Gods and scribbly gums
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My first intellectual memory at about the age of five or six marked me clearly as one who appreciated evidence – as one who had potential as an empiricist. Gathered around the old scribbly gum tree at the end of the lane, my Catholic neighbourhood friends insisted God was up there in the cloudless sky. I peered, admittedly without a telescope, but could see nothing. At this age, such thoughts would appear to be innate as none in my family were philosophers, scientists or the like. Neither were they religious. I had escaped religious indoctrination, and for that matter political and other ideological indoctrination, conceivably critical factors in my subsequent intellectual development. Probably important was my parents’ artistic endeavours. They later took trips to Arnhem Land in Northern Australia and Papua New Guinea to collect art works for the New South Wales Art Gallery, illustrating their broad cultural outlook. Later, with my teenage eyes, again without a telescope, I helped my grandparents find the first Soviet sputnik in the starry sky. Then I heard on the radio a Russian official explaining to a visiting British Christian that their satellite had confirmed the absence of any gods above the clouds and even in outer space. My atheism was confirmed by reading Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian.
By the age of fourteen I had become especially interested in India by reading a book borrowed from the local library, and but for the dreary geography teacher this would have been my favourite subject. Geography was both ‘physical’ and human, although hardly distinguished as such. However, the apparent bias of our national system during the ‘cold war’ led me into physical science at secondary school and university without a query. Thus, I found myself with only a limited knowledge of the human and even the biological world around me. Entering university as a science student, we were given the choice of geology or biology as a fourth subject. I peered first at the latter, visiting their building, but was soon faced with a lab of students dissecting rats, spreading blood across the tables. Wanting to distance myself, I fled to geology where I was impressed by displays of maps and associated inanimate rock and mineral samples, and organisms, but this time safely dead in the form of fossils. So, I was soon toiling over standard science subjects while majoring in geology, and while interested in biology, I took to fossils as the safe alternative. In the marvellously free roaming environment that was the university, I found myself attending lunchtime clubs and talks, representing the student faculty on the Students Representative Council, starting an art club. Several other extra-curricular influences led me to begin to explore alternatives to science. I peered into philosophy and anthropology courses, informally attending lectures and buying text books, but I did not see a sufficient employment path. I joined the Vietnam-Australia Association, and was soon roped in by the Vietnamese students as President. During these same years, I was drawn into politics through stirring speeches by students on the university front lawn. I reacted against a business-oriented government over conscription to fight in Vietnam, joining protest marches into the city and luckily was not conscripted.
Later, I eventually saw an opportunity to explore India on a back-packing trip organized by the Student Unions of both countries. At Benares (now Varanasi) on the river Ganga I fortuitously met a Thai monk who arranged accommodation with a monk friend of his at his monastery in Bangkok on my way home. This stay and walks in the suburb around the monastery fostered a strong interest in Thailand and thus, on returning home I soon joined the Thai-Australia Association. These experiences led easily to an interest in Asia as a whole.
As a graduate geology student in Sydney, now at the University of NSW, I was at last given a good telescope by my great uncle, mariner JG Bisset, which I kept in my study room, but it was stolen! It was inscribed JGB and may now be kept by someone who is unaware of its origin. During this time, tutoring in the history and philosophy of science, I stayed at International House and subsequently started an Asia Club. Later, taking courses in groundwater and drilling and also tutoring in human geography gave me the basis of a scholarship and a hydro-geo-econo-techno research topic on Thailand. This varied background was to lead ultimately to the development of a multi-disciplinary approach that I explain further in other articles.
Stumbling towards an integrated view of human life on planet Earth
I had studied philosophy informally as an undergraduate, so as a post graduate in geology and paleoecology at University of NSW I was excited to encounter Thomas Kuhn’s the structure of scientific revolutions. Having read it enthusiastically, I approached the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science in our university to discuss and was soon offered a tutorship teaching position! I read another major philosophy of science text to boost my credentials and was pleased to hear that the students felt my effort was rewarded.
Later, I joined the newly opened International House for post graduates, including international students, a truly multi-cultural experience that rekindled my interest in Asia. This eventually led to a desire to start an Asia Club that would bring Asian and Australian students together at a fun and more intense intellectual level. This meant leaving the House and renting a private house with a large living room in which to hold events. We soon attracted 50 or so members, including from Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, as well as Australia, from both inside and outside the university. Many friendships grew. I have several lifelong friends stemming from club days. Some were sadly lost due to the difficulty of communication.
