This timely collection of essays by leading international scholars across religious studies and the environmental humanities advances a lively discussion on materialism in its many forms. While there is little agreement on what 'materialism' means, it is evident that there is a resurgence in thinking about matter in more animated and active ways. The volume explores how debates concerning the new materialisms impinge on religious traditions and the extent to which religions, with their material culture and beliefs in the Divine (...) within the material, can make a creative contribution to debates about ecological materialisms. Spanning a broad range of themes, including politics, architecture, hermeneutics, literature, and religion, the book brings together a series of discussions on materialism in the context of diverse methodologies and approaches. The volume investigates a range of issues including space and place, hierarchy and relationality, the relationship between nature and society, human and other agencies, and worldviews and cultural values. Drawing on literary and critical theory, and queer, philosophical, theological and social theoretical approaches, this ground-breaking book will make an important contribution to the environmental humanities. It will be a key read for postgraduate students, researchers and scholars in religious studies, cultural anthropology, literary studies, philosophy and environmental studies. (shrink)

Haraway foregrounds many stories that we, in a late capitalist era, tell ourselves in order to justify, or not even notice, actions that are harmful to all living things. While I am mindful of Haraway’s excellent attention to the ways that ‘stories tell stories, thoughts think thoughts, and knots knot knots,’ I argue that we must take great care when we, as educators, blur the lines between facts and fiction; reality and art. When everything becomes a story—with some stories simply (...) being more compelling than other stories—we run the risk of contributing to the very sense of unmooring that has led us to the status quo where arctic icecaps are melting, living things are becoming extinct, and humans are suffering from man-made pollution. In this paper, I trouble the use of stories to draw attention to the ecological harm we have done to our earth. While stories can be powerful, there are risks associated with how we tell stories; and particular risks when we blur the lines between critical storytelling and the idea of something as ‘factual’. Storytelling, and blurring the lines between stories and facts, can have negative implications for our quest to generate a sense of ‘response-ability’ for our planet and all who live on it. In order to make that argument, I first talk about my own story and the ways that I have used stories in the classroom. I then touch on Haraway and her particular use of stories. I then foreground the practice of telling truths with stories by exploring the use of critical fiction and narrative inquiry. I conclude with implications for pedagogy. (shrink)

The present collection takes stock of posthumanism and its theoretical development and impact in the field of Anglophone literary and cultural studies, with a particular focus on its role in education and the practice of teaching English. Posthumanism informs work in environmental or ecological criticism, climate change research, or human-animal studies - and poses an educational challenge since it also affects curricular and pedagogic theory and practice. Moreover, humanist idea(l)s of subject formation and individually acquired competences have a (...) direct bearing on conceptions of education. This is why the volume interrogates the potentials and pitfalls of posthumanist pedagogies and its connections with digitization, multiliteracies, non-European and non-anthropocentric thinking, and the role of literature pedagogy more generally, presenting case studies of teaching the posthuman from primary to tertiary levels. (shrink)

In this volume C.A. (Chet) Bowers, whose pioneering work on education and environmental and sustainability issues is widely recognized and respected around the world, brings together a carefully curated selection of his seminal work on the ideological, cultural, and linguistic roots of the ecological crisis; misconceptions underlying modern consciousness; the cultural commons; a critique of technology; and educational reforms to address these pressing concerns. In the World Library of Educationalists, international scholars themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to (...) be their finest pieces - extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and/practical contributions - so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands of their work and see their contribution to the development of a field, as well as the development of the field itself. Contributors to the series include : Michael Apple, James A. Banks, Joel Spring, William F. Pinar, Stephen J. Ball, Elliot Eisner, Howard Gardner, John Gilbert, Ivor F. Goodson, Peter Jarvis. (shrink)

