ETHICS AND URBAN SUSTAINABILITY

Local Ecology, Human Ecology And Urban Ecology

BY PETER NEWMAN
Professor of City Policy, and Director, Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, Murdoch University

Introduction
Gilbert White and Local Ecology
E F Schumacher and Human Ecology
Jane Jacobs and Urban Ecology
Conclusions
Questions
References

INTRODUCTION

"One of the greatest moral statements ever made is 'Love your neighbour as yourself', but how can I love my neighbour if I have no neighbours.....if I live dominated by the cult of individualism and addicted to the drug of consumerism....a city that does not address the spiritual needs of its inhabitants and does not consider the importance of caring for the soul will end up being a city of greed rather than a city of God." Satesh Kumar (1994, p 39)

In the green wedge open space between two corridors of northern Copenhagen there is a small tea room called Kalkegarden which is run by an 89 year old woman who has been there for over 70 years. During the past 15 years this woman has been the main moral force behind the movement to stop a Motorway designed to ring the city near Kalkegarden. The opposition is made up of people from three overlapping movements: conservation groups who do not want to see the character of the rural wedge destroyed, those who are against all forms of transport infrastructure which facilitate car use and those in the city who do not want to see the road ripping into local neighbourhoods.

The elderly woman is an urban equivalent of an 'earth mother' and the three groups of people are part of the tapestry of urban environmental ethics. Around the world there are hundreds of similar people and groups whose ethical approach to the urban environment is holding back the tide of destructive modernism and automobile dependence. This case study tries to trace some of their ideas and see how they relate to the pattern of environmental ethics.

My approach to environmental ethics has always been to tell stories of how environmental struggles have been won, for example the edited collection of Western Australian stories "Case Studies in Environmental Hope", (Newman, Neville and Duxbury, 1988), or the small book of stories about urban communities "Winning Back the Cities", (Newman, Kenworthy and Robinson, 1992) and in our recent text ‬ S.Sustainability and Cities‬ (Newman and Kenworthy, 1999. In this case study I will try to continue this narrative approach by relating three stories of the lives and work of Gilbert White, E. F. Schumacher and Jane Jacobs. Each have contributed much to my understanding of environmental ethics, particularly to cities, so I hope they can help us gain some perspective on this relatively untouched side of environmental ethics. The three seem also to have been important influences on the overlapping movements outlined in the Motorway issue above, movements that can be seen struggling with many of the urban environmental issues around the world. These movements are labelled Local Ecology, Human Ecology and Urban Ecology.

Herein lies my main attempt at a small contribution to the on-going process of understanding environmental ethics in our western culture, particularly in a culture dominated by cities. This is, to find a renewed understanding of our own aboriginality, our traditions in the west which go back thousands of years and come mainly from oral tradition, even today. This tradition I have called the western spiritual tradition and it is not often discussed by deep ecologists other than in rather negative tones because of its association to the institutional churches. There are of course exceptions such as Mathew Fox in his books such as "Western Spirituality" (Fox, 1981) who tries to outline some of this tradition as do contributors to the journal "Green Cross".

But as with the above three people I find the ancient narratives that have been passed down to us, which I will briefly summarise below, to be full of meaning and relevance for our topic. I see that the ethical principles espoused have emerged from a struggle within their own environmental and social problems and that they coincide and cross again and again with the narratives occuring in human and natural history since. Therefore, I am obviously seeking to find a spiritual /ethical framework in my generalisations, but what fills out this framework is organic and grows from each new situation. Hence I look for stories and beneath them I find evidence that this western spiritual tradition is still alive - but it could be better understood.

GILBERT WHITE AND LOCAL ECOLOGY

Gilbert White represents the best of the western spiritual tradition as it applies to nature. He was the pioneer of the natural history movement or what I am calling local ecology.

Throughout the world there are groups of scientists and local amateur botanists, ornithologists etc who are collecting information on the natural history of their area. It is now a vital part of how our environment is protected. It is very local and community based, it is organic in its approach to nature, it is very organic in its approach to change, and few contributors to discussions on environmental ethics would do other than applaud this movement. But few who discuss environmental ethics seem to be aware of the crucial role of Gilbert White in pioneering this local ecology movement.

