The great irony of our time (pronouncedly visible in Germany, where ecologism and state adulation form a two-pronged "religion") is that people use the term "ecology" to describe and support utterly unecological pursuits; whether in the form of the most unecological alarmist conception of a single factor, CO2, driving the whole complex climate nexus (a simplification required to mobilise support in utter disdain of a truly ecological approach to the issue), or whether failing to understand the ecological nature of human society. While human interaction should be one of the foremost targets of ecological curiosity and research, our approach to the phenomenon of society is woefully mechanistic, hubristic, and anti-ecological. Society is thought to be good to the extent that the political process and government have ordained and constructed it to be good. That is in fatal contradistinction to the natural scientists' ecological approach to nature, which commences by carefully recognising its subject-matter as not being man-made, but as a self-generating order to which one ought to adapt in the most circumspect spirit, always alert to the order's autonomous features.
Political "ecologists" fail as genuine ecologists because they are oblivious to (i) the ecological nature of society and insensitive to (ii) the unecological measures and instruments of political dirigism that they favour to force simplistic and simple-to-sell solutions addressing the apocalyptic figments that they set up to shock people into supporting their ambitions for power.
Not only do they truncate the full realm of the ecological by cutting out the human world from it, they violate the meaning and requirements of ecological analysis even in the narrower field of extra-human nature. For they are given to naively rationalist dreams of political intervention which yield the comfort of feeling righteous and utterly entitled to great power. By contrast, approached in seriousness, ecological issues tend to prove intricate, subtle, and not particularly suitable for propagandistic steamrolling.
Below find a great, brief summary of much of what I have been arguing about the evolving and hence ecological nature of human society in this blog over the past four years - mostly peddling the ideas of better and more original thinkers than my sweet self.
The source.
