To design and build according to Symbiocene principles, sumbiocentric thinking, symbiomimicry and the discipline of sumbiology, (sumbios: living together and techne: to build). The archi in architecture means to rule or to command … it has to go. To design and build with others (human and non-human) for the purpose of harmoniously living together. We used to talk about form and function … now we must talk about process, form and function.

Glenn. A. Albrecht: First published in Ecosystem Health V 7 December 2001, 243-252. (old, but maybe still useful).

Abstract

We live at a time when billions of people on this earth cannot achieve their full potential. Their lives are cut short or impoverished by malnutrition, pollution and disease caused by failure of ecosystem and social services. In addition, if we were to project the quality of life enjoyed by those in advanced industrial countries to the world’s poor, we would need about two planets to satisfy the demands for resources and waste assimilation services. Superimposed on the degradation of social systems, ecosystems worldwide are experiencing major threats to their integrity and health. Excessive human impacts are degrading ecosystem service provision, breaking and contracting food chains and making them less productive. Despite a growing understanding of social and ecosystem dysfunctionality, there remains little movement towards social sustainability and the restoration of the health of ecosystems worldwide. This paper will present an ethical foundation for those who seek sustainability. The key to such an applied ethic is the idea of directionality where the natural tendency towards increasing complexity and diversity in complex adaptive systems provides guidance on what constitutes a sustainable society. The achievement of such a society can be facilitated by an ethic of potentiality that will assist humans to reintegrate ecosystem and human health.

Achieving the Unsustainable

This paper is not the place to catalogue the non-sustainable loss and destruction of individual animals, plants, species and ecosystems that is now happening on a global scale (see Pimm et al. 2001, Vitousek et al. 1997). It is enough to note, as was mentioned above, that the way people in advanced, technologically sophisticated societies are currently living cannot even be universalised for all people currently living on the planet (Rees 1990 and Wackernagel & Rees 1997). In the year 2001, according to the UN Population Fund, one third of the world’s population of 6 billion people cannot even meet their needs for food, security and adequate water supplies. By 2050, it has been estimated that 4.2 billion people out of a population of 9.3 billion will not have the ability to satisfy basic needs. I will not attempt to prove that what we are doing is unsustainable, I think we already know that it is, but are in denial. The denial is profound and pervasive. Even those at the leading edge of the environmental movement know that their habitat, transport and food supply systems are not sustainable, but they, like millions of others, are locked into ‘the system’ and cannot change it.

The Potential of Ethics

We live in a time when ethics, defined very generally as the critical study of human values, seems to be enjoying popular support. Ethicists are in high demand from policy makers who wish to include normative dimensions to their deliberations. However, while there has been a ‘greening’ of philosophy and ethics, the corresponding attitudes and behaviours that would bring about substantial improvements in ecosystem health have not been forthcoming. So, while applied ethics has made substantial inroads into national and international policy documents on the environment and sustainability such as the Rio Declaration and the Earth Charter, the world continues down the path of non-sustainability.

Within environmental ethics itself, there have been a number of significant disputes between the major traditions that have made it difficult for philosophy to present a united and consistent front in the face of the threat of environmental destruction (Hay 2002). Ecocentric versus anthropocentric traditions continue to slug it out in the books and journals with Deep Ecology (Naess 1973) and its advocacy of ecocentric intrinsic value pitted against anthropocentric traditions such as Stewardship (Passmore 1974) and Social Ecology (Bookchin 1982). Similarly, within Eco-feminism; post modernist, essentialist and realist/ecosocialist (Plumwood 2000) branches continue to vigorously oppose one another and patriarchal schools of thought.

It is obviously unfair to lay sole blame on environmental ethics for the state of our predicament with respect to a non-sustainable world. However, it could be argued that in the academic response to sustainability generally, we have the appearance of a great deal of intellectual activity, but an outcome of social inertia. Despite more definitions being created, more distinctions being drawn, more paper used, more careers sustained; no progress towards genuine sustainability is made. Indeed, the very idea that there can be such a thing as intellectual ‘progress’, in any context, has been openly questioned by some postmodernist philosophers.

