Botkin, Daniel B. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century. Oxford University Press: New York, 1990.

Natural systems -- a kinder, gentler positivism. -- Art Fricke

Sorry, Art. Had to borrow that. It sums up everything about this book that I struggled so hard to put into such and eloquent turn of phrase. Although the book is an excellent study in looking at complex systems in an applied fashion, in this case, natural systems as a whole, it fails to escape the positivism inherent in the sciences that engendered it.

In Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century, Daniel Botkin argues that we must escape past myths of nature, which we have carried with us into the modern age, if we are to properly understand how to move forward in the management of nature.

Daniel Botkin presents the history of our conception of nature in three ways of thinking. The first two of which overlap significantly, and the third of which is a product of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Before the Enlightenment and the subsequent mechanization of the world, the world was perceived in one of two ways. Either as divinely ordered and therefore perfect (or perfectly imperfect) or as an organic being in its own right. Although he does not delve into this too deeply, the source of these two systems of belief are founded, respectively, in the Judeo-Christian and pagan-animistic traditions of Europe. With the coming of mechanization, the idea of the machine was applied to the Earth as metaphor -- the concept of the mechanistic, clockwork universe. This metaphor he rightly attributes to being a rationalized continuation of the older conception of the divinely ordered universe.

His assertion is that we must get past the metaphor of the mechanistic universe and the metaphor of the divinely ordered universe that underlies it and move forward. The direction we must move, in his view, is toward an understanding of the complexity of nature. Daniel Botkin points out that computers, unlike any other tool in history, allow us to do the math necessary to measure complexity. He argues that computers, in allowing us to measurably understand the complexity of nature, thereby allowing us to comprehend it, will, if used properly, also allow us to return to a concept of the Earth as organic, as wholistic entity but without the needless mucking about in the theological implications of Earth as divine or divinely created.

This book purports to be about overturning outmoded ideas and myths about the way science and policy approach nature. In promoting thinking about ways of thinking about nature, it is a good, clear, accessible work. However, David Botkin appears incapable of perceiving the myths that bind him, such as the myth of that everything is knowable through science if a way can be found to measure it. Although he claims that room must be left for unknowability, it is a mathematical unknowability, something that is stochaic, that can be measured in terms of probabilities. There is no room in his philosophy for the truly unknowable, such as divinity.

Some salient quotes:

The potential for us to make progress with environmental issues is limited by the basic assumptions that we make about nature, the unspoken, often unrecognized perspective from which we view our environment. [p.5]

A logistic moose responds instantaneously to changes in the size of the population; there is no history, no time lags, no season; a logistic moose has no fat. [p.37]

It is perhaps ironic that the strong intentional separation of science from religion tended to obscure the underlying connections between them in the explanations about the character of biological nature. [p.89]

Knowing that bacteria act like databanks and that we can mimic a forest in a computer, we no longer need deny the complexities of nature in our theories and ideas. [p. 120]

Thus we must accept nature for what we are able to observe it to be, not for what we might wish it to be. [p. 130]

The biosphere is not a mystical organismic entity contraposed to rationality, but a system open to scientific analysis and to a new kind of understanding because of new knowledge and new metaphors. [p.151]

We must distinguish between merely the persistence of some kinds of life and the maintenance of a biosphere that is desirable to human beings. [p.182]

A harmony between ourselves and nature depends on -- indeed, requires -- modern technological tools to teach us about the Earth and to help us manage wisely what we realize we have inadvertently begun to unravel. [p.189]