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  • From: Johnathan Yelenick <yelenick@riseup.net>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] On Fireweed and Ecological Understanding
  • Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 10:38:20 -0600

Considering the Fireweed articles that were recently contributed, there was a quote in the article from http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-ocean30jul30,0,952130.story written by Kenneth R. Weiss, Times Staff Writer:
Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.

I question the veracity of this proposition. If ecological succession consists a fundamental dualism of both devastation and aggregation, how can we separate one from that other and say one is "good" while the other must be "bad". While this *subjective* assumption may pertain to the human organism, et al., it cannot be forced across the boards and applied as truth. The assumption sits in a myopic binary opposition mode of thinking, too narrow to categorize the flowing forth of Nature.

The antiquated mindset of classical Darwinian theory has wallowed too long in ecological applications, despite overwhelming evidence of its insufficiency, stemming foremost from the works of Norman Pace and Carl Woese (see /A New Biology for a New Century/, Carl Woese, Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, June 2004). Classical Darwinian theory operates in a linear time perception that is essentially separated from itself. We see this operation signified in the above quote when the author says that Fireweed is growing an ecology that is "returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago". The author cannot comprehend how a time that is supposed to be fit in a box and filed away could creep back onto the scene. If indeed an organism that was supposed to be transgressed, in the great Liberal dogma of Progress, was not passed and this "primeval" organism is still existing, then maybe we should question the conceptual health of Progress and classical Darwinian theory.

This author does not feel, as signified through his words, Nature as a holistic process. He works within a paradigm that is hierarchically related, trying to anthropomorphize Nature to his subjective whim. Biology becomes for him a tool to change the world, not primarily a window from which to understand it.

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