Can ecology be used for degrowth?
Now, appealing as this sounds, it should be pointed out that ecology—as a science—is a considerably harsher one than economics. The word sounds nicer, but a quick comparison of textbooks of the subjects reveal that while, yes, economics focuses significantly on competition, ecology does so to a yet greater extent, and also callously studies bifurcation diagrams of populations (which is a nice way of saying, when most die off in a horrible collapse, before they grow back, and repeat), and it also features words like predators and parasites, which are hardly mentioned in economics.
I mention this to point out that ecology, as a science, seems to support the claim that entropy increases, complexity increases, until one day it breaks and crashes. It’s rather economics, not ecology, that imagines a state of sustainable exchanges and flows.
Ecology, as a science, sounds surprisingly little like ecologism or environmentalism, the “green” political ideology. We could blame this on the evils of detached, mechanistic, Cartesian, Western science, of course. Maybe a true science of ecology would be more generous? If other, softer and more spiritual, perspectives were applied, perhaps other visions of ecological community would come to the fore? It has become a popular trope to claim that Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution shapes ecology to this day, never really spoke of competition and struggle. For the record, this is manifestly untrue (go ahead and look at Goodreads quotes, enjoy). To complicate things, Darwin was no crude or reductive theorist—he believed in the importance both of cooperation and competition, in interplay with one another. But even if this trope is wrong and based on wishful thinking, what does it matter? Maybe ecology could be a science based more on cooperation and harmony, and maybe this could then guide our steps towards harmonic relationships with nature? Again, maybe Darwin was also too steeped in Western reductionism?
There have indeed been some important theoretical advancements in this direction of seeing a more cooperative mechanism of evolution: The ornithologist Richard Plum’s Evolution of Beauty elegantly weaves in the feminist insight that females have selected aesthetically for males across species, and that this has led to a veritable explosion of color and beauty in birds that simply cannot be accounted for by “survival fitness” (which is entirely congruent with Darwin as well as with how chaos theory works).
But that does not take anything away from the fact that ecology studies populations and individuals locked in a struggle for survival, and that this spirit can and would pervade any perspective based on ecology—to a yet higher degree than today’s economics-based perspective. Fundamentally, economics is about competition and trade, ecology about competition and death. Life and death are locked in a dance—that’s what entropy is all about. Although Kate Raworth’s Donut Economics is an impressive and promising start for creating resilient economies, it still suffers from this division of the world into “bad” economics and “good” ecology—failing to account for the fact that ecology studies yet grimmer processes, where collapse is entirely normal.
So: If relying on ecology does not resolve the conundrum of how degrowth can be achieved, what can?
In the article below you can read my answer to this question.
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| medium.com |
Why our ecological sensibilities need a proper reconstruction — and how DEGROWTH can be achieved
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