In Being at One: Dwelling in the Earth’s Commonwealth of Virtue and Being and Place, I set biology and ecology in the context of ethics and politics, recontextualising public life along the lines of living processes at the same time. We may call it a 'life' or a 'process' philosophy, so long as it is understood as a moral position that is something more than a quasi-scientific ethical naturalism. I seek to outline a way forward in environmental ethics and politics by adopting a praxis-oriented approach that transcends debates as to where value lies between anthropocentrism, ecocentrism and biocentrism. I argue for an environmentalism that sets natural processes and ecosystem health within a larger moral and political framework, a framework that is concerned to revitalize public life through civic participation, foster community identity and belonging, and build local and regional culture so as to generate a sense of place, purpose and public interest that goes beyond short-term self-interest. In this conception, ecology is a moral and political ecology that offers both a critical and transformative approach to social and political life. By developing the practical roots of our relation to the world, my intention is to bring an expansive, virtuous, and vital conception of ‘the political’ to the heart of the attempts to resolve the convergent environmental crises that currently beset us. Through the cultivation of a genuine public life, we generate the community spirit and civic mindedness central to our coming to assume responsibility for our actions. We find the common good as we claim our place on common ground. I call this the Ecopolis, the Republic in the Age of (Moral) Ecology, something that is constituted by a Republican councilism integrating the above and the below. My view is that the large-scale comprehensive, concerted programmes of social and environmental action that are certainly required to address the 'global' problems that confront humanity will only succeed to the extent in which they are grounded in small-scale practical reasoning, social proximity, love of home and love of place, and habits of the heart nurtured within communities of character and practice. This view is not a design solution, a 'system' to be implemented and engineered: it is a way of life.

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Organic and holist, this approach integrates environmental, ethical and social dimensions in the ways in which we come to organise and live our interchange with nature. This approach recognises the mutual impor­tance and continuous interaction between the social world and the natural ecosystem, grounding the organised social existence of human beings in an empathetic connection with the complex ecological region. The approach integrates a concern with the health and preservation of the ecological region within a conception of politics, planning, and regulation, expressing an effective concern with the long-range common good. This is to reenvision ecology as a social and political ecology, defining ‘the political’ in the expansive terms of a civic-minded, participatory, social order. Planning for ecological preservation and restoration therefore proceeds hand in hand with social, cultural, and political renewal.

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Whilst developing a philosophical ethic for the wise treatment of non-human nature, I therefore also argue for the civic enrichment of public community, and for planning and design solutions in the context of an effective social movement possessing organisational and structural capacity in order to give these commitments practical form. The appreciation of nature, valuing the worth of natural things, therefore entails a civic dimension, one that recognises the importance of citizenship in a stewardship that benefits both human and natural community.

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The focus in environmental ethics is thus switched away from an increasingly sterile debate between anthropocentric, ecocentric and biocentric positions towards politics, civic structures, and community involvement. Drawing on ecology, ethics, philosophy and political theory, I argue for an actively democratic environmental ethics which envisions a civic sphere mediating between rival human-centred and nature-centred outlooks. I engage in a rethinking of environmental ethics in light of the interconnections of principle, politics, and practice. The intention is to set the critical debates in environmental philosophy in a context that integrates ethics, politics, and practice by providing a comprehensive framework for an engaged and cooperative environmentalism that is concerned with both problem solving and democratic governance.
 

The emphasis is placed on an environmental politics, understanding politics in the expansive sense of a public life infused with value, meaning, and purpose. I seek to revalue the rich moral tradition of virtue ethics by conceiving a politically grounded and civic minded environmentalism. Conceived in conscious recognition of ecological constraints, educating the will to conform to ultimate reality, this environmentalism incorporates prudence, wise use, and preservation so that civic renewal and ecological restoration become twin processes. Environmentalism is thus developed in terms of a mixed conception of human and natural community, expressing a concern for the natural world through a conception of ecological citizenship that embraces civic participation, community involvement, collective responsibility, and seeing local and regional culture as constitutive of the common good.

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CIVIC ENVIRONMENTALISM

Environmentalism has always had a core preservationist content. There is a need, however, to recognise that conservation is failing. (Jordan 2001; Scott 1999; Freyfogle 2006). Civic environmentalism seeks to move from the protective conception we have with respect to the environment to a developmental conception in which citizens are proactive and live in active planful and reverential relation with their environment. We therefore move forward from a concern to protect the environment from destructive forces to a context in which these destructive forces have been checked and eliminated with the result that the environment no longer stands in need of protection. The great merit of a civic environmentalism is that it enables individuals to come forward and act as eco-citizens assuming responsibility in relation to the environment, participating in a public realm that embraces reason and nature and will and artifice. The conservationist ideal has failed. The attempt to put a protective shield around nature, keeping it separate, pure and pristine, can offer no more than a rear-guard action, fighting a losing battle against the encroachment of human development. We have to recognise that there is no way of keeping that development at bay, only tempering our praxis within a conception of right order.

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Climate change, rapid urbanization, ecological degradation, loss of biodiversity, and all manner of other accelerating anthropogenic forces all attest to the fact that we are now living in the Anthropocene, the age of humans. Lamenting this fact will achieve nothing. Stewart Brand begins his book Whole Earth Discipline with the quote: ‘We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it.’ He is wrong. We are human beings living in the age of humans – and we had better get good at being human if we are to survive. Dismissing ethics and notions of behavioural change, Brand focuses upon technological solutions to planetary crisis. This is narrow. Issues of the exploitation and the preservation of nature need to be set within a much greater frame, that of the relation of human development as a creative self-realisation within an ecological context.

