by Dr. Braden Allenby, AT&T EH&S Vice President

The term "industrial ecology" has long been recognized as an evocative analogy, suggesting the benefits of designing industrial systems to more closely resemble "natural" biological systems in their cycling of materials, energy, and waste. In some cases, there has been a failure to appreciate that the relationship between human and natural systems is one of analogy, not exact correspondence. This has led to proposals to treat industrial structures and institutions as if they were gardens or forests. Thus, while industrial ecology is a powerful way to suggest new patterns of operations, it can be counterproductive when it leads to superficial commentary that fails to appreciate the profound differences between the two types of systems.

Human systems - including economic and industrial systems - with their reflexivity, autocatalytic dynamics, contingency, and intentionality, are much more complex than nonhuman systems. The logical and perceptual fallacy involved in conflating human and nonhuman biological systems is perhaps ironically illustrated by the fact that most such commentary displays strong ideological roots - and ideology is quite characteristic of human systems, hard to find in a salt marsh or boreal ecosystem.

I wish to invert the usual order of things. Perhaps blinded by the power of this metaphor to suggest that industrial systems should resemble ecosystems, few recognize that the analogy may be powerful in reverse: It is equally interesting, and provocative, to understand that many "natural" ecosystems can only be understood with reference to industrial - more broadly, human cultural and economic - systems.

Thus, for example, if I wish to understand the ecological structure of the Florida Everglades, I must first understand the flow of money, trade policies, and political power that created and nourishes the state's sugar cane industry, as well as Florida's overall demographic profile over time. To understand the rapidly changing ecology of the Aral Sea, I must understand the agricultural and cultural patterns of the Soviet Union regarding cotton. To understand changes in the world's forests, I must understand the pulp, paper, and timber industries, local governments and institutions, and, at times, their suborning through corruption.

Notice that this is not simply a static causal input to the analysis of the ecosystems involved. The coupling of such systems is far more fundamental than that. In many cases their dynamics, which may have been determined for ages by such nonhuman factors such as predator/prey interactions, nutrient limitations, and the like, are now increasingly determined by human systems. In short, many "natural" systems now have structures and dynamics that reflect the reflexivity, contingency, and autocatalytical character found in human systems. This is true of both fundamental cycles - think of the carbon, hydrologic, and climate cycles - and biological systems at all scales - think of genetic engineering and, on the other end of the spectrum, the effect on island ecologies of the Polynesian and European migrations. In short, it is not so much a world of "natural capitalism" as of "industrial natural systems." It follows that the study of population biology, systems ecology, industrial ecology, and the like should begin with a foundation of sociology, philosophy, and history. An interesting outcome.

This reading of industrial ecology suggests a different way of conceptualizing the study of ecosystems and, more broadly, any "natural" system. Currently, such study tends to emphasize the system's nonhuman elements - mapping, for example, nutrient and energy flows, or species distribution and predation patterns. But perhaps we need to overlay this with other maps - the flows of money and information, demand and supply patterns, and cultural and demographic dynamics, for example.

More difficult, perhaps, will be the study of the ideological and sociological determinants of "natural" ecosystem structure - the U.S. has national parks, for example, in part because of its powerful mythology about the American West. That all ecosystems are increasingly industrial is also based on analogy - but it is increasingly apparent, and a much more powerful analogy than we may want to recognize.

- Discusions

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