With the release of Laudato Si (2015) Pope Francis has introduced new conceptual language into Catholic social teaching (CST), what he has called "integral ecology." His intent appears to be grounded in the realization that "It is essential to seek comprehensive solutions which consider the interactions with natural systems themselves and with social systems" (LS, no. CXXXVIII). Pope Francis goes on to make the case that ''We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other (...) social, but rather with one complex crisis with isboth social and environmental" (LS, no. CXXXVIII). Consequently, in order to solve this crisis we need to utilize "an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time pro­ tecting nature" (LS, no. CXXXVlll). This perspective represents a major development in CST whereby the encyclical connects the dots between ecology/environment, economics and society, three essential aspects of what many in the environmental community and elsewhere see as in­ dispensable for humanity to achieve a sustainable relationship with the Earth. While this is extremely important for articulating a Catholic vision of sustainability, that is not the direction we take in this article. Rather our intent is to use the concept of integral ecology to do three things:(1) examine a current case in the U.S. that has received signif­ icant media attention as well as notoriety-the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; (2) describe how our recent understanding of the epigenetic impacts of environmental toxins casts a new and ominous light on this crisis and on other instances of environmental toxin exposure, and (3) propose some ideas on how epigenetic research might enlarge our in­ terpretation of basic aspects of CST highlighted in Laudato Si such as human dignity, justice and the common good. (shrink)

In recent years official Roman Catholic documents have addressed the ecological crisis from the perspective of Catholic social teaching. This expansion of Catholic social thought addresses the social and ecological question. This paper links environmental and human ecology with the concept of sustainability and proposes an interpretation of the common good and a definition of sustainability within Catholic social teaching. Our treatment of sustainability and Catholic social teaching includes: an analysis of the ecological processes that (...) sustain nature; insights from human ecology, and an examination of models of sustainability as a foundation for re-structuring society to promote the common good. The paper provides a summary of the historical expansion of the common good within modern Catholic social thought, and concludes with an ecological interpretation of the common good and a definition of sustainability within the Catholic understanding of justice. (shrink)

Human ecology - the study and practice of relationships between the natural and the social environment - has gained prominence as scholars seek more effectively to engage with pressing global concerns. In the past seventy years most human ecology has skirted the fringes of geography, sociology and biology. This volume pioneers radical new directions. In particular, it explores the power of indigenous and traditional peoples' epistemologies both to critique and to complement insights from modernity and (...) postmodernity. (shrink)

In this special issue of Human Nature we explore the possible adaptive links between teaching and learning during childhood, and we aim to expand the dialogue on the ways in which the social sciences, and in particular current anthropological research, may better inform our shifting understanding of how these processes vary in different social and ecological environments. Despite the cross-disciplinary trend toward incorporating more behavioral and cognitive data outside of postindustrial state societies, much of the published cross-cultural data (...) is presented as stand-alone population-level studies, making it challenging to extrapolate trends or incorporate both ecological and developmental perspectives. Here, contributors explore how human life history, ecological experience, cumulative culture, and ethnolinguistics impact social learning and child development in foraging and transitioning societies around the world. Using historical ethnographic data and qualitative and quantitative data from studies with contemporary populations, authors interrogate the array of factors that likely interact with cognitive development and learning. They provide contributions that explore the unique environmental, social, and cultural conditions that characterize such populations, offering key insights into processes of social learning, adaptive learning responses, and culture change. This series of articles demonstrates that children are taught culturally and environmentally salient skills in myriad ways, ranging from institutionalized instruction to brief, nuanced, and indirect instruction. Our hope is that this collection stimulates more research on the evolutionary and developmental implications associated with teaching and learning among humans. (shrink)

Answering the call of the Second Vatican Council for moral theology to 'draw more fully on the teaching of Holy Scripture,' the authors examine the virtues that both flow from Scripture and provide a lens by which to interpret Scripture. By remaining true to both the New Testament's emphasis on the human response to God's gracious activity in Jesus Christ and to the ethical needs and desires of Christians in the twenty-first century, the authors address key topics such (...) as discipleship, the Sermon on the Mount, love, sin, politics, justice, sexuality, marriage, divorce, bioethics, and ecology. (shrink)

