Earth Day,Caring for Creation and Information Ecology

My surprise discovery of the identification of this blog as "Best results for Earth Day" on the LookSnart Science site reminded me of my initial conception of this blog as a space for a 15-year retrospective of Information Habitat: Where Information Lives, from the Earth Day 1990 dedication of Oh Say, Can You See, by the One Light in All as the Fifth Verse of the U.S. National Anthem, at an interfaith sunrise ceremony at Fort McHenry in Baltimore through Earth Day 2005 with the dedication of Open Gates as a framework operating system for a whole earth community.

A reminder on the focus of Earth Day for the retrospective is timely for many reasons; a recent speech by Bill Moyers to the Societyof Environmental Journalists, Caring for Creation, makes a clear and cogent case for the critical need for truthful and accurate information on the state of the environment, and emphasizes the need to appeal to Christian conservatives to focus their attention on caring for creation.

The title - and theme - of Bill Moyers' speech was of particular interest to me as it was at a May 1990 conference titled Caring for Creation, organized by Father Don Conroy, when Information Habitat: Where Information Lives was conceived, and with it the seeds of the discipline of information ecology.

Indeed, a concern for inclusive faith-based leadership in healing of the Earth has been a core value in the evolution of Information Habitat, combined with a deep appreciation of the critically important role of information and communications technology with regard to the environment - as an immensely powerful medium for organizing and disseminating information relating to the environment, as a powerful tool for building participatory organizations and networks.

The roots of Information Habitat did not just grow out of a technical or utlitiarian appreciation of the power of information technology, for at its heart was a perspective that grew out my work with the Friends Committee on Unity with Nature, and expressed in the Queries on Unity with Nature in the phrase:

"Do I extend the Quaker practice of answering that of God in every person
to answering that of God in all creation?"

- a phrase that served for me as an affirmation that everything that exists is part of Divine creation - which now, as a dervish, I understand as an expression of "La ilaha Ilallah" - there is no God but God; there is nothing that is not of God.

Thus, the phrase "where information lives" is an appreciation of information and information systems as a life forms and incorpoates an appreciation of the phenomenal evolution that is taking place in these life forms, or information species. The radical concept of information and information systems as life forms, embodying a profound shift in perception of the nature of life has its roots for me in Alfred J. Lotke's Elements of Mathematical Biology, a remarkable book that provided one of the key foundations of information ecology.

I had come across Elements of Mathematical Biology about thirty-five years ago in the stacks of the library at The Johns Hopkins University while I was struggling with the scope and implications of of a Ph.D. thesis on a multi-dimensional mathematical framework of human behaviour - a thesis that I eventually abandoned as opening a Pandora's Box. For while I felt confident in the theoretical and empirical foundations, I was very aware that I only had a glimpse of the deeper implications.

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Finding Freedom in Blogging

One of the aspects of blogging I am enjoying is giving myself permission ot write in a way that isn't constrained by too much of a concern for order and structure. Normally when I write, I spend an inordinate amount of time and energy seeking to maintain a highly structured format, for example, using an outline style in WordPerfect 5.1+.

This approach has led to some very successful documents that incorporated a clear and well structured outline table of contents - the first of which being Foundations for a Sustainable Common Future; others included Towards Earth Summit II and Financing for Development in a Knowledge-Based Economy.

However, in recent years, the net result of my seeking to impose an outline structure has been a slew of unfinished documents that staggered and came to a standstill under a burdensome outline that ususally grew so prolifically into levels of detail that most of the document would remain purely in an outline / sketch form.

I often recall the freedom in writing that I had discovered in the early days of electronic communictions - i.e. in the years before the 1992 Earth Summit, when I used to write many of my postings to the EcoNet conferences "live" while online - as there was nothing like the wonders of Eudora in those days. I remember feeling a similar freedom then as I let go of the ability to edit what I had written, just letting the words flow into the ether, as it were.

With blogging, however, I am finding that I am increasingly feeling comfortable with adding thoughts, comments observations and recollections whenever they come upforme -especially given that I see that it would be quite unrealistic to try to impose both a historical and logical sequence on what I write and when.

This way of writing - and letting myself hop / float around in my mind fits well with what is evolving as my modus operandi in general - a way that I have been inclined to for some time, and which the wonders of the Gates Exhibit in Central Park gave additional inspiration through what I perceived as a wonderful welcome invitation while in the exhibit to simply let myself be led by the wind and the light - so I allow myself to be led by the breezes in my mind, puffs of intuition - as I float and swim freely in and out the many gates, doors, rooms and windows of my digital home.