Summary
An ecology of change is the idea that social change comes from many kinds of work – protest, organising, building alternatives, inside politics, personal change – which depend on one another like species in an ecosystem. Mark and Paul Engler, authors of ‘This Is an Uprising’, use the phrase: in a healthy one “you have both shorter-term movement uprisings and longer-term organization building”. Carlos Saavedra and Paul Engler developed the related ‘social movement ecology’ framework at the Ayni Institute; Movement Ecology in the UK maps movements similarly.
Its use is diagnostic. Groups tend to dismiss approaches unlike their own; seeing the whole helps them work as complements.
Rationale
Part 1 warns that a field disposed to “individualistic competition” reproduces fragmentation “rather than webs of mutually beneficial coordination”. This is a working answer. Wolfgang Wopperer of Movement Ecology was a studio collaborator.