1.5.3 Cultural ecology
Cultural ecology is a commentary on the Marxist model of society. 
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The Marxist model may be expressed as the ‘Economic Base supporting an Idealogical Superstructure’. 
The economic base of a society determines the ideas that define the organisations and individual behaviours that express its culture.  
Everything in the superstructure is reducible to, or is determined by, the economic forces of the base.  From this perspective, things in the superstructure, such as politics, literature or religion, which at first glance do not seem to have much to do with economics, are ultimately best grasped in terms of identifiable economic causes. 
The Economic Base is the primary element in any society and may be subdivided into:
  • the means of production, that is to say  the geographical circumstances, the raw materials and the technology available at a given stage of history.  For example, ‘plough and land’ was the means of production and survival during the Middle Ages.   A century ago it was ‘minerals and factories’;
  • the forces of production, were the nature of the producers involved in the production of the means of survival.  For example, production mostly involved men as opposed to women, or educated as opposed to uneducated, or rural peasants as opposed to the urban proletariat; 
  • and the social relations of production, involved the division of the society in question into economic classes.  For example, some people, were wealthy because they owned the land or the factories (the term for this is capital) as opposed to others who merely worked for these owners.  This resulted in the asymmetrical distribution of economic wealth and, thus, power.
The Superstructure, on the other hand, is secondary in that it is derived from the primary Economic Base and is comprised of various social institutions, such as some form of political administration, a legal system, religious organisations an educational system a particular philosophical world view, a moral code, and specific artistic and cultural practices, and the political, legal, religious, philosophical, moral, and aesthetic ideologies that predominate within these institutions.
The Marxist model was proposed in the 1840s to deal with the capitalist economics of the urbanising societies that were then coming into being through industrialisation.  These days it is clear that the global economy has to be aligned with Earth’s limited supply of renewable resources.   From this viewpoint ecological limitations on human production require a change in the economic base to define a society that is disciplined to balance the organisation of people for production (political economy) and the organisation of nature for production (natural economy).
The economic base of cultural ecology consists of five behavioural pillars, which support a superstructure consisting of nine sets of ideas which define living sustainably. This structure is presented in the following two diagrams.
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Together, the modern base and infrastructure model, expressed as cultural ecology, defines the cross-curricular framework necessary to promote the new economics of living sustainably.  The strategy for environmental management to achieve these ends is set out in Agenda 21 of the 1992 Rio Environment Summit.
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 aspect involves 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”.