Thoughtscapes – Reimagining

I wrote this what seems light years ago.  I think it was 2007 or 2008.

This is very rough, a mind dump.  It was done quickly, and is more to do with me getting thoughts out of my mind and into some more coherent structure. There are some opening remarks, an attempt at fleshing out the differences between the paradigms that can guide us, and some closing comments. I’ve only included a few references. I’ve said and written about bits of it before, some in much greater depth than here. But it presents an argument, my argument, for what is the essence of ‘the problem’ associated with land use in New Zealand. Forgive the language. I’ve used Late-Modern rather than Post-Modern because the latter conjures up ideas that there is no ‘real’ world, so it’s all just narrative. I’d argue there is, in fact, a real world, just not the one envisaged by the Modern mechanical mind.

Introduction – Modern or Late-Modern?

This started as an analytical exercise in defining options for forestry strategy, and, with that, forest policy. Not everyone within forestry is happy with the shift to an ever narrower and ever more short-term view of forests. Breadth and a long-term view were both once considered integral to an appreciation of forests, and, it follows, from their management. But the narrower agendas have progressively built their power bases; particularly those that define forestry, and for that matter, all land use, through ‘resourcist’ ideas that forests, farms and fisheries represent agronomic crops, or, worse, manifestations of capital.

The antithesis is the power base of peopleless preservation, where people and wider values are again marginalised in pursuit of a purity that is not real. Agricultural trends continue in the same direction as forestry. I would strongly argue that both preservation and what amounts to an industrial view of land are very much part of the same structuralist, Modern view of the world. These modern trends are general, and there are particular examples where individuals and communities have argued for an alternative approach, even in New Zealand, where the capacity for the simplification of land is far greater than in older societies in Asia and Europe. There, people cannot be marginalised so readily, at least in a sense of challenging their right to belong within the land (notwithstanding the existence of military/authoritarian regimes and their removal of people through various modes of ‘cleansings’); something that both industrialists do, and preservationists like John Muir have advocated.

The questions that relate to land use strategy and policy cannot be differentiated from wider land use policy. Hence, this wee piece suggests we take a look at all land use, and the underlying assumptions and trends that do, I think along with Wendell Berry, represent “a crisis of culture” (Berry 1977). It is not ‘fact’ that limits us, and prevents us from a form of mutually assured destruction, so much as wider aspects of knowledge (knowledge is not just about ‘fact’, challenging as that heretical idea may be), a philosophical sense of how things relate, and what are likely consequences. Thinking our way out of it requires us to dig deeper than just the biophysical, yet the disciplines that deal in the biophysical and the financial still largely dictate the policy path, whether that be in a socially-segregated ecology, or a socially- and environmentally-segregated agronomy and economics. They all subscribe to a modern view of the world, and that is the view that, at least in the ‘West’, predominates. Albert Schweitzer (Schweitzer 1957) argued that any lasting civilisation requires a worldview (Weltanschauung) that encompasses a wider philosophy than mere fact and faith in universal mechanical law. We all have a worldview, and the one that currently predominates may be the problem.

Figure 1 below gives a particular perspective on where our landscape may be, and where it is heading. The left hand status represents land uses administered within narrow objectives, emphasising output of biophysical resource and area of reserve, many presuming that focusing on increasing the number of whatever narrow item you treat in isolation from the function of the whole will correspond to a measure of ‘success’. Yet the actual functionality of such a landscape where homogeneity is increased, and landscape hydrology and soil quality is compromised, may be lost. Landscape quality matters, and seeing the world through a narrow lens where proponents visualise the land they administer as all of one thing or another does nothing to maintain the functionality upon which society and economy depend.

Figure 1: Where does New Zealand sit? Which way are we trending?

Modified from Angelstan et al. 2005

On the right hand side is an integrated landscape. It does not mean that there are no patches of forest, pasture or reserve. There is always, in a structural or compositional sense, an ‘allocation’ of land to one type of patch relative to another. The properties of land and the processes that flow across land do, if not determine, at least greatly influence the position of a wetland, or a shrubland dominated by cold-tolerant fuchsia, or wet-tolerant manuka, or disturbance-tolerant pasture.

The point is that such an integrated landscape is not functionally-bounded. You don’t have a situation where an artificial boundary defines where the processes associated with people suddenly cease; any more than we can reign in hydrology, or soil building, shifting, and ‘gift’ (not utilitarian ‘service’)  functions, or the flights of birds, or carbon flux and flows, or even economic functions. Yet thinking as though landscape function is delineated by landscape structure is something we so often do. As if only the within-patch centripetal processes matter, so we ignore the centrifugal processes that come back in the form of feedbacks to influence any patch. But such a functionally allocative process gives the illusion (delusion?) of being ‘tidy’. It simplifies the issues. And it leads to problems, many of which the filing clerk minds cannot visualise. Most important of all, it is anti-real; that is, it is something in our minds rather than how things actually are.

