EXPERTS AND CRITICS AND THE ECO-CRATIC DISCOURSE*

In any case, said the Frenchman, it is not systems but their excesses that dehumanize history. -Gabriel Garca Mrquez -The General in His Labyrinth

My son, tired from football practice, sent me back to his classroom to retrieve his coat. Its in the first closet right inside the door. The closet has a picture of a globe and some Save the Earth things all over it. Sure enough, the coat was there, right behind the earth. Saving the earth is very big in schools. Its right up there with enhancing self esteems. Almost every classroom has the obligatory picture of the earth seen from space. And inevitably theres a lesson on thingsalways simple things and usually 50 of themthe students can do to and/or for the environment to save the earth. Frankly, I dont mind this sort of instruction because most of the students know it has as much to do with their immediate lives as their math lessons. Enduring these lessons is easy because they often involve field trips or visits from guest experts (who sometimes bring something real, like an eagle, to class). They also give students another opportunity to pester their parents (Mom, why dont you clean the stove so the reflectors under the heating elements can reflect the heat? or Dad, have you put aerators on the faucets yet?). But, like most of what schools do, these lessons are harmless. A picture of the
* *

Based on an intervention at a discussion on Conflicts in Global Ecology, June 27-

30, 1991, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, Germany. 1

globe with some Save the earth things is a fine way to distinguish one closet from another. What concerns me is the possibility that our children may someday run into a teacher who sees through the silliness of this sort of globalism and who is thoughtfully critical of naive environmentalism. For just below the surface of the purchasable globalism on display in most classrooms is a set of sophistications of thought that have real and dangerous implications for life together. If anyone in the schools ever thinks beyond those glossy pictures of the earth from space, I will be the first to become concerned. Just below the surface of naive globalism is thought that perhaps no one should be thinking. Im wondering if I shouldnt be more afraid of the good and able criticism than I am of the ardent eco-experts. To call the mentality that leads to the indiscriminate display of the earth seen from space naive globalism or naive environmentalism is not to say that it comes to us from naive, marginalized people. This, for example, is from the Chairmans foreword a report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. The report was titled Our Common Future:

Perhaps our most urgent task today is to persuade nations of the need to return to multilateralism.... The challenge of finding sustainable development paths ought to provide the impetusindeed the imperative for a renewed search for multilateral solutions and a restructured international economic system of co-operation. These challenges cut across the divides of national sovereignty, of limited strategies for economic gain, and of separated disciplines of science.

After a decade and a half of a standstill or even deterioration in global co-operation, I believe the time has come for higher expectations, for common goals pursued together, for an increased political will to address our common future.1

Five years after Gro Harlem Brundtland penned these words, it is hard to tell whether the principal effect of Our Common Future has been to bring about more global co-operation or to generate more global criticism of those who would urge us to think using terms like Our Common Future. And it is hard to tell whether the depersonalized, high abstractions of multilateralism and cooperation or the hyper-humanized counterpositions are more dangerous. Frankly, I think it is neither the call for cooperation nor the explosion of criticism such a call always generates but the concatenation of the two that should concern us. Around the modern move to turn the environment into a fetish and the globe into an icon, the agonistic conversation being enacted between the environmental experts and the expert eco-critics has created a common eco-cratic discourse. It is this discourse that makes it difficult for the rest of us to think for ourselves. The eco-cratic discourse, as formulated by the experts and their critics is cast in terms of systems thinking. Ervin Laslos introduction to systems theory is titled, instructively, A Systems View of the World. Systems thinking is offered as a corrective to the kind of vision that apprehends the complexity of a thing by seeing it, as Descartes taught the West to do, in terms of the simple parts that compose it and in terms of the simple relations that drive it. To see the world from a systems perspective one must see connectedness instead of boundaries and irreducible organization instead of well