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My work draws on several fields – science, philosophy, ethics, ecology, design and planning, civic activism - to address the question of what kind of environmentalism is required in order to meet the challenges we face. Those arguing for a nonanthropocentric ethic are sceptical of an argument developed in terms of what human beings should do. Arguing for a more humble and restrained view of human action on the planet, they may consider the question of becoming and being human misguided. Human beings, on their view, should do as little as possible (and, in more misanthropic accounts, should, preferably, go away). Instead, I argue for an approach which respects the value of nature, both in itself as well as for its benefits to human beings. This approach recognises the facts of human intervention, and demands that human beings become wise in their actions and assume responsibility for the consequences of those actions. I seek to overcome the split between human-centred and nature-centred approaches, replacing the notion of a centre with the conception of a relational field of materialist immanence. The result is a critical environmental realism which emphasises prudence and wise action in respect of planetary boundaries, an approach which is capable of a sustained practical engagement with the key problems we face.

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At the heart of this civic environmentalism is a conception of eco-praxis, the idea that the transformation of the world around us is also a self-transformation. In changing circumstances, we change ourselves. In the process of engaging in ecologically wise actions, we become eco-citizens. I seek to show how eco-praxis is effective in relation to the environmental crises we face.

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I see ethics and politics in terms of practical reason, translating knowledge into action. In emphasising the practical dimension, I am concerned that environmental ethics should not be allowed to pursue fine distinctions, subtlety and purity at the expense of policy relevance and political effectiveness. Practical irrelevance renders even the most sophisticated theory pointless. If environmental ethics is to be more than an esoteric discipline pursued within academic confines, it needs to strike a chord amongst members of the general public and have a practical relevance to our current condition. In recovering the sense of ‘the political’ in terms of a public realm defined along ecological lines, I affirm the possibility of an ecological citizenship, a view which is capable of making the democratic ideal of social self-governance an active reality.

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My argument seeks to live up to the titles of Being at One and Being and Place, seeking unity in terms of values which rest on a firm foundation in our environment, in our relation to it and to each other. I build upon the ideal of an active, informed and involved citizenry to deepen and broaden the democratic basis for the ecological society, supporting a pluralistic way by which human beings as creative agents are able to determine and seek to realise environmental values together.

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I therefore recognise that 'morality matters' and defend ethics and the quest for meaning whilst going on to present a praxis-oriented civic environmentalism that is attuned to the demands of living within planetary boundaries in the coming era of climate adaptation. In the process, I offer reasons for rethinking conventional approaches to intrinsic values, not so much arguing for or against anthropocentrism, ecocentrism or biocentrism as affirming a dynamic relationism that is beyond questions of centrism. The ethical debates concerning whether the things of nature have a value or their own, or whether we value those things for their ability to serve human interests or contribute to human well-being, seem to have reached an impasse. The distinctive positions are mapped out with a wealth of scholarship behind them. By bringing in political and policy implications, requiring popular support and legitimacy, a civic environmentalism breaks out of the academic confines of the debate and seek common agreement on the fundamentals of ecological health.

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There is, in fine, an ineliminable social and political dimension to environmental ethics. The end in view is a nature which is valued and appreciated in common. I therefore define a civic environmentalism that seeks to transcend the dualisms of anthropocentrism-versus-ecocentrism and use-versus-preservation upon which the debate on environmental ethics has stalled.

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Seeking to revalue the connections between environmental thought, ecological sensibility, and political culture, I seek to outline the contours of a civic environmentalism as a way of life. This does not amount to a visionless, value-free pragmatism shaped by practical concerns and political interests. Rather, it seeks to deemphasize the concern to define an environmental ethic in abstraction from experience, translating anthropocentric, biocentric or ecocentric positions into an environmental practice to achieve the ecological society as a way of life. We find common ground when we come together, build bridges between theory and practice, and work to resolve practical problems and manage common affairs in a sustainable way.

  

 I offer an approach that is broad in scope, intertwining ethics and politics on the basis of a critical realism that combines science and history with an imaginative vision of the future ecological society.

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My work outlines an approach to social and environmental issues that is developed in the intersection of our scientific knowledge, ethical commitments, environmental actions and political obligations with a view to realising a democratically constituted ecological citizenship, highlighting the concerns of social and environmental equality and justice in political action and policy making. The result is a civic-minded democratic environmentalism that sees human beings as a part of nature, acting wisely together in respect of that common ground.

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In fine, rather than attempt to define an ecological ethic in advance of and abstraction from the world of experience, I adopt a critical realism that sees the world in terms of a creative partnership. Human beings are creative change agents at work in a creative universe. As such, the world we live in is to be understood in terms of the interplay of political norms and obligations and environmental values.

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Environmental thought does not develop in isolation as a freestanding ‘ideology of nature,' but in relation to social and philosophical thought more generally. Environmental thought does not represent a fundamental break with the Western philosophical and political tradition. There has been a tendency to devalue the philosophical and cultural resources in the Western intellectual tradition, ignoring much that would greatly aid the cause of environmental thought and practice. Environmental thought is sustained by these deeper moral, political, and social currents. Instead of repudiating these resources in search of a 'new' environmental ethic that stands apart from this tradition, I explore and develop this rich philosophical bequest so as to establish our place and responsibilities within the cultural, built, technological, and natural in which we are placed. I therefore develop the concept of 'rational freedom' drawn from ethics and philosophy within an integral environmentalism.