Gilbert White was an English country clergyman whose collected letters to the Royal Society were published in a book "The Natural History of Selborne". This book, first published in 1788, is now the fourth most published book in the English language. The Introduction written by Richard Mabey says this:

"More than any other book it has shaped our everyday view of the relations between man and nature. I say 'everyday' without in anyway meaning to belittle White's scientific contributions. These were considerable, particularly in the area of observational method. But their impact on scientific theory was small and they were soon overshadowed by the discoveries of giants like Darwin and Mendel. White's contribution was more personal, in both senses. He was perhaps the first writer to talk of animals - and particularly birds - as if they conceivably inhabited the same universe as human beings."

White loves the local flora and fauna[1]. He is totally fascinated by the way their patterns of life fit together. He describes other living things as though they had an inherent goodness, a life of their own with a richness and rhythm, to which we can respond.

The context of this is important. Not only was there great social upheaval in Europe but it was the period of the Enlightenment with a strong sense of progress from science. The Royal Society was building a huge system of how nature worked that was very mechanical. Every plant and animal was classified by Linnaeus with scientific names and the explorers who went to the colonies were bringing back large collections of unusual plants and animals. Most naturalists were filing dead species, as Mabey says, in "a desire to drill some order into the disarrayed ranks of Creation."

So instead of the grand scheme or system, White showed that there was an intensely interesting life in his local environment, eg he talks with great affection about the giant Yew in his churchyard which can still be seen. And this is the other great quality of the "Natural History of Selborne", it is telling a story which as Maybey says gives "an unbroken line of continuity in the life of the countryside".

Gilbert White puts in perspective the debate about Genesis and what this meant to people in the western spiritual tradition. For several decades since the work of Lyn White and others in the 60's (discussed further below), Genesis was the rationale for how humans can exploit nature. As I will show it is very hard to glean a purely dualistic and exploitative meaning from these ancient words, though no doubt some have. 'The House' philosophy certainly does seem to have had this tendency. However the main point I want to make is that the western quilt is far more complex than this and contains within it a more organic, spiritual tradition which Gilbert White was expressing.

White's book and his life show three main things about the meaning of the human-nature relationship:

First, he shows that the theology of Genesis in practice is to rejoice in the teeming life of creation. Rather than classifying dead nature into systems which can be used to show our dominance, we can indeed just appreciate the beauties of a living creation. It is interesting to speculate whether Gilbert White recognised consciously that his approach to go out and study the interconnections in his local ecology was in fact a direct attack on the Enlightenment philosophers of the day, who believed in the grand designs of human progress based on rational processes and science that would order nature to do human will.

Secondly, Gilbert White shows that by seeing nature as special but not sacred, allows scientific curiosity but not scientific exploitation. White was driven by an enormous curiosity about nature. This, as I show later, is also an integral part of the organic western approach. He made detailed studies of earthworms and their importance to soil and he had a great passion to understand where birds went to in winter. He was the first to suggest that they actually migrated. He did this through much observation but also through ecological experimentation - he got his parishoners to comb the winter forest beating the bush to try and scare the birds out of their hiding places which others said they occupied. He may not have been a very good clergyman but he was a first rate local ecologist and the biological sciences were given a different basis that has been a major tradition ever since.

The scientific information collected by this organic local ecology movement is a basic input for the new discipline of environmental science and environmental impact assessment. Whenever new development is planned and its impact must now be gauged and managed, then the scientists go to the natural historians to find out about the area. This applies to city or rural areas. They add their own scientific data but all the best studies build on the story that is known from the locals. This use of science is an important part of how we are beginning to change our impact on the environment and is very different to using science to exploit nature.

The third important contribution of Gilbert White is to show how the western spiritual tradition is based in organic processes. His collection of local natural history provided a powerful sense of hope for ordinary people as any community can develop the story of their local ecology. He showed that they can, without being super scientists, go out and observe and understand and appreciate their piece of countryside. And so it has been.

The natural history movement has gone worldwide and in virtually every community you can find a small group with this interest. So many politically active conservation groups are based on knowledge from their local ecology, including those attempting to stop motorways like the one in Copenhagen. Thus it has become a part of how people in the western spiritual tradition have provided an ethical approach to their cities.