The suggestion that yet another angle from a philosopher might throw new light on the problem could be dismissed as another contribution to the inertia. However, rather than engage in a debate with all previous environmental philosophy, in this paper I suggest an approach to the ethics of the human – nature relationship that has its origins deep within the human condition and has been developed by philosophers since the days of the ancient Greeks. In addition, it will be argued that this perspective on ethics can be supported by ideas at the leading edge of ecological and physical sciences. Philosophy, and in particular ethical theory, has a great deal to gain from a symbiotic relationship with the physical and ecological sciences. Ethical health may indeed be linked to ecosystem and human health.

An Ethic of Potentiality

In nearly all human cultures there is a fundamental ethical response to the premature loss of a member of a community. The feeling that the accidental death of a child is a tragedy and deserving of our grief is linked to the belief that, in life, the child had the ability to realise a great deal of latent potential. Our grief about such tragedy is about the rich potentiality of life cut short.

We fight sickness and disease because they have the power to cut life short. We value health because its possession enables humans to achieve their potential in whatever field of endeavour they undertake. Similarly, our sense that poverty is a social evil (an injustice) is linked to the belief that it prevents individuals (and whole populations) from reaching their full potential as human beings. Failure to be educated or failure to thrive because of malnutrition are social evils that arrest the otherwise spontaneous path humans take from potentiality to actuality, all things being equal. When public relations and advertising agencies use images of starving children to generate funds for international relief agencies, they play upon this most basic expression of ethical thinking. To cut the path from potentiality to actuality for innocent members of the community is ethically wrong. To help re-establish the pathway is ethically good. If given the chance to re-establish the pathway (gifts, donations, etc) it is ethically good (virtuous) to do so.

Moments in a person’s life when they achieve their full potential are considered highly valuable. This applies equally to moments like giving birth or producing a work of art. Value is linked to the actualisation of potentiality and scales of value can be created that enable us to evaluate the degree to which actualisation takes place for any given individual. The role of good teaching might be considered to be the teacher as a facilitator of the achievement of potential within the student. The good teacher provides pathways for potential to be actualised, the bad teacher cuts such development off.

These very basic expressions of an ethical framework founded on a sense of the ability of humans to achieve latent potential have been developed in varying degrees in the philosophies of Aristotle, G.W.F Hegel and the neo-Hegelian contemporary philosopher, Murray Bookchin (Albrecht 1998, 2000).

Aristotle (5th century BC) first championed the idea of ‘inner teleology’ or the view that living things and human activities develop from potentiality to actuality according to a principle or purpose that is internal to the relevant system. He suggested that:

… for whatever is the end product of the perfecting process of any object, that we call its nature, that which man, house, household, or anything else aims at being. Moreover the aim and the end can only be that which is best, perfection and self-sufficiency is both end and perfection. (Aristotle 1975, p. 28).

Aristotle applied this way of thinking about all forms of development to human society and argued that in the Greek city-state the maximum potential of human beings as co-operative, social animals can be realised.

Hegel, in the tradition established by Aristotle, used the distinction between potentiality and actuality to generate a whole philosophical framework for the evaluation of human affairs. His view of nature as an unfolding of latent potential into actuality was explicated throughout his mature writings. In The Philosophy of Nature Hegel argues:

To see purpose as inherent within natural objects, is to grasp nature in its simple determinateness, e.g. the seed of a plant, which contains the real potential of everything to the tree, which as purposeful activity is therefore orientated solely towards self-preservation. Aristotle had already noticed this notion of purpose within nature, and he called the activity the ‘nature of a thing’. This is the true teleological view, for it regards nature in its proper animation as free, and is therefore the highest view of nature. (Hegel 1970, p. 196).

