Now forming on Maui, the Forum for Adaptive Ecology proposes to study the adaptation of urban people to sustainable land-based lifestyles as the most feasible and optimal approach to resolving the global issues of settlement strategy now challenging post industrial man. Simultaneously charged with the ethical mission of relieving world poverty, the Forum advocates access to sustainable subsistence homestead lifestyles for the disenfranchised and landless poor and otherwise disadvantaged working-class grass-roots people as the obvious democratic and peaceable solution to the atavistic delusions, beliefs and institutions that support currently and historically perverse tradition of private property in land. Second only to advancing land-based, homestead lifestyle as the paradigm for post-industrial settlement, the Forum for Adaptive Ecology proposes a curriculum of study intended to prepare city-living people for sustainable or ecological homesteading.
Opening with a series of six two-hour learning seminars at Kolealea Farm in Haiku, Maui, the Forum invites you to participate in, ongoing open discussion, in person or on line at www.adaptiveecology.org or by e-mail at http://www.adeco09@gmail.com
So, Why Adaptive Ecology?
As the science of life, biology objectively defines the organic processes and describes the properties and diversity of plants and animals. Ecology, as a branch of biology, defines the perceived adaptive interactions of organisms with each other and with the environment; which implies interaction with themselves as individuals, with each other, as conspecifics, other species as codependents, and with the abiotic or physical environment; which, taken all together, amounts to interaction of the individual with what we think of as nature. In full recognition of the biologically determined needs of animals, adaptive ecology proposes to study the question: what do animals want? Construed as animal nature or animal intelligence, the subjective, needs and wants of individual animals determine their behavior. By observing the behavior of free-living animals we are rationally permitted to infer their emotional states and intentions.
The study of animal behavior opened up by this subjective/adaptive point of view or what we might begin to identify as the ecological point of view, may be correctly regarded as the field for a science of living; literally translating ecology from an objective science in which the observer stands outside of the environment looking in at the unsuspecting subject organism, to a subjective science, focusing the organism itself as the inside observer of its own systemic needs, symbiotic/altruistic inspirations and sentiments, adaptive imperatives and interactive lifestyle, all within the ecologically cogent and verifiable context of own its own animal nature, in fact, as the focus of self-consciousness, scientific attention and on-the-ground living.
Recognizing ecology as the science of living, furthermore, authorizes the individual to invest his on-the-ground biological needs and wants with ethical implications thus incurring personal autonomy and accountability for his behavior in nature. In the case of Homo sapiens, and, perhaps, to a lesser degree with the pre-human intelligence of other highly evolved species, adaptive ecology assumes specific significance in bringing ethically charged values, ideals, attitudes, appetites, expectations, fantasies hopes and fears into a rational perspective that allows for scientific treatment. Orchestrated as empirical parameters of adaptive and reproductive fitness, these ethically engaged scruples become definitive; constituents, constants and principles of human and animal nature, behavior and culture which, for purposes of further analysis can be conveniently studied as the adaptive instincts or imperatives. So, to return to the crucial question: What do all animals, simply by being alive and self-conscious, if not completely self-aware organisms need and want? For these are precisely the terms and conditions that we need to formulate as the theoretical principles and empirical processes of a science of living, or a sturdy individuative/adaptive ecology.
Animals want to experience well-being as a lifelong and secure condition of living. Prompted by their adaptive instincts, animals seek to optimize conditions of health, learning, peace and love as the working parameters of well-being. At the level of the individual animal, well-being can be summed up simply as the feeling that things fall together, life is good, nature works. Throughout the phylogenetic spectrum, ethical parameters of living constitute what we may define as the terms and conditions through, and by which the individual animal acts and interacts ecologically. Considered as animal nature, then, these ethical values define the goals, needs and wants of individual animals; animals strive to optimize health, learning, peace and love as necessary conditions of ecological living. On the basis of the above analysis, adaptive ecology claims credibility as a scientifically grounded metaphor for working to make the world a better place to live.
Adaptive Ecology 