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My work therefore traverses science, political philosophy, democratic theory and environmental ethics in order to shed light on the question of how we can constitute and live the common good on common ground. What emerges is an environmentalism that places political and moral motives alongside the recognition of ecological constraints.

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THE ECOPOLIS

The idea of an urban/ecological public sphere can be expressed by the term ‘Ecopolis’. This can be defined in the expansive sense of the ancient Greek politeia, a term that is broader than the constitution and the whole social, political, economic and legal structure of the state. For Aristotle, politeia is crucial to securing the end of the good life; ‘politeia’ refers to an association of individuals united in their acceptance of the moral, spiritual and cultural standards prescribed by the constitution within which they live. Citizens learn these standards with a view to living the good and happy life (Aristotle Politics 1981:429/30).  Aristotle is concerned that the young citizen should develop sense of ‘belonging to the community’, of ‘being a part of the community’.  And this entails establishing the common good as the central purpose of politics. ‘In the state, the good aimed at is justice; and that means what is for the benefit of the whole community’ (Aristotle P 1981:207).

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The conception of the Ecopolis establishes the good life in an expansive sense. In setting the city in the context of an ecological regionalism, the Ecopolis is an integral part of reorienting social life towards a biocentric form of civilization. The Ecopolis, therefore, is constituted as both a public and an ecological community, constituted by civic structures that fit the contours of natural design. 

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The conception of the Ecopolis recognises that a ‘balanced’ region requires effective institutions that promote the interests and preserve and develop the resources of the community.

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Urban ecological planning offers the opportunity for using some of the techniques of modern industry — mass production, large-scale planning, a unified conception — whilst at the same time reconfiguring and recontextualizing the techno-urban industrial system along ecological lines. Our technological potential is best realized in a setting such as that provided by the Ecopolis. As against endlessly producing more of the same, only bigger, taller and faster, the Ecopolis is organised around a spatial arrangement that promises to achieve balance in the urban environment: a ‘functional balance’ of industry, civic structure, residence, and nature’s life support systems, encompassing all this by scaling urban life to human dimensions and proportions. The Ecopolis thus establishes the city in a larger ecological context, restoring and revitalising the region in light of environing natural and cultural relations. The Ecopolis has the potential to be an ecological regional city, a new kind of city, one which sees the urban and the rural engaged in a creative interaction with each other. The country would therefore be drawn into direct relation with the city, as the city would be set in the context of the natural world.

 

By developing a conception of the Ecopolis as a regional public embracing place, social life, and the natural environment, I outline the contours of a civic environmentalism which mediates between nature and culture and which is capable of facilitating human and planetary flourishing. The idea of the Ecopolis stands in contradistinction to the overscaled, exploitative, parasitic polities of the modern age.

 

The emphasis is upon political renewal and ecological restoration through a lived experience that bridges the social and natural worlds, developing an alternative to the dominant antisocial and anti-ecological form of contemporary individualism. This alternative connects person, place, and purpose by establishing our pragmatic and intuitive relation to the commonwealth of life. The intention here is to link this understanding of ecology to the public sphere and in turn contribute to the development of an ecological regionalism that expresses a concern with the health and of both natural ecosystems and human communities. By conceiving the human role within nature’s community of life as a commonwealth of virtue, we may define the world as a federated republic of ecological regions whose geographic vitality and diversity is consonant with the civic ideal of decentralized participatory democracy.

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I write on the idea of life as an ‘experiment’ in relation to a conception of citizen science. A better term than this, however, is ‘exploration’. I see the urban/ecological regionalism contained in the Ecopolis as an ‘exploration’ which combines science and ethics and connects fact and value at the level of lived experience. Such an approach brings objective fact and subjective experience together at the level of practice, presenting a vision of an organic order that is capable of endlessly revitalising culture.

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The Ecopolis is, therefore, an alternative to the dominant modern worldview that has turned nature into dead, meaningless matter and advanced technological ‘solutions’ that override the complexities of both social and natural communities. The mechanistic worldview has proceeded in symbiotic relation with the world as a political and economic machine, endlessly accumulating quantities and enlarging power through the direction of physical force against organic natural and human communities. The Ecopolis, as an urban/ecological regionalism and multi-layered public sphere of federated regions, checks this threat by invoking the organic order that emerges out of the observed and experienced qualities of place. The holist-organic principle does more than counter a mechanistic modernity: it establishes the healthy relation to nature in terms of a civic environmentalism based upon active democratic participation, lived experience and a moral sense of place.

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The realization of ecological health calls for politics, organisation, and planning, adapting technology to ecological principles and patterns so as to respect natural boundaries and diversity as a matter of conscious purpose and effort. Given the extent to which the destruction of nature has proceeded in tandem with the deterioration of urban life, there is a need to develop an integrated approach that enables human beings to determine their lives by being sensitive to the influences and constraints of the ecosystems to which life must continually adapt.