Many recent evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology studies have tested hypotheses by examining correlations between variables measured at a group level (e.g., state, country, continent). In such analyses, variables collected for each aggregation are often taken to be representative of the individuals present within them, and relationships between such variables are presumed to reflect individual-level processes. There are multiple reasons to exercise caution when doing so, including: (1) the ecological fallacy, whereby relationships observed at the aggregate level (...) do not accurately represent individual-level processes; (2) non-independence of data points, which violates assumptions of the inferential techniques used in null hypothesis testing; and (3) cross-cultural non-equivalence of measurement (differences in construct validity between groups). We provide examples of how each of these gives rise to problems in the context of testing evolutionary hypotheses about human behavior, and we offer some suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Umwelt theory is an expression of von Uexküll’s subjective biology and as such usually applied in analysis of individual animals, yet it is fundamentally relational and therefore also suitable for analysis of more complex wholes. Since the birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s, there has been growing scientific and political acknowledgement of there being a global environmental crisis, which today manifests itself as a climate change and biodiversity crisis. This calls for a multi-scale ecosemiotic approach to analysis (...) of human ecology at various levels and scales. In this article I explore to what extent ecosemiotic methodology, drawing on Umwelt theory and its consistently subjective perspective, can be applied in analysis of human ecology at different geographical and ecological scales ranging from the global to the local. The article incorporates a case study of human–animal relations in Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in the Central Amazon. This is a seasonal floodplain forest area surrounded by rivers. I investigate aspects of the living conditions and ecology of the reserve, with a main focus on indigenous communities and the circumstances of two primate species, namely the red howler monkey and the black-headed squirrel monkey. I outline matrixes of levels of study in ecosemiotics, and scales in human ecology, and apply two scales to the Mamirauá case. These take an individual animal’s and an individual human being’s subjective experience as their respectively starting points. This allows for multi-scale studies of human ecology from complementary angles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 222-228 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds. Edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryuken Williams. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997. 467 pp. As Mary Evelyn Tucker's foreword explains, this book is part of a series of conferences and publications exploring the relationship between (...) religion and ecology initiated by the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. The volume is divided into several sections. In the first section, "Overview: Framing the Issues," Lewis Lancaster provides an excellent overview of the important role of religion in relation to ecology in "Buddhism and Ecology: Collective Cultural Perceptions." In addition, he discusses some of the promise and pitfalls of interpreting Buddhism to ascertain its perspectives on nature, the human/nature relationship, and so forth.The first substantive section, "Theravada Buddhism and Ecology," has a focus on Thailand, with essays by Donald Swearer on Thai Buddhist perspectives on nature, and Leslie Sponsel and Poranee Natadecha-Sponsel, entitled "Theoretical Analysis of the Potential Contribution of the Monastic Community in Promoting a Green Society in Thailand." Swearer describes the approaches of two preeminent Thai Buddhist monk scholars and activists, Bhikkhu Buddhadasa and Phra Prayudh Payutto, concluding that these two offer distinct but similarly proenvironmental interpretations of Buddha dharma.The Sponsels' essay is less persuasive. Their thesis is that "the local monastic communities of Thailand have the potential to serve as working models of a green society and that some actually do" (48). The evidence they offer is that "by drawing on the environmental wisdom of the dharma, by serving as a model of a green society, and through the power afforded by their liminal status, local monastic communities have significant potential to contribute to the environmental awareness, information, and ethics of the populace" (Sponsel and Sponsel 53). Since the monastic environment is comprised predominantly of males, however, what contribution do women make to these goals, and how do they become educated into environmental awareness? The authors do acknowledge the gender discrimination of the sangha and recognize both that "one of the concomitants of a green society is gender equity" as well as that the gender bias of the sangha and society in Thailand need to change if a green society is to be realized in Thailand (56). However, assuming that women are equal contributors to environmental destruction as well as the potential for rehabilitation, it would seem to be important to use vehicles for environmental education that provide access to females as well as males, rather than monastic institutions composed exclusively of males (at least the formally recognized ones).However, the Sponsels see the greatest obstacle to the attainment of a green society in Thailand to be "the disparity between Buddhist ideals and teachings, on the one hand, and the actual practices of Buddhists, on the other" (56). The authors note that in reality, Thailand is increasingly becoming an environmental disaster rather [End Page 222] than an ecotopia. Although the authors contend that Buddhism is one of the most important resources for resolving environmental problems in Thailand because of its ability to "penetrate to the very roots of the problems and to find lasting solutions rather than merely treat superficial symptoms and single issues," they have failed to describe what these principles are in any detail other than the doctrine of interdependent origination and care for all sentient beings, as well as failing to demonstrate specifically how monks actually provide an example of a green society. Thus, their "hypotheses" remain largely unproven and unsupported.The third section of the volume, "Mahayana Buddhism and Ecology," focuses on Japan. Paul O. Ingram's essay, "The Jeweled Net of Nature," supports the thesis that Shingon (esoteric) Buddhism, especially that of the Japanese monk and scholar Kukai, offer resources for resolving the environmental crisis (as Graham Parkes also does in a later essay in this section). Beginning from the premise that the dualistic, hierarchical, atomizing, androcentric, and sexist characteristics of Western monotheistic religion and... (shrink)

