, since the start of the Industrial Revolution—as a result of human impact on ecosystems, compared to the number that would have gone extinct anyway? The answer to why conservation ecologists should attempt to manage nature at all, of course, is that nature is already being managed, badly. Letting nature alone would mean abandoning nature to the land developers, the oil companies, the timber cutters, the mining companies, agribusiness, and so forth. Does the same analogy work for culture? Those who say no to applied ethnomusicology tend to do so on the grounds that music is best left alone to take its natural course. But what is its natural (cultural) course?

    When I was participating in a meeting of the folk arts panel for the National Endowment for the Arts about 30 years ago, one of the panelists urged this hands-off approach. We were trying to decide whether to recommend for approval a grant proposal that would give money to an organization that was attempting to manage the flow of music in its city by encouraging musicians in underserved communities to set up a music school. One of the panelists objected, saying that it seemed to him like the organization was interfering in the natural (cultural) flow of music in that city. “We shouldn’t be meddling in their affairs,” the panelist concluded, with a flourish. Bess Hawes, director of the Folk Arts Program, seldom spoke at these meetings; she felt she should not try to influence the panelists. But here was a fundamental challenge, and if the answer was no meddling, no attempts to manage, then her organization might as well cease to exist. And so when the panelist said we shouldn’t be meddling, she responded by saying something like this: “Of course we should meddle! Everyone else is meddling with culture and the arts. Some institutions think only fine art is worthy of support, and that’s where they put their money because fine arts aren't self-supporting. Other people think that the only worthwhile art is art that makes money, so they want to get rid of all support. Some people think that the arts are the finest expressions of human life. Others think the arts are useless. Everyone is meddling; why shouldn’t we? We want to encourage the folk and traditional arts. Not many others do. Why shouldn’t we act on our beliefs, if we truly believe in them? Why shouldn’t we meddle? Supporting folk arts is meddling. Not supporting folk arts is another way of meddling. We are all meddlers no matter what. Why shouldn’t we try to meddle for good?”

    Needless to say, her argument carried the day. But the position that one should stay out of the way and let nature or culture take its course might be supported on other grounds. Neoliberal economists rely on their interpretation of Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand: that each party acting out of economic self-interest results in a market that is guided (by an invisible hand) for the common good, and so that economy is best which is managed (regulated) least. The same would be true, by analogy, in the realm of culture and the arts: an invisible hand would ensure the best outcome.

    Now, Adam Smith did write that an invisible hand guided self-interested actors to work for the public good. Here is the relevant excerpt from The Wealth of Nations: ““Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it ... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for society that it was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

    But although Smith thought that an invisible hand guided self-interest toward public good, he did not go on to derive the neoliberal principle that market regulation was largely unnecessary. In fact, he believed that markets should be managed and regulated. Therefore, the neoliberal argument for laissez-faire rests on a misunderstanding of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” and so it would be wrong to rely on Smith’s authority here. Of course, that does not prevent neoliberals from deriving laissez-faire and less government regulation from the so-called invisible hand. But this is wishful thinking. If the hand is invisible there is no way of knowing whether, or how, it works—or if it works at all. Experience suggests the contrary: that self-interested actors guide their own hands toward wealth, and without regulation the result is income inequality and cycles of boom and bust, not to mention social injustice and ecosystem exploitation.

    Given that conservation ecologists do attempt to intervene to prevent the extinction of species by managing ecosystems in the environment, and allowing that their “meddling” is meant for the benefit of all, we return to the question of how conservation ecology transfers over into the realm of cultural sustainability, particularly for music but also for other aspects of expressive culture. And that is where the “four principles” come in. Why these four principles and not others? Why not, for example, manage for a “balance of culture” or cultural equilibrium? Isn’t that ecological?

    Here it’s helpful to understand that ecological thinking has undergone a sea change regarding how nature “naturally” behaves. Until the latter part of the twentieth century, most scientific ecologists agreed that, left to its own devices, an ecosystem moved towards a balanced equilibrium, a dynamic, but stable, state. Of course, ecosystems were subject to disturbance (fire, drought, etc.) but they tended to restore themselves to a stable “climax” condition, or at least move in that direction until the next disturbance.

    But a paradigm shift occurred during the last 40 years or so, and now most ecologists no longer believe that nature “naturally” moves toward a dynamic, balanced equilibrium. The “balance of nature” paradigm was replaced by a new one that emphasizes change and disturbance. The new paradigm admits that nature may achieve equilibria, but these are temporary and, for a given ecosystem, they occur at different points of balance, with the result that there is no longer any “climax” state towards which nature moves, but rather a series or scale of different possible equilibrium points, some advantaging certain species, some others. Ecosystems are not self-restorative. Instead of sustainability, with a view toward achieving it through encouraging the balance of nature, the new paradigm centers on the concept of resilience, or the degree to which an ecosystem resists disturbance. Ecosystems are managed, now, to increase resilience to damaging changes. Of course, a resilient ecosystem does manage to achieve a degree of sustainability, if only temporarily; but not in the same way as a stable, balanced one.

    Will managing for cultural (and musical) sustainability be replaced, then, by resilience? So far, it does not appear that “cultural resilience” has caught hold. Possibly it will, and perhaps it should; so let’s anticipate a little bit what it would mean. Cultural policymakers managing for sustainability, such as those involved with UNESCO, or the “big three in DC” (the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution’s Office of Folklife and Cultural Studies, and the Folk and Traditional Arts division of the National Endowment for the Arts), have also been managing for resilience as a means toward sustainability, chiefly by encouraging activities involving the traditional arts and their continuation, strengthening institutions and attempting to add value to those arts, particularly among the younger generations who must be the ones to continue them. “Resiliance management” might not come as news to these culture workers, or to those who have been partnering with musical and other traditional arts communities through participatory action research. Alan Lomax’s 1972 call for action against what he termed “cultural grey-out” was a resiliency response to a perceived disturbance.

    But there would, I think, be some subtle differences in managing for resilience rather than for sustainability. For one thing, resilience would suggest that managers (whether for culture or nature) adopt a defensive posture and be vigilant against disturbance, which means anticipating possible changes to the natural (or cultural) ecosystem and planning for them. Again, the obvious example is global warming, and the need to plan for this major change and the disturbances that it is bringing, such as an increase in violent weather that damages the natural and built environment, or the need to transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable sources of energy. In a way, of course, this is common sense. In the cultural arena, resilience planning would involve such things as responses to new communications models, such as the Internet: how can expressive culture be encouraged in an environment where so many musical exchanges, so to speak, take place virtually, over the Internet. Not that virtual music is new; it’s been around ever since recordings, and arguably is embedded in musical notation. But the Internet fosters new models for virtual communication, new opportunities for co-presence (whereas recordings were not traditionally interactive in this way).

    The downside of resilience is that the defensive posture puts managers in a response mode in which cultures are regarded as reactive rather than dynamic or innovative. That is one problem. Another is this: if change is the rule in nature, why not also in science? If nature does not progress to a climax, why should science? What grounds have we for believing in resilience? Is it just that it seems to fit today’s world better than balance? And if so, is that good enough—for now, until another paradigm comes along?  In future blog entries I will have more to say about my reservations about managing for resilience.

[1] "Economy, Ecology and Music: An Introduction," and "Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint," The World of Music, Vol. 59, no. 1, 2009, pp. 5-16 and 119-138.

Ecosystem as descriptor

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

Notes

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

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

A Sound Commons for All Living Beings

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

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