Murray Bookchin (1921-), a contemporary philosopher has, following Hegel, created an ethic based on the dialectical actualisation of structural (internal) potentiality. He openly uses Hegel to explain what is meant by directionality from potentiality to actuality. He quotes from Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy with his own comments:

“The plant, for example, does not lose itself in mere indefinite change,” he writes. It has a distinct directionality – in the case of conscious beings, purpose as will. “From the germ much is produced when at first nothing was to be seen, but the whole of what is brought forth, if not developed, is yet hidden and ideally contained within itself.” It is worth noting, in this passage, that what may be “brought forth” is not necessarily developed: an acorn, for example, may become food for a squirrel or wither on a concrete sidewalk, rather than develop into what it is potentially constituted to become – notably, an oak tree. “The principle of this projection into existence is that the germ cannot remain merely implicit”, Hegel goes on to observe, “but is impelled towards development, since it presents the contradiction of being only implicit.” (Bookchin 1996, p. 18).

Bookchin then gives a more graphic example of self-actualisation of potential. He describes the tension that is present when a thing is attempting to realise its potential to become or produce something new, “much as a fetus ripening toward birth strains to be born because of the way it is constituted … it must ripen into the fullness of its being” (Bookchin 1996, pp.18-19).

While acknowledging that humans have the potential or capacity to display all sorts of attributes such as irrationality and violence, Bookchin (1996) argues that while manifestations of these attributes are real in the sense that they exist, but they do not represent the full potential humans have to be “truly social”. To be truly social, to actualise their potential to be both rational and ethical, humans must strive to find ways to allow potential to self-actualise and oppose tendencies to censor or stop its free expression.

In developing his philosophy of Social Ecology, Bookchin makes it clear that he sees his own advocacy of actualisation of potential as not entailing acceptance of some fixed goal or end state, as could be interpreted in the work of Aristotle and Hegel. He argues that his own version of directionality theory, by contrast:

… does not terminate in a Hegelian absolute at the end of a cosmic developmental path, but rather advances the vision of an ever-increasing wholeness, fullness, and richness of differentiation and subjectivity. (Bookchin 1996, p. 20).

By ‘ecologising’ the dialectical tradition in idealist philosophy, Bookchin attempted to create a naturalistic and organicist account of self-organisation in nature and remove all taints of past forms of teleological thinking from the legacy of Aristotle and Hegel. In Bookchin’s ‘dialectical naturalism’ we have what can be called an ‘immanent teleology’ where potentiality can be actualised along a continuum of possibilities that enable ethical evaluation (see Albrecht 2000 for more detail on Bookchin’s position). While Bookchin’s approach to potentiality is certainly more pluralistic than his predecessors, it still has deterministic elements within it. I have argued elsewhere (Albrecht 2000) that in the face of contemporary complexity theory, Bookchin’s immanent teleology seems incapable of accommodating chance and contingency as both constructive and destructive elements of dissipative processes within complex adaptive systems. Indeed, in the light of contemporary theory within ecology that lays stress on the possibility of multiple end points in the evolution of ecosystems, each one dependent on different attractors within the system that might exert an influence at different moments in its evolutionary history (Holling 1986), any attempt to link ethics to directionality might be seen as a lost cause. However, in what follows, I shall attempt to take directionality and potentiality theory into a post-catastrophe, post-chaotic view of ecosystems, one that takes contingency seriously, but uses energy system methods (Campbell 2000) and ‘entropy bookkeeping’ (Dyke 1988) to construct an ethical perspective based on emergent directionality within ecosystems towards endemic complexity and diversity.

Human Health and Ecosystem health

In order for a human being to achieve its full potential, the possession of health (physical and mental) can be considered a necessity. Health is a good because its possession enables both intellectual and physical potential to be realised. Health is not a fixed condition, but a process of continual adjustment to circumstances that put boundaries around potential. Hence, while old age brings a contraction of the boundaries of the possible for a human in that a person in their eighties cannot perform physically at the same level as they did in their twenties, health in old age is a condition that enables the full potential of a human of that age to be realised. In all cases, relative to the context, the best possible outcome for a human is the achievement of maximum potential. We might describe the best possible outcome as the ‘ideal state’ or ‘signature’ with deviations from it permitting normative judgements about how a person is performing relative to the ideal for their circumstances.