Food systems are influenced by discourses held by individuals and institutions. Market oriented food security and food sovereignty are frequently presented as co-existing discourses in food systems. This paper documents how smallholder farmers embody market food security and food sovereignty discourses in their agricultural practices, and how these discourses prevent new forms of agriculture from developing given socio-political and institutional rigidity. A human ecology systems framework is used to analyse semi-structured interviews with 39 coconut producing smallholder farmers from (...) Leyte, The Philippines. The results document how smallholders perceive market food security discourse as the main way out of food insecure situations, and thus continue to seek institutional support for maintaining a coconut based agricultural system. Farmers also perceive elements of the food sovereignty discourse, notably decision-making agency and agricultural diversification, as parallel strategies to improve their food security. The ongoing support for coconut production and inequitable access to training and knowledge in rural systems traps farmers into an agricultural system influenced by a long history of colonial institutions and social structures. The paper demonstrates that farmers are aware of the interventions required to diversify food systems towards higher value commodities, yet sovereignty is unlikely to be enabled due to maladaptive institutions and the associated access to new training and extension opportunities. The use of human ecology advances food scholarship through embedding a systems analysis into qualitative studies to reveal the influence of food discourses on food systems’ behaviour and outcomes. (shrink)

Figurativity has attracted scholars' attention for thousands of years and yet there are still open questions concerning its nature. Figurativity and Human Ecology endorses a view of figurativity as ubiquitous in human reasoning and language, and as a key example of how a human organism and its perceived or imagined environment co-function as a system. The volume sees figurativity not only as embedded in an environment but also as a way of acting within that environment. It (...) places figurativity within an ecological context, and approaches it as a phenomenon which cuts across bodily, psychological, linguistic, social, cultural and natural environments. Figurativity and Human Ecology will appeal to those interested in the analysis of the all-encompassing creativity of the human mind and in the methodological difficulties associated with the study of cognition. (shrink)

Take part... and you will bear witness to the semiotic nature of human animals. This event, commented by Charbel Niño El-Hani (Federal University of Bahia) and chaired by Elma Berisha (Lyceum Institute), is part of the activities of the 2022 International Open Seminar on Semiotics: a Tribute to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing, cooperatively organized by the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, the Lyceum Institute, (...) the Deely Project, Saint Vincent College, the Iranian Society for Phenomenology at the Iranian Political Science Association, the International Association for Semiotics of Space and Time, the Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Semiotic Society of America, the American Maritain Association, the International Association for Semiotic Studies, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, the International Center for Semiotics and Intercultural Dialogue, Moscow State Academic University for the Humanities and the Mansarda Acesa with the support of the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the Government of Portugal under the UID/FIL/00010/2020 project. *** Jamin Pelkey is Associate Professor and Program Director in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Ryerson University, Toronto, where he is also an active faculty member in the Ryerson-York graduate program in Communication & Culture. He serves as Co-Editor of Semiotica, Vice President of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics, and executive board member for the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, and the Semiotic Society of America. Jamin’s research explores semiotic dimensions of language evolution and embodied cognition. He is the recipient of the 2017 Mouton d’Or Award for best article in Semiotica and has edited or co-edited twelve collections in linguistics, anthropology, and semiotics, including Tropological Thought and Action (2022), Cognitive Semiotics (2019), Applied Brand Semiotics (2018), Archaeology of Concepts (2018), Sociohistorical Linguistics in Southeast Asia (2017), Virtual Identities (2016), and The Semiotics of Paradox (2015). His authored books include Dialectology as Dialectic (2011) and The Semiotics of X (2017). He is currently editing Bloomsbury Semiotics, a major reference work in four volumes. *** Charbel N. El-Hani is full professor in the Institute of Biology, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. Coordinator of the LEFHBio - History, Philosophy, and Biology Teaching Lab and the INCT IN-TREE - National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution. Between January 2020 and July 2021, he was visiting researcher at the CES - Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He works in the areas of philosophy of biology, ecology, ethnobiology and science education research. *** Homepage: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s Auditorium: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s/auditorium *** Technical support assured by Robert Junqueira. The cover image for the video was designed by Zahra Soltani. (shrink)