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The integrated approach of civic environmentalism, therefore, seeks to recontextualize urban life in relation to natural life-support systems, thereby reorienting our way of life to address the crises of overdevelopment and overurbanization. A civic environmentalism is neither urban nor rural but establishes the city as the Ecopolis, defined in relation to the organic complexities of the environing ecosystem. As against the economies of scale associated with mass production and industrial development, the Ecopolis takes advantage of natural economies, finding both efficiency and sufficiency in renewable sources of energy, appropriate technology, ecological design, biomimetics or biomimicry, ecological restoration, small scale economic units,  economic regionalism and a green industrialism that focuses on satisfying basic needs, taking the place of a system of commodification that requires the continuous stimulation of wants to absorb ever expanding levels of production.

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The Ecopolis presents a powerful alternative to the prevailing social and cultural pattern of development, reenvisioning the relation of the built environment to the natural region. Presenting the Ecopolis in terms of a civic environmentalism, I am seeking to re-focus ecology on a pragmatic concern with a way of life and define a democratic alternative to the over-developed, over-scaled, unsustainable existence that now prevails. The Ecopolis requires a managed environmentalism and a planned decentralization that applies techniques and technologies, specialist knowledge and professional expertise whilst emphasising civic participation and citizen knowledges, remedying both the ecological degradation and the social inequities which are the result of capitalist industrialization and the endless, expansionary dynamic of accumulation. The approach establishes the health and preservation of ecosystems in the context of new urban/ecological forms, sustaining a commitment to a moral sense of place and reconceiving the forms of common living in order to achieve a sense of subjectivity, common identity and ownership in relation to place.

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A civic environmentalism recognises that an ecologically sound and sustainable policy towards ecosystems must address the health of the human ecology. Ecological destruction is often associated with the breakdown of social communities, so that ecological restoration is often a case of reinvigorating urban/rural forms.

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The idea of the Ecopolis as an urban/ecological regional public responds to the problems created by mass industrialisation and urbanisation. Such an idea will not succeed on account of its moral and intellectual persuasiveness alone, but requires a mode of implementation and construction that is capable of connecting theory and practice. It requires planning and politics, knowledge and technology, and extensive public spaces enabling both democratic participation in its achievement and civic involvement in its maintenance. Such transformations will not be achieved by the evolution of technology or economic integration alone, nor by planning and regulation through governmental agencies alone. A civic environmentalism sees human beings as change agents epistemologically and structurally equipped to bring about the Ecopolis. Transformations can be guided toward social and ecological ends through internal relation to the means of realisation. Without that actively democratic content, the ideal is powerless when confronted with the intransigence of political and business elites with vested material and psychological interests in the status quo. Without the participation of human agents in the process of constituting themselves as eco-citizens, the Ecopolis as an eco-regionalist public sphere cannot be considered a viable alternative to the prevailing social order. It will lack popular support and living democratic content.

 

The Ecopolis conceives a new public life which is capable of exercising public power – the collective force of the sovereign people - in such a way as to realise the potentialities that are immanent in technological modernization, but which are repressed by vested interests and institutional inertia. These potentials can only be realised through a democratic self-socialization that is able to put the collective good ahead of the self-destructive motives of individual and sectional self-interest and private gain. Based upon popular forms of common life and control, I will show how socialisation so conceived is the solution to the game theoretic problem of how to reconcile individual and collective rationality and freedom. In the absence of collective mechanisms of control, individual rationality and freedom will continue to generate a collective irrationality and unfreedom. The problem demands urgent solution. The crisis in the climate system is an unrestrained and irresponsible collective force that positively demands that we develop a collective power of our own, a form of internal social regulation that allows us to assume collective responsibility for our actions.

In developing an awareness of power relations, we come to appreciate the nature of the social and economic forces that stand in the way of the realisation of any ideal. An ideal will not succeed as a result of its cogency alone, it requires means of translation that connect theory and practice. This can involve planning agencies and governmental bodies. Substantial programmes of reconstruction will require a planning framework. But they also require a social agency with the structural capacity to effecting substantial change as well as the will, motivation and character to act. Reconstruction requires the creation of appropriate institutions that are capable of taking effective action, of commanding popular support and of involving people as citizens. The civic environmentalism I develop conceives social transformation to be a self-transformation.

 

Developing a public discourse and generating a civic consciousness through democratic participation are a means not of dissolving expert knowledge but of redirecting its professionalization away from the political and economic elites and interests responsible for the destruction of human and natural communities and toward social and ecological concerns of these communities. This is also a way of opening a space for citizen knowledges generated from within those communities.

 

This view points to the need to democratize and rescale economic and political power as an integral part of the attempt to reconfigure the built environment in light of ecological constraints. I therefore present civic environmentalism as a pragmatic and democratic response to the social and ecological conditions of modernity.

 

PERSON, PLACE AND “THE POLITICAL”

In light of the environmental crisis we are learning not only about natural limits but about the limits of reason and technology. We are having to address the social, moral and aesthetic implications of science and technology. We need a way of restoring the unity of reason and emotion, understanding that hard and soft culture are complementary, that tool making and symbol making, the practical and creative arts, go together.

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The idea of the Ecopolis expands the boundaries of the ‘political’. By bringing science, ethics, planning and the creative arts into relation with everyday life, we not only achieve an integral approach, we underscore the conditions of democracy as a cultural experience. The fundamental assumption and value of the concern to unite aesthetics and ethics is the awareness that a meaningful and enduring social transformation requires imaginative vision and courage. If we are to succeed in resolving the twin crises of social decay and ecological destruction, we will require the ‘ecological imagination.’ (Worster 1993: 209 210).

