What is civilization? By civilization
I mean those expansive cultural
formations established by the
sedentary, stratified, usually literate,
administratively centralized societies that
originated in the northern hemisphere in
Neolithic times and predominate in the
world today. Such societies were based
on labour-intensive, agrarian forms
of production. Whereas pre-agrarian
societies had looked to natural ecologies to
furnish their livelihoods, civilised societies
carved out spaces of their own within their
environments, dedicating those spaces
exclusively to human use. They achieved
this, at the cost of great effort, through land
clearing, cultivation and domestication –
often of exotic species – and through the
construction of permanent settlements.
Such cultivated and, eventually, engineered
scenarios gradually began to replace
natural landscapes. Recourse to human
effort and artifice rather than reliance on
nature ultimately gave rise not merely to
agrarian economies and the urbanization
of society but to industrialism, and it is
in this industrial form that civilization
dominates the world today.1
Members of pre-agrarian societies, by
contrast, depended on the affordances
of local ecologies for provender, shelter
and other requisites. Whether they were
true foragers or what I have elsewhere
called custodials, practising sophisticated
forms of ecological management, their
cultures reflected a sense of enmeshment
in, and responsibility for, an intricate
set of ecological interdependencies
(Mathews, 2019). Intimate knowledge of
these interdependencies enabled people
to ensure, by way of relatively small
interventions, that ecosystems themselves
would do the work of providing for them. So,
in pre-colonial Australia, for example, just
by walking through country with a firestick,
practising highly selective burning of
plant communities, people could promote
grasslands and so ensure an ongoing
abundance of game (Gammage, 2011); or,
by selectively digging out wild yams, they
could ensure increased propagation of yam
daisies in subsequent years (Pascoe, 2014).
Such practices, or forms of praxis, relied
not so much on effort as on a sophisticated
understanding of ecological systems, and
on how to tweak them.
For agrarian peoples, sweating in
their fields, a knowledge of planting and
husbandry was of course indispensible,
but otherwise the environment, as a
realm of natural ecologies, was relatively
discounted, as outside the sphere of the
praxical and hence ultimately as outside
the sphere of the cultural. ‘Nature’ in other
words tended to become progressively
backgrounded to the sphere of human
agency – ignored and little understood, it
was expected to take care of itself. A deep
human–nature dualism thus lies at the
core of traditional forms of civilization – a
tendency to construct culture as set apart
from nature and as the exclusive focus of
interest and value.
In the contemporary world, civilization
under its industrial aspect has largely
overtaken the natural environment. In its
ignorance and discounting of the processes
and principles underpinning the integrity
of natural systems, this form of civilization
has, often with little awareness of what it
is doing, ransacked and ravaged nature,
with the consequence that the health and
integrity of the entire biosphere is now
under grave threat.
What is ecological civilization?
Ecological civilization, a term of great
significance in contemporary China, is here
defined by its aim of rendering civilization,
as a social formation, consistent with the
repair and ongoing renewal of Earth’s life
in all its abundance, beauty and ecological
diversity.
Approaches to ecological civilization
have thus far taken two broad forms. The
first seeks not to overturn the existing
parameters of industrial civilization, nor
the dualist ideologies that reinforce those
parameters from within, but merely to limit
their impact on the biosphere. We might call
this the reformational approach. The second
does challenge those parameters, seeking
to replace them with new parameters
enabling economies to be re-integrated into
ecosystems in such a way that economic
functionality becomes interdependent
with ecological functionality – a state
of affairs that would in turn reconfigure
the inner ideologies of civilization. Since
this latter approach would require a
complete overhaul of currently prevailing
socioeconomic arrangements, we might
call it a transformational approach to
ecological civilization.
The reformational approach
Examples of the kind of strategies used
under the first, reformational approach
include the following.
Current capitalist modes of techno-
industrial and economic organization
are maintained but drastic reductions
are effected in either levels of production
and consumption, or levels of human
population, or both.