Singularizing progressive time bounds pasts, presents, and futures to cause-effect chains overdetermining existence in education and social life more broadly. Indigenous Futures and Learnings Taking Place disrupts the common sense of "futures" in education or "knowledge for the future" by examining the multiplicity of possible destinies in coexistent experiences of living and learning. Taking place is the intention this book has to embody and word multiplicity across the landscapes that sustain life. The book contends that Indigenous perspectives open spaces for (...) new forms of sociality and relationships with knowledge, time, and landscapes. Through Goanna walking and caring for Country; conjuring encounters between forests, humans, and the more-than-human; dreams, dream literacies, and planes of existence; the spirit realm taking place; ancestral luchas; Musquem Land pedagogies; and resoluteness and gratitude for atunhetsla/the spirit within, the chapters in the collection become politicocultural and (hi)storical statements challenging the singular order of the future towards multiple encounters of all that is to come. In doing so, Indigenous Futures and Learnings Taking Place offers various points of departure to (hi)story educational futures more responsive to the multiplicities of lives in what has not yet become. The contributors in this volume are Indigenous women, women of Indigenous backgrounds, Black, Red, and Brown women, and women whose scholarship is committed to Indigenous matters across spaces and times. Their work in the chapters often defies prescriptions of academic conventions, and at times occupies them to enunciate ontologies of the not yet. As people historically fabricated "women," their scholarly production critically intervenes on time to break teleological education that births patriarchal-ized and master-ized forms of living. What emerges are presences that undiscipline education and educationalized social life breaking futures out of time. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Indigenous studies, future studies, post-colonial studies in education, settler colonialism and coloniality, diversity and multiculturalism in education, and international comparative education. (shrink)

In _Ecological Ethics and the Human Soul: Aquinas, Whitehead, and the Metaphysics of Value_, Francisco J. Benzoni addresses the pervasive and destructive view that there is a moral gulf between human beings and other creatures. Thomas Aquinas, whose metaphysics entails such a moral gulf, holds that human beings are ultimately separate from nature. Alfred North Whitehead, in contrast, maintains that human beings are continuous with the rest of nature. These different metaphysical systems demand different ethical stances (...) toward creation. Benzoni analyzes and challenges Thomas's understanding of the human soul, his primary justification for the moral separation, arguing that it is finally philosophically untenable. The author finds promising the alternative metaphysics of Whitehead, for whom human beings are a part of nature—even if the highest part; all creatures have a degree of subjectivity and creativity, and thus all have intrinsic value and moral worth, independent of subjective human valuation. Further, though there is difference, there is no moral gulf between God and the world. God is truly affected by the experience of creatures. Benzoni argues that if this vision of moral worth is articulated with sufficient force and clarity, it could help heal the human relation to our planet. “Eminently clear in concept and analysis, profound in insight, and precise in reasoning, this book not only contributes a distinguished study of Aquinas but also reshapes contemporary ecological ethics by relating it to basic issues of metaphysics. Both subsequent moral theory attentive to Aquinas and subsequent formulations of ecological ethics will be incomplete without taking account of Benzoni's argument.” —_Franklin I. Gamwell, Shailer Mathews Distinguished Service Professor of Religious Ethics, the Philosophy of Religion, and Theology, The University of Chicago Divinity School_ “In the introduction and conclusion, Francisco Benzoni makes clear the broader significance of this work for the field of ecological ethics and the future well-being of the human species on this earth. One can learn a great deal about the philosophy of both Aquinas and Whitehead in working through these pages.” —_Joseph Bracken, Xavier University _. (shrink)

