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.