Current capitalist modes of techno-
industrial and economic organization
are maintained, but areas of land and
sea reserved for conservation are vastly
expanded, where this affords space
for the recovery and regeneration of
biosphere processes.
An influential example of the latter
approach can be found in the Ecomodernist
Manifesto, which seeks further to intensify
and centralize industrialism – fully
‘decoupling’ it from nature by restructuring
it along circular economy lines – with a
view to thereby freeing up land currently
under industrial and urban usage for
conservation instead (Asafu-Adjaye et al.,
2015; cf. Wilson, 2016).
Arguably, however, as long as the
dominant techno-industrial modes of
production prevail, holding the dualistic
ideological core of civilization in place,
the biosphere will continue to be seen as
subordinate to human interests, and the
biological resources of the planet will
continue to be regarded as the rightful
property of humanity, ever available for
new forms of exploitation. The end-point
to which such an attitude leads in the long
run is total exploitation: a biosphere that
retains only those ecological components
with demonstrated utility for human
purposes. Currently such components
cannot be definitively identified: no one
can determine which of the myriad existing
species, planetary cycles and systems
are truly necessary as underpinnings for
human civilization. However, it is already
clear that many species are dispensable
and, with the development of ever-more-
elaborate geo-engineering systems that
may replace natural systems with artificial
ones, it may turn out that most ecosystem
processes will prove dispensable or
substitutable by artificial processes in the
future.
“As long as the
dominant techno-
industrial modes of
production prevail,
holding the dualistic
ideological core of
civilization in place,
the biosphere will
continue to be seen
as subordinate to
human interests.”
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Logically then, failure to replace the
kinds of praxis which give rise to dualist
attitudes with forms of praxis conducive to
a more integrative view of the relationship
between humanity and nature seems likely
to undermine any attempt to establish a
new – ecological – form of civilization
truly consistent with the repair, integrity
and ongoing flourishing of the biosphere.
The transformational approach
It might seem then that a transformational
approach is required – that it is not
enough merely to clean up the impacts
of an economic system fundamentally
at odds with the biosphere, but that our
economic praxis needs to be intimately
tailored to the needs of the biosphere from
the start. Of course, this is not to say that
we might not want to incorporate into
our transformational approach strategies
identified under the reformational
approach, such as population control and
the reservation of large tracts of land and
sea for conservation. But it is to say that
such strategies may prove ineffective
unless we also transform our fundamental
modes of production in ways calculated to
generate new, more integrative, attitudes
to nature in place of our traditional dualist
ones.
In prefiguring the transformative
approach, we need again to distinguish
at least two different pathways to
transformation.
The first pathway is the approach known
as bioregionalism. It calls for devolution of
the present global, high-impact, hungrily
extractive economy into a multitude of
small, local, adaptive and low-impact
economies. Societies built on this model
would substitute simpler, decentralized,
ecologically informed, place-identified,
value-rich but technically minimal and
scale-appropriate forms of cultural
and material life for current regimes
of centralized, de-regionalized, high-
tech mass production and global
distribution and consumption. We might
call this the bioregional version of the
transformational approach (Sale, 1985;
Snyder, 1995; McGinnis, 1999; Crist, 2019).
Although bioregionalism undoubtedly
represents in many ways an optimal
contemporary pathway to an authentic
non-dualist – ecological – consciousness,
and hence to a genuinely ecological
civilization, its disadvantage is that it
seems, in the context of today’s geopolitical
realities, a utopian one. A transition
towards bioregionalism would require not
merely a reconfiguration but a reversal
of our prevailing political and economic
arrangements. In a world in which net
demographic trends are, for a multitude
of economic and techno-cultural reasons,
strongly towards urbanization and ever
greater concentrations of production and
of high-density living, conditions for the
kind of decentralization and industrial
downscaling required by bioregionalism
appear unfavourable – unfavourable
enough, at any rate, for us to consider
a second, less idyllic but perhaps more
realistic, transitional version of the
transformational approach.
This second pathway to transformation I
term biosynergy. From this viewpoint, it is
not necessary to reverse the demographic
tendency of modern civilization. What
is required is rather a design revolution.