Answering the call of the Second Vatican Council for moral theology to 'draw more fully on the teaching of Holy Scripture,' the authors examine the virtues that both flow from Scripture and provide a lens by which to interpret Scripture. By remaining true to both the New Testament's emphasis on the human response to God's gracious activity in Jesus Christ and to the ethical needs and desires of Christians in the twenty-first century, the authors address key topics such (...) as discipleship, the Sermon on the Mount, love, sin, politics, justice, sexuality, marriage, divorce, bioethics, and ecology. (shrink)

Environmental problems do have a universal dimension: they concern entire humanity as well as each human being individually, therefore, a new ecology needs to be developed in which man will play a principal role being a focal point of the study, its creator and executor of its assumptions, the discipline thus understood is one of the aspects of general ecology for it studies relationships between man as a species and its environment, the author believes that, regardless (...) of the standpoint that representatives of various sciences may take, the future of our species depends on the interdisciplinary approach toward the questions that are subject to human ecology studies. (shrink)

Climate change has been called both a ‘slow emergency’ and an ‘urgent crisis’, it creates tensions between human and non-human temporalities, it asks some communities to ‘speed up’ and demands others slow down, and requires choices between present needs, historical responsibilities and future consequences. If students are to understand and confront climate (in)justice, then a ‘temporal imagination’ (Adam, 1998) is required that is alert to the ways that time is central to the politics of a warming world. This (...) paper therefore explores how ‘teaching time’ can support the awareness of and attention to (in)justice. The paper discusses the limits of current approaches to teaching time in education and explores a range of practices for developing ‘temporal attunement’ (Jensen, 2023) that can be found in public arts, Indigenous education, educational philosophy, futures studies and decolonial praxis. It maps out five temporal educational practices of: relational time; rhythm; anticipation and reparation; temporal suspension; and critical time keeping. It argues that these practices can be put into dialogue as a basis for a ‘temporal pedagogy’ that comprises three moves: interruption (of habitual and dominant temporal frames and their production of injustice), attention (to the latent, situated, plural timings and rhythms of the situation), and encounter (through invitations to judgement about the temporal practices that should govern more just collective action in response to climate change). It concludes by working through an example of how such a pedagogy might be deployed to negotiate the conflicting temporalities of socio-ecological change. (shrink)

Introduction. Artificial intelligence is a trend of NBIC-convergence and information technologies in particular. Since the 70s of the 20th century it has been a subject of intense debate in the scientific community. A direct indicator of the importance of the topic is the publication dynamics and the annual increase in the number of indexed articles. According to the statistics, Western social sciences are in the top five industry leaders. The purpose of the study is to analyze the Scopus database (...) and identify the key mythologems of the scientific discourse of social sciences (in the field of artificial intelligence). The latter go beyond the boundaries of research norms and standards and express non-reflective research intentions. Methods. The reference base of scientific arti- cles includes works published during the decade (2010—2020). Methods for detecting verbal mark- ers and content analysis were used. At the same time, the emphasis was mainly placed not on quan- titative, but on qualitative analytics as well. The basis for the choice of markers was the frequency of their use in abstracts (abstracts), headings (titles) and keywords. The selection of verbal markers was made in accordance with two conditionally desig- nated categories: «trends», or frequency engineering, technical and social and humanitarian terms, expressing the direction of research practic- es and «mythologemes», or elements of a second- ary semiotic system. Scientific novelty of the study. Scientific novelty is due to the specification of the research subject. In the West, the direction of the so-called «Tech- nological mythology», which focuses mainly on the discourses of art and ideological documents is being developed. The analytics of scientific content makes it possible to remove the existing research limitations of the subject and identify prospects for further study of modern mythology. Content analysis made it possible to identify some extreme- ly general formulations of technological mythologe- mes, which can be refined and concretized. Results. Following the results of the study, a de- scription of three metatrends was made — techno- logical, social and anthropological. All key directions within the boundaries of each trend are listed. At the same time, it is argued that the anthropotrend has a relatively smaller share in the discourse of Western social sciences. As a debatable aspect of the study, five scientific mythologemes were iden- tified and conditionally designated. Interpretations and characteristic examples of the functioning of each are offered. Conclusion. The technological trend is constituted by the data of technical sciences and engineering developments with a social orientation. Sociotrend is determined by the spectrum of technology application areas. The conclusion is made about the diffusion of two trends and the discourses serving these trends. Discursively, the technotrend serves to construct a strictly scientific discourse based not on abstract, but on specific and precise proposi- tions. Particular attention is paid to the discursive mainstream of «smartization», which is characteris- tic of the scientific content of the second decade of the 21st century. Emphasis is placed on the anthro- pological risks of extrapolating «smartization» to specialized practices. (shrink)

