The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

84
The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
lines of which are being articulated equally in the natural sciences, the social sciences,
philosophy and religious thought. It involves more systemic approaches that recognise
the validity of different perspectives and the fact that theories and models are mental
constructions. These will replace the view of logical positivism inherent to the industrial
worldview of the modern age of rationalism that was based on the notion that
sense observations are the only meaningful statements (1993: 164f.). This position is
shared by a number of authors. Berkes, for instance, comments that although much of
ecology continues as a conventional reductionist science, more holistic approaches
have recently emerged providing »a new vision of the earth as an ecosystem of interconnected
relationships in which humans are part of the web of life« (1999: 164).
This view is also presented by Goldsmith (1993) in his book The Way. Drawing on
ideas developed in the philosophy of science, he explores the underlying causes of environmental
destruction more thoroughly. For him, our society is committed to economic
development – a process that must increase systematically the impact of economic
activities on an environment ever less capable of sustaining them. The ›Western‹
worldview that he specifies as modernism is reflected in the paradigms of economics
and science. And one of its most fundamental tenets is the idea that all benefits.
This implies that human welfare is derived from the ›man-made world‹, i.e. science,
technology and industry, and the economic development that these make possible,
which is imbued by the objective to maximise all benefit through ›progress‹. These assumptions
inherent to the ›Western‹ worldview and the general human tendency to regard
the only world known as ›normal‹ are reflected in the disciplines taught in schools
and universities. The role of the academic world is acknowledged to provide governments
and societies at large with knowledge that serves the public interest and general
welfare. But as the worldview of modernism does not accommodate the policies
needed to bring to an end the environmental deterioration and to develop a sustainable
way of life, Goldsmith sets out to establish a new ecological worldview. To do so, inspiration
may be derived from »vernacular societies« and in particular from their
»chthonic worldview of the earliest period when people knew to live in harmony with
the natural world« (1993: xvii). Therein he identifies two major principles to be taken
into account. The first is the notion that the biosphere is the basic source of all benefit.
The second is that the overriding goal of behavioural patterns in an ecological society
must be to preserve the critical order of the natural world or the cosmos. Cosmovision
in this sense refers to this order of the cosmos and is used to denote the way
that must be taken:
Evolution and its constituent life processes build up order. Individualistic systems become organized,
differentiated and hence specialized in the fulfilment of various functions. As this occurs, so competition
yields to cooperation, so the incidence and severity of discontinuities is reduced, and so the systems
become more stable. Indeed, order implies organization, differentiation, specialization, cooperation,
and stability. They are only different ways of looking at the same fundamental feature of the living
world (Goldsmith 1993: 183).