Reckoning the nonexistent: Putting the science right

Patten (2014) focuses upon some obvious conflicts between environmental action and the science of ecology and asks whether either should be revised to achieve better accord. It appears that both need to be reconsidered, but it is the conventional notion of science that seems more in need of emendation. The materialist/mechanist metaphysics of conventional science renders it unsuitable for the interpretation of ethics and inadequate to the full treatment of the phenomenon of life. Fortunately, the study of ecological networks provides a natural introduction of the apophatic (that which does not exist) into science, because it makes possible the quantitative parsing of the organization inherent in a network from its residual flexibility (an apophasis, or lack of constraint). Data suggest that both are necessary for sustainability, and methods for achieving a balance between the opposing attributes are outlined. The conventional mechanistic picture of the ecological world as a noisy clockwork must be transformed into the metaphor of a dialectic between the buildup of autocatalytic constraints and the entropic decay of system organization. Enduring configurations of mutualistic contingencies appear more relevant to the explanation of ecosystem behavior than is classical dynamical theory. With this transition to a more encompassing metaphysics, most of the inconsistencies observed by Patten evaporate. For example, the full picture reveals that there are contexts under which maximum power should be allowed full reign, while other conditions call for the environmentalist's conservative approach.