Health is a process of constant adjustment to changing circumstances to maximise self-regulation and self-fulfilment of human potential. Ill health, by contrast, is the loss of the ability to self-regulate and a loss of ability to achieve full human potential. Ill health necessitates intervention on the part of others (doctors, nurses, carers, therapists etc) to assist in the return to self-regulated health (Higginbotham et al. 2001 pp. 58-59). Health has both contextually specific properties and measurable dimensions that enable normative assessment of states of health.

Ecosystem Health

The ultimate context for ethical discussion is life and the ecosphere. Life on earth, including human life, is dependent on the relationships between the ordered arrangement of the living and non-living components of the ecosphere. The human ability to “think about life” is predicated on an intellectual edifice being built upon social, physical and environmental footings. In other words, thought, and in particular, thought about ethics and the good, is built on a foundation (life and the ecosphere) that enables thinking life to occur. However, such an environment might constitute a rich and diverse natural setting for human affairs or it might be one that has very limited natural complexity and diversity. To maximise the ethical health of a human community we need to know in more detail what constitutes a maximally “healthy” setting for thinking life. We need to know if there is a relationship between ethical health and ecosystem health.

Ecosystem health (Costanza et al. 1992, Rapport et al. 1998a), like human health, can be conceptualised in terms of the ability to achieve full potential in a given set of circumstances. Ecosystems possess the potential to achieve greater complexity and diversity (higher levels of integrity and order) over time. In doing this they seem to defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics which suggests that all systems, be they closed or open, tend towards the maximum possible state of disorder. In the language of physics, there is spontaneous movement from order to disorder with the measure of the degree of disorder defined as ‘entropy’. The maximum possible degree of disorder (high entropy) is described as the ‘state of equilibrium’. The implication of this view is that as natural processes occur and as energy is used, there is an inexorable movement towards the state of thermal equilibrium. Ultimately, as all sources of available energy (potent energy) are used, all order will be extinguished and nothing but unusable waste heat will remain in the universe. We have then the difficulty of explaining how it is that life on earth is possible and how it can be consistent with a law that suggests that increases in complexity and diversity in living systems contradict the tendency to maximum entropy in the universe.

As Schneider and Kay (1995) point out, a closer examination of the Second Law with respect to the organised behaviour of life enables us to overcome this apparent contradiction. In response to the energy gradient imposed on the earth by the radiation of the sun, they argue that living systems respond by increasing order and complexity that dissipates that energy. We can appreciate then that biological complexity in the form of emergent biodiversity within ecosystems is a response to the thermodynamic imperative to dissipate energy and to obey the Second Law. As energy enters the ecosphere from the sun, life self-organises to dissipate that energy. Where the energy is greatest, at the equator, the maximum possible biodiversity and ecosystem complexity emerges. As argued by Schneider and Kay:

… food chains are based on photosynthetic fixed material and further dissipate these gradients by making more highly ordered structures. Thus we would expect more species diversity to occur where there is more available exergy (energy available to perform useful work). (1995, p.168)

And this is precisely what happens with respect to the utilisation of energy gradients on the earth. Where energy gradients are lowest, at the poles, there are lower level orders of complexity and diversity while at the equator where 5/6 of the earth’s radiation occurs, species diversity is highest (Schneider & Kay, 1995, Wilson, 1992). Hence, there is one important aspect of directionality from high to low levels of biological complexity and diversity from the equator to the poles. In addition, at any one point on earth, there is also the potential to maximise complexity and diversity given the energy and materials available, “the more exergy available to be partitioned among species the more pathways are available for energy degradation” (Schneider & Kay 1995 p. 168).