Neither capitalism nor techno-indus-
trialism per se would need to be given up,
but productive practices, as they pertain to
the whole manufacturing, agricultural and
architectural fabric of our material culture,
would need to be reconfigured so as to
render these practices productive not only
for us but also for biological systems.
“No one can
determine which of
the myriad existing
species, planetary
cycles and systems
are truly necessary
as underpinnings for
human civilization.”
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Such an approach would involve designing
human production systems with reference
to biological systems, rendering society
materially integral with biosphere processes
rather than antagonistic to them. If all
production systems, together with our ways
of organizing and administering them, were
reconfigured so that these systems afforded
ongoing sustenance for the biosphere as well
as for us, then there would be less need to curb
industrialism per se or reduce population in
the interests of sustainability (though upper
ecological limits on human population would
necessarily still apply). Like the activities of
the legendarily industrious ant, the total
biomass of whose many species on Earth is
greater than the total biomass of humanity,
our own industriousness could nourish and
replenish the life-community, rather than
obliterating it (McDonough and Braungart,
2002).
One name that has been proposed for such
a design approach to ecological civilization
is biomimicry. This design philosophy was
originally popularized by biologist, Janine
Benyus, economists, Amory and Hunter
Lovins, and architect William McDonough.
Benyus (2002: front matter; emphasis in
original) writes that:
Biomimicry is a new science that studies
nature’s models and then imitates or
takes inspiration from these designs and
processes to solve human problems, e.g., a
solar cell inspired by a leaf […] Biomimicry is
a new way of viewing and valuing nature. It
introduces an era based not on what we can
extract from the natural world, but on what
we can learn from it.
Benyus identifies various principles she
considers as characteristic of life processes
generally, and hence as underlying nature’s
designs. Nature, she proposes, runs on
sunlight, uses only the energy it needs,
fits form to function, recycles everything,
rewards cooperation, banks on diversity,
demands local expertise, curbs excesses
from within, and taps the power of limits
(Benyus, 2002: 7). Such principles are
accordingly proposed as the guidelines
for biomimetic design. Were our industrial
and urban systems modelled along these
lines, those systems would, according
to advocates of biomimicry, become as
productive for the larger community of
life on Earth as are the industries and built
structures of ants.
As a key to designing an ecological
civilization, however, the philosophy of
biomimicry is problematic. In itself, such a
philosophy can as easily lead to ecologically
dystopian as to utopian outcomes – to a
form of ostensible ‘sustainability’ that
would replace actual biotic communities
with artificial systems designed for the
exclusive benefit of humanity. Following
the lines of an autonomous, organic archi-
tecture that self-constellates and self-
regulates in adaptation to the environment,
exemplified in solar cities that photo-
synthesize and industrial aggregates
that cycle water and carbon and morph
in accordance with variable conditions,
such ‘genetic architecture’ could be built
from the inside out in accordance with
the morphogenetic principles of life itself
(Chu, 2004). This would pre-eminently
qualify as biomimetic, but at its limit, it
could dispense with nature altogether,
securing a state of ‘sustainability-without-
nature’ – that is, a state of sustainability
for humanity that spelled death for other-
than-human nature (Mathews, 2011).
In other words, it is not enough to imitate
nature in our production systems. While
imitating another does imply a certain
respect for their qualities – or in this case
for their operating principles – it by no
means entails actual consideration for their
interests. Consider the Romans’ imitation
of the Etruscans: what the Romans learned
from the Etruscans helped them not only
to overpower and displace the Etruscans
but eventually to erase most independent
traces of Etruscan existence. Imitation is,
in other words, consistent with a brutal
plagiarism that results in appropriation
and displacement.
If imitation or mimicry, then, is not the
appropriate category on which to found
an ecological civilization, what category
might serve? I think it is true that we do
need to ‘follow nature’ in the design of our
production systems if we are functionally to
integrate these systems with the biosphere.