articulated, interacting parts. Systems thinking gathers everything together without discrimination or prejudice. It allows for the appearance of experts in everything, men like Garca Mrquezs Frenchman, a man who had an insatiable need to demonstrate ... his universal knowledge regarding the enigmas of this life and the next.2 And it allows for the excessiveness against which the Frenchman warned. It is not systems thinking alone that should be of principal concern; it is the sophistications of thought to which it can lead that threaten, as he put it, to dehumanize history. Some Signs of (Subtle and Sophisticated) Systems Thinking I came to appreciate the dehumanizing effects of subtle and sophisticated systems thinking by studying the system that produced the first atomic bombs.3 That study alerted me to some of the effects of systems thinking. Even though saving the earth seems to be on the opposite end of the moral spectrum from building those bombs, it may be useful to become aware of the effects of a mentalitysystems thinking common to both. We can see the signs of sophisticated systems thinking emerging out of the eco-cratic discourse. What are these signs?

> Standards become only topics for cynical commentary. Don Worster, an historian of ecology at the University of Kansas, says he asked a group of ecologists a critical question: What is a healthy eco-system? Their inability even to define an eco-system was proof, Worster says, of the intellectual poverty of all the systems talk. But it is possible that Worsters experts were stumped by his adjective, healthy. Sophisticated systems thinkers know that while systems might be described, they cannot be judged by simple standards such as healthy. They are just too complex to admit simple assessments.

Indeed, in the institutional arena devoted to concerns about health, doctors gave up trying to organize their work around a concept like health decades ago. Medicine now tries to help patients realize their unique potentials, to optimize life experiences along life course trajectories. This kind of rhetoric, which dominates contemporary medical discourse,4 enables action even without critical standards by which to judge those actions. Indeed, having standards would limit the scope of possible action by placing some actions out of bounds. If one can affect a little cynicism with respect to any standard, there are no limits to what one can do. And cynicism is just what one gets from the potent combination of, on the one hand, experts knowing that simple standards are untenable and, on the other, critics laughing at the experts who cant answer simple, so-called critical questions like What is a healthy eco-system? Systems thinking is encompassing and leaves no outside from which to develop standards according to which something can be judged. So it is not surprising to hear the eco-critics saying that a term like sustainable, so central to Chairman Brundtlands work, has no real meaning. Sustainable, the expert critics tell us, must be kept around only because of its effectiveness in mobilizing populations to political action (because we live, they tell us, in democracies in which people must be mobilized to meet the threats that they dont understand might threaten them) even though the experts can agree only on the fact that they cannot agree on the meaning of this term.** By claiming that a word like sustainable can have viable utility only as a rallying cry, other words like democracy are also eviscerated. What remains when words like these are no longer
* **

This was a central them that emerged in the discussion in Essen. Sustainable was,

to the expert critics assembled there, an unsustainable but probably useful term, and democracy was clearly, for them, a degraded idea. 5

available for use in civic discussion is only the cynicism with which they are dismissed. And cynicism is hardly a firm foundation for political discourse and action.

> Diversity becomes a scarce resource. The Ecologist, in an effort to critically counter Our Common Future, proposed to publish a report for the Rio eco-summit conference called Whose Common Future?5 The report looks to the local people, not to multilateral cooperation, for redemption. The report to be written, we are told, will portray clearly the vitality, innovativeness, and dynamism of local people in meeting the challenge of the environmental crisis and will document how they are actively seeking solutions themselves and what their solutions are. I do not personally know of any local people anywhere who think of themselves as meeting the challenge of the environmental crisis. Most local people are, at least, more modest than that. But I do know that this new approach, exemplified by The Ecologists interest in the local people, is right in line with so many other developments of our day that come under the heading of making diversity into a scarce resource. People, cultures, thought and actions become important not because they are but for what they might represent. Everyone and everything are no longer worthwhile but are, instead, valuable for their possible contribution to diversity. Diversity becomes the basis for a new, sophisticated colonization of the mind, of people, of nations, of regions. Diversity is a scarce resource. The Ecologists report says, [Part Two] will argue that there is no need to invent alternatives: they already exist. One principle of systems thinking is that there is rarely a need anymore to invent new knowledge; all the knowledge that one would