 

Against the abstracting tendencies of an exploitative and authoritarian technics transgressing planetary boundaries, a democratic technics is in tune with organic realities. From this perspective, the capital system, for all of its much vaunted progress in expanding economic production, stands condemned as an economic, ecological, social and moral failure. It fails because it inverts true relations and exalts abstractions  – capital, commodities, money, prices, profit margins, shares – over realities – human relations, communities, ecosystems. The inversion and destruction of the real in favour of the fetish systems of state politics and capitalist production points to the violence and tyranny of abstraction at work in the modern world, the suppression of the insurgency of life under the regularities of a mechanistic order. We need to recover the cardinal virtues as natural virtues and in the process make the holist-organic principle the cardinal measure of human activity.

 

The holistic approach is timely. We need to set technologies and techniques within an ethico-social matrix that encompasses political and social institutions, networks and relations, the creative arts and culture. The problems we face are, like reality, multi-faceted and multi-dimensional. It follows that we require an integrated approach, one that draws on all disciplines as well as being interdisciplinary. Such an approach has breadth whilst being able to apply specialist knowledge in depth. The integral framework we establish understands the relationship between technology and culture within the patterns of social life, and seeks to give expression to the underlying norms, values and beliefs, the mores, which give meaning at the level of the everyday life world. Such an approach seeks to bring our moral capacities up to our level of technological development, thereby orienting society away from the destructive tendencies associated with uneven development and balance, orienting our powers towards life. Emphasising the importance of a standpoint in defining a civilised way of life, an overarching framework taps into and brings to the surface the underlying norms, values, and be­liefs that bond a society together.

 

The positive resolution of our ecological as well as social and economic ills requires the revitalisation of public life. Political and social transformation cannot take place without a cultural transformation which makes meaning and purpose explicit. The ecological vision thus develops a political sophistication and popular legitimacy by being articulated through a democratic culture within the public sphere.

 

This incorporation of a cultural dimension is fundamen­tal in giving subjective content and meaning to civic environmentalism, mediating pragmatically between state planning, expert knowledge and members of the general public, thus giving expression to an urban, local or regional public sphere. The merit of civic environmentalism is to grasp transformation as a holistic and integrative process. Fundamental transformation is not a technical question in which ecological, economic, political and cultural changes can be kept apart from each other, the province of experts and elites.

 

Affirming the creative role of culture within geographic place sets an aesthetic appreciation of the environment alongside scientific understanding. This approach gives due attention to culture and consciousness in an imaginative aesthetic and ethical reconstruction of place. Achieving a democratic culture, involving ethics and aesthetics, is crucial in establishing the unity of person and place. In 1929, Wittgenstein declared that aesthetics and ethics are ‘one and the same’. Restoring the unity between ethics and aesthetics has the effect of making cultural criticism a moral criticism; and both are integral to politics as something more than a technology of acquiring and retaining power. Establishing the relationships which link up the diverse aspects of behaviour and contexts is an attempt to give form to a cultural vision.

 

Civic environmentalism is distinguished by the way it restores the unity between politics and ethics and integrates culture, geography and biology within a transformed and expansive sense of ‘the political’. The ecological public sphere that emerges reflects the dynamics of social relations, ecological constraints and the human exchange with nature. The approach sets public life in the context of its environing relations. Hence the need for an expansive sense of ‘the political’. Enduring political change is accompanied by a transfor­mation of values. Any genuinely ecological transformation of ‘the political’ requires a simultaneous change in the cultural, moral, even spiritual, dimensions. In light of encroaching environmental threats and an increasing awareness of ecological constraints, such a transformation involves changing the whole basis of our parasitic, exploitative and destructive industrial civilization.

 

The environmental crisis is a civilisation crisis, characterised by an increase in destructive (as well as creative) powers. The positive resolution of this crisis requires a holistic approach. In addition to institutional recommendations, planning policies, applications of technology and creation of energy infrastructures, a positive resolution of our environmental problems requires a fundamental change in the way we think and act, it requires a change at the most profound level of character. Such a change begins in the psyche and proceeds outwards so that personal identity gains expression in social relation to others in place. The approach adumbrated in these pages thus seeks to address our social and ecological predicament with appropriate moral psychological depth.

 

The abstracting forces and destructive tendencies unleashed by our techno-industrial system are not only unravelling communities and ways of life, they are undermining nature’s life support systems. This external violence is the outer expression of the narrow and minimal notion of self expressed by modern systems, the idea of the human being as a self-maximising atom in competition with other atoms for scarce resources. This produces a subjectivity conceived in antagonistic relation to nature, destructive of the human nature within as well as the nature without.

 

In addition to the regulatory measures we may take at the level of institutions and codes to restrain such destructive behaviours, then, any changes we propose, to be effective, require altering the boundaries of self through transformations at the level of culture, social practices and relations, values, and ethical standpoint. The approach I am developing here seeks to connect inner transformations in the self to transformations in the wider world within a public life broadly conceived, so that through civic participation, one’s subjectivity can be given an outer expression.

 

One appreciates, then, the extent to which community is crucial in giving ideals and solutions permanent form and living expression. The idea of an ecological society becomes practicable in an actively democratic society which is scaled to human dimensions and proportions, makes extensive participatory structures available, and fosters a sense of ownership of and commitment to place. Such a society learns to fit itself to natural boundaries and reorganise economic activity and technological use and innovation along ecological contours. The recovery of the self and of place therefore go together. A civic environmentalism seeks to integrate place and person, intertwining the social, political, cultural, aesthetic and ecological aspects of life in a seamless whole. The approach combines institutions of governance, policy frameworks, planning and technologies within a moral and social ecology that is committed to place and person. The result is an integration of social and natural ecology through a public sphere that cultivates a moral sense of place.

