Hi Gunnar,
Thanks for flagging up these issues with Leopold's tenet:
> Leopold's basic preset: *'A thing is right when it tend so preserve the
> integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when
> it tends otherwise'.* **Aldo Leopold. The Land Ethic. 1947
*You said: The first is the assumption of stability, The second is the very
phrase "biotic community." Who is part of this community and who is not?*
Perhaps it will help if I explain my understanding of what Leopold would
have meant by both 'stability' and 'community'.
1.
Leopold was an ecologist. Within ecology the concept of 'stability' is not
some kind of constant state or equilibrium. Obviously cycles in natural
systems depend on destructive events such as on forest fires and the death
of individual organisms to make room for new life. While ecological systems
remain healthy and support biodiversity within dynamic cycles that have
evolved over literally hundreds of millions of years, this is not the case
when natural cycles are disrupted very quickly in a short amount of time as
is the case with climate change, rapid loss of biodiversity, soil depletion,
fresh water depletion, ocean die-off, toxic waste contamination, rain forest
loss, etc. While cycles of growth and destruction are healthy, the kind of
destruction caused by industrial processes over the past two hundred years
is completely unprecedented. While it might appear that we can sustain a
civilization (and a design community!) while continuing to dramatically
reduce the bio-capacity and resilience of natural systems, this is not the
conclusion of the world's ecologists. A certain amount of ecological
stability is *essential*. Because we will never know exactly what we cannot
do, which ecological process we just cannot live without - unless/until that
ecological process/species/element collapses, we are very foolish to push
boundaries conditions beyond what know are the limits of a 'stable' system -
i.e. one that will not collapse. The point is there there are thresholds in
ecological systems and if we cross these boundaries sharp non-linear effects
become possible / likely, and then what happens eventually is collapse. We
are entirely dependent on relatively stable ecological systems and so a
tenet emphasizing ecological stability, i.e. where we recognize that there
are ecological limits that we must respect and not transgress is necessary.
2.
A similar argument supports a definition of biotic community. Biotic
communities are interdependent. A healthy biotic community is bio diverse.
Biodiversity creates resilience, i.e. the capacity to withstand dramatic
changes. What ecologists mean by community is the diverse communities of
animals, plants, and minerals that sustain healthy ecosystems. We allow
these communities to become degraded at our own peril - since we ultimately
depend on them. Furthermore, for many of us Nature has intrinsic value. We
live embedded within an ecological system which sustains us; this entire
system is our community, and we ignore this community's needs at risk of
destroying our capacity to sustain ourselves. Obviously some negotiation is
needed in a world of different people, animals and other organisms with
various needs. Yet the mechanisms that we have now to determine who 'wins'
(i.e. who gets to use the most ecological space) results in the continuing
destruction of natural systems at an unprecedented rate (=we all 'lose').
This will need to change if we want to sustain any civilization over the
long term.
A code of practice for designers must recognize the rights of the present
biotic community and future generations to enjoy the (relatively) stable
ecological systems that we inherited. But recognizing this fact as a
necessity is only the first step, and on it's own it is relatively
meaningless unless we start to do the much harder work of transforming
industrial, political and cultural systems that perpetuate the current state
of deep unsustainability. An ethical design practice *must *acknowledge the
design industry's impact on natural systems and attempt to reverse this
situation.
All the best,
j
Jody Joanna Boehnert
Director | EcoLabs | www.eco-labs.org | Brixton, London
AHRC sponsored PhD candidate | University of Brighton
0772 555 1550 | Twitter: @ecolabs
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