Ecosystem health, then, is similar to human health in that it is the process of continual re-adjustment to the prevailing conditions in order to maximise latent complexity and diversity. At any one point on earth, a system that maximises the potential to use available exergy and other foundational components (water, nutrients) can be described as ‘healthy’ while a system that is tending towards an unhealthy state is one that cannot achieve the full potential for complexity and diversity given the prevailing conditions. As argued by Schneider and Kay,

… ecosystems develop in a way which increases the amount of exergy that they capture and utilise. As a consequence, as ecosystems develop, the exergy of the out-going energy decreases. It is in this sense that ecosystems develop the most power, that is, they make the most effective use of the exergy in the incoming energy while at the same time increasing the amount of energy they capture… disorganising stresses will cause ecosystems to retreat to configurations with lower energy degradation potential. (Schneider and Kay 1995, p.168-9)

The relationship between ‘power’ and ecosystem health is one that has relevance for how humans can judge their impacts on natural systems. At a superficial level, we can use measures of power (energy transfers through systems or emergy) to give us a way of evaluating our impacts on nature. Where human perturbation causes a given ecosystem to lose power, that is to lose complexity and diversity, we can evaluate such an impact as a loss of potential. In this sense, ecosystems are no different from humans and their personal and bodily health.

A more elaborate version of the potentiality thesis has emerged within energy systems theory and its application to understanding ecosystem dynamics. Campbell (2000), building on the work of Lotka (1922) and Odum (1996), has proposed the “maximum empower principle” where the transfer of usable energy through an ecosystem leads to the maximum degree of structural organisation within it. He argues:

… ecological integrity is an emergent property of ecosystems that is greatest when all the structural components of a system that should be present based on the underlying signature are there (i.e., structural integrity is complete), and all the processes operating within this system of components are functioning optimally to produce maximum empower in the network (i.e., the ecosystem is “healthy”) (Campbell 2000, p.192-193).

The eco-thermodynamic view of potentiality enables evaluation of human actions affecting biodiversity and ecosystems within an ethical framework. Any given state of structural integrity and health can be compared and contrasted with deviations from the signature or ideal state for such a system. Actions that qualify as ethically good in an environmental context will be consistent with the maximisation of the potential of a particular geographical location to create and maintain its complexity and diversity. Further, actions that open up the possibility of a return to full ecosystem potential will be ethically defensible. By contrast, actions that degrade given complexity and diversity are ethically bad because they arrest the achievement of full ecosystem potential and power.

Such an ethic does not entail maintenance of equilibrium within ecosystems and the protection of so-called ‘climax communities’. As argued by Reice (1994), a degree of disturbance of ecosystems may in fact be an integral part of the maintenance of complexity and diversity. In opening up new pathways for energy utilisation and degradation, disturbance is linked to re-colonisation and ongoing evolutionary development. So important is disturbance to ecosystem complexity and diversity that Reice argues that in addition to the wholesale removal of heterogeneity, lowering the level of disturbance so as to cut off opportunities for re-colonisation is an important point of ethical consideration in our relationships with ecosystems. He argues that from the perspective of the world’s biodiversity, if human actions reduce complexity and diversity and lower the level of disturbance then they ought not to be done. Conversely, it can be argued that over-emphasis on disturbance could lead to the impossibility of re-colonisation, succession and ongoing loss of heterogeneity. There is a fine line between the persistence and disturbance required to maintain recognisable ecosystems over long periods of time (thousands of years).

The issue of human intervention in ecosystem complexity and diversity can be illuminated by examining the impact of what Crosby (1986) has called ‘ecological imperialism’. While endemic complexity and diversity can be replaced by imported exotic complexity and diversity there is an argument to suggest that local adaptations to specific local/regional conditions will produce the maximum possible diversity of highly ordered structures utilising the energy, matter and waste sinks available to them. Hence, there is greater potentiality for structural complexity and integrity with the endemic system than the ‘introduced’ one. To go with the flow of realisation of potentiality (directionality) can also be used in the defence of particular (unique or endemic) ecological configurations against threatening processes such as clearing and intensive agriculture.

In the south west region of Western Australia (WA), for example, there is a richness of vascular plants that has attracted international attention. The high level of endemism (75%) and the numbers of species within the region (8,000 recorded) have evolved in the face of highly impoverished soils (low in nutrients) and high background salt levels. In response to these harsh boundary conditions the WA flora has evolved complex adaptations.

