Social Ecology

Social Ecology is an interdisciplinary field of research and action that integrates personal, social, and environmental domains. It takes a systemic view of the ways in which people interact with each other and the world in order to cultivate health, wisdom, and sustainability. Social Ecology draws on insights from disciplines including psychology, epistemology, ecology, critical theory, systems theory, chaos and complexity theory, cybernetics, cognitive biology and philosophy.

Gregory Bateson

Whole Systems

Social Ecology is especially concerned with the functioning of whole systems, rather than reducing systems to their components and analysing these separately. Reduction is a powerful tool of inquiry however it is of limited use in examining the emergent properties of complex systems. This is because emergent systemic properties are simply not predictable on the basis of the properties of the system's components.

A whole-system approach places as much importance on the relationships between components as it does on the specific attributes of the individual components.

As a simple example, no amount of analysis of individual musical notes will yield insight into the emotional tones that can be produced by melodies that include these notes. The sense of melody derives from the relationships between the notes, not the notes themselves. A melody can be transposed to a different key such that it uses a completely new set of notes, yet if the pattern of relationships between the component notes - the pattern of intervals - is preserved, the sense of the melody remains the same.

Biological Systems, Including Human Systems

Biological systems, including individual organisms and social groups are complex systems par excellence. They are characterised by feedback loops, emergent properties, learning and evolution. Social ecology offers ways of applying these concepts to our understanding of human functioning whether at the level of individual functioning, social phenomena and interactions between the human and non-human worlds. Such an approach allows us to revisit and reformulate some of humanity's deepest questions, old and new, in ways that are aligned with our nature as social and biological beings.

Insights from social ecology can help heal the conceptual - and lived - rifts between mind and body. The relationships between people and our environments can be reframed to recognise our participation in and dependence upon larger - more than human - systems. Such reconceptualisations allow us to act more wisely, and to achieve greater harmony between long and short-term goals.

The European Enlightenment was a period of staggering scientific progress along the lines of reductive and analytical methods. This "progress" has also led to the creation of nuclear weapons, mass-consumerism, global climate destabilisation, and the explosion of human population at the expense of other species and their habitats.

While certain visionaries have long critiqued the shortcomings of purely reductive science, it was in the 1940s, with the birth of cybernetics, that a scientific shift began to include systemic thinking as a balance to the narrow vision of reductionism. As we move through the 21st century this shift is continuing and systemic thinking will surely be a part of any adequate response to the current challenges facing humanity. It will also be a necessary way of thinking if we are to avoid major calamities in the future, rather than simply dealing with them in ad hoc ways.

Significant Figures

The people who have most influenced me in this field include Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Norbert Wiener, Evan Thompson, Mary Catherine Bateson, Jay Haley, Carl Jung, R.D. Laing, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Stuart B. Hill.

Intersection with Alexander Technique and NLP

The Alexander Technique and NLP are inherently ecological in their approaches to learning and change. They are concerned with the integrated functioning of whole people and the deep principles by which our functioning is organised. The Alexander Technique and NLP are both predicated upon and serve to demonstrate the unity, the inseparability of mind and body. We function, learn, and change as whole beings. Thinking, sensing, and moving are not separable categories, they are aspects of our whole way of being, and change to any one will involve change to the others.

As a coach and teacher I find my social ecology training gives me richer language and concepts with which to describe and explain the Alexander Technique and NLP. In turn, NLP and the Alexander Technique, as deeply practical processes, support the types of experience and thinking that enable me to better grasp and develop ecological ideas.

My Qualifications

My undergraduate degree, from the University of WesternSydney, was a Bachelor of Applied Science in Social Ecology, majoring in Community Development and Organisational Change.

I later added to this with an honours thesis entitled "The Alexander Technique and Bateson's Ecological Epistemology: Approaches to Elegance." My academic qualification thus becoming a Bachelor of Applied Science with Honours in Social Ecology