The ‘“key-log’” which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an [environmental] ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
—Aldo Leopold

Are you an environmentalist, or do you work for a living?
—Bumper sticker popular with Oregon loggers

Whose Environment Is It?
Digging in with its forelegs, a beetle extends its maxillary palps to grasp a tasty bit of decaying wood a few centimeters inside a 200-year-old Douglas fir, weakened by age and felled by a windstorm years earlier. A ravenous woodpecker, hopping along the tree’s carcass in search of insects, begins its rapid-fire hammering, which resounds for half a mile or more. Perking up its ears at the arboreal anvil chorus, a bear saunters through stands of cedar and spruce along the way to its favorite valley stream, now roiling with salmon journeying toward their spawning ponds.

Flying in a helicopter over the same steep valley, formed by glaciers thousands of years ago, a British Columbia forester conducts a survey of conditions in the Mid and North Coast Timber Supply Area. At midday, a daring photographer moves in close to capture the image of a grizzly one-handedly spearing a salmon that leaps toward the top of the falls.

Meanwhile, in a side canyon, a gang uses chain saws and bulldozers to establish the road needed to haul out trees that will be cut for faraway markets. Some environmental activists, staging a sit-in to halt the road building, engage in a shouting match with the road crew and loggers. The loggers tell them to go back to the city so that local folks can make a living by doing real work.

A local council of First Nation (indigenous) people, who have long made a living by salmon fishing, announces yet another legal strategy to regain control of their ancestral land—mountains and streams, plants and animals, burial grounds and ritual sites—the future of which is being contested primarily by descendants of European settlers.

A politician in Victoria gets an earful from constituents who differ sharply about logging the coastal rainforests. That evening, on a prime-time news program broadcast across the United States, viewers are informed about tense confrontations building over the fate of the Great Bear Rainforest, otherwise known as the Mid and North Coast Timber Supply Area. Those watching easily make the connection between this troubled region and other disappearing rainforests. In another program, an ecosystem scientist uses satellite imagery and GIS (geographic information system) to show that the rainforest in question is the size of a small country, that significant portions of it have already been clear-cut, and that within 20 years—at current logging rates—all the old growth will be lumber and plywood for voracious consumers. Although he is speaking as a supposedly impartial scientist, the ecologist’s tone of voice and facial expression give away his deep concern about the future of the rainforest.

Which is the “real” rainforest? The beetle’s? The woodpecker’s? The bear’s? The forester’s? The photographer’s? The salmon’s? The road worker’s? The environmentalist’s? The logger’s? The First Nation member’s? The politician’s? The television viewer’s? The sawmill worker’s? The plywood manufacturer’s? Or the ecologist’s? We maintain that the rainforest is composed of all these perspectives, and many others. This book is about how to organize and integrate all of these perspectives.

Being able to understand multiple perspectives is essential to sustainable solutions, as Darcy Riddell discovered in the campaign to preserve the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia. Along with many other people, she was involved in negotiating the historic April 2001 treaty, in which the provincial government and logging industry agreed to protect significant portions of the Great Bear Rainforest; to continue good-faith discussions to protect other large segments of the rainforest; and to undertake ecologically informed logging in still other parts of the rainforest. After five more years of negotiation, on February 7, 2006, a comprehensive protection package was announced for the Great Bear Rainforest.

The package has four key elements: rainforest protection, improved logging practices, First Nation involvement in decision-making, and conservation financing to enable economic diversification. In total, 5 million acres of forest is to be permanently protected from logging, including new parks (3.3 million acres), previous parks (1 million acres), and new no-logging zones (736,000 acres). Stakeholders agreed to conservation-oriented land management practices to be guided by an Ecosystem Based Management approach by 2009. The overall framework was developed and approved by each First Nation, and grants them greater stewardship and decision-making power over resource development in their traditional territories. Finally, U.S. and Canadian foundations, and the BC government, raised $90 million toward a financing package to fund conservation management projects and ecologically sustainable business ventures in First Nation territories.