For example, gathering and storing nutrients from highly infertile soils has placed a selective premium on the evolution of novel root systems (e.g. the fine mat of subsurface proteoid roots of banksias) or the symbiotic partnerships with soil microorganisms such as mycorrhizal fungi. The diversity of such fungi has scarcely been documented, but the discovery of more than 300 macrofungi in the Two Peoples Bay Nature Reserve suggests a complexity equal to that of the better documented flowering plants. (Hopper 2001).

The more we understand such ecosystem complexity, the more it becomes possible to compare and contrast such maximisation of diversity and complexity (high level order) with alternative land use strategies. A large proportion of the South West region of WA has been cleared of its native vegetation for sheep and wheat production. With additional inputs such super-phosphate, these areas have been productive for a short period of time but then experience severe land degradation caused mainly by salt rising to the surface. As documented in a recent Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) press release on the situation in WA, Hatton (head of CSIRO) provides an overview of the collapse of ecosystem health in this region:

Salinisation of rivers draining the WA wheatbelt is already causing massive loss of biodiversity, farm production and asset values. At present 10 per cent of the landscape is affected, but this is forecast to grow rapidly, to engulf 30-40 per cent of the land over the coming half century. “At the moment we’re losing an area equal to one football oval an hour – or about 85 typical suburban blocks,” Dr Hatton says. “In WA, eighty per cent of the remnant native vegetation on farms and 50 per cent on public lands is at risk. In other words we stand to lose a large fraction of our native biodiversity.” “Eighty per cent of the beds and banks of rivers and streams in the WA wheatbelt are seriously degraded. Wetlands are badly affected and riverine systems are largely degraded already.” “Below this landscape lies stores of salt as high as 10,000 tonnes per hectare.” (CSIRO 1999).

Wholesale destruction of biodiversity, by removing “self-organisation strategies that work” (Schneider & Kay 1995), can lead to extinction cascades creating a situation where there are insufficient species available to allow for recolonisation and, hence, regeneration of disturbed ecosystems. This is especially severe when the species involved are primary producers in a food chain or trophic cascade. In the case of S.W. WA, such primary producers include the invisible mega-diversity of fungi that support a mega-diversity of surface flora and fauna all within a symbiotically connected ‘unity in diversity’ below and above the ground. Combined, all these elements constitute a unique landscape, one that cannot be replicated anywhere else. Nor can the landscape be reconstructed if major change is enacted on any one part.

Ecosystem distress syndrome (Rapport & Whitford 1999) is the appropriate diagnosis for such a degraded landscape as the salt-affected wheat belt of WA. The loss of productive land is a loss of potentiality, not only in the limited sense for growing wheat and sheep, but also for restoring vegetation of any sort to the most salt-affected areas. Farmers experience the loss of potentiality of their land as a personal failure with at times tragic results. Reports of high levels of suicide and mental illness in farming communities (Cannon 2000) can be connected to the collapse of the ecosystem health of the landscape. They see their role in its transformation from one of the richest places on earth for biodiversity to salt desert within two or three generations. Hence, the connection between ecosystem and human distress is abundantly clear and in both cases the loss of potential to achieve complexity and diversity (power) can be documented and measured.

By over-clearing, a new type of ecosystem is created, but it is manifestly one that does not have the power, complexity and diversity of the previous one. In other words, it can now achieve potentiality as a saline ecosystem, but that type of ecosystem, in the very same location as the former Dryandra woodland, has measurably less complexity and diversity and measurably less power.

Another closely related example of the full complexity and power of ecosystems, their health and how easily they can be destroyed, is to be gained from understanding the role of the Woylie or Brush-tailed Bettong (a type of rat kangaroo) of the Dryandra forest of S.W. WA. The complexity and stability of this region was intricately bound-up with the digging habits of the Woylie. Garkaklis (1998, 2001), in field research for his doctorate, was able to show that the overall health of the Dryandra woodland ecosystem was maintained by the digging habits of the Woylie. Individual Woylies (one kilogram in weight), in digging for their preferred food, a truffle or underground fungi, move up to six tonnes of soil annually. The movement of all this soil is connected to the quality of the soil profile.

