FROM THE LEXICON - CUDC Quarterly 3:3/4 - Winter 2004

Ecology

From the perspective of the early 21st Century, as we attempt to measure and/or remedy the unintended consequences of some two centuries of unprecedented technological and scientific change, it is almost unthinkable that people ever got by without this word. In fact, though, it’s relatively young, appearing in print for the first time only in the 1870s, and for sometime thereafter mostly in relation to the emergent theory of evolution, as biologists needed to consider the relationship between an individual organism and its surroundings.

It was probably this element of "feedback", the way in which an organism both acts on and is formed by its environment, that suggested the neologism from "economy". The industrial world had become acutely aware that the economy is the result of myriad human actions, which nevertheless comprise a whole that frustrates the best efforts of human management, often with irrational and destructive effects. Something equally mysterious must have seemed to be at work in relations that, only after the fact, could be seen to cause the differentiation of species in nature.

It was only somewhat later that "ecology" came to be used in a more global sense. In 1936, for example, we find H. G. Wells writing that the world community can be assumed to be "subject to general ecological laws." Again, the implied comparison with "economy" is oddly fitting. Participation in the economy is, so to speak, compulsory, and the effects of economic change are inescapable, especially when things go bad. By the middle of the last century, it’s not surprising that far-thinking people were beginning to realize that the sum total of human interactions with the environment might have similarly inescapable and potentially devastating effects.

This, however, points to a surprising divergence between the two words. Economics has worked very hard to divest itself of any moral or prescriptive dimension (and with some success, at least within the horizons of the advanced, capitalist world). Macroeconomists mostly try to pursue stability without making too many judgements about what happens on the ground. Classical microeconomic theory achieves an almost surreal value neutrality by making no distinction at all between "needs" and "desires" and attempting to analyze individual economic decisions based solely on a calculus of utility. In contrast, ecology has become the new "dismal science", not only moralizing, but sometimes censorious. In its most radical and so-called "deep" forms, it’s incapable of defining any human need or desire as legitimate. All are suspect from the global point-of-view of "nature". Because of the hard truths it uncovers, ecology is forced to prescribe conduct, but it is not necessarily well equipped to do so.

An ecological urbanism is, therefore, not such a simple proposition. Cities are not simply about the efficient satisfaction of needs, any more than they are simply about the efficient circulation of goods and services. They are, instead, vehicles for the definition, expression and contention of desires. To think about the physical acts required to sustain and enrich that play of desires, it might be useful to revisit the ancient Greek roots of our two kindred words. We tend to stress only the shared prefix: "oikos", the household, which must be managed according to a "nomos" , custom or unwritten law, in order to keep the roof fast and mouths fed. (N.B. "home economics" is therefore technically redundant.) "Logos" or "reasoned discourse" was irrelevant to the household, because the Greeks felt that logos required the context of the city and the ongoing shared pursuit of a good life that was its basis. It was inherently public and inherently beyond questions of mere necessity. Of course, the Greeks were also busy depleting their little peninsula of most of its wild species and forests, so a simple return to their categories is hardly advisable. Something of their spirit might not be unwelcome, though, when why try to think "ecology" in the city.