According to Riddell, whose account of this historic campaign appears as a case study in part four of this book, environmental activists at first exclusively identified with their own perspective (one of ecological science), according to which clear cutting was seriously degrading the coastal arboreal ecosystem. With these facts in hand, most environmentalists called for a complete logging ban. In so doing, however, they ignored or denied the possibility that well-intended individuals and communities could propose and defend different assessments of the very same facts. Recognizing that to create a sustainable, regional solution, everyone—including environmentalists—needed to understand the Great Bear Rainforest in light of at least some of those other perspectives, Riddell and a number of her colleagues learned about the array of economic, political, cultural, and social factors that drove current logging practices. Because she understood that many well-intentioned people had ties to the forest, Riddell and some of her colleagues began personal transformational practices aimed at reducing their “subtle superiority” based on their previous assumptions that only their ecological perspective was worth adopting. In this respect, Riddell and others practiced some important elements of Integral Ecology, even though most of them had never heard of Integral Theory.

Soon environmentalists realized that they had to get serious about economics, rather than regard it exclusively as the human domain most responsible for destroying the rainforest. Hence, they asked large North American retailers to purchase lumber solely from companies who agreed not to clear cut temperate rainforests. This economic strategy engendered a more flexible attitude on the part of timber officials and British Columbia government representatives at the bargaining table because now loggers might be deprived of their usual markets. Loggers stopped their stalling tactics known as “talk and chop,” and they engaged environmentalists and First Nations in increasingly good-faith negotiations. The retail campaign against clear cutting did more than give economic leverage to those opposed to timber company and government intentions to log the entire Great Bear Rainforest; it also focused international attention and criticism on the logging practices employed by powerful groups.

With millions of concerned individuals now looking over their shoulders, those involved in the controversy listened more seriously and sympathetically to opposing views and interests. For instance, an increasing number of environmental activists saw the need to address the pressing economic and social circumstances of the region’s human inhabitants, whose ways of life were tied up in the rainforest. Clearly, a viable solution would have to include economic alternatives to unsustainable logging practices. As environmentalists stopped identifying exclusively with their “polarizing identities,” they transformed from “being outside agitators to solution-builders.” Unfortunately, this shift led some environmentalists to accuse others of selling out to the logging establishment. Despite such accusations, Riddell reports, “Negotiations also enabled opposite sides to engage one another with humanity and mutual respect, fostering [Integral] capacities of mutual understanding.” As we will see, integral capacities refer in part to the ability to cease exclusive identification with a particular position, such as modern (industrial logger) or postmodern (green environmentalist), and start sympathizing with multiple perspectives and realities. Riddell writes:

When [Integral] capacities emerge, complex issues and diverse perspectives can be more readily integrated into holistic, long-term solutions. Leaders acting from Integral capacities act as cultural empathizers and transformers who operate dynamically across multiple worldviews motivating people with diverse interests toward common ecological, economic, cultural, political, and social goals. Leaders with Integral perspectives can foster healthy ecological worldviews, enabling mutual understanding, and fueling individual and cultural transformations of increasing scope and depth.

The Need for an Integral Ecology
Growing recognition of the complexity of environmental problems has led leaders in environmental organizations, regulatory agencies, corporate offices, and academia to call for greater interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and even transdisciplinary models to describe, address, and resolve environmental problems. We agree—we need a morecomprehensive map to understand and solve our most intransigent problems. Riddell’s application of one version of integral ecology demonstrates just how successful a comprehensive integration of multiple perspectives and disciplines can be. Yet until now, people have not had access to a robust theoretical model that organizes and integrates various disciplines and methods, and generates the most comprehensive solutions. We maintain that Integral Ecology is that theoretical model, built upon the distinctions of Integral Theory.

Integral Theory is a content-free framework developed by Ken Wilber and colleagues. According to Wilber, “the word integralmeans comprehensive, inclusive, non-marginalizing, embracing. Integral approaches to any field attempt to be exactly that: to include as many perspectives, styles, and methodologies as possible within a coherent view of the topic. In a certain sense, integral approaches are ‘meta-paradigms,’ or ways to draw together an already existing number of separate paradigms into an interrelated network of approaches that are mutually enriching.”