ever need exists already in any system with sufficient diversity. The job of the system manager, of which breed I count Oppenheimer among the first, is to mobilize existing knowledge. And one does this by respecting and nurturing diversity, eccentricity, individuality, local knowledge, and so forth. Hence it is not surprising, from a systems perspective, to see now the eco-critics turn toward celebrating the diversity of the local people and their successes vs--vs the environmental crisis. We preserve diversity (of seed stock, of semen and ova) in the cryogenic labs of private corporations because it diversityis valuable. The Ecologist will preserve the diversity of wisdom of local people everywhere in their report because their diversity is valuable too.

> People become resources; everyone becomes dead but real. The Ecologists proposed report anticipates one of the risks of taking an interest in the diverse resources of the local people everywhere and of bringing their knowledge together so comprehensively in a report. Part Twothe part that will portray the vitality, etc., of the local peoplewe are told, is not to produce a dry, technical compendium of alternatives. The risk in becoming part of a system, which The Ecologist seems to anticipate intuitively, is to enter a new category: dead but real. The term dead but real comes from a marketing manager at Weyerhauser who was describing a new plant that the company was marketing for use in modern offices filled with artificial air and light. The plants, he said, look real and smell real because they are made from real plants, but they metabolize nothing. When asked to describe them, Stephen Barger said, They are not live, not artificial, but in between. It is a new category. Dead but real.6

The local people who lend their experiences to this comprehensive report stand at risk of having their stories become part of a dry, technical compendium of alternatives. Unless the stories of the locals find their ways into the hands of a good writer well cautioned far in advance, their vitality, dynamism and innovativeness might not be well portrayed. And it is only if people can be seen as contributing stories of redemption7 to the scarce resource of diversity that they will be valued at all in these times. And if they go unvalued, someone may notice that all of ones efforts are being devoted to making everything seem vital, dynamic and innovative. At that point, the very best the local people can hope for is to be put to sleep or stored in a deep freeze so that they might possibly contribute to diversity sometime in the future when their stories are deemed less dry and technical, or more alternative. Hans Achterhuis talks8 about the history of the concept of nature as enemy, our collective western history since the time of our conceptual (at least) separation from nature. I would suggest that somewhere in that 200-year history there was a point where human beings came to see themselves as part of this nature (again, so to speak). One effect of systems thinking, which took firm root in the middle of this century, is to include everything in its scope without discrimination or privilege. Under this scheme, humans, along with everything else, come to be capable of being valued. They become substitutable equivalents in systems. I agree with Achterhuis that we are still at war with nature, but now that we are included back in nature according to our relative value, this puts us today in the peculiar situation of being at war with ourselves. (And this applies more broadly than just to the farmers in Holland who, Achterhuis tells us, are at war with themselves over the new EEC regulations that will require a reduction of their numbers by 40%.) We are in the very peculiar position of not just being torn away from nature,

but of being torn away from ourselves, of being in a position not to see or otherwise sense our roles in cause-and-effect relations in the places we live.9 Dead but real.

> Professional philosophy becomes essential. When all standards come under the sway of cynicism and when people become dead but real resources in a battle to preserve diversity (instead of being, say, consolations for being alive), new and very sophisticated philosophical justifications for action become essential. They are already appearing in the literature of the expert ecocritics. Gary Snyder, an old poet and a new ecology guru, says he organizes his thinking about ecology around a balance between cosmopolitan pluralism and deep local consciousness.10 Wolfgang Sachs argues for cosmopolitan localism.11 Once expert systems thinking creates the world as a manageable or doctorable entity and once the expert critics create the local people as an aspect of the scarce resource of diversity, sophisticated philosophy is necessary to join these elements in a relationship of complementarity. It requires a form of thinking well beyond common sense to join globalistic concerns with a valorization of the local. As Robert Oppenheimer tried to tell us some 40 years ago, science has voided common sense12 and it seems that we require professional philosophy to show us how to think to justify all our undertakings. In these times and under the rise of systems thinking, ethics will be a growth industry. In a situation where there are no standards of judgment that cannot be cynically dismissed and in which systems can only be managed but not controlled, ethics will offer up intellectual and moral rationales for action. Ethics becomes a cheap political activity, a way of justifying the drawing of the lines and the making of the choices that the critics,