Meanwhile, postgraduate study at University of NSW continued in a totally unrelated subject. I had been peering down a microscope at a 400-million-year-old fossil, wondering what marine environment it inhabited, when, in 1971, pioneering human ecologist Paul Ehrlich spoke on Australia’s ABC radio about the global environmental crisis. I began to wonder why I was studying such ancient environments when humankind faced such a perilous future.
A new awakening
A negative situation, similar to the war in Vietnam, but this time global, was again awakening me. Surely, I began to think, our human condition was a more important study than ancient pre-human environments.
The next day I searched the university’s hectare-sized, still book-filled library, for a book on this topic. That day in 1971, I found none, but did find and read a book on human geography, a subject I hadn’t touched since our third-year classes at high school. With Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s book Population, Resources, Environment, which had just come on sale, under arm, I visited, as advised by the geographers upstairs at UNSW, Macquarie University’s Geography Department with a view to discussing the Ehrlichs’ ideas, but again, was shortly offered a tutorship! The geographers there seemed to think that my varied formal and informal background would allow me to quickly merge into human geography. So, Ehrlich’s inspiration drew me away from paleo-ecology, a ‘pure’ natural science unrelated to humans, towards human ecology and thus to a full-time tutorship in human geography and a new life increasingly linking ‘social science’ to technology and Nature. As part of my earlier inquiry into 400 million-year-old marine environments, I had read one or two papers by oceanographer Roger Revelle, but had either failed to pick up his warnings about carbon dioxide or had read the wrong papers. Ehrlich’s account of climate was not conclusive, as to him, at that time, the evidence was pointing in two directions: a cooling or a warming.
In this new tutoring position in human geography, I was learning and teaching, not only about the problems of the environment, but also about those of politics and economics or, actually, political economy. I found myself also unimpressed by abstract models in human geography and economics that neglected evidence, whether because they were a little speculative or approaching ‘facts’ that were either already available or readily obtainable. Why are such abstract models found in ‘social science’ more than in natural science? Meanwhile, I was struggling against the odds to finish my doctorate on fossils in 400 million-year-old environments, about which I had reduced interest.
Changing conditions
In this new tutoring position in human geography I combined the characteristics of both an old hand and a raw beginner, startling staff with ignorance and originality. As a newly recruited tutor coming from science, the history and philosophy of science and multi-culturalism, with experience of India, I asked many questions of fellow staff, but felt unconstrained by the intellectual history that nearly all social scientists carry into their jobs. Thus, I could stumble even then towards a holistic theory and in fact wrote a paper on this that was never published, except in part within the university. Interestingly, I almost forsook human ecology in that paper as I had become fascinated with political economy and sociology in relation to human geography and other related ‘social sciences’. I had cheerfully called for an integration of human geography with the integrated social sciences, disturbing some of the established academics I had come to know. It was becoming clear to me that the social sciences must be integrated, but in hindsight at this stage, I was a long way from understanding how this could be done.
My later MA thesis in human geography begun in 1976 was an attempt to fully understand rural or village water supply in Thailand. I thus had to integrate the socio-economics, politics, history and geography of village water supply with health issues and the hydrogeology and technology of groundwater development, a subject that made some use of my earlier geological studies. My geological, hydrological and new technological knowledge enabled me to critique socio-political and economic approaches to water supply. Even though my MA thesis was actually a reasonable approach towards what I was to later call a humanity systems study, I failed at that stage to understand its potential, possibly because agriculture was only peripheral to the study. I also failed to bring in psychology and law and did not fully come to grips with sensitive Thai ‘politics’ and certainly not military and police force, about much of which I was ignorant.Perhaps one can absorb only so much in a study about a new subject in a foreign country. No one encouraged me to consider other subjects and they certainly did not present themselves insistently to me. I was already involved with five social sciences and three scientific/technological subjects, which I guess was quite enough for a relative beginner. The academic and professional worlds are so focused on specialised approaches that integrating alternatives are not often considered.
Over five years from 1983 I obtained consulting/advising work with a company and government on a large project aided by the Australian government. It covered a wide plain in Northeast Thailand and included a variety of biophysical and ‘social’ topics that I managed to integrate to some extent. Ostensibly my main duties were around land salinity management and groundwater irrigation, but at all stages I worked closely, not only with Thai and other foreign staff, but also with the villagers. The task was partly socio-economic, or at least I made it so.
