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Lenitive Medicine - Of Human Ecology and Social Justice
By Columnist Leonard Sawatsky
The dictionary defines human ecology as "a branch of sociology dealing especially with the spatial and temporal interrelationships between humans and their economic, social, and political organization." Unfortunately, this definition confines human ecology more than it defines it.
Human ecology may be an approach to sociological inquiry or a sociological perspective (such as structural functionalism, symbolic interaction or conflict theories) but it is not a branch of sociology. Also missing in the dictionary definition of human ecology is what is commonly referred to as "nature". Sociology restricts itself to interrelationships between humans, human groupings and the social order. Human ecology certainly includes interrelationships of humans with economic, social and political organization but most importantly with the environment, the totality of our surrounding natural conditions.
The word ecology embraces the relationship of the environment with all living organisms. Humans are one of billions of these living organisms on the earth and in the universe, and it is essential to also explore our relationship with the environment along with human made structures and institutions. It is the absence of doing so that I believe is at the root of most if not all of the current social, economic and political problems we face in western society.
Social justice is the attempt to re-vision and re-imagine the interrelationships of humans with the natural environment, along with how this impacts with the social, economic and political structures in which we live. In fact, for most people, except for indigenous peoples who are still shaped by traditional perspectives, it is more a matter of establishing an initial relationship with nature. We spend a lot of effort and time in isolating and protecting ourselves from the environment in thought, word and action. Thus, we are more influenced by that which is made by humans (social, economic and political institutions) than that which was not brought about by human development. We are more comfortable with that which we think we can control rather than by that which we cannot control. Nature represents for us a fear of the unknown rather than a living organism to which we accommodate ourselves.
The real task of social justice, then, is to bring about balance, the same kind of balance we find in nature, such as the four seasons or the orderly movement of the planets around the sun in our universe. This is a very different kind of balance than what is held as common sense in the linear perspective where there is a mad rush to the political centre (always a moveable target) or as found in the symbolic scales of legal justice held by a blindfolded woman.
Ecologically, balance is found in a circle of life image, not in a line of progress image. We will not achieve social justice if we continue to use the means and strategies of the old linear paradigm. I understand the appeal of pragmatism but my concern, which has been borne out in experience, is that people get lost in the process. It's like the words of a Leonard Cohen song, "I've been sentenced to 20 years of boredom for trying to change the system from within." The tools of the old system can only build another version of the old system. As someone long ago said, we need "new wineskins for the new wine". If we pour the new wine of a human ecology approach into the old wineskins, we will lose both the wineskin and the wine.
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Leonard Sawatsky is a social justice advocate and consultant as well as vice-president of the Green Party of Saskatchewan. The views expressed in this column are his own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policies of Pure Greenius or the policy platform of the Green Party of Saskatchewan. They are designed to stimulate creative discussion through which we together can develop an ideological framework for Green Party policy positions.
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