At 10:56 AM 3/7/99 +0100, Diane HODGES wrote:
(Snipping..a wholly admirable tirade on the "management" of change which
ended)
>
>Anyway,
>the implication of the message disturbs the HELL out of me:
>"if you want to understand/know/be "one" with something, try to change it"
>
>is pure invasion ideology. stuff changes. watch for it. trying to change
>things we don't understand is ludicrous as a responsible practice, I don't
>care who said it: it's invasion rationalization and is a bad way to think.
>bad.
>
>if you want to understand something so much that the only thing you
>can do is change whatever it is, then it can't be what it "is" that is
>of interest, but what kinds of effects human interventions have on stuff.
>Back to the Water-Table and Sink or Float games, maybe.
>
>
>diane -
>
>(I just let loose a tirade elsewhere and seem to have
>slipped some of it in here - no hard feelings 'dere now, youse are all da
>good guyz'n'galz, ya?
>
>suure ye be. I know dat...
Brava!
I gave a little talk yesterday in which i had occasion to remark that
mostly, when we talk about "managing" anything, some part of what it is
we're supposed to be managing manages to turn up dead in consequence of
some other, rhetorically unrelated, but nevertheless implicated, commercial
transaction...cf coyotes, bison, bears, tigers, but also trees, wilderness,
diversity, etc...
once you start "managing" your competitors for food, it is but a small step
to managing competitors for attention, or other resources. In no trivial
sense, business "management" is about "culling," a cheerful euphemism for
selective slaughter, whether of unsuccessful "product" or of
"non-productive" labor...
the "success" of the genetic engineering programs which have now produced
terminator genes that prevent commercial crop seed from being reproduced on
the present generation of growing plants, while simultaneously rendering
the "product" seed immune to chemical treatmenst designed to kill off EVERY
other competing plant species--thereby assuring all subsequent transactions
of the sort will be exclusively one-sided and two pronged--perhaps could be
a cautionary exemplar for the uses of such complete understandings as are
the product of "trying to change it."
hear her...
konopak