Singularizing progressive time bounds pasts, presents, and futures to cause-effect chains overdetermining existence in education and social life more broadly. Indigenous Futures and Learnings Taking Place disrupts the common sense of "futures" in education or "knowledge for the future" by examining the multiplicity of possible destinies in coexistent experiences of living and learning. Taking place is the intention this book has to embody and word multiplicity across the landscapes that sustain life. The book contends that Indigenous perspectives open spaces for (...) new forms of sociality and relationships with knowledge, time, and landscapes. Through Goanna walking and caring for Country; conjuring encounters between forests, humans, and the more-than-human; dreams, dream literacies, and planes of existence; the spirit realm taking place; ancestral luchas; Musquem Land pedagogies; and resoluteness and gratitude for atunhetsla/the spirit within, the chapters in the collection become politicocultural and (hi)storical statements challenging the singular order of the future towards multiple encounters of all that is to come. In doing so, Indigenous Futures and Learnings Taking Place offers various points of departure to (hi)story educational futures more responsive to the multiplicities of lives in what has not yet become. The contributors in this volume are Indigenous women, women of Indigenous backgrounds, Black, Red, and Brown women, and women whose scholarship is committed to Indigenous matters across spaces and times. Their work in the chapters often defies prescriptions of academic conventions, and at times occupies them to enunciate ontologies of the not yet. As people historically fabricated "women," their scholarly production critically intervenes on time to break teleological education that births patriarchal-ized and master-ized forms of living. What emerges are presences that undiscipline education and educationalized social life breaking futures out of time. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Indigenous studies, future studies, post-colonial studies in education, settler colonialism and coloniality, diversity and multiculturalism in education, and international comparative education. (shrink)

The human species is more reliant on cultural adaptation than any other species, but it is unclear how observational learning can give rise to the faithful transmission of cultural adaptations. One possibility is that teaching facilitates accurate social transmission by narrowing the range of inferences that learners make. However, there is wide disagreement about how to define teaching, and how to interpret the empirical evidence for teaching across cultures and species. In this article I argue that (...) disputes about the nature and prevalence of teaching across human societies and nonhuman animals are based on a number of deep-rooted theoretical differences between fields, as well as on important differences in how teaching is defined. To reconcile these disparate bodies of research, I review the three major approaches to the study of teaching – mentalistic, culture-based, and functionalist – and outline the research questions about teaching that each addresses. I then argue for a new, integrated framework that differentiates between teaching types according to the specific adaptive problems that each type solves, and apply this framework to restructure current empirical evidence on teaching in humans and nonhuman animals. This integrative framework generates novel insights, with broad implications for the study of the evolution of teaching, including the roles of cognitive constraints and cooperative dilemmas in how and when teaching evolves. Finally, I propose an explanation for why some types of teaching are uniquely human, and discuss new directions for research motivated by this framework. (shrink)

Advanced technologies such as drones, intelligent algorithms and androids have grave implications for human existence. With the purpose of exploring their basis for doing so, the paper proposes a framework for investigating the complex relationship between such devices and human practices and language-mediated cognition. Specifically, it centers on the importance of the typically neglected intermediate layer of culture which not only drives both technophobia and philia but also, more fundamentally, connects pre-reflective experience and socio-material practices by placing advanced (...) technologies in the loop. Theoretically, the paper draws on contributions from performativist Science and Technology Studies and Radically Embodied Cognitive Science and pushes new grounds by stressing their compatibility. Yet, it also emphasizes the importance of the enlanguaged side of cognition which is a requirement for human-style socio-material practices and, hence, the emergence of cultures that fetishizes certain technologies. (shrink)