As a result of its applicability within, across, and between disciplinary boundaries, Integral Theory has been widely embraced by individuals in many different fields. Applied in the context of environmental problems, Integral Theory organizes insights from more than 200 distinct perspectives to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the eco-sociocultural dimensions involved. Surely there is the need for a model capable of such organization and integration, and surely the field of ecology could make use of such a model.

The Integral Model maintains that there are at least four irreducible perspectives, two of which have been almost entirely excluded from academic and popular ecological discourse. If we exclude any one of these perspectives, we arrive at partial understandings and, unfortunately, partial solutions. We must include objective, interobjective, subjective, and intersubjective perspectives. The objective perspective examines the composition and exterior behavior of individual phenomena, including humans, bears, salmon, and beetles. The interobjective perspective examines the structure and exterior behavior of collective phenomena, ranging from ecosystems to political and economic systems. The data generated by these two perspectives are valuable, yet such data alone do not exhaust the “reality” of the phenomena under investigation, nor do they provide motivation for action. Motivation arises when we experience the phenomena in question through two additional perspectives—subjective (1^st-person—I, me) and intersubjective (2^nd-person—you, we). These perspectives constitute the interior aspects of phenomena, are traditionally associated with aesthetic experience and cultural values, and have largely been excluded from academic ecological discourse. We cannot understand our complex interiors through natural or social scientific methods, nor can we understand the natural world solely through our interior experience. We need both.

Integral Theory refers to these irreducible perspectives as quadrants, and we summarize them as experience (subjective, 1^st-person), culture (intersubjective, 2^nd-person/1^st-person plural), behavior (objective, 3^rd-person singular), and systems (interobjective, 3^rd-person plural). We cannot understand any one of these perspectives through methods suitable for analyzing the realities of another. Hence, Integral Theory avoids reductionism, especially “gross reductionism,” or the reduction of all of reality to individual, objective phenomena (reducing all interiors and systems to atoms—individual “its”); and subtle reductionism, or the reduction of all interiors to interobjective phenomena (reducing the “I” and “we” perspectives to interwoven systems—“its”). The science of ecology has typically exemplified the latter form of reductionism, and this subtle reductionism has generated partial understandings of the natural world and continues to generate partial solutions to some of our toughest problems.

Clearly there is a need for subjective and intersubjective perspectives, because they show up at the bargaining table (we don’t just have ecological difficulties, we have human difficulties!). Intersubjectivity (2^nd-person) arises between two subjects: I and thou, me and you. Different people will experience and assess the same data in different ways. If the subjects involved do not consider the cultural matrices—beliefs, values, norms, religious traditions, ethnic self-identification—of the other subjects, it is difficult to create common ground and understanding. Without understanding and flexibility, it is difficult to agree upon a sustainable solution. Understanding the presuppositions and beliefs that shape your opponent’s experience, and discerning how your own experience may be distorted by unyielding adherence to a particular position, are vital to creating common ground and successful, inclusive negotiations.

Genuine mutual respect is difficult to attain, even among experts from different fields, because experts often think that their particular method or perspective is the only correct or most valuable one. There is a need for an integral ecology that resists this method hegemony, the supposition that one or a few perspective(s) can provide the only useful and pertinent truth claims about a complex environmental problem. In resisting method hegemony, Integral Ecology creates a meta-framework that contextualizes and includes the partial truths of all traditions. Indeed, as one commentator stated, “Integral theory carries out a demythologizing [i.e., deabsolutizing] mission, in which it undermines the sacred reductionisms and absolutisms practiced by many different methodologies.” Instead, it coordinates and organizes all these partial perspectives into a more coherent whole.

Not only does Integral Ecology study interiors in addition to exteriors, but it also studies how those interiors develop within organisms in general and humans in particular. Integral Ecology acknowledges that all organisms have subjective and intersubjective dimensions and describes how interior development in humans determines in profound ways our relationship to the natural world. Until now, ecologists and ecological discourse have mostly excluded an explicit recognition of interiors and their development—and make no mistake, there is a need to understand our interior individual and collective relationship to the natural world, for it is within our interiors that motivation to treat the natural world in healthier ways resides.