E F SCHUMACHER AND HUMAN ECOLOGY

Cities necessarily focus on humans. Thus if we are to develop our environmental ethics beyond a simple rejection of cities we have to be able to do more than can be gleaned from a local ecology approach alone. To develop this further requires a perspective on the role of economics and technology and how they relate to nature. I have mentioned how the Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth century tended to deify science and technology as the basis of progress. In the twentieth century this process has tended to be attributed not only to these but also to the human science of economics. This system of managing the world was believed to solve our problems in ways that more primitive, organic, native peoples would never know.

Economics and technology have had a good record at creating wealth but they have begun to come up against some significant constraints, not the least of which are in the environmental area. For many environmentalists in the 70's and 80's GNP became known as Gross National Pollution and 'technological progress' became dirty words. Global and local problems seemed to be out of control and economics and technology were seen to be a part of the problem not the solution.

However the economist E F Schumacher helped to re-orient many people's thinking to give a more hopeful perspective, based on a new approach to western technology. This approach I have called human ecology.

His books are a culmination of years of struggle within the economics paradigm (Schumacher, 1974,1980,1985). Schumacher's approach was to remind us of the human values questions behind all our science, technology and economics. He said:

"Environmental deterioration does not stem from science or technology, or from a lack of information, trained people or money for research. It stems from the lifestyle of the modern world, which in turn arises from its basic beliefs."

E F Schumacher's transition to this understanding was not easy but is a story which illuminates my basic message about the Western spiritual tradition. After working as an economist in the UK Coal Board for many years (including a period where he was said to have provided Keynes with his theory) he went as an adviser to a number of Asian countries on economic development. He became very confused as his economic models did not seem to apply and he recognised that so many of the simple technology transfer solutions from the West had done more damage than good.

Instead of pushing them harder he decided to reflect and went into a Burmese Bhuddist monastery where he rediscovered the importance of spiritual values. He was urged by a monk to rediscover the spiritual roots within his own tradition. He in fact refound his catholic faith but in a more mystical way and slowly began to develop his concepts of appropriate technology and grass roots economics. He used the spiritual traditions of the west to illuminate how we should adapt our economics and technology.

Schumacher did not just theorise about this. He set up the Intermediate Technology Development Group and began showing that if you were curious about how different communities actually worked, you could devise smaller scale technologies that fitted their needs and did not exploit their local environment. In essence his value framework was organic: to reassert the importance of communities. The key criterion in assessing whether a technology was appropriate was if it helped to build up a community or not. Much of his work was helping rural women with their domestic and agricultural work. This was done in a way that enabled them to continue their community networking rather than isolating them in individualised work, as we have in our suburbs, or leaving them with back-breaking drudgery. This work continues to develop through most grass roots development agencies.

Schumacher was taken seriously because he was able to show that different technologies can emerge when you change your economics by looking at its fundamental values. He thus provided a bridge for the increasingly warring parties of economists and environmentalists as it was no longer possible to hide behind some inevitable, single solution that modern economics and technology had thrown up to every world problem. Different solutions in different communities can be found. That led directly to the Brundtland Commission and the concept of sustainable development and to ecological economics (eg Daly and Cobb, 1989). He was the pioneer therefore of what can be called the human ecology movement.

Schumacher's role in shaping environmentalism is well recognised, but it is not often accepted that he did this by using the western spiritual tradition. He not only embraced these traditions he used them to explain his concepts[2].

The human ecology movement is now trying worldwide to create a more ecocentric approach to economics and technology. It began in rural parts of the third world but has now embraced every activity which humans undergo in all parts of the world, including of course our cities. Documents such as Agenda 21 with its 500 pages of action statements, was signed by every government on earth. It may not go far enough for some environmental ethicists but it is a long way further forward to creating a human ecology than when Schumacher first showed that there was a difference between renewable and non-renewable resources, that national borders were irrevelevant in an age of global pollution and that our cities would collapse unless they changed their gigantism and stupid technologies like motorways.

Schumacher was acutely aware of our natural environment and saw an inherent solution in the organic processes of communities, as he said:

"The case for hope rests on the fact that ordinary people are often able to take a wider view, and a more 'humanistic' view, than is normally taken by experts".

However Schumacher did not apply his community-oriented human ecology approach to cities as much as he did to rural areas of the world. This struggle was being fought by others.

