Gerald Dillenbeck | + Follow Poet |
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Ecological Imperatives

Ecologists seem more aware
than economic and political scientists
and capital and democracy leaders of state investments,
of the remarkable multi-functionality of natural systems,
like trees,
and river valleys
and their forests
with canopies of shade
enlightened from above by sun,
glimmered by moon and starlight,
creating energy,
nutrition,
predators and prey, but also beauty,
health and pathology,
feeding and bleeding co-invested systems
of interdependent relationships.

While multi-functionality of organic systems
is a complicated array of niches,
these are not just the economist's consumer market niches
or just producers of goods and bads through labor,
through both WinLose and WinWin Games,
but more like all of the above.

This comes to mind
because as I have earned the perspective
of multi-functioning economic and political decades,
as both consumer and producer,
I have also noticed that polarized U.S. elected officials,
especially those working in, or even near,
our infamous District of Columbia,
have reduced the citizenry
to producers of tax revenues and votes,
expecting to consume diminishing returns
of peace and justice,
to expect Business As Usual,
a drought of functionality,
dwindling absence of Constitutionally protected returns
for health
happiness
and mutually cooperative prosperity.

Ecologists
and other health v pathology students,
learn to become more aware of the reciprocal,
perhaps even contagious,
relationships between producers giving care
and consumers receiving healthy care.

I don't see many elected folks
working and living in our public sector
burning the midnight oil
pondering together 
how to become more multi-functional care-givers
and care-receivers,
which requires cooperation more
and competition for votes and tax dollars less.

As a wanna-be culture of healthy ecopolitics,
we are too capital-mesmerized
by our own recent investment histories
in unhealthy pathologies,
driven to capture what's left of value
on the verge of a no longer merely impending
humane energy production descent,
choking on our own culture of BadNews
competing consumer markets of polarizing pathology.

If economists and political scientists
and dipolar ecopolitical practitioners
like me
and you
and our families,
and our communities,
and our States,
and our Nations,
and our anthro-centric global population
were to burn what's left of the midnight oil
discerning together this basic functionality
of balancing consumer markets for health and happiness
and producer forces and contagious flows
for cooperative wealth thereof,
WinWin Both-And options only,
like forest systems of democratic trees,
and other living, breathing cultures of Earth's health,
I wonder if the return on our votes and tax investments
in mutual-care receiving
may pay off more robustly,
resonantly,
cooperatively,
organically,
permaculturally,
ecologically,
not quite so pathologically
polarized WinLose competitions.

Copyright © Gerald Dillenbeck | Year Posted 2017

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