However, ‘following nature’ in this
connection may be not so much a matter of
imitating specific mechanisms observable
in natural systems but rather of adopting
the behavioural protocols underlying those
systems. In other words, to reconfigure
our modes of production may be a matter
not merely of “remaking the way we make
things,” as McDonough and Braungart put
it in the subtitle of their 2002 book, but
of emending the way we engage with our
environment.
“As a key to
designing an
ecological civilization
the philosophy
of biomimicry is
problematic.”
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The root-protocol observable in nature
has twin, co-defining aspects: conativity
and accommodation and least resistance.
Conativity denotes the impulse of all living
things to preserve and increase their
own existence. It is only by virtue of this
drive towards self-existence that living
things count as living at all. But in nature
this drive is qualified by the principle
of accommodation and least resistance:
organisms which conserve their energy
by adapting their ends as far as possible
to the ends of the organisms with which
they are in systemic interaction will
be naturally selected over organisms
which needlessly provoke resistance and
competition. We might describe such an
evolutionary tendency towards the cross-
referencing of conativities as synergistic.
Synergy is here understood as the adaptive
process whereby the ends, indeed the very
conativities, of two or more parties are
continually mutually refracted via their
collaboration. I use the term biosynergy to
denote the way in which this protocol plays
out in the natural world.
Biosynergy has affinities with the
Daoist principle of wu wei – a term which
translates literally as non-action, where
this may understood not as passivity but as
a process of accommodation and adaptation
to the ends of others. Wu wei enables one
to conserve one’s own energy, and thereby
increase one’s own existence, by (i) desiring
what simultaneously complements the
desires of others, rather than pitting oneself
against them, and (ii) desiring what others,
following their own conativity, are already
incidentally providing, thereby saving
oneself the effort of providing it (Mathews,
2011).
In the biosphere, the conativity of most
species is broadly shaped by biosynergy
because this is the strategy that, being
energy-conserving, tends to result from
natural selection. Conflict, competition and
predation do of course still occur in nature.
In the case of predator–prey relationships,
synergy may occur at the level of the
species rather than that of the individual:
predation is often a necessary condition
for prey population stability. Where the
interests of particular parties cannot find a
synergistic fit, outright conflict may result.
But such conflict will always entail an
energy-cost for the parties in question. In
order that this cost be minimized, modes of
conflict themselves will in turn be shaped
by the principle of accommodation and
least resistance. At the end of the day, the
imperative to internalize the conativity
of others by desiring what they need one
to desire will be what ensures that every
living thing, in seeking its own self-
existence, at the same time perpetuates the
larger system.
Biosynergy in this sense is clearly a
fundamental ecosystem dynamic, well
illustrated by the activity of those species
described as ecosystem engineers. Beavers,
for example, desire quiet shelters, safe from
turbulence and predators. They accordingly
dam waterways to create still ponds in
which stick lodges may be conveniently
built. Beaver dams modify and redirect
stream flows, in the process hydrating
the landscape, mitigating floods, filtering
runoff and creating wetlands that provide
habitat for myriads of other plant and
animal species – where these biodiverse
and healthy wetlands afford necessary
conditions for healthy waterways and hence
for healthy beavers. Healthy ecosystems are
held together and continually regenerated
by countless such synergies.
As humans, we have the capacity to depart
from the evolutionary logic of biosynergy.
Throughout the history of civilization,
we have substituted external sources of
power, such as domestic animals, slaves
and, more recently, fossil fuels, for the
energy available to us from our own bodies.
This has enabled us – unlike other species
which seek to pit themselves against their
biotic fellows but suffer exhaustion and
selective disadvantage as a result – to
impose ourselves on our environment with
impunity. Moreover, through our highly
developed reflexivity – our capacity to
reflect on and hence change our behaviour
– we can also substitute arbitrary, culturally
mediated ends for the ends imprinted in us
through evolution. In our modern societies
we have entirely forgotten about desiring
only what Earth-others need us to desire –
and, so far, we have gotten away with this.
“In the biosphere,
the conativity of
most species is
broadly shaped by
biosynergy because
this is the strategy
that, being energy-
conserving, tends to
result from natural
selection.”