Working effectively with villagers, with limitations
Eventually in 1988, after I saw an opportunity to work with greater freedom – to innovate in NPO work in close consultation with young Thai professionals, as well as working closely with villagers. This NPO project was supported by APACE, an Australian appropriate technology organization, and the Thai NPO, Population and Community Development Association. This participatory socio-economic environmental project was run in six villages in a small catchment. It became a lifetime favourite job, far more enjoyable and cost-effective than the large 5-year project that I had worked on earlier.
Mainly women and children villagers of Ban Krayom Northeast Thailand. Pick the odd ones out in this line-up of villagers and two project workers working on a chicken raising activity. (NPO project, Northeast Thailand)
However, in both this and the earlier project, I was so focused on the practical side of working with the Thai staff and villagers that again I failed to grasp the whole system. It is frustrating in hindsight to realize that fascination with the obvious and attractive hinders progress.
What the new project did do was give me the opportunity for the first time to conduct extensive dialogue with the villagers and highly motivated professional Thai graduates, exploring ways of offering the villagers learning support, usually using traditional or intermediate technology, and at the same time learning from them in a cost-effective way. Notice I refer to learning support, not teaching. The project focused on the land salinity in the lower catchment, emphasized villager initiative and cooperation in production groups, and shared input contributions.
A difference between the long-term environmental focus and the villagers’ short-term interest in income generation soon became apparent. For example, the project encouraged tree planting, but also sought to encourage work for youthful women in the village to give them a viable alternative to low-skilled and often dangerous jobs in the city. Our difference was well resolved by focusing first on income to gain the villagers’ confidence, and later placing emphasis on forest conservation and tree culture.
Weavers learning from other village weavers (NPO project Northeast Thailand)
We taught children to raise tree seedlings. (NPO project, Northeast Thailand)
Another issue emerged from the difference between material change, which our NPO project undoubtedly achieved, and the changed minds, greater self-confidence, awareness, cooperation and creativity of the villagers. The project was not financially supported for long enough to achieve conclusive environmental results, but the villagers learned and participated in several useful processes including children’s support for raising tree seedlings, protection against intruders cutting the local forest, and solar processing of salt.
At the project’s end, we were pleased to hear from the leading headman that in his view the most important achievement was not material – not the youth shop or joint vegetable farm, not the mud brick building or forest conservation – but helping the villagers think for themselves. This had been achieved by hiring young Thai graduates, their dialogue with the villagers, offering the villagers learning support, encouraging villager initiative, cooperation in production groups, and shared input contributions. Whether creativity in the long-term can be expected is not known.
Nevertheless, perhaps such a strategy is not only appropriate in so-called developing nations, and for that matter among the so-called developed people, but also in Indigenous communities that have suffered from intrusion by more forceful humanity systems over the millennia. In developing countries where continuing rural ‘welfare’ assistance tends to be weak, the main support from internal or external sources comes as ‘development’ projects run by the national government-state or foreign ‘aid’. This is offered at various levels of foresight, efficiency and sincerity, but it tends not to engender greater dependence as it is short term. When the project or program finishes, that’s it, until a new project is offered, but not promised.
What I regret about this project is that I made too little effort to spread the ideas, either through publication, the local university or even through government-state, except for some lectures to an international audience. I enjoyed working closely with the villagers too much and my links with Thai NPOs were inadequate. What I now realize is that such a local community and small catchment approach is inadequate by itself. The ideas are unlikely to spread of their own accord either vertically or laterally. In the end, one needs to link to national political movements involving national citizens.
The beginnings of an integrating view
It was following the small NPO project, while giving a couple of lectures at the Asian Institute of Technology in 1991, that I was invited to run a similar project in Laos with the Ministry of Science and Technology. And one day in 1992, it was while in Laos reading a book on agriculture that the penny dropped. I could suddenly see a way to view human life holistically. The social sciences could not be integrated on their own but required the involvement of the ecological and technological sciences to create a whole system.
Flooded, fixed field padi rice cultivation, ready for transplanting, Central Laos. This is the dominant form of rice cultivation in flat (low) land, sometimes known as Sawah, throughout monsoonal Asia. This contrasts with shifting cultivation illustrated below. Were these rice fields in Laos a biophysical system or a social system?
I was reading about rice cultivation in Laos, as we see above, when I wondered whether these rice fields amounted to part of an agro-ecosystem, a farming system, an economy, a hierarchical power system, a regional system or perhaps all of these and more. An agro-ecologist was describing a rice field as though it was natural, forgetting that humans made it. It struck me that the biophysics of all the farms of the world were part of both human biophysical and ‘social’ activity. I suddenly realized that as rice fields were human-created systems, and thus not merely natural biophysical ecosystems, it could be said that the political economy, society and so on were linked to the human ecology of rice in one system.
