Subject: ** The Way: An Ecological Worldview **
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Comments:
To really embrace ecosystem management requires that we change our
ways: our way of thinking and our way of living.  This is true
because it is more correct to think that ecosystems manage us
than vice versa.  The UTNE READER recently printed a book review
of THE WAY: An Ecological World-View by Edward Goldsmith.  The review
gives us something to think hard about.  Thanks to Cathy Dahms:R03A
for sharing.  2 Pages.   Dave.

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                                                                     Eco-Watch
                                                                     7/21/93

                       The Way: An Ecological World-View
                              by Edward Goldsmith
                         (Shambala Publications, $20).
               Book Review, from the Utne Reader, May/June 1993

  If you ask the deep ecologists what must be done to stem the ruin of this
planet, they won't tell you to buy laundry soap in a recycled box or hold
another conference in Rio.  What gives the depth to deep ecology is the idea
that superficial measures will never be enough, not when a society's attitudes
are corrupted to the core.  The only way to stop the razing of nature, they
argue, is to realize how systematic the degradation of the environment is - and
how little can be done until the West rejects some of its deepest beliefs.

  Goldsmith, founder of the British magazine, The Ecologist, has made a career
of revealing these beliefs and showing how dangerous they become when they are
translated into scientific research and public policy.  He has said that it took
him 30 years to write this book, and the effort shows.  The Way is a sweeping
and learned argument that the key to a better future lies not in technological
progress, but in the lost wisdom of the past.  Only by returning to what so many
ancient peoples knew - that human beings have to live as part of nature, not in
tension with it - will modern society find the means to check its own
destruction.  

  "Living in harmony with the natural world" has become an empty slogan, but
Goldsmith reinvigorates the idea by explaining what it really means.  The book
draws its title from the fact that many traditional societies had a word that
roughly meant "the way", like the Chinese tao, or the concept of dharma shared
by the Hindus and Buddhists.  These and most other peoples understood that the
cycles of nature, indeed the entire cosmos, provide humans with a model for
their lives.  To live according to the natural order insured prosperity and
peace.  To defy the order was to risk the turmoil of change and damage to local
resources.  The history of human custom can be read as the effort to interpret
and abide by this code.  Though "the way" has differed in its details from
people to people, Goldsmith notes that on a deep level the basic insights have
been remarkably similar.  

  That such wisdom should be so universal makes the modern rejection of it all
the more stunning.  Goldsmith traces the origin of what he calls modernism, the
paradigm of science, or simply the Great Misinterpretation to the rise of
Newtonian physics, a view of the universe as composed of individual atoms in
random, meaningless motion.  What followed was an effort by all the other
sciences to redefine themselves in Newtonian terms.

  The result of this worldview - which, for all its destructiveness, is a mere
blip on the time line of human history - is a kind of monopoly on perception. 
Many of those working in the social and physical sciences see what they want to
see, then use their findings to perpetuate a picture of the world that today
seems simplistic as well as dangerous.  Embedded within this view is a belief
in the virtue of progress and economic growth.  The course of life is no longer
seen as a repeating circle, but as the path of a bullet streaking into the
future.  Our notion of the ideal society resembles a shark swimming through
time, a primitive organism that must either move forward or die.  Needless to
say, its restlessness threatens everything in its path.

  Goldsmith's effort to dismantle the paradigm of science may be a challenge to
the general reader, but it's fascinating.  The work is arranged in 66 chapters,
each of which makes a case for a simple statement like "Gaia is alive" or
"Living systems are intelligent."  Goldsmith brings to his argument an
impressive grasp of many disciplines, including biology and anthropology. 
Beginning with our understanding of the living cell and working outward to the
interwoven megasystems of the biosphere, Goldsmith eventually questions all the
major assumptions of the scientific worldview.  What he offers in its place is
a system that is just as comprehensive, but less destructive to the planet - and
perhaps to the human soul.  (Reviewed by Jeremiah Creedom)