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It is this break from the evolutionary
logic of biosynergy that first gave rise to
and has since perpetuated our dualistic
sense of separation from and superiority to
the rest of the natural world. And perhaps
we can continue to get away with flouting
evolutionary logic in this way, replacing
the life-world with techno-engineered
systems designed to serve human interests
exclusively. But if we wish to restore a rich
and flourishing biosphere, we shall have to
recover this logic. Thanks to our capacity
for reflexivity, it is not impossible for us
still to do so, and thereafter to review and
revise our desires in order to re-align them
with what Earth-life needs us to want.
Biosynergy, understood as a proto-moral
principle of adaptative accommodation to
the needs of the rest of Earth-life, broadly
equates not only to wu wei, in ancient Daoist
tradition, but to the normative principle, or
Law, that is core to Australian Aboriginal
cultures and that Aboriginal people read
from land itself (Mathews, 2020). Just
as negotiating their environment in
accordance with Law requires of Aboriginal
peoples intimate attunement to the multiple
conativities intricately at play in local
ecologies, so we too will need to decipher
at least the contours of the conativities
surrounding us before we can begin to
reframe our desires and hence our praxis
along biosynergy lines. Discovering these
contours, which are none other than the
contours of other-than-human inner life,
will draw us into social and communicative
relationship with our prospective ecological
partners and allies, where this means these
actors will inevitably enter our culture via
stories that pull us into social and affective
relationship with them. Biosynergy will
in this sense become enshrined as a root-
norm in our culture as much by story as by
science.
Biosynergy as a guide to ecological civilization
How then might biosynergy as a protocol or
normative principle apply in practice in the
circumstances of our 21st century global
civilization?
To begin with, there is, on the largest
scale, the question of how efficaciously
to tackle the problem of climate change.
To adopt a biosynergy approach in this
connection would involve not the heroic,
impose-and-control methods of the
dualistic mind-set, such as pumping
sulphate particles into the atmosphere,
erecting giant mirrors in space or
artificially whitening clouds, but, first,
acknowledging the conativity of the Earth-
system, then considering how that system,
left to itself, would correct the problem.
Left to its own devices, the biosphere would
undoubtedly simply re-vegetate itself.
Vegetation is the basis of Earth-life, and
maintaining and increasing vegetation is
the conative imperative of the biosphere.
Re-vegetation would, of course, draw
down carbon dioxide and hence in due
course re-balance the composition of the
atmosphere. A biosynergy, wu wei–type
approach to climate change would thus
simply be to let the biosphere get on with
its own business, at most assisting it to do
so. In addition to obvious strategies such as
re-afforestation, assistance might take the
form of providing opportunities for plants
such as the fast-growing freshwater fern,
Azolla, to repeat the remarkable feat of
global cooling it achieved 50 million years
ago – the so-called Arctic Azolla event,
when the spread of Azolla across a land-
locked arctic sea sequestered so much
carbon that it converted a greenhouse
climate to an icehouse one (Brinkhuis and
Schouten, 2006).
“Vegetation is the
basis of Earth-life,
and maintaining and
increasing vegetation
is the conative
imperative of the
biosphere.”
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An ecological analogue to Azolla in
present-day circumstances might be giant
kelp: with the aid of artificial tethers,
marine afforestation with kelp (and other
seaweeds) could be conducted in the open
ocean. These (unenclosed) kelp forests
would not only draw down carbon at a
rate and scale comparable to ancient
Azolla, but would de-acidify surrounding
seawater, affording rich habitat for many
marine species, particularly shellfish – to
the extent that, with a very minor set of
interventions on our part, such marine
forests could support sustainable fisheries
apparently capable of providing 200 kg of
seafood per year, per person, for 10 billion
people (Flannery, 2017).
