Recently, I got a pamphlet explaining how firms should embed social consciousness "into the DNA of their enterprises." Interesting. I’ve worked in a firm for a long time, and have yet to see any DNA floating around the corridors. It’s a strange turn of phrase, yet sounds somehow proper. What’s going on?

From a cultural anthropology viewpoint, one of the most interesting dimensions of any society is the fundamental analogy upon which its self-image is based. The analogy is powerful, often simple, pervasive, obvious yet habitually unconscious. The reigning analogy since the Industrial Revolution has been the machine. Capitalist production, following the Taylor efficiency and the Fordist mass production models, was viewed as a mechanism that could be tuned for efficiency -- to the point where even Stalin and Mao, though they were following the siren song of Marxism, idolized Fordist production techniques. Where diplomacy broke down, "war machines" took over. Machine values –– "efficiency" being the principle one – were paramount.

But the past decades have seen a subtle but powerful shift. We are now in the age of "ecotopia," of the "DNA of enterprises," of "ecoparks" replacing industrial estates. A powerful example is the language used regarding cities: the technocratic, machine language of Le Corbusier and Robert Moses has given way to the "ecological urbanism" of people like Wolman, Deleuze, Guattari, and Abriani. "Nature" becomes the blueprint for the city, and the source of rules and underlying cultural validity for social structure: the landscape architect Ian McHarg, for example, asserts that the science of ecology applied to urban design provides "not only an explanation, but also a command" (quoted in Gandy, page 10, Concrete and Clay, an excellent discussion of the interplay of culture, capitalism, and "nature" in New York City). And, of course, with reference to business and environment, the analogy proves more than fertile: "natural capitalism," "industrial ecology," and "business metabolics." Make no mistake: one of the most powerful sources of authority for environmentalism is its alignment with the analogy of the age.

Such analogies are not inherently inappropriate. Like the machine analogy before it, ecology is a useful way to view the world and provokes researchable problems of considerable interest. To what extent, for example, are industries like ecosystems -- and where do they differ? Industrial ecology has proven to be a useful way to begin to model and understand larger-scale industrial flows of material and energy, and has grown to the point where it supports a very competent technical journal and an international society.

The problems arise when the analogy is mistaken for correspondence: when it is assumed that industrial or other human systems are, indeed, ecosystems in drag. That is because human systems are inherently of a different, and higher, order of complexity than natural systems. A salt marsh does not exhibit the self-referential behavior of Manhattan; a corporation is not a rain forest. Unquestionably, if the biological analogy is consciously used as a learning device, it can be very useful. The belief that biological systems are somehow equivalent to cultural and social systems, however, profoundly misunderstands the degrees of complexity of "natural" versus human systems, and can lead to dysfunctional results.

Most importantly, perhaps, it inverts the relationship between the cultural and the "natural," making rational management of environmental perturbations more difficult. "Environment" and "nature" are cultural constructs, ideas that not only embed specific values, but reflect a particular time, place, and culture, and are thus contingent and changing over time. To the extent they are regarded as absolute, higher guides for behavior and social organization, they create the potential for significant cultural conflict and become paths for the introduction of rigid and powerful ideologies into environmental debates, with the usual consequences: unnecessary conflict and lack of progress in addressing major issues.

Fundamental analogies have their uses. But those who use them must always be very careful to remember the simple axiom: the map is not the thing mapped.

-- Brad Allenby

Allenby is Environment, Health and Safety Vice President for AT&T, an adjunct professor at the University of Virginia’s Engineering School and Princeton Theological Seminary, and Batten Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School. The views expressed herein are those of the author, and not any institution with which he is associated.