as well as the experts, tell us will have to be drawn and made. We would do well to think about Ch. von Weizsckers prediction that ethics will become as much an object of idolization as technical ability in these times. And we should think about what happens to the local people whom we rush to value if they find themselves unable to participate in sophisticated, professionalized thought. Be Careful About What You Think I once taught with a woman from one of the tribes of the Iroquois Confederation. She tells me that members of her tribe try to be collectively careful about what they choose to think about. She says that they think about only those things that they want to bring about and, once they decide to think something, that means they have decided to deal with the object of their thought completely, no matter how many generations it might take. Her words are a caution to those who might be inclined to think things better left unthought. This caution to be careful about what you think receives a dark echo in the first public report of Robert Oppenheimer following the end of the war with Japan. He said, If there was any great surprise in [the] first explosion it lay not in any great new discovery. It lay rather in the fact that what happened was so like what we thought would happen.13 Just thinking things together by writing an equation on the board or making a model in a computer can have effects. I think we should exercise a little caution in even thinking about joining everything togetherincluding all the ideas and experiences of all the local people everywherein any way, in any respect, under any rubric, no matter how humane it may sound, no matter how philosophically sophisticated the rationale.

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I recall a rancher in Northern California. His name is Bo. One afternoon, he told my son an old story about some boys who stole some beans from a garden some 15 miles from his place and how, when the rancher there appeared with a gun, the boys ran the whole 15 miles back. Then he told John that when he recently walked that same path he had been able to see how the land had been changed by fencing and grazing. Then he told my son about the last 100 years of water use on his ranch, including how the gold rush affected his water, and about how he was sitting now with the local water board to think about water use in the area for the next 100 years. As I listened, I immediately associated Bos stories with two dimensions of living I had read about in the literature that appeals to those inclined to be thoughtful eco-critics: (1) a circle of 22 km (about 14 miles) radius that Ivan Illich calls a Kohr to honor Leopold Kohr and which is, many seem to agree, the geographical area that one person can actually come to know and care about over time and (2) Elise Bouldings planning unit of the 200 year present, a unit of time extending 100 years in the past and 100 years in the future. I said to myself, and to other ecologists, academics and scientists who would listen, how ecologically sensitive Bo seemed and how smart Bo was to live within these academically respected ecological dimensions without ever having been schooled to know about, much less live within, them. He was only one mile off from a Kohr and he was right on the dimensionality of Bouldings present. Yes, how smart Bo was, we all agreed. A fine example of a small-is-beautiful or appropriate-is-just-right critic, we noted. But then it occurred to me that the only smart person party to this encounter on that afternoon was me.

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Boa person who finally agreed that he was an old timer because, as he put it, all the others I knew as old timers are deadwas only doing what he always did: He was contending*** with the situation as it presented itself to him. He was well aware (and he told other stories to make this point) that if you make a mistake with the water or the soil or the plants on the ranch, the ranch makes you pay for your mistake, but most of the time the price, even over the long term, is not very high. You just continue on: contend and pay. It only falls to the well-schooled few, I finally realized, to think together the many ways many different people contend and pay into such things as dimensions for living or some such pretentious phrase as I used to re-present Bos stories. Bo strikes me now as a person who is trying only to live well until the time when other people are the old timers of the area. He is not contributing to diversity or thinking in terms of Kohrs or 200-year presents or anything else. He was, on this day, simply filling part of the afternoon by telling stories to a young boy who was, for a few days, in this old mans company and without television. Bos mistake, if I may speak this way, was to tell his stories within the hearing of a well-schooled personyours trulywho would be so smart as to think him to be a representative of the natural wisdom of local people everywhere, and not just Bo. I dont think there is much chance to escape the expansion of systems thinking, at least the sophisticated variety that wants to nurture diversity and mobilize it under comprehensive approaches that will help initiate and strengthen local movements for
* ***