A biosynergistic approach to climate
change would thus consist in our assisting
the biosphere to get on with its own business
of revegetating itself, but ideally in ways
that could at the same time incidentally
provide for our human needs. For this to
work, however, we humans would have to
be prepared to adapt our desires to what
the biosphere needs us to desire – which,
in the case of the kelp scenario, would be
seafood as our staple, rather than, say,
beef or pork. A deeper understanding of the
ecology of climate dynamics would reveal
innumerable other ways in which restoring
ecological functionality would ameliorate
current climate distress, with possibly
other incidental benefits for us.
For a further case study pertaining to
food provision, we might look to the Veta
La Palma aquaculture farm in Spain (see
www.vetalapalma.es). The 8000-acre fish
farm is part of a larger estate on a marshy
island in the Guadalquivir River. Degraded
by inappropriate livestock farming in the
first half of the 20th century, the marshy
parts of the estate were restored in the 1970s
and an ‘extensive’ (as opposed to intensive)
form of fish farming begun. Extensive
farming relies mainly on the natural
ecology of farmland to provide for the
species farmed. In the case of Veta La Palma,
this means that a variety of fish species
are sustained by abundant crustaceans
and other naturally occurring aquatic life.
Optimum habitat health is maintained by
large populations of waterfowl, numbering
up to 600,000 at times, and comprised of up
to 250 species. Instead of regarding birds
as competitors for fish, Veta La Palma sees
them, in classic biosynergy, wu wei style,
as allies – as assistant farmers helping to
do the hard work of maintaining conditions
conducive to fish flourishing. Human input
into the farm is minimal. Staff do regulate
the hydrology of the marshlands by way of
a network of fish ponds that are artificially
flooded to ensure the physical and
microbiological quality of the water. More
than 100 islands have also been created
for the nesting of waterfowl and 93 miles
of banks have been revegetated. Twelve
thousand acres of the estate have been
set aside as a marshlands habitat reserve.
The end result of this edifying exercise
in intentional biosynergy is provision of
seafood of exceptional quality and the
creation of the largest waterfowl sanctuary
in Europe.
“A deeper
understanding of the
ecology of climate
dynamics would
reveal innumerable
other ways in which
restoring ecological
functionality would
ameliorate current
climate distress.”
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Numerous other examples of an
ecological approach to food provision could
be cited here. Making full use of ecosystem
services and taking advantage of, yet at
the same time regenerating, ecological
relationships, has long been central to
alternative farming and horticultural
philosophies, from the “one straw
revolution” of Fukuoka, to companion
planting of organics, to permacultural
synergies between selected plant and
animal species that deliver outcomes
farmers themselves would otherwise have
to labour to achieve.
All such strategies exemplify the
biosynergy approach: by accommodating
stakeholder-species, by inviting them
into synergy with us via the creation of
conditions conducive to their flourishing,
we can enlist them as allies in the provision
of our livelihood, allocating to them the
major burden of effort required for such
provision. For them, such effort is not an
imposition because it is made with, rather
than against, the grain of their conativity.
“For the moment
it may be enough to
show how, even in
our contemporary
mass societies, we
could in principle
return to ways of
feeding ourselves
that retain continuity
with pre-agrarian
modalities.”
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Biosynergy-driven alternatives to
traditional agriculture are then readily
conceivable. I do not have space here to
explore the more challenging question of
how manufacturing as well as agriculture
could be revisioned along biosynergy
lines. For the moment it may be enough
to show how, even in our contemporary
mass societies, we could in principle
return to ways of feeding ourselves that
retain continuity with pre-agrarian
modalities. In doing so, we would perhaps
lay down ideological foundations for a more
ecologically adaptive and collaborative
relationship with the biosphere that
would in time articulate itself through all
our systems of production, emanating at
last in a new blossoming of planet-wide
mutualism properly describable as an
ecological civilization.
Notes
1 This thumbnail definition of civilization of course
misses many intermediate forms of society, such
as pastoralism, village horticulture combined
with periods of herding or supplemented by
hunting or forest gathering, maritime societies
reliant on trade with agrarian societies, and so
on. For present purposes, however, the simplified
contrast between agrarian and pre-agrarian will
suffice.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Freya Matthews is an environmental philosopher who lives in Australia.
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