Cybersystemic Conviviality:Addressing the Conundrum of Ecosystems Services

摘要

Most readers of this column will be only too aware of the history of contestation that has prevailed in both the systems and cybernetics communities, particularly from the middle of the 20th century. The contestation of ideas can of course create a healthy academic milieu and in the right circumstances is to be welcomed. Unfortunately the discursive practices that arose too often left those in the conversation with the experience of not being heard or valued, or of having their ideas rejected creating divisions and enmities many of which have been sustained over long time periods. Academic practices and institutional arrangements also favoured bifurcation and reification of particular ideas, theories and ultimately lineages at the expense of a broader and richer intellectual synthesis that could have been based on a celebration of difference, an ethic of staying in the conversation and a joint enterprise of building a more powerful international discourse (Krippendorff, 1995) and more robust institutional arrangements.