It happens that some of Mohi Munawar’s favourite terms, as manifested in the title of this monograph and of the sponsoring society, are also among my favourite words. Here I reflect on some of my recent experiences with these terms.
First a comment about Lake Superior: It has not yet been degraded as badly as the other Laurentian Great Lakes, but some taxa of fish have been lost. Decades ago my colleague John Goodier (1981) searched old archives to identify various taxa or stocks of lake trout in this lake and how they organized their interactive community before human abuses became intense. The evolutionary complexity of the whole salmonid community reminded me of the diversity of the cichlid community that I had encountered briefly in Lake Victoria in 1970.
Over the past half century I’ve paid close attention to how the term ‘ecosystem’ is used by an author or speaker. I have inferred that people who use that term constructively are not likely to be hidebound reductionists. Nowadays empirical scientists who publish in leading journals use methods like those of the old reductionism responsibly; i.e. balanced with analyses of emergent ‘whole’ phenomena for which extreme reductionism is ineffective. Arthur Koestler (1969) termed such a balanced approach ‘holonic’ in which ‘hol’ refers to the whole integrated woolly phenomenon and ‘on’ to perceived less-woolly parts of that whole.
An ecosystem approach may now be cast as a kind of mindscape, with antecedents to be found in old writings of Kant, Kropotkin, Bergson, Teilhard, Vernadsky, etc., besides those of many more Non-Europeans. Starting about four decades ago, Magoroh Maruyama chose an empirical approach to identify, describe and analyze common mindscapes that he found in various cultures of the world. Among North Americans of European descent he found four common mindscapes each of which had a favoured scientific methodology. He termed one of these four ‘G’ and, in 1980, described it as follows: “Interactions generate more diversity, new combinations of mutually beneficial relations, new patterns, and a rising level of sophistication of biological, social, and some physical systems. The universe grows.”
My understanding of what we in the Laurentian Basin commonly call an ‘ecosystem approach’, is that it starts within Maruyama’s G mindscape, ontogenetically as well as epistemologically. One can perceive many complementary vistas within a generic G mindscape including ecologics, economics, ekistics, ecumenics, ecosophics and ecothealogics. These terms all start with a version of the Greek ‘oicos’ which refers to a household, or a home together (repeat, together) with its inhabitants, or a habitat with its inhabitants, to a text within its context, etc. It’s important to note that such a cross-level integrated phenomenon is taken to be an ‘elementary unit’ in ontogenetic reality and epistemological methods. In our Laurentian Basin ecosystem, in the widest sense of that ecosystem term, colleagues and I have found that the other three common mindscapes in our culture can be nested usefully and pragmatically as approximations for some ecosystem features. So we use all four Maruyaman mindscapes – H, I, S and G – in our work, but with the first three subservient to the fourth. The H mindscape is closest to obsolete fundamentalistic reductionism, which can nevertheless be useful in a tempered form.
An eco-phenomenon manifests features like self-organizing, holonic (as a more general kind of nesting than ‘hierarchic’ with its unfortunate etymological implications) and intentionally open to selected external influences (eustresses) but also intentionally closed to some unwanted influences (distresses). The term ‘integrity’ may refer to a complex dynamic phenomenon with sufficient autonomous propensities to sustain the identity of such an eco-phenomenon in trying circumstances and times (Rapport et al. 1985). Again, an emergent eco-phenomenon cannot be explicated fully through narrow reductionistic methods.
Recall the work in the 1980s by the World Commission on Environment and Development chaired by physician Gro Harlem Brundtland and titled “Our Common Future”. USSR Academician N. N. Moiseev submitted a recommendation at a WCED hearing in Moscow on 8 December 1986: “Some unique objects like Lake Baikal, ..., the Great Lakes of Africa and North America, are parts of our global patrimony. They are some of the absolute values our planet possesses and their significance transcends any national boundaries. ... What is needed today is the molding of a new ethos and new arrangements for building understanding among people, countries and regions.”
Some of us vibrate positively to Moiseev’s terms ‘absolute value’ and ‘ethos’. Compatible versions of a generic ecosystem approach to foster Lake Superior’s ‘health, integrity [and ethical] management’ are at hand. Those relevant to an ‘aquatic’ vista in our eco-mindscape, as in the present volume, are complemented by others relevant to the whole watershed and to social, economic and political vistas of the encompassing mindscape. Perhaps Anishinabek and Cree People could help any remaining reductionistic true believers to reform and appreciate sacred features of the Lake Superior ecosystem.
Recently the Editors of Nature (2009) have argued that the “economic downturn might be the best time to include ecosystem services in the real economy”. Further, they opine that “the ecosystem services approach clearly has great potential. Indeed, it is a natural extension of the market-based carbon tax or cap-and-trade approaches…” And then they call for more good science relevant to such valuation. Editor Mohi Munawar has been mobilizing such science for decades, as in the present volume.