The Ehrlichs and other human ecologists, such as Amos Hawley in 1986, had linked many aspects of human life to farming, mining and technology, including within it culture and other factors, and other human ecological topics. However, they did not appear to have done so in a thoroughly integrating system. It was only later that I encountered cultural anthropologist Julian Steward’s concept of cultural ecology, introduced in 1955, which went some way towards that of a humanity system, although anthropologist Emelio Moran notes that Steward’s concept is seen as both culturally and ecologically determinist rather than ‘interactionist’.
Humans depend on natural ecosystems for immediate resources and for human ecological and climate stability. We still harvest, degrade and destroy forests and seas far too much, and depend on the uncertain ecological stability offered by remaining natural ecosystems and other surface Earth systems. The boundary of the human-related ecosystem varies a little between authors. I include only the human-related activities as being part of the humanitysystem, while recognizing the interaction with nature. Economists study the relevant prices or money store-flows but pay limited attention to our intense interaction with nature, let alone politics, power, our minds or other matters. In short, people with negative personalities and rising power accumulate wealth in the corporative world in association with government/state including the armed forces. Nature reacts.
From my time of arrival at Macquarie University in 1972 until my first work in Laos in 1991, I had regarded the biophysical aspects of the study of human ecology and groundwater technology, with which I was involved every day, as part of a separate system to that of the ‘social system’, including economics. I then saw my error. While I, like many writers, were focused on what seemed to amount to a contemporary ‘environmental crisis’, I could now conceive of the human interaction with Nature as part of a long-term system evolution. Moreover, I could see how all the subjects and disciplines with which I had been involved over many years could be linked together in one system, making a larger contribution to an understanding of human life. I realized that this system could also include ideas about populations, health, mining, urban growth and pollution. These thoughts led me to consider the evolution of the humanity system – from our early evolution from primate animals, through nomadic nature harvesting (hunter-scavenger-gathering) to first farming, cities and on to modernity. With the rise of modernization, we eventually arrive at a global view that needs further elaboration that I will attempt subsequently in a later publication.
But why did the realization come then, and not five, ten or fifteen years before? Perhaps it was because I was reading about farming in greater depth than I had before. Farming is the critically obvious human ecological activity that links the human mind-body and ‘society’ or ‘the economy’ to Nature in an ongoing way.
However, despite the promising theoretical development, it took me another two decades to create what I now hope others will embrace as a holistic view of human life on Earth. I began to come to grips with the further wide range of subjects necessary to begin to understand my own life and the wider world. I subsequently realized over many further years working mainly in Southeast Asia that, apart from the main macro-socio-cultural disciplines, many other disciplines such as those concerning military studies, mind, money, law, force, building and other topics in time and space must be addressed. Paleo-anthropology, psychology and archaeology also could not be ignored in an attempt to understand human life. It was only later during my working life, and inspired by my thinking on integration, that I learned about critical topics such as private bank money creation, personality theory, the details of human evolution, various theories of schooling, and the evolution of agriculture and early towns and cities. I devised the concept ‘human related store-flows’ or just store-flows as a non-comital substitute for trade supported by force, and the linking of power and force as power-force as they usually are.
I gradually realized that the inspiration from the rice field was only a start. Linking agriculture and political economy with human ecology, geography and history only linked what had become the most obvious parts of the system.
After what seemed to be a flash of integrating inspiration, I returned for a three-year stint working with the Landcare movement in the Murrumbidgee River catchment in Australia. I thought I could perhaps use my experience with land salinity and farming communities in rural Thailand, together with this new insight, to work productively with Australian farmers. Landcare is a programme in which government-state staff work alongside farmer groups, usually based in small catchments, in a similar way to the NPO project in Northeast Thailand. In Australia, I found I was able to use my new ideas to integrate a study of land salinity with political, economic and land use history to better understand the origin of salinity and thus the best means to mitigate it. The politico-economic history of land use in Australia has been recorded and well analysed, unlike in Thailand where speculation was needed. It is important to note that widespread land salinity in many nations is not simply caused by the greater percolation of surface water into the groundwater due to the burning or felling of tree cover and other vegetation. (I outlined the ideas in a report ‘Dryland salinity in the Riverina: Integrated theory and strategy’, 1995.)
These non-natural biophysical processes can be explained by population growth, Indigenous or farmer land management, government policies on farm expansion, fossil energy, bank operations and specialized schooling – for a start.