 

The Ecopolis is therefore a cultural vision that moves and motivates individuals within place as a lived experience. And this vision is connected to both the democratic participation required to support an urban/ecological public sphere, and the respect for natural boundaries required to sustain this public life. This is to define a civic environmentalism that sees human beings as both social and natural beings. 

 

ECOLOGICAL REGIONALISM

The conception of the Ecopolis establishes a new framework for civilisation. This framework combines a recognition of ecological constraints, an ecological regionalism and a commitment to public life. Despite a name which draws upon the ancient polis, the approach is forward-looking rather than nostalgic. The intention is not to turn the clock back to some lost community. The old solidarities have gone; our task is to create new solidarities. And the intention is not to repudiate technology but, rather, to reorient our technological capacities away from the endless extension of exploitative power over nature to the service of life in accordance with ecological principles. Instead of an antagonistic relation between nature and culture, there is an interaction.

 

Civic environmentalism is defined by the way that ecology, scientific knowledge, technological capacity, culture, ideas, the creative arts, government and politics are integrated. The approach sees technolo­gies being adapted to the end of ecological restoration, ecological principles coming to be recognised in social practices, and community being scaled to human proportions and dimensions so as to enable democratic participation and civic-mindedness. Such a view envisages democracy as a developmental rather than a protective conception, conceiving the principle of self-assumed obligation in terms of democratic self-government so as to furnish the conditions for an active civic democracy.

 

Understood in these terms, civic environmentalism entails an eco-pragmatism that negotiates a path between the twin reefs of a deep ecology that has a tendency to undervalue politics and a political environmentalism that focuses upon existing institutions to the neglect of ecological concerns. As a political idea, civic environmentalism involves the creation of an urban/ecological public sphere based upon closely integrated human and natural communities. As against the centralisation and concentration of power which characterises modern systems of control, a civic environmentalism sees urban public spheres and regions connected through cooperative, localist institutions that unify politics, economics, ethics and ecology. The idea of the Ecopolis as an ecological regionalism projects the possibility of an alternative, feasible, viable and better social and political life based upon cooperative institutions and practices. This envisages a public life grounded in a moral and meaningful sense of sense of place gained by exploration and experience, a conscious appropriation, owning and valuing on the part of those who dwell in place.

 

The idea of place, then, is not ideal or abstract. Instead, it is fundamental to the Ecopolis as a public sphere grounded firmly in ecological realities, establishing the conditions of existence. This is to appreciate how human activities stand in functional relation to the ecological reality of regional structures, making for an informed and nuanced approach to planning, one that draws upon the latest techniques and social science in appreciating how natural and built structures interlace. This approach respects and incorporates ecological principles, understands the region in terms of environmental relationships extending throughout an entire area, and recognises the importance of the geo­graphical factors of terrain, climate, and soil in establishing the conditions of ecosystem health.

 

Despite the globalisation of economic relations, subsuming geo­graphical particularities within a system of economic specialization, place remains significant as a geographic influence in the lives of human beings. Economic globalization has proceeded in a way that overrides the potential for working with natural geographies. The expansionary dynamics of the modern economy are dead set against ecological realities. The universalizing tendencies of the global capital system are threats to the world’s regions, undermining both human and natural structures. The capital system is a mass production system which generates an expansionary commercial and consumptive culture that is neglectful of the importance of climate, soil, fresh and sea water, and flora in sustaining human communities. Indeed, this commercial culture considers its ability to overcome time and space to be the hallmark of economic efficiency, a technological conquest that enables rational human control of contingency. The dissipation of resources and degradation of natural ecologies follows this obliviousness to consequences of actions as a matter of course. Both human and natural ecologies are threatened by the globalisation of economic relations.  Against this, civic environmentalism redefines globalisation as the attainment of a global civil society, affirming both the symbolic and ecological sig­nificance of local and regional particularities whilst making connections between them.

 

In this respect, unregulated trade and uncontrolled urbanization are twin processes that threaten to unravel ecological, local and regional systems. Human activity needs to be brought within the constraints of planetary boundaries in recognition of the fact that there are limits to nature's capacity to sustain human activity. An increasing carbon footprint, for instance, indicates an imbalance between human demands and ecological realities. These realities are also the realities of social and geographic place. Excessive demands generate problems with respect to necessities such as land, food, and water which come to encroach upon surrounding areas. The technological fix is an evasion that postpones but cannot avoid the real problem, the imbalance between human demands and ecological reali­ties that calls for the establishment of proper relations within and between human and natural communities. At some point, we need to bring our technical brilliance back down to earth through a recognition of ecological and social realities. And that would be to bring human activities back within nature’s capacity to absorb pressures and demands.