In Woylie-absent areas, the soil was typically hard and water repellent due to in part (other factors might include grazing by hard-hoofed animals and machinery tracks) to a hard waxy layer of eucalyptus residues that formed a surface crust. The result of such ‘hard pan’ was high levels of water run-off with subsequent formation of erosion gullies and transport of nutrients to waterways. Where Woylies were active, Garkaklis was able to show that the digging activity broke the crust and allowed water and nutrients to penetrate the soil making them available to the woodland forest. In addition, the Woylies assisted in the dispersal of the mycorrhizal fungi (truffles) by ingesting and excreting them back into the soil. The fungi play a vital role in the supply of nutrients to shrubs and trees in the ecosystem.

As was observed in the flora example above, the role of fungi in providing nutrients to plants via symbiotic relationships is now being more fully appreciated and the combined effects of the normal relationship (maintained for over 20 million years) between Woylies, fungi, soil and Dryandra woodland is a healthy ecosystem. Such an ecosystem is one in which the maximum diversity possible is maintained by the mosaic of dynamic interrelationships between all the elements of the ecosystem operating at maximum dissipative power.

When we deliberately remove or alter the long-term endemic situation, we do so with the awareness that the new ecosystem will be one less complex and diverse than the original and as such fails to capture the full power potential of the site. Such an outcome occurred in WA with the introduction of exotic predators such as the fox. The fox preyed on the Woylie and as Woylies became scarce, and could not continue their creative bioturbation, the system as a whole became unhealthy. If we also degrade or change a system so that its potential is reduced (less exergy and matter available) then we can describe that system as ‘degraded’ and suffering from ill health. Perturbations to the system that cannot be assimilated within the existing structure and processes can lead to total system change with less integrity and less resistance to disorder. In such circumstances, irreversible system change produces a ‘sick’ ecosystem, one that has less potential to degrade the available energy than the previous iteration.

Conclusion

The concept of achievement of potentiality has applicability across a wide range of contexts from the personal to large, complex, interrelated systems such as ecosystems. The tendency (directionality) towards actualising potential or actualising as much potential as possible (maximising power) within ecosystems enables evaluation of many types of complex adaptive systems. Directionality towards unity and diversity within system limits is a measurable expression of power and a universal tendency of all living systems.

Such an evaluative principle helps bring together transdisciplinary (Higginbotham et al. 2001; Somerville & Rapport (eds) 2000) insights into understanding the relationships between the key aspects of life on earth; evolution, genetics, ecology and complexity. Evolution, genetics, ecology and complexity all play a part in the achievement of directionality towards maximum efficiency in energy and materials processing within the ecosphere. Evolution provides new pathways for the dissipation of energy and genes enable the information contained within novel but successful strategies for capturing energy to be replicated and passed on to future generations. Ecosystems, as the repositories of successful evolutionary strategies (biodiversity), become more complex and more unified (largely through symbiotic relationships) over time as they too increase the efficiency of energy degradation. Complexity theory, in providing an understanding of the way non-equilibrium dissipative structures and processes work, acts as a transdisciplinary, unifying meta-theory.

The key connecting element in all domains is directionality towards the actualisation of latent potential (dissipative processes). Left to their own devices, complex adaptive living systems spontaneously and irreversibly develop greater complexity and diversity within the limitations of energy and materials availability at any given place on earth (Depew & Weber 1988).

While chance, contingency and accident are all important parts of the story behind possible novel configurations within evolving systems, it is equally important to recognise the significance of the perpetuation of existing successful organisational strategies. In a given environment, where boundary conditions remain fairly constant (solar budget, nutrient availability etc) those life strategies (as represented by the genes within biodiversity) that are most efficient at capturing and utilising available energy and materials will be those most likely to be successful in the long term. As argued by Schneider and Kay, “ successful species are those that funnel energy into their own production and reproduction and contribute to autocatalytic processes, thereby increasing the total dissipation of the ecosystem” (1995 p.168). It is this efficiency that produces ecosystems with high levels of endemism. The native species have adapted to the particular conditions of place and maintained those successful adaptations over very long periods of time. It also needs to be remembered that greater complexity and diversity comes with interrelatedness to other energy processing organisational centres (symbiosis ) within eco-energy hierarchies.

