وحدت طبیعت: کلیت و فروپاشی در اکولوژی و علم

It is unclear how to count out the right number of stars when a book is, to oversimplify, stimulating but wrong. This is especially the case since this book will strike different readers quite differently.

Sort of ironically, these considerations I find important are (sort of) the motivation to Marshall’s book. Marshall argues strenuously against trying to summarize biota into a quantitative measure, and he argues strenuously in favor of consideration for the wide variety of points of view in the world. But, while I think these are central guiding considerations when describing a book, I don’t think they should guide a description of nature. Marshall is a committed postmodernist and reads everything (all things) as a “text.” In the introduction he specifies that he has “sympathies” for and is “more allied to” the constructionist notion of nature than to realism. In other words, he tends to see nature as something the seer makes, rather than as something the seer discovers objectively. The author’s keen postmodern approach is the strongest feature of the book, though it doesn’t really shine until ~150 pages into the book, when Marshall commences the final of the book’s three sections.

In Section A, the author briefly sketches the book’s overarching concept: the unity of nature. (I’ll type this as “UN.”) This is the idea that all living things are connected. Readers may be familiar with this idea being called the circle of life, the food web, or Gaia.

Section B is meaty and interesting. In four chapters Marshall argues that UN is allied with four (apparently) undesirable other ideas: fascism, technocentrism, social stability (of a conservative flavor), and liberal capitalism. It may strike the reader that these four ideas are not notoriously compatible, but this is not addressed in the book. I cannot take the time to address all four of these topics individually, so I will generalize on the second, third, and fourth topics: the analyses are interesting and, I think, reveal genuine philosophical similarities between concepts that are not typically considered to be similar. Marshall treats technology, social stability, and liberal capitalism as undesirable, without ever positing those preferences explicitly, and this choice imparts a faint polemic tone to the work. It is as if readers should already agree with his politics and he’s showing us that we should be upset by UN because it is similar to the things we already dislike. The conceptual similarities I found interesting; the tone unjustified. As it turns out, one of the strange things about the book is that the author never defines or considers what actually constitutes good environmental actions/policy, although it seems to be preservation of each and every living thing.

The first claim of section B is that UN leads to ecological “fascism”; this follows from the fact that ecosystem science, biogeochemistry, and Gaia theory treat biota as pools and fluxes of matter and energy, rather than as groups of individual organisms — thus they are blind to individuals and are capable of sacrificing individuals to safeguard what they can see, large-scale ecosystem function. This point has, in part, logical validity to it, but the author makes a serious error in that between the scientific approaches mentioned and “ecological fascism” he only shows compatibility whereas he believes there is an imperative. He writes as if ecosystem science necessarily, or at least with considerable likelihood, leads to ecological fascism. In fact it is widely understood that different scientific approaches provide different types of data about the same physical entities and that, especially in ecology, it is outlandish to claim that one approach gives the complete picture. I did not feel that Marshall ever established a tendency for people to transform a scientific methodology into an authoritative worldview. He did provide a few instances of this, focusing on James Lovelock, co-originator of the Gaia theory. But Lovelock is widely considered, uh, ‘extreme’ and is not representative of ecosystem science philosophically, sociologically, or as a scientist in practice. On this key point, Marshall follows a common postmodernist tendency in inferring a greater claim to authoritativeness from scientists than the scientists intend to claim.

Moreover, the book’s other serious gap enters here: the author shows no real-world human activities based on UN or ecosystem science that have harmed the environment. (He does portray several hypothetical possibilities.) In point of fact some of the most important early victories of environmentalism policy hinged on these scientific methodologies and established environmental policies as worth our effort on the basis of their capacity for success. Moreover, the present problem of climate change — which I think most environmentalists consider important — can only be understood through the systems theory that Marshall fears.

Section C starts with the longest and best chapter in the book, and here Marshall’s postmodernist rigor shines. In fact this chapter does a good job of characterizing postmodernism as a whole, which is a rare feat since postmodernists are usually rather cagey about describing their discipline/philosophy. Indeed Marshall stresses that postmodernism is not amenable to describing anything as a whole — postmodernism recognizes only fragmentation. By the end of Section C, a reader will have a very good idea what postmodernism can and cannot do. In this respect the book is valuable, because its lengthy comparison between postmodern approaches and certain scientific fields reveal a lot about what mutual ground postmodernism and science might or might not be able to share. Most people interested in this topic will probably have plenty of their own thoughts and I won’t attempt to settle the matter now (as if I could). I will say that Marshall’s final chapter is an attempt to suggest a true “postmodern science,” which he calls postmodern associationism. Marshall says:

“[U]nder postmodern associationism stories are able to be constructed for each and every biological individual that exists in the ecological world. In this way, through atomising the ecological world, the needs, lives, tragedies, interests, values and historical heritage of each non-human may be told in all their variety. Stories which, under unitarianism, are drowned out by the constant re-telling of the one metanarrative that is unity.” [sic]

As a suggestion for a scientific field this is at least a vast challenge, since it requires a huge and detailed scheme of data collection. There are more “biological individual”s that will live and die on Earth today than there are humans who have ever lived … so telling all the stories doesn’t seem feasible. Certainly we could tell some fraction of the stories, and this is already done under the name of natural history. Furthermore, Marshall’s association is possibly incoherent. This is partially due to the issue of constructionism vs objectivity, which Marshall doesn’t address except to say which he prefers. Science and scientists as a rule however operate under the objective idea of reality. That aside, science is also pretty keen on the idea of natural law, and is thus at odds with the author’s dislike for “metanarrative.” Marshall’s associationism seems to me like in practice it would be natural history of a peculiar type, somewhat like collecting butterflies but without killing them.

A final point to mention: cornerstone environmental policy in the U.S. is the Endangered Species Act. The ESA was passed in 1973 and takes an approach quite in line with Marshall’s ideas. That is, instead of maintaining the integrity of ecosystems as physio-chemical systems, it protects each species from extinction. Marshall is not from the U.S. though, and I don’t know how other jurisdictions handle conservation.

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In summary, the book was worthwhile for its thorough and rigorous consideration of subject matter, even if it didn’t convince me on some major points. I would recommend this book to readers interested in philosophy of nature, postmodernism (especially as it relates to science and environmentalism), and philosophy and sociology of ecology.