In English this is a nice word. It evokes images of struggle, of course, but it

bespeaks a relationship based on tending, a tending with, one might say. It also phonetically evokes the notion of being content.
12

change. Modern systems are too good to leave much room for escape. It is very difficult today, in the face of so many good and smart people so concerned about the welfare of everyone and the protection of everything, to remember who we are and to resist becoming a dead but real example of a solution to a global crisis, or some such thing. But it may be possible. Gary Snyder opens his The Practice of the Wild by recounting a visit he made, along with a friend (a student of native California literature and language) to an old Indian in the hills of the Sierra Nevada, coincidentally very near Bos ranch. After some small talk, Snyders friend proudly announced the reason for the visit. Louie, he says, I have found another person who speaks Nisenan, a native language spoken at that time by two or, maybe, three people. In the name of preserving diversity and respecting a dying culture, this well meaning young man had sought out another speaker so that the two old people could speak, probably into a tape recorder, perhaps on video, so that a soon-to-be-dead language might be preserved in the audio and video collections of a local university. Who? Louie asked. He told her name..., Snyder reports of his friend, the expert. She lives back of Oroville. I can bring her here, and you two can speak. I know her from way back, Louie said. She wouldnt want to come over here. I dont think I should see her. Besides, her family and mine never did get along. Snyder comments,

Here was a man who would not let the mere threat of cultural extinction stand in the way of his (and her) values.... Louie and his fellow Nisenan had more important business with each other than conversations. I think that he saw it as a matter of keeping their dignity, their pride, and

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their own waysregardless of what straits they had fallen uponuntil the end.14

I would put it this way: Louie seems indifferent to the progress of systems thinking and the help that it brings to a world in need. But he also seems positively uninterested in making a contribution to the enhancement of the scarce resource of cultural diversity. In his polite way, he seems insistent on not becoming a datum for this no-doubt smart student of literature and language. In his own way, he seems a man who will probably remember who he is. He seems a man unlikely ever to enter that new category of dead but real. Saying no to being helped to contribute to diversity and saying no to global cooperation, especially when so much is at stake, is, I suspect, very difficult. But it is possible. I know it is possible to refuse to participate in the eco-cratic discourse because both Louie and Bo did just that. But both Louie and Bo have an advantage over our children: Neither of them is a resident in the schools that are just now learning how to talk about and value the environment.

NOTES

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15

1.

World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, New York,

N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. x.

Garca Mrquez, Gabriel, The General in His Labyrinth, New York, N.Y.: Penguin, 1990, p.

120.
3.

Arney, William Ray, Experts in the Age of Systems, Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New

Mexico Press, 1991.

See Arney, William Ray and Bernard Bergen, Medicine and the Management of Living,

Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Hildyard, Nicholas, "Whose Common Future?: Proposed Structure," The Ecologist, January,

1991.
6.

Gapay, Les, "Preserved trees look alive, thanks to Weyerhauser," Seattle Post- Intelligencer,

January 7, 1987, pp. B6, A1.

Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and

Modern Culture, New York, N.Y.: Schocken Books, 1985, Bersani, Leo, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1986, and Bersani, Leo, The Culture of Redemption, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.
8.

In his intervention at the conference. As Ch. von Weizscker put it in her intervention in the conference. Snyder, Gary, The Practice of the Wild, San Francisco, Calif.: North Point Press, 1990, p. 42. Sachs, Wolfgang, "One World," Development: A Polemical Dictionary, London: Zed Books,

9.

10.

11.

1991.
12.

Oppenheimer, Robert, Science and the Common Understanding, New York, N.Y.: Simon and

Schuster, 1953.
13.

Oppenheimer, J. Robert, "The atomic age," New York Philharmonic Symphony Radio

Program, December 23, 1945.

14.

Snyder, op. cit., pp. 3-4.