After Landcare and a research and writing stint in Sydney, I returned to Laos where I worked in a wide variety of consulting or rather advising jobs. In 2005, I left ‘consulting’ to devote myself almost full time to research and writing except for ‘family administration’, a year planning and supervising the building of a semi-eco-house in Chiang Mai.
So why did it take me some 30 years of my adult life to think of the initial idea of linking the biophysics and the socio-politico-economics of human action to form the humanity systems idea, and another 20 years or so to round it out using ideas from all the disciplines concerned with human-related affairs? Although I have been involved in education all my life, both as student and teacher at school and university, as well as in so-called non-formal education in villages and meeting rooms, it was only in the last two decades that I really began to understand its main weaknesses, and why it is weak, but also its potential. I now suspect that it was not only my varied life, involved in many disciplines, but a life without long-term commitment to any one hierarchical organization that allowed my free will and creativity to prosper to some extent, albeit frustratingly slowly.
However promising that may sound, I believe much of my effort was wasted because of my early periods of specialized top-down instruction and learning, the weak careers advice I received during secondary and tertiary schooling, and the relatively remote and somewhat disinterested government-states and corporations with which I usually worked. In almost every job a significant intellectual gap existed between my ‘supervisor’ and myself, partly because they only occasionally visited the field sites, but mostly due to different educational experiences. Although I was genuinely trying to help both peasantry/farmers and civil servants with whom I worked, support from on high was variable.
How, you may ask, even with this wide disciplinary and organizational experience, did I arrive at a holistic view of human life? Might it not be that one becomes overwhelmed by such diversity? And does a broad multi-disciplinary approach to education, teaching and learning, both formal and non-formal, only temporarily committed to organizational hierarchies, facilitate creativity and a better understanding of the world in which we live?
A multi-cultural life and both disciplinary interaction and mutual support, and presumably genetics, led eventually to a holistic view. This journey was not simply a logical process or one based on a steadily increasing knowledge, although these were both important. Progress resulted as much from reaction to startling intellectual events as steady study. I hope my writing will help others to seek, attain and devise more effective learning opportunities and processes in the future.
In order to do our best in the future, in view of our ongoing crises, humankind needs a new approach, including an alternative way of spreading understanding using learning support more than teaching. To achieve this, we need a theory to help understand the systems in which we live. To continue this integrating endeavour and spread understanding are the purposes of this document.
Conclusion
After the realization that the biophysics of human creation of farms and infrastructure should be integrated with the politico-socio-cultural of such, I began the exploration of many other critical subjects such as psychology and bank creation of money. Even though my MA thesis on water supply in Thailand was actually a reasonable approach towards a humanity systems study, I failed at that stage to understand its potential, possibly because agriculture was only marginal to the study. I was already involved with eight scientific/technological subjects.
In our NPO project’s end, we were pleased to hear from the leading headman that in his view the most importantachievement was helping the villagers think for themselves. And one day in 1992, while in Laos reading a book on agriculture, I could suddenly see a way to view human life holistically. The social sciences could not be integrated on their own but required the involvement of the ecological, geographical and technological sciences to create a whole system
I was reading about rice cultivation in Laos, when it struck me that the biophysics of all the farms of the world were part of both human biophysical and ‘social’ activity. I suddenly realized that as rice fields were human-created systems, and thus not merely natural biophysical ecosystems, it could be said that the political economy, society and so on were linked to the human ecology of rice in one system.
I now suspect that it was not only my varied life, but a life without long-term commitment to any one discipline or hierarchical organization that allowed my free will and creativity to prosper to some extent, albeit frustratingly slowly.
We can best explore the nature of humanity and try to understand what I am calling humanity systems by studying ideas and information taken from about 20 disciplines that consider human-related concepts and to integrate them into whole systems over time and space. We have sought in particular to integrate the most useful ideas from economics, political economy, spatio-temporal studies, socio-cultural studies, human ecology and technology, but not whole disciplines. Both singly, and in their interaction with each other, all of the concepts are involved in biological, cultural and humanity system evolution in natural environmental and human created conditions.
My varied background, as we have seen, was to lead ultimately to the development of a multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary approach that I initially came to call the humanity system that is the interaction of everything that involves humans over time and space. In more detail, the humanity system is an integrated view of the evolution of the interactions of all of human consciousness, human-related sensed feeling and thought, information, ideas, and actions and their consequences, locally and globally, over time and space, in our short and long term on Earth.
These thoughts were to lead me to write Changing the world: Humanity system integrating the social sciences, first published in 2014, now on Amazon’s Kindle. To continue this integrating endeavour and spread understanding are the purposes of this book.
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