Tuesday, October 11, 2005

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.

No comments: