Politics Fighting Policy
Markendeya Yeddanapudi
Edited version
Politics Fighting Policy
Policy means a definite line of action. Politics is the intricate process by which that policy is implemented.
The fundamental policy of your life is already present in the organization with which you begin as a zygote. Your father contributes twenty-three chromosomes and your mother contributes twenty-three chromosomes; their fusion creates the genetic beginning of you. But DNA alone does not constitute the whole organization of life. The mitochondria—ancient organisms that entered into an enduring symbiotic relationship with ancestral cells—are also part of the cellular organization that sustains you.
The zygote does not simply grow mechanically. Its development involves continuous regulation, communication, feedback, differentiation and self-maintenance. This is where the concept of autopoiesis, developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, becomes relevant: a living system continually produces and maintains the organization that makes it a living system. (Springer)
I call this continuing self-regulation an “audit” of life. Before and during each stage of development, the living system responds to its internal condition and to its surroundings. As cells divide and differentiate, the organization of life is continuously implemented. Thus, in my terminology, policy and politics remain synchronized: the underlying biological organization is continuously translated into the actual processes of living.
This process does not belong to human beings alone. It occurs throughout the Biosphere. Every organism participates in an intricate web of relationships in which life maintains itself while interacting with other life and with its environment. In this sense, the Biosphere possesses an autopoietic dimension. Perhaps Nature's evolutionary “audit mechanism” is ecology itself.
Here lies the danger of economics when it becomes detached from ecology.
Life forms cannot simply incorporate our plastics, metals and machines into their biological processes. No plant grows a plastic machine. No animal manufactures a metal factory as part of its ecological life. Other organisms live within ecological relationships that have evolved over immense periods of time.
Our technologic is therefore increasingly in conflict with the ecologic.
Technology has enabled human beings to transform Nature on a scale unmatched by other organisms. But when economic power becomes the primary criterion for that transformation, we can place ourselves in opposition to the ecological organization upon which our own lives depend. We may then find ourselves acting against the very biological conditions that sustain us.
The urge to communicate and participate in relationships is fundamental to life. The Biosphere can therefore be understood not merely as a collection of isolated organisms but as a vast network of interdependence and symbiosis. Our crisis may arise partly from our attempt to exclude ourselves from this larger ecological relationship—and then to call that exclusion economic progress.
A tiger kills an animal to live. But the tiger does not establish a gigantic meat industry that transforms the entire ecological system for profit. Its predation remains embedded within an ecological network.
Human beings, however, have developed systems of extraction, production and consumption capable of disrupting that network on a planetary scale. The ecological coordination of life, operating from the cellular level upward, is increasingly being subordinated to economic policy.
The consequences are also visible in education. When universities are governed predominantly by economic priorities, education can become separated from Nature. Nature loses its position as teacher, while the student is trained primarily to become an economic producer.
Yet access to Nature's own processes of education may be one of the deepest meanings of freedom.
We are therefore creating what I call counter-evolution. Natural evolution has produced extraordinary forms of cooperation, competition, adaptation and symbiosis. But human institutions can convert these processes into social, economic, political and environmental struggles in which the most powerful system prevails. We may ultimately be moving toward Technological Darwinism, in which machines make increasing numbers of human activities redundant.
We have consequently created a politics that may repudiate the very policy from which life arose.
The minimum that every university should do to atone for its ecological separation is to establish a Free Nature Park—a place in which Nature is not merely displayed, controlled or technologically manipulated, but allowed to function and teach.
Perhaps education should begin again by listening to the teacher that existed long before the university: Nature itself.
YM Sarma
My views
I think this is one of your stronger essays conceptually, because the policy–politics distinction gives your larger philosophy a new organizing metaphor.
Your argument can be represented as:
DNA / cellular organization → organism → ecological relationships → Biosphere → human institutions
and your warning is that the direction has been reversed:
Economics → technology → institutions → education → disruption of ecology.
That is a genuinely interesting philosophical construction.
Where I think you are especially strong
1. “Policy” and “politics” is an original framing.
You are not using politics merely in the governmental sense. You are using it as the actual implementation of an underlying order. That lets you compare biological development with social organization.
2. Your “audit” idea is philosophically fruitful.
Scientifically, I would call it feedback, regulation, error correction, homeostasis and developmental control, rather than literally an audit. But as your metaphor, “Nature's audit” is memorable.
3. Your connection with autopoiesis is substantial.
Maturana and Varela described living systems in terms of self-production and self-maintenance. Later discussions connected autopoiesis with Gaia and planetary organization. (Springer)
This is particularly interesting because Lynn Margulis connected symbiogenesis with Gaia, while later thinkers have discussed Gaia through both autopoiesis and sympoiesis—the latter emphasizing that living systems can arise and persist through processes of “making-with” rather than simply self-making. (OUP Academic)
That actually strengthens your own idea: life is not merely self-maintenance; it is maintenance through relationship.
4. Your attack is really on economic supremacy, not simply on technology.
That distinction matters. Your deepest proposition seems to be:
Economics must be subordinate to ecology, not ecology subordinate to economics.
That is considerably more defensible than saying that every technology is inherently anti-natural.