JANE JACOBS AND URBAN ECOLOGY

Today there is a global movement to green the city known variously as eco cities, sustainable cities, ecological cities or as I will call it, urban ecology. It is everywhere apparent and it is seeking to find deeper answers to the urban issues of our day than can be provided by better technology or more efficient government (Stren et al 1992, Haughton, and Hunter, 1994, Roseland, 1992, Newman and Kenworthy, 1999). It is a paradigm shift but it is not entirely new as it builds on the same traditions of awareness of nature and of the organic processes of communities outlined above. These traditions come from our western mosaic.

In this century it is possible to point to several people who have helped us to see how we were going wrong in our cities by neglecting nature and organic communities. Lewis Mumford (1934, 1940) was a powerful advocate of 'organic planning' for 50 years and his work like all in this tradition was always passionately related to real issues in cities. This tradition has been built upon by more recent people like McHarg (1969), Schneider (1979), Alexander (1979), Hough (1984) and Gratz (1989). The literature from these people contains a common thread of organic thinking - they believe in the need for diversity, human scale, sensitivity to history and to nature, community-based processes and creative artistic expression in the city.

Jane Jacobs is perhaps the most influential person from this tradition. She is the urban equivalent of an ecofeminist who without any formal training in an urban profession followed her instincts until she knew why she was right and could publish books that are now classics (Jacobs, 1961, 1969, 1984, 1994). She was working in New York in the 60's and became dismayed at the large-scale clearance of urban areas in the name of urban renewal and motorway projects. Such developments were threatening Greenwich Village, her home, and so she wrote a series of newspaper articles that grew into a book called 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This is now seen as probably the key book in the twentieth century on the organic approach to cities.

She then moved to Toronto to enable her family to avoid the Vietnam war. Here she spearheaded the movement which stopped the Spadina Expressway. This prophetic action was critical to how Toronto then changed its priorities and today is one of the most livable cities in North America. This story and many others in modern cities (such as those related in Newman and Kenworthy, 1999) show how communities were able to dramatise their urban environmental problems and begin a struggle which eventually changed the priorities in their cities.

Jacobs had an intuitive insight into the nature of cities and urban environments that all the professionals and experts of her day did not seem to have. They had elevated their modernist assumptions to some unified view of the truth but they had somehow left out nature (apart from in a highly sentimentalised version) and they even left out the people they were supposed to be helping. Jacobs could see this very clearly from her 'non expert' view of the world. She was then able to achieve some good sense in fighting things like motorways because her moral outrage communicated to other ordinary people and eventually to politicians.

In her Foreword to the 1992 edition of 'Death and Life...' Jacobs says that 'at some point along the trail I realised I was engaged in studying the ecology of cities' (pxvi). She then outlines how this is not a superficial ecology of how a few plants and animals may exist in a city but is a study of city ecosystems. She then shows how natural ecosystems and city ecosystems have so much in common due to their complex interactions of diverse functions and how diversity develops organically over time.[3] Jane Jacobs says that 'to investigate either natural or city ecosystems demands the same kind of thinking' (pxvii) and urges us to 'understand as much as we can about city ecology...starting with the humble city street and neighbourhood' (pxviii).

In a personal letter she adds:

'To my mind, economy is as basic to understanding cities as ecology is to understanding the rest of nature, both being at the core of the tradition of curiosity about how things work and respect for their own integrity'. (personal communication,1997).

In a sentence she is able to help us see how her work on cities links with Schumacher's appropriate technology and Gilbert White's natural history: respect for the integrity of nature and of human community as well as curiosity about how they work. This seems to be the heart of the organic approach to ethics.

This organic approach to cities in "Death and Life.." was described by The New York Times 30 years after its first publication as 'perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning.' She has been the inspiration to decades of urban activists and now to the urban ecology movement. Christopher Alexander has tried to define this organic process in cities in his book "New Theory of Urban Design" by seeing every good urban development as somehow contributing to a healing of some part of the urban fabric. He says:

"Each new act of construction becomes related in a deep way to what has gone before. This can only be accomplished by a process of wholeness as its overiding purpose, and in which every increment of construction, no matter how small, is devoted to this purpose." (Alexander, 1987, p 15-16)

Jane Jacobs (and others in this movement) did not go to other traditions to find this enlightenment. She simply acted out some of the wisdom and assumptions of the western spiritual tradition which she had inherited as part of her culture. She did not go to other cultures for her inspiration, though in the organic tradition she has a profound respect for aboriginal cultures; in a recent book she edited and did commentary upon about her great aunt, an Alaskan school teacher, she discusses how the environmental ethical tradition is passed on and in this case how it intersects with aboriginal tradition (Jacobs, 1997).