 

A civic environmentalism sees ethics and politics as intertwined in a field of practical reason mediating between nature and society. The approach combines science and ethics and sees human beings as agents in a world of both fact and value. The ethic here is not simply read off from geographic facts or ecological realities, but emphasises the choices human beings must make in determining the relation of the social to the natural world. How we decide between arrangements that foster cooperation or allow free riding is, ultimately, a matter of moral choice. This view emphasises responsibility, human beings as moral agents capable of assuming responsibility for actions and consequences, capable of deciding whether to nurture or exploit, create or destroy. This is not a fixed and static moralism but a set of principles which emerge from our practical engagement with nature, guiding choice and action. And the view recognises that this responsibility has to be given a social form to be effective. The problem we face today is that uncoordinated human activities have generated a collective, supra-individual external force that is beyond the competence and control of individuals, communities and governments even. Moral choice and responsibility has to be more than individual to be meaningful and effective. An individual can reduce his or her carbon footprint, but such individual actions alone will not resolve the crisis in the climate system.  A common, coordinated approach that unites the power of individuals through collective mechanisms is required. In this way, moral choice gains social and institutional force. We need to create those appropriate, effective collectivities of individuals, enabling conscious democratic control and responsibility.

 

The conception of the Ecopolis affirms the view that the balancing of human activities and ecological realities through the public sphere is a real possibility. This public sphere is constituted by a civic mindedness that is attentive to ecological constraints and responsibilities as well as to relations to others. This internal balance and sensibility checks the problems of overdevelopment, not by a return to pre-modern solidarities, but by the creation of new solidarities capable of embracing the full range of human activities in light of ecological principles. Civic environmentalism therefore conceives the virtues integral to living well as ecological virtues. 

 

Civic environmentalism works with natural design, not in the sense of deriving human purpose from nature, but in seeing creative purpose at work in all living organisms. The approach therefore encompasses both social and ecological realities. In this way, human activities and natural ecologies are considered in their interaction. That interactive element in creatively unfolding the purpose within is critical in underscoring will, choice and agency, thus avoiding a bad teleology which sees a single, fixed and transparent design contained in a given reality, discerned by some totalising science or morality, and legislated and handed down by an authoritarian and elitist ethics and politics. That kind of essentialism and teleology is rightly criticised and rejected, and is not being proposed here. One appreciates here the degree of moral independence that human beings have alongside their natural dependency. Human ends cannot be simply and directly derived from nature. We must wrestle with and reflect upon the complexities of the social and natural realities which set the context of our lives. The extent of the human impact on the natural environment is now abundantly clear. Whether this human engagement with nature turns is creative or destructive depends on the power of human beings as moral and ecological agents. To survive, let alone thrive, we need to develop an ecological sensibility that pays attention to ecological constraints. Politics, expressed in the public sphere, is the mediating term, the expression and embodiment and orientation of that creative agency.

 

Demonstrating an awareness of the human impact on the environment, a civic environmentalism envisages a time when human activities can come to make a positive contribution to, and play a participatory role in, the restoration of the living community. The Earth’s community of life is thus envisioned as a commonwealth of virtue, a conception which gives due recognition to both the moral autonomy and the natural dependency of human beings. This amounts to more than recognising ecological limits. Restoration sees human activity as being undertaken with a view to aiding natural processes, as a realisation of creative powers and not just a conservation of an already achieved state.

 

Place, as the field of human interaction with the environment, is crucial to this restorative process. The emphasis on regional ecologies established around a field of functional relationships offers a grounding in which it becomes possible to identify and control the causes and consequences of human actions. This grounding is organised around a dynamic and interactive human-nature nexus. Rather than being bound to natural limits in some direct physical sense, there is a reciprocal relationship based upon the human engagement with the natural world. The more socially and ecologically aware we become within that relationship, the more we will learn to live within ecological boundaries and value the natural influences upon social life. The Ecopolis is therefore both a ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ form, based on an interactive relation human beings and the natural world.

 

 

COMMUNITY AND PLACE

The Ecopolis is premised upon a productive orientation to the world as central to self-realization, a way of being-in-the-world. Self-reliance in community cultivates a subjectivity grounded in the functional relationships and ecological realities of place. The cultivation of public life therefore spans the larger world of the ecological community and the inner world of self. The approach therefore joins both place and person, valuing not only the natural ecology of the region but also the interior space of the person. As a result, we do not just live on the earth, we live in it. As against the abstract organization of space which typifies the modern town, with the geometric gridiron of streets, we come to dwell in a place grounded in its social, cultural and ecological environment.

 

Against the view that the form and structures of the built environment shape the social life of a town in a direct and uni-linear way, civic environmentalism is premised on the view that community is fostered by a moral and shared sense of place, grounded in a respectful relation to nature.

 

The public sphere so conceived establishes the social and cultural conditions of a vital and enduring ecological society in terms of a productive, just, and interactive relation be­tween human and natural communities generating a sense of the commons based upon mutual respect and value. At the heart of the public sphere envisioned along ecological lines is a commonality that is more than an abstract ethic codified and implemented at the legal-institutional level, but is forged within social relationships so that civic-mindedness and social unity are produced and reproduced in the reciprocal ties of everyday life.

 

A holistic awareness of the importance of place, the natural environment, and the interactive relationship between human and natural ecology establishes community at the core of public life. And at the core of community is the human-nature nexus mediated by social relations. This is to incorporate the ecological prin­ciple of interdependence among and between species into a conception of community as a shared environment. Community is therefore formed and sustained by establishing the connections between natural and social ecologies within mutualist social relations. The Ecopolis is a public community formed from smaller communities, affirming the regional interdependence of humanity and nature through reciprocal and mutualist relations within the social and natural worlds.