To conceptualize an ecosystem, for example, requires a highly developed level of cognition, a level unavailable to children (a level that was even unavailable to most adults many centuries ago). Different kinds of phenomena can manifest—and in that sense be—only within an adequate perspective, clearing, or worldspace (we will discuss this in great detail in chapter 5). If the worldspace needed for a phenomenon to appear is lacking, it cannot show up. In some sense ecosystems subsisted long before ecologists conceptualized them, but in another sense ecosystems, as specifiable phenomena, came into being only when we established the necessary cognitive worldspace. Don’t be misled; Integral Theory is not a subjective idealism. Things really do exist, but they manifest only within a worldspace capable of allowing for them.

Based upon decades of research in philosophy and social science, Integral Theory asserts that mind is not a mirror that reflects a pregiven reality. Instead, mind both enables and limits the ways in which things appear. Hence, the worldspace that a child can hold open is clearly more complex than a frog’s, but less complex than a mature adult’s. During maturation, the human worldspace expands and deepens enormously in many different ways. Because a more expansive and inclusive interior allows a more comprehensive worldspace to emerge, some assertions made about a given phenomenon are more comprehensive, and thus have greater validity, than other claims. Hence, integral perspectivalism is not equivalent to relativism. We do not assert that all perspectives are equal. Some truths are more comprehensive than others. Integral perspectivalism maintains that partial worldviews and partial perspectives reveal partial truths. These partial truths are accurate and essential, yet they must be integrated into a larger, more comprehensive picture. Without an Integral framework, we currently have no framework capable of integrating and organizing these partial perspectives and partial worldviews. Clearly, such a framework is needed.

This ever more comprehensive pattern arises in all 4 quadrants—experience (subjective), behavior (objective), culture (intersubjective), and systems (interobjective). Just as interiors develop (as when a child’s worldspace evolves into a more complex, adult worldspace), so, too, exteriors develop (as when an acorn develops into a tree). Integral Ecology recognizes levels of complexity in all 4 quadrants, or throughout all four dimensions or perspectives: systems, behavior, experience, and culture:

• Ecosystems are composed of and influenced by natural and social systems.
• Ecosystems involve the individual behaviors of organisms, at all scales (including microbes and humans). These organisms are understood as being members (not parts) of ecosystems.
• Members of ecosystems have various degrees of interiority (perception, experience, intentionality, and awareness).
• Members of ecosystems interact within and across species to create horizons of shared meaning and understanding.

Integral Ecology creates a framework that allows all aspects of reality to connect with what has traditionally been associated with the scientific study of ecology. But instead of collapsing all connections into an “everything is ecology” position, Integral Ecology highlights the factors that differentiate interrelated phenomena. Thus,while everything can be viewed as (inter)connected, not everything is connected in the same way nor to the same degree! The cliché “Everything is interconnected” becomes “Everything is interconnected, but some things are more connected than others.” In other words, there are spectrums of interconnection between variables both in terms of depth and span. As a result, depending on the perspective one is taking, some “parts” are actually not very connected to other “parts.”

The four dimensions of any phenomenon co-arise and mutually influence one another in complex ways; none of them has ontological priority. Hence, when we address an environmental problem, we must do more than assess its ecosystemic aspects, such as whether an environmental toxin has altered the food chain. We must also inquire how the pollution affects (or is interpreted by) the aesthetic, recreational, economic, and cultural aspects of communities and organisms that depend upon it.

In short, Integral Ecology advances the development and application of a comprehensive approach to environmental issues. This approach organizes insights from various eco-approaches into an all-inclusive framework. This new framework has promising applications in many contexts: outdoor schools, urban planning, wilderness trips, policy development, restoration projects, environmental impact assessments, community development, and green business, to name a few. Integral Ecology transcends many of the problems that have assailed contemporary partial approaches to the environment and moves toward a developmentally informed understanding of individuals, communities, and systems. As a result, Integral Ecology draws on the expertise of many disciplines and offers extremely comprehensive, far-sighted, and flexible solutions for the environment—solutions that honor the interiors of animals and people and that can carry us into right relationship, at multiple scales, with the Earth.