Peter Bond
The phrase fantasy of separation was coined to draw attention to an obstacle to sustainable development—the mistaken belief that we are separate from the biosphere (Nichols and Seeley, undated). Living this fantasy means we don’t recognise ourselves as part of Nature, as biological entities, nor as the last representatives of the hominid species.
I wish to explore here the impact of removing this obstacle on our understanding and teaching of enterprise and innovation as a precondition for truly sustainable development. I begin with a simple model of organism and environment relationships I will call the organism-medium system (O-MS) which was developed independently by a psychologist Timo Järvilehto (1998), and two biologists, Humberto Maturana (e.g., 1997) and Francisco Varela.
The O-MS is a single unit of analysis and acts as the basis of a mechanism for explaining living systems behaviour. For brevity’s sake, I will treat the medium as a niche, that part of the biosphere we engage with directly constituted by: i) materials we consume; ii) others of our kind and; iii) other organisms with which we have a symbiotic or mutually supportive relationship as part of a network of life. The model highlights a reciprocal relationship between the organism and its niche. Persistence of an organism over time indicates it has maintained fitness with it. Evidence an organism has evolved implies it has co-evolved with its niche, so maintaining the integrity of the organism-medium system. This, we might say, is the normal situation, but there is something extraordinary about the evolution of the Human Organism-Medium System (HO-MS), which might explain the Western world’s widespread belief in the fantasy of separation.
Paleoanthropologists and archaeologists have revealed a startling fact about our evolutionary trajectory they call the sapient paradox (e.g., Renfrew, 2010). The fossil record suggests homo sapiens has not evolved biologically for 150, 000 years or so, not much anyway. What has evolved, very evidently, is human culture, by which I mean all the practices and the resulting artefacts, from tools to organizations, and the buildings, transport and trading infrastructures that set us apart from other animals. This apparent disconnection of biological and cultural evolution is unprecedented in the animal world and has proven difficult to explain. What is more, some evolutionary biologists now argue the natural environment is not humankind’s niche after all, rather it is our culture (e.g., http://lalandlab.st-andrews.ac.uk/niche/index.html). Cultural space, then, acts as a buffer between humankind and the natural environment and mediates our relationship with it. Cultural spaces explain our success as a species. They are constructed in the dynamic interplay between the human organism and its medium and so emerge in their uniqueness and variety from different landscapes or naturescapes.
The material and climactic character of different naturescapes is reflected in the practices and artefacts created through uniquely human inventiveness and enterprise. Technology represents our collective ability to respond to changes in our niche through problem solving to the extent that culture can be conceived as an archive of solutions (Rammert, 1997). But now cultural evolution is The Problem. Cultural space expanded to the point where we are barely aware of Nature, except when it reminds us of its existence through volcanic eruptions, and abnormal weather conditions. It’s not surprising that we live a fantasy of separation, but our dependence on the biosphere remains an incontrovertible fact.
Yes, culture has separated us from Nature. Yes, cultural spaces are beneficial, they are what enables us to survive almost anywhere on the planet. However it will be evident from the brief introduction to the organism-medium system model that survival of the organism involves consumption of the niche.
Normally this is replenished by the cycle of life in a connected system of living entities. However, as we have learnt, the construction of cultural niches also involves consumption of the medium of operation. This is the essence of cultural niche construction. Because of the extent to which the cultural niche has now displaced the natural one and due to our fantasy of separation, we don’t perceive the unsustainable consumption of the natural world, our ultimate medium of operation. The most significant consequence of living the fantasy of separation is we attempt to conserve cultural relations and not relations with nature. Our approach to enterprise and innovation education generally serves only to conserve a culture that is dysfunctional in the long term. How do we escape this dilemma?
My belief is we need to develop an anthropology of enterprise and innovation. This should have the purpose of encouraging and enabling critical reflection on the most recent period of economic and cultural history by placing it within the context of human evolution. After all, as the archaeologist Richard Rudgley (1999, p.1) says, The prehistory of humankind is no mere prelude to history: history is rather a colourful and eventful afterword to the stone-age.
Where can we begin this enterprise, what do we build an anthropology of enterprise and innovation on? First is the knowledge that homo sapiens did live sustainably for over 95% of our time on Earth, and when and where we failed to, there are numerous examples of cultural extinctions we can learn from (Diamond, 2005). Archaeologists and anthropologists know about these. Second is that biologically we should be capable of doing so again, and third we have examples of sustainable living in the form of hunter-gatherer and pastoral communities who survive today, even though they exist under extreme natural pressures and in danger of being overwhelmed by Western culture.
Peter Bond, Learning Futures Consulting, plbond@polytechnics.fsnet.co.uk