 

Community therefore emerges as an ecology constituted on the basis of functional interdependence and the realisation of subjectivities, a mutuality that unites the inner and outer worlds, overcoming the separation of culture from nature. As an ecological regionalism, the Ecopolis brings about the reconciliation of the human community and the natural community.

 

The organic, therefore, is a social ecology rather than an unmediated nature. The Ecopolis is the organic vision expressed as polity, a place-based ecological democracy based on the reciprocal relations between the built and the natural environments and sustained by civic structures enabling and fostering participation.

 

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ORGANIC HOLISM AND PLANNING

Establishing the organic relation between nature and culture is a holistic concern that encompasses the full range of human activities. That relation requires a practical expression in terms of social organisation, an expression that must incorporate scientific knowledge and technological capacity, a recognition of biological and ecological realities and organic principles in planning, policy and design, aesthetics, ethics and the creative arts, and the everyday life world so as to overcome the spatial imbalances between the social and natural environments. This is to conceive politics is a broad and expansive sense as a public life grounded in the fundamental socio-economic and ecological realities of place, achieving a balance between human activities and environing relations to create genuinely sustainable communities.

 

An integrative approach enables creative responses that appropriate the varied information generated in the world of experience and fuse it to give it form. Form is essential, since emergence entails the realization of form. In A.N. Whitehead’s process conception, ‘all actuality involves the realization of form’ (Whitehead 1968: 90). The organic conception of unity in emergence seeks expressions of form – planning, policy and design - that are functional within the world of experience. These forms possess a capacity to fuse art and experience, moral and aesthetic value and technological efficiency, reason and imagination, combining a functional robustness with creative vision. The organic approach thus counters the specialization of knowledge and fragmentation of life which characterises the modern world.

 

The Ecopolis can be presented as such a form, a planned eco-city and public community that expresses inherent potentiality creatively unfolding in experience, offering a vision of an immanent alternative to the actually existing social order. These processes making for unity are biological and ecological as well as cultural and technological. The Ecopolis as public form achieves unity that overcomes the fragmented worlds of ‘knowledge’ so as to hold all processes in relation. Beyond specialism, this public form values all citizen knowledges.

 

The Ecopolis encapsulates biological and ecological principles and aesthetic and moral values in public form: it is an urban/ecological form that combines the application of new technologies and planning techniques in creative relation to lived experience within ecological boundaries to achieve a mutual unfolding of nature and culture.

The organic-holist approach conceives an aesthetics of place that is sensitive to technological modernization and social differentiation, bridging technical and artistic worlds and creating the sense of place. The aesthetic and the practical are therefore established in a mutual relation. The potentialities of science and technology are to be drawn out with respect to their moral and social implications and rendered compatible with organic principles of design, achieving a new appreciation of modern technology and its use. At the same time, we come to underscore the importance of place in developing a sense of self.

 

The Ecopolis is therefore a public form that reconciles technological modernization, ecological design and human activities in such a way as to ensure sound, sustainable development that is in tune with the natural attributes of a place.

 

This conception highlights the extent to which human prospects depend on our coming to reconfigure and recontextualize our technological powers along the lines of natural relations. This is to establish the connection between ethics and ecology through a concomitant process of humanisation and naturalisation. In the process, we come to see our self-made world, comprising our built environment and technological powers, as an extension of living organisms. The point is, unless we address the moral and social implications of technological modernization, society will continue to be marked by a potentially catastrophic imbalance between human activity and natural limits. To overcome this, we need to render the development of social science, ecological science, and the systematic application of science to technological innovation, compatible with moral and social concerns within a holist-organic conception.

 

This would be to transcend the mechanistic paradigm in favour of a way of life lived in full recognition of natural boundaries. An organicist technics reconciles economics, ethics and ecology, developing a form of economic activity that respects natural limits, expresses values and serves a social use. And this implies an ecological economics that rejects the systemic imperatives of endless appropriation and accumulation in favour of conserving resources, aiding natural processes and respecting the functional requirements of environing ecosystems. Such an economics sees ecological constraints in terms of both limitation and possibility. This would be to bring economics back to its origins in the oikos, combining economic development and ecological sustainability rather than setting the two in antagonistic relation as in the contemporary economy.

 

The Ecopolis is a public community resting on and preserving the ecological balance of the natural region or locality. As against the mechanistic approach, which turns a place into a mechanism exploiting specialized knowledge in order to churn out endless quantities, the organic conception sees the world as an organism, capable of maintaining its balance internally. There is an internal coherence at the heart of the public life of Ecopolis that is self-stabilizing and which is only upset by the encroachment of extraneous forces. Based on holist and organic principles, the Ecopolis flourishes through being able to draw on its multi-faceted potentials as a habitus for organic life.

 

The holist-organic conception overcomes the fragmentation of knowledge and of life as a result of the domination of the mechanistic paradigm. Holism sees the world in terms of form, organism, connection, interrelation, pattern, configuration, affiliation. To come to value these organic and holistic principles and incorporate them within social practices would be indicative of an expansive, creative, democratic technics being applied in the transition to a biocentric civilisation. Good design is not only functional with respect to technology and technique, but appropriate within social and natural contexts.

 

This would be to restore purpose and meaning to the world. Whereas mechanistic science sees the world as objectively valueless, the holist-organic conception sees purpose in emergent properties and life-enhancing activities. Such a view implies human beings engaged in a partnership with the living organisms of the earth, the earth as a commonwealth of virtue practising mutual aid.