There are a number of examples indicating that this left-side modern segregationist approach is predominant in New Zealand, whether that be the rise in intensive land use with increasingly large-scale ownership structures, or the focus on reserves as “where the environment is dealt with”; over there, outside, the other, dichotomous, bounded, separate, a place of which we are not a part.

Synthesising the evidence in the Ministry for the Environment’s State of the Environment report (an excellent series since stopped by the present 2008-2017 government) should not simply be a repository of quantitative ‘fact’; it represents the opportunity for a higher form of knowledge; the ability to answer questions like “What is important?”, “What is happening?”, “Why is it happening?”, “What are the likely consequences?”, and “What should be done about it?”; all of which requires the ability to connect, interpret, and judge. If we limit ourselves to ‘facts’, as if they are independent of meaning and value, we might as well spend our lives measuring the grains of sand on 90 mile beach.  Ministry thinkers need the ability and courage to connect, because if we cannot connect, then you cannot think.

Our Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry tends to treat land and policy issues in isolation, without any broad sweeping framework, certainly not an integrated one (MAF has been renamed the Ministry of Primary Industries – defining a whole environmental & economic landscape and socialscape as an ‘industry’ is indicative of the values and bounded thinking we are facing).  The forestry policy relating to carbon is an obvious a case in point. If ever there was one policy that could achieve a number of positives in the wider landscape, it is the active encouragement of integrated land covers (woodlands, wetlands, pastures, etc.) as patches within the landscape, building the soil and diversity within those patches. The beneficial functions are not just environmental, but economic and social.  Agro-ecological thinking is well developed, though the productivist paradigm is still the research programme that is funded in New Zealand.  Better profit, risk, diversity, high-value opportunity, business and social resilience, productivity (input/output, energy demand, less contribution to climate change, better soil function, drought & flood resilience, water quality, terrestrial & aquatic biodiversity, aesthetics, recreation & mahinga kai (food gathering), and ……. gross production.

But if our Ministry is only thinking about gross production within what is essentially a mechanical hydroponic concept of land use, then I fear they can only ‘see’ a segregated, competitive concept of land use, where homogeneous agriculture, blanket single species forestry, and peopleless preserves compete over where to place the fence.

The promise is in doing away with the fences, especially the fences in the minds. That would represent a late-modern policy turn, a change in focus to integration and maintaining qualitative capacity and function rather than quantitative output or area. Aspects of this challenge are presented below.

Paradigm’s Lost & Found

When we start digging deep into why we choose a particular path, or how you choose to define and bound the object of any analysis, then we are faced with two choices. We can either agree with and succumb to the modern appeal to segregate and view individual parts of a wider whole through some increasingly narrow lens, until, in Galileo’s creed, you get to things that are irreducible; or we can do what Dewey argued, and seek a late-modern path to reintegrate whatever part we seek to examine with the wider influences and meanings that it itself affects, and that affects it in turn.

To make that choice is to delve into the philosophical; beyond the physics, into the metaphysics. It is a place where science cannot go, and because that is the case, these deep questions are often ignored in a society that for whatever reason has given ‘science’ a position on a pedestal, as representing our currently fashionable view of higher ‘reason’, as if it, and its companion technology, can indicate where we ought to go, and what we ought to do. I would argue that allowing the ‘facts’ – disputable as most of them are because they are derived from interpretations, questions, and methods defined by a context – to define strategic & policy direction is to put the cart before the horse. In the words of Sylvio Funtowitz:

“To use the traditional scientific method to deal with issues where facts are uncertain, stakes are high, values in dispute and decisions urgent is to be like the drunkard who lost his keys. Although he had misplaced them elsewhere, he looked for them under the street light because it was the only place where he was able to see. The problem is that the key is not there, we don’t even know if there is a key, and the light of the lamppost is getting weaker” (Silvio O. Funtowicz, quoted in Tognetti, S. S. 1999)

Since modern science, technology and commerce almost by definition look at the world through a narrow lens, then the policies and practices that replicate that approach become self fulfilling; that is, the solution is to segregate and marginalise and consider only the apparently regular and quantitative. The numbers on a spreadsheet are assumed the status of a latter-day objective oracle, as is often the case with forest policy controlled by both corporate financiers and Treasury economists. If there is any ‘fact’ it is that such an approach can delude because the quality of the data is dependent upon the ideas and the questions that are asked. It may be a fact that a given increase in fertiliser under given conditions produces a given change in production. But if the additional effects and corollaries are ignored, whether because they are qualitative, or because they behave too variably for statistics, then any decision based on a selected narrow fact is as, or more, value-laden than a decision based on an inside observer’s long-term observation.

