Welcome to Eco-Protagonist
‘Eco’ comes from the Greek ‘oikos’, meaning ‘home’. It is the root word of both ‘ecology’ and ‘economy’ – concepts that have largely been severed from each other in today’s world.
Ecology = oikos + logos = home + knowledge: Knowledge of our home, of our place, of the living world.
Economy = oikos + nomos = home + management: Our ways of caring for and developing the riches of our home, of our place, of the living world.
Protagonist (also Greek. Thanks, Greece.): A principal character in a story or drama.
To be an eco-protagonist, therefore, is to play a principal role in the ecological and economic dramas unfolding. An eco-protagonist is not a scriptwriter or an overlord. Nor are they a spectator or an impartial onlooker. They are a main character in the story, inextricable from relationships and context.
A local food producer is a good example of an eco-protagonist. A local food producer intimately knows the specific soils and climates of this hillside and that valley. She is sensitive to the movement of the seasons and the stars. She develops relationships with the with the wagtail who sits upon her spade, fliting down to catch the insects she disturbs in her plantings. She sows hedges to build habitat for pest-managers, setting the scene for a family of tailorbirds to move in and weave their own story. She raises children, and meets her community in the local market. In a time of crisis, like a flood or a fire, she provides a lifeline, a meal, and a shoulder to cry on.
These are the threads of local interdependence, of an ecological economy. And through these threads, a network, a locus of power, a culture is woven. Through seemingly mundane things – like our systems of food, fibre, water, and waste – we little humans take part in the drama; in whatever it is that is greater than ourselves.
The modern world forces us to forget this role. A global technological machine of extraction (which we have called “the economy”) picks us out of the fabric of local interdependence, enmeshing us instead in large-scale institutions over which we have no oversight or power. We become dependent on long-distance supply-chains, blind to the consequences of our actions.
In this way, we are transformed from eco-protagonists into a crowd of impotent consumers – C-grade characters, extras on the set. We do not know what ingredients make the products we eat, let alone where they were produced, by whom, and how. We are atomised, disconnected from our neighbours, and thereby ultimately disempowered to make decisions that affect our lives.
The lesson is this: If the economy is centralised and global, it abstracts us from our places, obfuscates our supply-chains, and physically removes us from nature and community. It wrenches us out of the story, displacing us in time and space.
On the other hand, if the economy is one that is place-based, then the feedback loops can be connected, and experiential awareness can inform action. If economic and political power is devolved into human-scale institutions, real people – instead of corporate lobbies – stand a chance of influence. In a local economy, we can see the impact of our livelihoods and consumption, make sound decisions, and use our heads, hearts and hands for good.
Can we switch from a system of blindness and destruction to one of wise oikos-nomos? Here, too, the concept of eco-protagonism comes in, suggesting we have agency in the economic story as well.
We learn that the onwards march of the global techno-economy is “progress” itself; an evolutionary force beyond our control. But the truth is, it’s a man-made structure, and a fragile one at that. With its tendency to wreak havoc, it will inevitably be wracked by a series of crises in the coming years.
As in any good drama, opportunity co-arises with crisis. Will we stand for the top-down implementation an ever more centralised techno-economic infrastructure? Or will we gather in our places, in the cracks of the big system, and build something smaller, wiser, more connected and more grounded?
Will we be characters, or props? Protagonists, or sleepwalkers in dreary supermarket aisles?
The eco-protagonist sees: the decision is ours to make.
In acknowledgement: I first heard the term ‘ecological protagonist’ through the work of Chris Smaje, who is a proponent of a small farm future and agrarian localism. I shortened it to ‘eco-protagonist’ in the same way Helena Norberg-Hodge shortens ecological and economic literacy to ‘eco-literacy’, which she describes as the dual understanding of ecological processes and economic systems which need inform activism for systemic change. My perspective on all these issues is guided by Helena’s work.