Toward the ecological republic

Centering governance on our habitation of the planet

10 minute read

The ecological failure of governance

Never has the failure of governance been more striking and the consequences more stark.  Across the planet, the ecological fundaments of life literally erode beneath our feet.  Growing swaths of the Earth’s surface are degraded, waters polluted and used up, soils exhausted and poisoned, forests mowed down and eliminated.  At sea most fisheries are stressed and many have collapsed, while oceans grow acidic to levels not seen in millions of years. 

Towering over this scene is a changing climate being heated and disrupted by carbon from fossil fuel pollution and land disturbances.   Ecological degradation alone threatens the stability of human systems.  Climate change multiplies and intensifies the dangers. All these trends are projected to accelerate as human numbers multiply from 7 billion now to 8, 9 or 10 billion this century, increasing billions seeking sustenance from declining natural systems

All these facts are well known, and have been called out for decades.  Movements have risen to address these challenges, international conferences called, reforms enacted.  While incremental improvements have taken place, the overall direction remains unchanged.  Business as usual continues largely unabated.  Like the Captain of the RMS Titanic ordering the boilers stoked to achieve a trans-Atlantic speed record, the governance systems of the world pile on fossil energy-intensive forms of economic growth, blithe to the field of icebergs up ahead.  To divert public attention from these facts, powerful interests mount psychological warfare operations deploying every disinformation weapon available.  The masses of people continue with their own lives, many in media-saturated ignorance, some aware of the situation but feeling helpless, others in bold denial. 

Business as usual proceeds on the assumption that somehow the immense adaptive cleverness of the human species, which has enabled us to reach this point of global dominion, will pull us through. After all, it has always done so before.  At the same time flows a paradoxical undercurrent of apocalyptic expectation, a sense of inevitability we are headed for some form of crash and there is little to be done about it.  This mix of perceptions plays in the recesses of our minds, enabling us to continue in the practical functions of the everyday, downplaying questions with which we can barely grapple.

The ultimate question

All this raises the ultimate question, the largest ever faced by the human species, indeed so out of scale with anything we have confronted before that we can barely comprehend it.  As in that famous metaphor, the fish is the last to see the ocean, we are challenged to perceive an inquiry that envelops us.  To what extent can Planet Earth continue to support current human and other populations?  This focuses the issue which centrally confronts our species, our habitation of this planet and the onset of an extinction event from which we cannot consider ourselves exempt.  The prospect for at least a significant dieback of human numbers must be taken into account, and increasingly is by thoughtful people.

The question has been put.  But the institutions of social governance appear largely deaf.  More than simply the public institutions of government, governance is a complex interaction of public agencies and civil society organizations that fulfill many roles of governance in the modern social ecosystem.  Government is, of course, the core, because it is here where authoritative decisions are made that span society, determine the allocation of limited resources, and condition the actions of more informal forms of governance.  At all levels of government and governance, the ultimate question of allocating limited planetary space has barely begun to be addressed.  

One definition of politics is the art of the possible. But the chasm between what is politically feasible and what is ecologically necessary seems to be only growing wider. Climate and sustainability advocates have proposed solutions that fit within their sense of the possible even though most of the solutions clearly fall far short of what is needed to preserve a habitable planet. Against the steepening curve of climate impacts, from dramatic increases in droughts and drenching storms, to rapid loss of polar ice, we must ask if all these efforts amount to spitting in the rising seas. 

Empty governance in a full world

This is why it is crucially necessary to consider governance in a deeper and more fundamental way than we have to this point.  We are compelled to ask why after decades of warnings and public processes from international negotiations to national and state legislative efforts, there is no serious turn of the global ship from the iceberg that will inevitably rip into its guts and send it to the bottom.  Why is governance, our prime means for allocating limited space and resources, in effect operating as if limits do not exist?  It is because there is an empty heart to governance, the absence of an idea to critically focus its actions. 

Ecological economist Herman Daly decades ago specified the nub of the issue.  Throughout human existence we lived in an empty world. Certainly we exhausted landscapes and hunted species to extinction.  But there were always other places to go, new frontiers to fill our needs and sate our desires.  Now we have filled the world, and the fact of the full world changes everything. 