She like Schumacher quotes biblical passages to illustrate her points. For example she begins her Introduction in 'Death and Life..' by telling the story of some local clergymen in Chicago who felt that the destructive city rebuilding process in their neighbourhood reminded them of the people castigated by Job in the Old Testament as they 'shoulder the poor aside, conspire to oppress the friendless, reap the field that is none of theirs...'. Her background like the other two above is not to reject her western traditions but to use them in expressing the depth of her feelings about making good cities, or the sustainable cities movement.

Conclusions

These three people and their stories highlight the three facets of environmental ethics which appear to be currently active in our cities today:

‬ A local ecology approach as developed in the western tradition by Gilbert White into the natural history movement. This local ecology approach is of course very obvious in most aboriginal cultures around the world but had been largely lost by the west. It is one of the forces in the conservation movement in the west today.

‬ A human ecology approach as developed by E F Schumacher which is able to provide a spiritual understanding of economics and technology. This has helped to forge the basis of ecological economics and sustainability in the west today.

‬ An urban ecology approach as developed by Jane Jacobs which provides insight into the organic processes of cities and how we can create more human living environments that are more compatible with the earth. In the west this is now expressed through the environmental movement in cities.

Questions

1. What are the characteristics of organic urbanism?
2. How does it relate to local, human and urban ecology?
3. Describe a local urban issue and outline how the ethical stances of the various participants differ.

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[1] Let me quote from the book as an example - this passage is about the Swift:

"It is a most alert bird, rising very early, and retiring to roost very late; and is on the wing in the height of summer at least sixteen hours. In the longest days it does not withdraw to rest till a quarter before nine in the evening, being the latest of all day birds. Just before they retire whole groups of them assemble high in the air, and squeak, and shoot about with wonderful rapidity. But this bird is never so much alive as in sultry thundry weather, when it expresses great alacrity, and calls forth all its powers. In hot mornings several , getting together in little parties, dash round the steeples and churches, squeaking as they go in a very clamorous manner; these, by nice observers, are supposed to be males, serenading their sitting hens; and not without reason, since they seldom squeak till they come close to the walls or eaves, and since those within utter at the same time a little inward note of complacency."

[2] . For example one famous passage from 'Small is Beautiful' says:

"Let us admit that the people of the forward stampede, like the devil, have all the best tunes or at least the most popular and familiar tunes ... 'More, further, quicker, richer,' ... There are no insoluble problems. The slogans of the people of the forward stampede burst into the newspaper headlines every day with the message, 'a breakthough a day keeps the crisis at bay'.

And what about the other side? This is made up of people who are deeply convinced that technological development has taken a wrong turn and needs to be redirected. The term 'home-comer' has, of course, a religious connotation. ... The genuine 'homecomer' does not have the best tunes, but he has the most exalted text, nothing less than the Gospels. For him, there could not be a more concise statement of his situation, of our situation, than the parable of the prodigal son. Strange to say, the Sermon on the Mount gives pretty precise instructions on how to construct an outlook that could lead to an Economics of Survival.

- How blessed are those who know that they are poor: the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.

- How blessed are the sorrowful;

they shall find consolation.

- How blessed are those of a gentle spirit;

they shall have the earth for their possession

- How blessed are those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail;

they shall be satisfied;

- How blessed are the peacemakers;

God shall call them his sons.

It may seem daring to connect these beatitudes with matters of technology and economics. But may it not be that we are in trouble precisely because we have failed for so long to make this connection? It is not difficult to discern what these beatitudes may mean for us today:

- We are poor, not demigods.

- We have plenty to be sorrowful about, and are not emerging into a golden age.

- We need a gentle approach, a non-violent spirit, and small is beautiful.

- We must concern ourselves with justice and see right prevail.

- And all this, only this, can enable us to become peacemakers."

[3]This concept can be understood ecologically through ecosystem theory; cities and ecosystems seem to develop based on similar processes in ecological succession (Newman, 1975).