Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
environment is not in itself surprising. Water is the cardinal barometer, the essential
indicator of the state of nature, being particularly sensitive to the effects of
development and construction. Rivers are powerful symbols, cutting through and
across rural—urban divides and bringing people and places together. New practices
in Japan are at least to some extent a reflection and an interpretation of new ideas
about ecology; ideas that are critical of rationalist science-based thinking, and that
some have sought to link to traditions of Eastern thought.
Until recently, an hierarchical and hypothetico-deductive explanatory framework
has been dominant, deriving from an essentially Platonic and Cartesian worldview
that defined a rational natural world distinct from the ineffable world of the soul.
This science-based approach is now subject to a widespread challenge posed by new
ways of thought in physics and ecology (Adams 1997; Murphy 1994; Pahl-Wostl
1995). Callicott and Ames (1989: 5) characterise the divergent thought systems as
'the atomistic—mechanistic image of nature inherited from the Greeks,
institutionalised in modern classical science, and expressed in modern technology,
on the one hand, and the holistic—organic reality disclosed by contemporary
ecology and quantum physics…on the other'. Murphy (1994:23) writes of a 'move
from a technological to an ecological social paradigm'. The old order is seen as
reductionist and excessively reliant on science-based modalities, as managerial and
technocratic, seeking to control and to direct according to hierarchies of expertise,
employing the techniques and idioms of large-scale, automotive intervention.
Ecological science belongs to this old order, being regarded as 'a technocratic recipe
topic for directing and controlling change' (Adams 1997:278). Humanity, as
controlling agent, restores nature by recreating ecosystems as they existed before its
intervention. Environmental crises, both actual and potential, as well as new
theories concerning the composition of matter have cast a different sort of ecology
as flag-bearer of the new order (Pahl-Wostl 1995). This new ecology identifies
ecosystems as dynamic and non-linear; it conceives human actions as being
intrinsically bound to the natural environment. It sees energy as 'a more
fundamental and primitive reality than material objects of discrete entities'
(Callicott 1989: 59). At its heart lie ideas about the chaotic structure of the
universe.
This affirmation of a non-linear and non-dualistic approach, these new ways of
thinking about ecology, bring with them a number of implications, in terms both of
human relations with other humans and of human relations with non-human
animals. Some of the consequences are eminently political, and have alimented the
recent proliferation of writing on political ecology (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987;
Escobar 1995; Peet and Watts 1996). This process occurs both in metaphorical and
in literal terms. Societies and cultures are no longer so readily seen as discrete, auto-
regenerative entities. Social hierarchies are interrogated; systems of knowledge are
deconstructed. The integrative power of the global capitalist system is taken to have
its referents in the workings of ecosystems. The direct, literal relevance of the new
ecology to the political structuring of human society is manifested, for example, in
movements attempting to create wider recognition for the benefits of traditional