Daly’s insight is resonant with a clarion by Jane Lubchenco when she was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: “ . . . during the last few decades, humans have emerged as a new force of nature. We are modifying physical, chemical, and biological systems in new ways, at faster rates, and over larger spatial scales than ever recorded on Earth. Humans have unwittingly embarked upon a grand experiment with our planet. The outcome of this experiment is unknown, but has profound implications for all of life on Earth.”

A new force of nature on a full world. This is fresh information. We have hardly had time to take it in and understand what it means.  So it is no surprise that governance systems, let alone human cultures, are still living on a planet that no longer exists, the empty world, not fully taking into account the vastly increased powers and impacts of our species.  We need an organizing idea of governance that brings us up to date, one that accounts for the challenge of inhabiting a full world. That idea is the ecos, the home.  The time is now for a new political framework that places ecos at the center.  We need to create the ecological republic, one which centers governance on the planetary ecos and our inhabitation of it. 

No matter how personally independent or individually willful, we are all dependent on the common life of the ecos. It begins with the land, the waters, the air, the natural systems that sustain our biological lives and those of our fellow life forms. Upon the ground of nature we create our social commons of human settlements and economies, of communities that educate our children, protect us, provide networks of circulation and exchange, and, we hope, pick us up when we fall down. The city is as much an ecosystem as the forest.  Human social ecosystems built upon non-human natural ecosystems together make up the ecos, the commons on which we depend as individuals and as communities. 

The roots of the word “republic” call out the commons, the Res Publica, literally the “Public Thing” that together we uphold.  In the ecological republic, the Res Publica is understood as the ecos, the commons of human and non-human ecosystems that we hold together as common heritage, and which we are commissioned to pass on to our next generations as a functioning whole.  Now, on our full planet where the continued functioning of ecosystems has become an open question, the essential task is to make this the first principle for governance, the one from which all others flow.

Coming back to the home place

The critical breakthrough is conceptual.  It is about integrating an understanding that in its most fundamental sense is an environing intelligence, a mind looking out at its surroundings to comprehend place and its relation to place.  It is about seeing ourselves embedded in the ecos, the home place at the varied scales at which we live, circles from the most local and regional to the planetary.  The essential challenge before a species rapidly crowding its home place and collapsing its foundations is first to see the home place, to understand that we live somewhere and bear responsibility for its keeping.  We require a revolution in human awareness that centers on our inhabitation of the ecos, makes this the organizing principle around which we consider all questions of common life. 

This idea was the foundation of Ernest Callenbach’s classic Ecotopia books about the creation of an ecologically-centered breakaway republic on the West Coast.  The root meaning of Eco-topia is home-place.  It is also the idea at the core of the bioregional movement that originated in the 1970s and 1980s.  That movement is about developing an environing intelligence that situates us in place. Its seeds have sprouted all over, spurring local watershed restoration efforts, community food movements and new frameworks in research and public policy.  This is the stuff of the ecological republic. 

The ecological republic builds on the bioregional tradition to place a revised and refined system of governance at the heart of the matter.  Many grassroots sustainability efforts have reflected a desire to escape the messy and conflict-ridden world of politics and government.  Building independent institutions and alternative lifestyles has been a key emphasis.  A current of neo-anarchism runs through much of this, a sense that dealing with politics and government is disempowering while making your own world is empowering. 

But we share a limited world, and that is the point. Humans will settle questions of limits by warfare and its close relative, dictatorship, or politically.  Politics involves conflict and dealing with people outside of cultural comfort zones, a necessary effort living on a crowded planet. Politics and governance must come to the fore, and to address the critical challenges, must come to center on questions of the ecos.  We must learn together how to inhabit this ever fuller world, and that learning process is the core of ecological governance.  The critical word is together. 

Government has a just and righteous purpose, to accomplish tasks that individuals and singular organizations cannot accomplish by themselves, in order to build and protect the frameworks of common life in which each person and community can fully develop themselves.  The ecological republic extends the framework to the whole of the ecos.  This is the change in governance needed to address the emerging position of humanity as a new force of nature on a full world. The ecological republic has as its first task to sustain the ecos as the foundation of the common life.   

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