Often the relevance of questions asked by technocrats is determined by what can be counted, rather than what really counts. The irregular, the contingent, the complex, the qualitative, the particulars of time and place, wider corollaries and feedbacks, are all so often ignored because they fall outside the mechanical ideal. Yet this focus on brute fact, what Alfred North Whitehead (Whitehead 1925) referred to as “anti-intellectual”, is given the status of ‘professionalism’ and technical excellence, when it is neither. It is either incapable of, or fears, asking the deeper questions. It is a mindset that seeks to find solutions using the same methods and assumptions that created them. In that it makes no reference to these underlying ideas that drive our assumptions, our questions, our interpretations, our policies, and our practices, it is, ultimately, shallow.

We can continue to ride this runaway train, or we can do what is inherently wiser, and saner. First, allow a wider judgment to direct a strategic path, and only then allow that context to define the questions and methods of what people mistakenly assume are the more ‘objective’ disciplines of science, technology and commerce. The process is adaptive, so information creates continual strategic adjustment, but the moment ascendancy is given to the narrow and the quantitative, the art essential to effective outcomes is reduced. Like John Ralston Saul and Val Plumwood (Ralston Saul 1992, Plumwood 2002), I’d argue that the left-side modernity in the graph above has lost the art, and with it the wisdom, to define workable strategies for complex things like land and communities.

That deeper examination of the roots of our position is relevant because each of the two paradigmatic choices is based on one of two distinct philosophical traditions;

• one defined with the paradigm of modernity where the brute facts associated with supposedly discrete parts together with regular, structured, mechanical processes (laws) determine what ‘is’ in the ascending scales above (physics explains chemistry, which explains DNA, which explains life, consciousness & individuals, which explains behaviour, which explains culture and society [unless you deny their existence of course], which explains history, and the predictable future. This obsession with a mechanically-structural, deterministic, reducible ontology is the basic premise to ‘positivist’ scientism); and
• the other late-modern emerging tradition that challenges what they think is an oversimplified mechanical and hierarchical approach, and hold instead to a more complex and irregular ontology where wholes confer properties to parts as much as the other way around (individual people influencing society, and society influencing individuals), where highly localised complexity, emergence (like ‘life’ or consciousness, or a ‘new’ biophysical system), adaptation, indeterminism, and thresholds mean that the mechanical certainty is a myth shrouded in desires for certainty, authority and control. Many of these effects are via feedbacks through domains that are actually interconnected, even though the modernists might work within their cells and presume – in their ironic search for ‘objectivity’ whilst marinating in unexamined values and beliefs – that they can be treated in isolation.

The debate is particularly relevant where we are dealing with policies and practices that have the ability to generate considerable harm or benefit to people, and to the environment within which society (and its subset, economy) is embedded. We live, after all, on a planet whose environmental history is both highly influenced by humans, and notoriously irregular when considered in evolutionary or geological, or even cultural, time. The debate is therefore nothing less than a debate concerning ‘sustainability’; of environment, of society, of economy. We have the power to destroy, and it these ideas of how things are organised, how they relate, what is relevant, and who ‘knows’, that are most influential.

The former modern analytical view seeks to understand the world through incommunicative compartmentalisation and a narrow lens. One of its corollaries is a dysfunctional, segregated landscape (left hand side of Figure 1). The latter late-modern view believes that the modern approach is fine where something is largely simple and mechanical (the physics of a billiard table), but where something is complex, such as landscapes and societies (which are themselves unable to be segregated, and which economies sit within, rather than outside as some governing force), then it leads to more problems than solutions. One of the corollaries of shifting to a late-modern view is the building of social and ecological capacities and qualities within a more integrated landscape (right hand side of Figure 1).

The table below is an attempt to look at the particular assumptions and approaches of the Modern and Late-Modern paradigms, aligned as left=modern and right=late-modern to give some symmetry to Figure 1 above.

Where are we heading?

New Zealand took a strong directional shift in the left-hand (Figure 1) direction of modernity with the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980s. Accountability was emphasised, so the soft, variable parts of the system were discounted against quantitative reports. Complexity and multiple functions make quantitative reporting difficult since the act of one person can lead to multiple reporting columns. Imprecision is a fact of life when one act can have many outcomes.

