ABSTRACT
The Global Ecological Integrity Group (GEIG) utilizes the concept of integrity to calibrate the degree of sustainability in the interfacing of human beings and nature. Succinctly put, integrity captures the properties of autopoiesis and reciprocal articulation of natural processes characteristic of wild ecosystems: to live in integrity demands that human beings organize their society in ways which simulate reproductive modalities of wild ecosystems and that lead to the combined sustainability of the eco/social system as a whole (Westra et al, 2000). While actually achieving a pristine integrity outcome is a stated goal for the future, GEIG nevertheless believes that efforts can be made in the here and now to begin the process of achieving integrity goals. This chapter accepts with GEIG that seeking to synchronize human activity with eco-sustainability and re-embed economic life in nature is a pressing concern for human society. However, it focuses on the way the debate over integrity, and eco-sustainability more broadly, proceeds in the absence of careful consideration of the exigencies of human material reproductive viability and how human material life is to be institutionally configured to effectuate a symbiosis between economic viability and eco-sustainability. To paraphrase Karl Marx (as so many have): human beings do make their own world, but they do not make it just as they please. The choices among viable modes of organizing the economic life of human societies are not unlimited. And the potential transformability of a viable mode of material reproduction is not open-ended. Further, particular modes of economy embody tendencies inimical to eco-sustainability that institutional re-jigging will never eviscerate within the material reproductive contours of those modes.
