Cultural ecology defines the webs of perception and action that lock individuals together
in
geographical space as societies. They are focused on balancing the exploitation of environmental
resources for production with the conservation of resources to ensure survival of the community.
This balancing act involves technological, sociological and ideological management systems.
The technological aspect of management is concerned with tools, materials
and machines. The
sociological aspectinvolves the relationships into which people enter especially in work and
at
home in the family. These two aspects encompass topics that deal respectively with the
exploitation of resources through production and demand.
The ideological aspect comprises beliefs, rituals, magical practices,
art, ethics, religious
practices and myths. These define the permissible and acceptable relationships with nature, and
more often than not, are part of a local system for conserving resources. In developed civilisations
the ideological package includes the philosophies and legal systems of the society. Changes in
technology and social organisation will bring forth changes in the ideas and beliefs that connect
people with local and planetary resources, and also define humans in the wider cosmos, but such
ideas will always feed back on the social organisation, which moves forward.
The ideological aspects of the conservation of resources are expressed
- through
ideas about 'nature' and 'place', as these have developed historically to provide
philosophical, artistic and spiritual values for defining present day environmentalism;
- through
science, as applied ecology, which underlies farming and wildlife conservation;
- and through living in nature
using traditional ecological knowledge to realise global and local
strategies of resource management.
All these aspects define the two major routes of Western reasoning about nature. On the one hand,
since the 18th century, there has been a ready acceptance of the scientific drive for the domination
of nature. On the other hand, the environmental outcomes of this mode of activity has precipitated
the ecological search for intrinsic value in nature and its preservation.
These two rival views of the relationship between humans and nature define cultural
ecology as a
fluid mind-map to steer a global society toward sustainability.The rivalry comes from fragmentation
of civil society in the pursuit of profit and status. Only as conscious agents of cultural revolution
that promotes a balanced synthesis of the exploitative and conserving segments of society can we
harness our species' ecological potential for a sustainable future.
The twentieth century opened with a revolution in our attitude to the world about
us. It sprang
spontaneously from all branches of culture and from all countries across a Europe which stretches
from Russia to Spain.
The discoveries of Einstein in outer space corresponded with those of Jung into the
inner
subconscious. Ecology began to shape the modern perspective of our place in nature. The arts
themselves exploded into a new environmental dimension. No longer was the inquiring mind
satisfied with appearance, scientists and artists became travellers in the subconscious to define
the relationship between people and environment that was more comprehensive than the search for
natural resources. Thus the artist set out to combine the invisible with the visible, the abstract with
the figurative. Foremost among the artists was Paul Klee, who dug deep into the subconscious to
pull out images that puzzle, delight and unaccountably exhilarate.
The literature of man’s relationship to environment is prolific and diverse,
yet it is an amazing fact
that there is no single publication currently available that offers a comprehensive survey of the
range of elements and their component parts which today we recognise as constituting the cultural
environment. No compendium exists which views all these realities both in their physical and their
inspirational aspects to describe and examine the phenomena of the earth's surface that we
include in the concept of cultural ecology.
We are part of nature from birth, and thus inside it, and nevertheless look at it
from the outside, as
an alien world. This double position leads to a lack of clarity. The biologist Jean Dausset writes:
'Nature does not speak, it is man who speaks. Man is unique in assembling and transmitting
through words and pictures, the message of nature. Man gives nature a voice'.
Hans Ddieter Schaal says we are at one and the same time inhabitants, observers, users,
spokesmen, admirers, consumers and destroyers of nature. Nature is visible and invisible at the
same time.
“The visible outer skin is available to the eye, the forces of nature
work largely invisibly. Life and
death occur in silence, reservedly. The heart beats, the lungs breathe, thoughts come and go,
blood circulates, the digestive system works away - everything is part of nature. A crack runs
through the middle of the ego, a crack dividing inside from outside, subject from object, ego from
nature, consciousness from the world”.
All structures and compositions that result from the use of natural resources are
ecological bridges
across the cracks in the cultural space between object and subject.
“Processes of confrontation, interconnection, superimposition, intensification
and encirclement are
triggered. Windows and doors acquire the function of ways through, paths and squares become
areas of encounter and greater closeness for man and nature”.