The basic assumption of a systems view (late-modern ontology) is that you never do just one thing. There are always other effects beyond the one considered. For the bookkeepers’ mind such complexity is given the effect of being overcome by simply measuring just one thing; a singular focus. An ostrich thinks the same thing when they put their head in the sand – the predator has gone.  There is an assumption that ‘efficiency’ and ‘effectiveness’  will follow from ‘accountability’ (accountability being focused on short-term internal process & ‘outputs’ rather than desired long-term ‘outcomes’). However, focus on accounting one thing can actually lead to inefficiency (three people in three separate organisations going around each doing one thing, where historically one went around doing three things), and to ineffectiveness because the conditions that really underpinned effectiveness were the soft and qualitative processes that were marginalised in pursuit of the fallacy of quantitative precision of one thing. Leaders with an intuitive feel for broader issues are replaced by administrators and bureaucrats that produce and rigidly follow procedures manuals.

Combine loss of effectiveness with the loss of foresight of both potential opportunity and threat that can result from a singular focus, as well as the lack of flexibility to adapt, and you have a recipe for organisations walking blithely over cliffs they never see.

Indications of a Turn?

There are some indications of a post-positivist turn in New Zealand. However, many are marginal ideas without a large constituency in policy, science or practice. The Parliamentary Commission for the Environment’s Growing for Good report suggested a new framework was needed to avoid continual unsustainable subsidisation of intensive agriculture, but energy intensification is increasing apace, and since 2008 the current government has set its sights on trebling value by trebling production.  Productivist research programmes are funded, and research programmes such as Agro-ecology starved.  This is in direct contrast with the growing realisation of the need to change our land use, and hence research focus since Olivier de Schutter’s report to the United Nations General Assembly in 2010.  He argues that the combined effects of climate change, energy scarcity, and water paucity require that we radically rethink our agricultural systems (de Schutter & Vanloqueren 2011).

The attitudes of some land owners as well as consumers has lead to examples of well integrated land use systems. Bay of Plenty kiwifruit is one example; some farmers (both certified organic and conventional), and some small holders.  Certification within forestry is an example of consumers demanding a broader focus that just the commercial, though it could be argued that compliance has not generally resulted in a change in attitude, just an acknowledgement of necessity for market access.

Internationally, things are in better heart. There are many indications of a late-modern turn:

• The rise in consideration of people as part of land, opposed by both industrialists and the preservationists who would see local people marginalised to suit their own narrow agendas, even when there is evidence that the values they seek to protect are often there because of the historical and current presence and actions of people rather than in spite of them (Cf India’s Joint Forest Management initiatives)
• Ecosystem management, Integrated Catchment management, and public participation have challenged modern ideas by specifically including values and the adaptive management processes that assume a lack of certainty in complex systems. There is still opposition from modern technocrats who protest the lack of regularity and mechanism.
• Landscape ecology and other academic disciplines including research into comanagement, alternative policy frameworks, traditional ecological knowledge, resilience theory, and socio-ecological systems provide a theoretical basis for late-modernity.
• The CBD’s emphasis on the ecosystem approach recognises that people are very much part of ecological systems, with extractive use and disturbance often fundamental to environmental protection, and preserves but one means of achieving biodiversity conservation.
• Non-wood forest product demand is continuing to rise, if not within local communities that have always relied on forests in complex ways, at least now in the eyes of policy agents.
• The work of alternative agricultural researchers such as Pretty, McNeely and Scheer working on integrated systems that replace reliance on energy inputs with multiple functioning elements, practices and policies, also involving learning systems and the building of social capital.
• In Europe the changing values placed on mixed landscapes and forests that would be called ‘inefficient’ by agricultural industrialists in New Zealand, has resulted in changes in policy emphasis away from just product output (Cf Angelstam et al. 2006)
• The rise in awareness of agro-ecological methods as a means of providing multiple positives: better rural social equity, better environmental outcomes, less energy demand, lower greenhouse gas contributions, and more gross production.  In direct contrast to agri-business commodity systems.

Will New Zealand realise the change? The industrial neo-liberal mindset and its antithesis of people-less preservation is still the dominant. Scientism remains their powerful ally, with the commercial focus unlikely to generate much resistance, at least from New Zealand’s Crown Research Institutes, whose interest are strongly tied to the desires of commercial funders and industrial-minded policy makers, rather than to community and clearly articulated future economic, social and environmental imperatives. The change of government in 2008 more entrenched the narrow and short-term agri-business approach.

Chris Perley

22 February 2008 (with edits March 2015)

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Berry, W. 1977. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

De Schutter, O. & G. Vanloqueren 2011. The New Green Revolution: How Twenty-First-Century Science Can Feed the World. Solutions for a Sustainable and Desirable Future 2(4): Aug 18, 2011. http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/7482/The%20New%20Green%20Revolution_%20How%20Twenty-First-Century%20Science%20Can%20Feed%20the%20World.pdf?sequence=1 Accessed 4 March 2015

Plumwood, V. 2002. Environmental Culture: the ecological crisis of reason. Routledge.

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Whitehead, A. N. 1925. Science and the modern world. London: Free Association Books.