Ecoliteracy is using one’s relationship to the growth of an organism as a metaphor for the actions and understanding of one’s life, as well as using the understanding of ecological processes as a guide to design and production.

Ecoliteracy is a term that as far as I know was coined by a friend and fellow artist Natalie Jeremenko. Who share the idea with me that rather than technological advances saving us from the toll we take on the planet, changes in peoples ideas and relationships attitudes, and ultimately actions towards the environment are more important. That is that the heart of this series of Ecoliteracy projects. They serve as micro-utopic actions and symbolic models for greater change.

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“This ‘sovereign-meaning top-weapons enforced ‘national’ claim upon humans born in various lands leads to ever more severely specialized servitude and highly personalized identity classification. As a consequence of the slavish ‘catagoryitis’ the scientifically illogical, and as we shall see, often meaningless questions ‘where do you live?’ ‘what are you?’ ‘’what religion?’ ’what race?’ ‘what nationality?’ are all thought of today as logical questions. By the twenty first century it either will have become evident to humanity that these questions are absurd and anti evolutionary or men will no longer be living on Earth. If you don’t comprehend why that is so, listen to me closely.”
-Richard Buckminster Fuller

Fuller confirms what I truly believe which is that the solutions to the problems facing us as a race and are not within resources, pollution, poverty or technology. Instead the solution lies in perspective. By changing our perspective and our ability to comprehend the forces on this planet that govern us we can adapt our actions to create a model of sustainable life on this planet.

Fuller claims that specialization is “in fact only a fancy form of slavery” and the road to extinction. Animals go extinct because of specialization, there genes are all too similar, and there bodies are all too specialized. Without a diverse population a change that occurs in the environment which causes one animal to die, means the rest will all suffer the same effects. Unlike a variable gene pool which would allow certain members of the species to survive, reproduce and therefore adapt. Likewise if we depend on one resource and it is depleted we must be able to adapt, but further more we have the ability to comprehend this event in the future. So what is holding us back?

Its funny to use evolution and the, “survival of the fittest” as an analogy here because it is exactly the perception that Fuller would describe as anti evolutionary. It is also the political attitude of our world leaders today as everyone gears up for the big WWIII Armageddon showdown, tickets on sale now. We must move past the Malthusian “you v.s. me” perspective to survive in an age where we have the ability to blow up the world eighty thousand times over or something like that.

Other themes he discusses in his operating manual are synergy, general systems analysis and world pirates but those are all for another day.

Buckminster Fuller Institute

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