November/December 1985 RAIN Page 15 by Kirkpatrick Sale The ecological law with which bioregional politics would logically begin is decentralism, centrifugal force, the spreading of power to small and widely dispersed units. So it is in the natural world, where nothing is more striking than the absence of any centralized control, any interspeciate domination, where there are none of the patterns of ruler-and-ruled that are taken as inevitable in human governance. “King of the jungle" is our description of the lion's status, and quite anthropo- morphously perverse; the lion (or, better, lioness) is profoundly unaware of this role, and the elephant and rhinoceros (not to mention the tsetse fly) would hardly accede to it. In a biotic community the various sets of animals and plants, no matter how they may run their own families and clusters, behave smoothly and regularly with each other without the need of any overall system of authority or dominance, any biotic Washington or Wall Street, in fact without any governing organization or superstructure of any kind soever. No one species rules over all—or any—others, not one even makes the attempt, not one even has either instinct or intenhon in that direction. (Even the kudzu and the redtide bacteria, for all that they sometimes look as if they have in mind to conquer the world, are merely blindly moving into comfortable new environments and have no thought of rule or enslavement.) What's more, when several subgroups of a single species occupy the same region, there is no attempt to consolidate power in one of them: you never see one hill of red ants try to take over another, one colony of crows try to conquer another, one pride of lions try to establish control over all the other lions around. Territoriality, yes: often a subgroup of a species attempts to carve out a part of the econiche for itself and goes to considerable lengths to keep other members of that species (and competing species) away. But that is not governance, not the creation of any central authority, it is merely a familial or communal statement about the carrying capacity of that niche for that species—and, I guess, of who was there first to measure it. And defense, too: there can be quite intense and deadly conflict when one subgroup defends its home—hive or hill, roost or lair— from another, and mammalian families and individuals will often go to great lengths, including aggression at times, to protect females and their young during birth and nesting periods. But these are not battles of conquest, they are not followed by domination or colonization (though some ants will take other ants as prisoners), and they are never caused by one subgroup desiring to estabBsh its rule, its command, over another. Now there is of course one continuous exercise of power between species in the ecosphere: many animals perforce depend on ingesting other animals and a wide range of plants. There is in fact a regular practice we call predation by which certain species live in a quasi-symbi- otic relationship of hunter and hunted, eater and eaten, and it is common among all biotic communities and among many species of animals as well as a few plants. But this is not governance, it is not rule or dominance, it is not even aggression of an organized political or miliIn the natural world, nothing is more striking than the absence of any centralized control. tary kind. Mosquitoes, whatever they may be said to think, do not believe that they are ruled over by the purple martin that plucks the unlucky ones out of the air; and zebras, however wary they may always be at the watering hole, do not regard themselves as being in an inferior position to the lion or under the regular administration of some larger species. The predatory relationship is certainly one of violence and death (and sustenance and life), certainly one of imbalance and nonreciprocation, but it is never undertaken for anything but food—not for governance, or control, or the establishment of power or sovereignty. An exercise of power it is, but it is still diffused power, almost accidental power. (Moreover, there is always some kind of mutuality at work in predation, even though it is of an unconscious kind and may go quite unappreciated by the predatee; one could not really expect the caribou to welcome the attack by the gray wolf pack, though in fact it is a necessary means of controlling the herd's population, and by weaning out the weakest and sickest helps to strengthen the herd's genetic heritage.) A similar kind of decentralism, a recurrent urge toward separatism, independence, and local autonomy rather than agglomeration and concentration, exists in human patterns as well. Throughout all human history, even in the past several hundred years, people have tended to live in separate and independent small groups, a “fragmentation of human society" that Harold Isaacs, the venerated professor of international affairs at MIT, has described as something akin to “a pervasive force in human affairs and always has been." Even when nations and empires have arisen, he notes, they have no staying power against the innate human drive toward decentralism: The record shows that there could be all kinds of lags, that declines could take a long time and falls run long overdue, but that these conditions could never be indefinitely maintained. Under external or internal pressure —usually both—authority was eroded, legitimacy Zebras do not regard themselves as being in inferior position to the lion or under the regular administration of some larger species.
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