Nested Ecology: The Place of Humans in the Ecological Hierarchy

Preface

ix Preface .................................................................................................................................... Imagine a set of Chinese boxes, beginning with one just large enough for you to stand in and nested within a series of progressively larger boxes stretching out into infinity. If you suppose that if you are in the middle of this set of boxes the world revolves around you and your kind, then you miss the point of this analogy. Your position in that small, central , nested domain is not a statement of your centrality—or that of humankind —to the rest of the world. It simply reflects the pragmatic reality that as a human being you can only perceive the world from your own subjective experiences, taking into account your biologically derived perceptual and cognitive capacities, and you can only interact with those progressively more expansive ecological domains through the use of your body and the tools that your body is capable of fashioning. Your position in this nested ecological matrix is no more than your biological and perceptual niche for viewing and interacting with the world. Every other creature occupies a box of their own in this nested hierarchy, and their position no more implies that they are the masters of the universe than yours does. In fact many, many of the planet’s living entities will occupy boxes much smaller than yours. However, every creature , as they perceptually and physically interact with the expansive ecological domains around them, will of necessity do so from the perspective of their own unique form of existence and place on the planet. In presenting this book for your consideration, I would like to thank six of my intellectual mentors who have taught me to think in terms of systems theory. The first is Herbert Simon, who was writing and lecturing at nearby Carnegie-Mellon University when I was a graduate student in public affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. My lifelong research interest x PREFACE has been systems theory as it is applied clinically, organizationally, socially , and ecologically. I am indebted to Simon for introducing me to hierarchy and systems theory from the outset as a set of nested Chinese boxes—an image that I develop in some length in this book. I am also indebted to Amitai Etzioni, whose work on decision making I studied during my graduate years. It was Etzioni who challenged me to think about the various ways in which decisions are made in social systems and who introduced me to his ‘‘mixed-scanning’’ approach. However , I am most immediately indebted to Etzioni for reminding me anew of Simon’s analogy of hierarchy as a set of Chinese boxes. Without him, I might have overlooked this beautiful metaphor for living ecologically in the world. I would also like to thank three noted family clinicians—Salvador Minuchin, Murray Bowen, and Monica McGoldrick—whose approaches to family systems theory I not only studied assiduously but also practiced for many years as a psychiatric social worker in family therapy. Minuchin, Bowen, and McGoldrick taught me not only to perceive individuals as members of current and historical family systems and family system networks , but also to conceive of family systems interacting with a complex array of social and organizational systems such that I was able to understand how behavior and values learned in families are ultimately reflected in organizational and social life. Moreover, they sensitized me to the fact that each member of a system perceives the system in a completely unique fashion, such that reality within any system is entirely a function of the person perceiving it. I have taken this insight into my work in ecology and have concluded that not only is an anthropocentric perspective on the world unavoidable, it is necessarily personal, such that every individual actor within nested ecological systems has a unique perspective on the world and their place within it. Finally, I would like to thank Aldo Leopold for helping me understand what it means to ‘‘think like a mountain,’’ which for me meant realizing that while every human being necessarily perceives and interacts with the world from the perspective of their own individual nested Chinese box— what I like to think of as their personal ‘‘household’’—so does every other creature on the planet, and if a mountain could really think, so could ecosystems or perhaps even the biosphere itself. Leopold’s insights have allowed me to apply everything else I have learned about systems theory to [13.58.112.1] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 01...