The Metacrisis Meets Traditional Ecological Knowledge
“Consequently it is the idea of ecological balance that can, and will, be taken as the underlying value-base of the study; for in the terms dictated by our situation the "good" is self-evidently and most generally capable of being defined as the re-establishment of that many-dimensional dynamic balance that seems to have been lost in the modern world.” (The Club of Rome, 1970)
Introducing the Problematique
In the 21st Century, the Earth System (including its humans) faces at least a polycrisis, but the growing opinion amongst leading research centers and intellectuals is that this polycrisis is a metacrisis. We highlight this synthesis in our publication, Meditation on Metacrisis, but you can also enjoy an overview from Daniel Schmachtenberger, lead researcher on the subject.
Or Terry Patton even earlier at a Google Talk in 2019
In short, one looks at the fusion of geopolitical tension, economic instability, political polarization, environmental disequilibrium, and humanitarian disaster and recognizes a sort of meta-problem which is interconnected.
The modern paradigm’s economic methods cause ecological imbalance, this ecological imbalance causes humanitarian disasters. Humanitarian disasters and ecological imbalance affects economic instability. Economic instability increases geopolitical tension & political polarization. Geopolitical tensions affect economic instability and humanitarian disasters.
On all these fronts, it cannot be denied that global society is beginning to do its utmost to address the matter. However, one does begin to get the feeling of a certain stagnancy which is stuck in the modern global system. A sort of repetition of old values and paradigms which aren’t coherent or correspondent to the matter at hand.
Whether it be Russia causing an old fashioned Cold War-esque military conflict in Ukraine, Trump croaking on about ‘Making America Great Again’, the renewal of FDR’s New Deal in Green terms, or Socialists arguing with Capitalists in Digital & Public Forums… it feels like a series of old dusty marbles bouncing off one another.
Most people caught in this stagnated modern paradigm tend to put their head in the sand and imagine that it’ll be business, technology and science which will save the day on all accounts… yet this point of view seems a bit naive considering that it was the Pandora's Box of Business & Technology which was a primary causal factor to at least the ecological crisis.
What was it Einstein said? “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
In 1970, The Club of Rome (a research institution founded by intellectuals & industrialists) originally called this notion of the metacrisis a Problematique", a “generalized meta-problem (or meta-system of problems)” - see their founding manuscript, the Predicament of Mankind.
In the Predicament of Mankind, they mention repeatedly the need for better systems which can handle the complexity of the Problematique.
As they write, “It is their [Founders of the Club of Rome] belief that only an effort which strives to go beyond "conventional wisdom" and methodological orthodoxy can allow us to perceive the complex dimensions of the problematique of our age, and thus set the stage for the formulation and development of the long-term options and alternative outlooks needed for policy-making.” (1970)
In this same work, they mention how the “all-pervasive analytic or positivistic methodologies”, have contributed greatly to the affluence of mankind, but how also, unfortunately, “[mankind’s] strength and efficiency to the identification of rather clear and direct lines of causality,” impedes its ability to solve problems of “obscure interactivity”. By “obscure interactivity” they mean the holistic & interconnected nature of the Problematique.
In the manuscript, the Founders enumerate a list of 49 problems constituting the Problematique, for reference, the first five run like this:
Explosive population growth with consequent escalation of social, economic, and other problems.
Widespread poverty throughout the world.
Increase in the production, destructive capacity, and accessibility of all weapons of war.
Uncontrolled urban spread.
Generalized and growing malnutrition.
The Founders go on to write, “from this limited listing we begin to sense that these large problem-areas are system-wide, interdependent, interactive and intersensitive; that they transcend national frontiers, or even regional boundaries; and that they are seemingly immune to linear or sequential resolution.”
The Traditional Ecological Shift In Awareness
What is fascinates us about this apparent blind spot (the immunity of the problematique to linear or sequential resolution) is from the perspective of Integrative Science, Postcolonial Studies, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), ‘Western-Mainstream’ Science is diagnosed as analytic, reductionistic, objectifying, quantitative, linear and partial.
This is often drawn in comparison to the Native Scientific tradition which is viewed as holistic, interconnected, resonant, ecological, integrative, and spiritual. For a master work on this subject, see Gregory Cajete’s Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. Additionally, significant contributions to this knowledge field can be found at the Institute of Integrative Science and Health. While the institute is now closed, they produced much pioneering work from 2001-2012, particularly developed by Dr. Cheryl Bartlett from Cape Breton University in conjunction with Mi'kmaw Elders.
The following chart lists & compares these distinct thought styles.
Back in 1970, the Club of Rome was looking for a better way of fostering ecological understanding. As they specifically mention, “[mankind] has failed to satisfy those other requirements that would have permitted us [mankind] to evolve in such a way that, for want of a better word, we shall henceforth called ‘balanced’.”
The Club of Rome supplement this with, “imbalance is a state which defines the pathology of an "ecological" system, which, in fact, our situation, seen in its entirety, represents. Ecology, as one hardly needs to note, is the study of the equilibria and the dynamics of "populations" of living entities within given environments.”
What they were trying to explain back in 1970 was that at the level of global stewardship, the modern paradigm’s methods of understanding are beginning to fail. What appears to the rational-analytic mind as a series of disconnected events - malnutrition, income inequality, species extinction, overpopulation and rising crime (+ 44 others) - is actually a totally interconnected and anthropogenic whole.
This is why they propose that modern global civilization needs to create new forms of understanding which in a sense transgress the modern way, in exchange for a solution which is more holistic.
This is where Indigenous Knowledge becomes very interesting. In Academia, the terms Indigenous Knowledge, Traditional Knowledge, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge are seen as more or less interchangeable.
In the same sense, Indigenous Scholar Oscar Kawagley, a Yupiak Anthropologist, has written, “Ecology is the Western Science that is closest to Indigenous Sciences.”
Closing Notes
On December 22nd, 2022, the White House released a blog update titled, What is “Indigenous Knowledge” And Why Does It Matter? Integrating Ancestral Wisdom and Approaches into Federal Decision-Making.
Here the US government writes, “Never before has humanity faced the confluence of crises we face. And never before has there been such a driving need to expand and diversify the kinds of evidence and knowledge we rely upon to make critical decisions to address them.”
It seems that for all of the Club of Rome’s work over the course of the past half century, they haven’t made a dent in the problem, even though they rightly assessed it.
The Predicament of Mankind, the Problematique, must be understood as a holistic entity. Methods of complexity only create more complexity. No matter how much data modern man produces in the attempt to rationalize the universe - without knowing what to do with the data, the data will be ineffective.
Adapting and evolving the modern paradigm is potentially a fundamental requirement for reducing the inflamations of the metacrisis. There are fortunately many people working on this at the moment, you can find these listed on the ‘Gratitude’ section of our publication Meditation on Metacrisis.
This is also a primary research priority at the New World DAO as we explore Emergent Pathways for making this happen. For additional perspectives on these emergent pathways, check-out the Ancestral-Future Initiative, or latest Perspective pieces on Integral Science.