5. The “Free Nature Park” is your most constructive proposal.
Much of your earlier writing diagnoses the Cartesian/economic problem. Here you provide an institutional response: restore Nature as teacher.
I think that deserves development into a major component of your philosophy.
Thinkers who stand close to this essay
Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela
Probably the closest scientific conceptual connection because of autopoiesis. Their work gives you a rigorous vocabulary for your idea that life continuously maintains its own organization. (Springer)
Lynn Margulis
Extremely important for your philosophy. Her work on symbiogenesis challenges the picture of evolution as merely competition between isolated organisms. Her Gaia work also helped connect cellular symbiosis with planetary thinking. (Springer)
James Lovelock
His Gaia hypothesis proposed that life and Earth's physical environment are coupled through feedback processes. Your “Biosphere as one organism” idea is clearly related, although your emphasis on feeling, education and ecological participation goes beyond Lovelock's scientific formulation. (Springer)
Donna Haraway
Her concept of sympoiesis is particularly interesting for your project because it shifts attention from an isolated self-producing organism toward beings that are produced and sustained with others. (OUP Academic)
Vladimir Vernadsky
His concept of the Biosphere is an important predecessor to Gaia thinking. Your claim that the Biosphere should be understood as a planetary whole has a strong intellectual connection to Vernadsky. (ScienceDirect)
Fritjof Capra
His systems-oriented thinking about interconnectedness, ecology and living systems is close to several of your recurring themes.
Arne Næss
His deep ecology provides another major connection: human beings should not understand Nature merely as an instrument for human economic purposes.
Ivan Illich
Especially relevant to your criticism of universities and institutionalized economic/technological systems. His critique of institutionalized education resonates strongly with your Free Nature Park proposal.
And the tribes you asked me to name
Here I think your essay becomes particularly interesting because your philosophical proposition has real-world human counterparts.
The Dongria Kondh of Niyamgiri, Odisha
This is probably the single most relevant example for your essay.
The Dongria Kondh resisted bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri Hills because their relationship with the hills, forests, water and cultural life could not be reduced to the economic value of the mineral underneath them. Scholarly research describes the Niyamgiri struggle explicitly as resistance to mining-induced displacement and industrialization. (Sage Journals)
Their struggle is almost a living illustration of your:
Ecological policy vs economic politics.
The movement ultimately achieved a major victory through the legal process surrounding the proposed mining project. (HSE Publications)
The Binjhal of Sonakhan, Odisha/Chhattisgarh region
Recent scholarship compares the Binjhal resistance to a gold-mining project with the Dongria Kondh struggle. The researchers describe both as forms of resistance to extractive capital, using history, memory and cultural imagination as sources of solidarity. (HSE Publications)
This is extraordinarily close to your idea that ecological knowledge is not necessarily found in a laboratory or university; it can be embedded in culture, memory and lived relationship with land.
The Māori of Aotearoa/New Zealand
Their struggles over land, water and relationships with the natural world are relevant to your broader argument, particularly because Māori concepts often resist the Western separation of “human” from “Nature.”
The Standing Rock Sioux and other Indigenous peoples of North America
Their resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline became an important contemporary example of Indigenous resistance to an extractive project and of the argument that water, land and cultural survival cannot simply be treated as economic commodities.
The Kichwa of Sarayaku, Ecuador
The Sarayaku struggle against oil extraction is another powerful example of an Indigenous community defending a living relationship with territory against an externally imposed economic model.
I would, however, make one important distinction: Indigenous peoples are not uniformly “anti-development” or outside economics. Their struggles differ greatly. What connects many of these movements to your argument is their rejection of a development model in which economic extraction overrides ecological, cultural and territorial relationships.
The deepest formulation I see emerging in your philosophy
Your present essay allows me to sharpen what I think has been developing across your recent writings:
Nature has a policy; life is its continuous implementation; ecology is the coordinating medium; and human politics becomes destructive when it attempts to replace ecological policy with economic policy.
And your most radical proposition is this:
The fundamental political question is not “Who should govern Nature?” but “Will human beings participate in Nature's policy or attempt to impose a policy upon Nature?”
That is a much stronger philosophical question than simply “technology versus Nature.”
Your Free Nature Park then becomes more than a park. It becomes a proposed institutional experiment in reversing the direction of education:
University → Nature
becomes
Nature → student → university.
That fits exceptionally well with the central theme I have seen developing through your recent essays: Nature is not merely the object of education; Nature is the teacher, and human beings are participants in the educational process.
One scientific caution will make your philosophy stronger rather than weaker: retain the poetry of “Nature's audit,” “Nature's policy,” and “Biosphere as one organism,” but clearly identify them as philosophical metaphors or hypotheses rather than established biological facts. The underlying scientific concepts—autopoiesis, symbiosis, developmental regulation, Gaia/Earth-system feedback—give you enough solid ground without overstating what biology has demonstrated. (Springer)
Rajaram Krishnamurthy
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to thatha_patty...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CACDCHC%2BNFFyLkrVdQ3u-ErvL70NTodYkgDV_d2amAPmJHBU2Lg%40mail.gmail.com.