Environment and Ecology

What is Open Source Ecology (OSE)?

Marcin Jakubowski - part 1 from East Bay Pictures on Vimeo. 

Download our short brochure: Factor e Farm in Five Minutes Or view it online. 

Distillations videos

The Distillations videos give an overview of OSE and the progress at Factor e Farm in 2008.

Introduction

Open Source Ecology is developing and testing the Global Village Construction Set, a set of tools to build replicable, open source, modern, off-grid resilient communities. By weaving open source permacultural and technological cycles together, we intend to provide basic human needs while being good stewards of the land, using resources sustainably, and pursuing right livelihood. With the gift of openly shared information, we can produce industrial products locally using open source design and digital fabrication. This frees us from the need to participate in the wasteful resource flows of the larger economy by letting us produce our own materials and components for the technologies we use. We see small, independent, land-based economies as means to transform societies, address pressing world issues, and evolve to freedom.

Cultural ecology studies the relationship between a given society and its natural environment as well as the life-forms and ecosystems that support its lifeways. This may be carried out diachronically (examining entities that existed in different epochs), or synchronically (examining a present system and its components). The central argument is that the natural environment, in small scale or subsistence societies dependent in part upon it - is a major contributor to social organization and other human institutions.

In the academic realm, when combined with study of political economy, the study of economies as polities, it becomes political ecology, another academic subfield. It also helps interrogate historical events like the Easter Island Syndrome.

Coining the term

Anthropologist Julian Steward (1973) is associated with the term. In his Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955), cultural ecology represents the "ways in which culture change is induced by adaptation to the environment."

Lloyd Fell, David Russell & Alan Stewart (eds)
Seized by Agreement, Swamped by Understanding

Ancient Wisdom
and Contemporary Ecological Problems

David Russell, Vladimir Dimitrov and Lloyd Fell 

• Abstract
• Introduction
• The "Alcoholics Anonymous" Paradigm
• Towards a new strategy for dealing with ecological problems
• References

Abstract

The Australian Aborigines' environmental culture and the "double bind" approach used in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous are considered as a source for the generation of a new strategy for dealing with the ecological problems of our day. The strategy aims at achieving a negotiated outcome in issues of high societal risk related to waste management in the Hawkesbury region of Sydney, Australia. 

Introduction

The contemporary ecological problems are created by all of us and we are the beings who have to deal with them. This is an axiom. It is an illusion that science and technology, no matter how powerful, can save the world from ecological disasters.

The idea of scientific and technological "miracles" creates a distorted image of human power that "we are beings who possess nature and that our ability to transform and model it, using the power of our omnipotent brain, will help us to deal successfully with the ecological crisis". Such an attitude is totally wrong because it considers human beings at a particular position outside nature, imposing their decisions and actions upon it. By putting ourselves at a position of dominance over nature, we disenfranchise ourselves completely, because we are part of this nature. The way we relate to other parts of it is of crucial importance for our survival.

All traditional state religions have one God-man at the top of a universal hierarchy. The Darwinian model, together with the contemporary humanistic philosophy reinforce the idea that human beings are elevated above any other creatures. Nature is considered as a force that must be kept at bay by human will and strength. Such a point of view justifies easily the intensive exploitation of the earth's natural resources and of all other creatures in the name of satisfaction of the human requirements. The same point is visible in all approaches, applying to the design of our contemporary military, government, economic and even ecological (!) systems.

Ecology, both as a science and as a world view, emphasizes the study of relationships, interconnections, and environmental wholes that are different from the sum of their environmental parts. “Special qualities emerge out of interactions and collectivities,” writes intellectual historian Donald Worster (1994, p. 22), in his Nature’s Economy, a history of ecological ideas in the Western world. [1]

The central question I address here is this: What do the relationships, interconnections, and environmental wholes of ecology become in a phenomenological perspective? [2] To examine this question, I consider one phenomenon from the natural world—color—and one phenomenon from the humanmade world—lively urban places. I think it important to offer an example from both natural and human worlds because a “phenomenological ecology,” as it might be called, must be responsive to all lived relationships and interconnections, examining and describing the ways that things, living forms, people, events, situations and worlds come together to make environmental and human wholes (Riegner 1993, p. 211-12; Seamon 1993, p. 16). [3]

By “lively urban places,” I refer to city neighborhoods and districts that provide easy access for pedestrians and generate, just by being what they are, chance face-to-face encounters, sidewalk life, and a sense of taken-for-granted safety because many people are present. To discuss a phenomenology of lively urban places, I turn to my own work on the bodily dimensions of environmental experience and action, especially as the lived body comes to know its everyday environment through the regularity and routine of extended time-space patterns contributing to the transformation of physical space into lived place.