Sustainability, as understood within directionality theory, is linked to the long-term maintenance of maximum energy inflow into a system or, to put it another way, to most efficiently degrade available energy. Maximum unity in diversity in living systems provides a degree of coherence, stability and predictability in a universal sea of increasing entropy. The term ‘resilience’ is appropriate to describe such persistence in the face of disunifying universal forces. Health, including ecosystem health, is the appropriate way to conceptualise the tentative state of resistance to lower levels of energy assimilation or “lower levels of energy degradation” (Schneider & Kay 1995 p. 169).

When humans create their own social systems they create social complexity and diversity within the matrix of local, regional and planetary ecosystems. In some respects, especially when linked to the burning of fossil fuels, such energy consumption can be considered as entropy maximising activity and hence consistent with thermodynamic imperatives. There are, however, three problems with such activity. Firstly, the human construction of order is achieved at the expense of non-human systems that exist as long-term order producing structures and systems that have proven evolutionary efficiency (a presence for millions of years). Secondly, due to finite time horizons for fossil fuel availability, the current petroleum-based complexity produced by human society has a limited lifespan. Thirdly, pollution of life support systems that destroy biological order and ultimately ecosystem support services for humans cannot be extended into the foreseeable future and is not sustainable. In essence, human complexity and diversity is achieved by placing “disorganising stresses” on ecosystems and forcing them to “retreat to lower energy degradation potential” (Schneider & Kay 1995 p.169).

While a fossil fuel based economy and technology is consistent with the universal context of the Second Law, it counters the directionality of living systems. The human economy achieves its complexity and diversity by reducing the complexity and diversity of the ecosphere while the ecosphere achieves its complexity and diversity by building on itself and creating more opportunities for the exploitation and dissipation of energy.

To be sustainable, humans need to meld their own activity with that of order resulting from existing long-term exergy capture maximising strategies present in nature. The challenge for social policy makers, designers of technology and engineers is to organically connect technologies based on renewable, non-polluting energy and materials sources to the satisfaction of human wants and needs, while at the same time permitting the maximum degree of energy capture and utilisation in natural systems. Hence, complexity and diversity is maximised in both social- and eco- systems and the interrelationship between the two, as has been long argued by Bookchin (1962), and supported more recently by Peacock (1999), is one of symbiosis, not opposition. Bookchin, as early as 1962 argued that:

Completeness, balance, and diversity should be regarded as practical ecological concepts – as important in producing healthy human communities as they are in producing stable plant-animal communities. Indeed, it is not farfetched to say that when these concepts are correctly applied, they promote human health because they produce a stable ecosystem of men, animals and plants. In the last analysis, the ecology of health is grounded in natural ecology (Bookchin 1962, p. 209).

Death of life is closure of potentiality. Conception and birth are moments marking the beginning of potential. Health is a condition that enables individual life and living systems to maximise potential. While the universe as a whole might be heading towards heat death and maximum entropy, life in living systems is busy self-organising towards increasing complexity and diversity. It is this directionality that provides humans with a normative principle that is of great relevance to the way the human economy can connect with and live within nature’s economy. As Peacock has argued, “ … sustainability must entail a mutualistic or near-mutualistic symbiosis between humans and ecosystems” (Peacock 1999 p. 96).

‘Progress’ in human affairs involves the idea that we have the capacity to create conditions of ever-greater complexity and diversity in culture, science and technology without concomitant destruction of complexity and diversity in ecosystems. With some insight into the fact that humans have this potential, an ethical framework can be created with ‘the good’ linked to realising and maximising latent human potential within the latent potential present in living ecosystems.

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