Ecology, Culture And Philosophy Is An Important Collection Of Essays That Illustrate The Continuing Validity And Relevance Of The System Of Metaphysics Developed By Basanta Kumar Mallik, One Of The Great 20Th Century Indian Thinkers. One Of The Contributors Unravels Issues In Ecology, And Discusses How Radically New Ways Of Thinking Can Offer A Way Out Of The Crisis Of The Modern Industrial System Which Threatens The Survival Of The Human Species. Another Study Attempts To See (...) The Conjection Of Musical Development And Cultural Values In Relation To Both Tradition And Modern Human Experience. Yet Another Essay Examines The Domain Of Philosophical Enquiry And Develops A New Perspective On The Relationship Between Ideas And Patterns Of Thought. Central Of Mallik S Thinking Were Problems Of Peace And Human Survival. This Collection Focuses On The New Weltanschauung Of Mallik And Makes His Philosophical Work Accessible To The General Reader By Providing Explications Of Key Concepts. Drawing On Mallik S Wider Vision Of A More Humane Future, The Contributors Consider Fresh And More Harmonious Ways Of Thinking About How We Can Relate To Our Environment, And How We Can Creatively Overcome The Threats To Cultural Values. The Result Is A Volume Which Makes Us See Our Current Crisis Against A Horizon Of Possibilities Ensuring Human Survival If New Ways Of Thinking Can Be Come Prevalent. (shrink)

What does it mean to teach, live, and imagine one’s futures amidst a global pandemic? How to respond to the reality of unequal and overlapping crises, COVID-19 being one of them? Can alternative understandings of time help us create a more just post-pandemic university? Drawing on environmental humanities, disaster and critical time studies, in conversation with qualitative data, this article theorizes a ‘pedagogy of scale’: a practical and conceptual centering on multiple temporalities and diverse interpretative frames. The analysis argues for (...) the need to attend to overlapping, non-linear, and changeable scales of time, reference, and meaning that students draw on in order to make sense of crises: every crisis, even as unprecedented as COVID-19, is embedded in environmental processes, long-term vulnerabilities and injustices. These overlooked and overlapping scales interweave personal, planetary, and theological notions of time—from ecological deep time to the divine time—meaning, and self. In its focus on asynchronicity, overlap and multiplicity, the analysis extends current theorizations of temporality and crisis in higher education, challenges paradigms of mastery, advocates for epistemic plurality, and embraces decolonial notions of human subjectivity, providing a much-needed critical model for the post-pandemic university. (shrink)

Taking the Heideggerian critical ontology of technology as its base, this volume looks at postcolonial modernization and development in the global south as the worldwide expansion of the western metaphysical understanding of reality. We live today in an increasingly globalizing technological society that Martin Heidegger described in the middle of the last century as 'the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man.' Consequent upon this cultural-intellectual globalization, the ahistorical, violent, individualistic, calculative and capitalistic logic of the metaphysics of technology is permeating (...) the life-world, even of the world's poorest peoples, in ways they could neither choose nor control. This volume questions the political ethics and justice of post-war development discourse in the light of the egalitarian aims of modern societies, cultural freedom of communities and nations, and the ecological limits of the planet. The final chapters discuss the alternative proposal of development as various conceptions of good life and equitable human flourishing amidst equally flourishing non-human life and non-living beings. This unique volume is the first book-length treatment of the ontology of modernization and development in the global south from a Heideggerian stance. (shrink)

Language plays a central role in human life. However, the term 'language' as defined in the language sciences of the 20th century and the traditions these have drawn on, have arguably, limited our thinking about what language is and does. The two inter-linked volumes of Thibault's study articulate crucially important aspects of an emerging new perspective shift on language - the Distributed Language view - that is now receiving more and more attention internationally. Rejecting the classical view that (...) the fundamental architecture of language can be localized as a number of inter-related levels of formal linguistic organization that function as the coded inputs and outputs to each other, the distributed language view argues that languaging behaviour is a bio-cultural organisation of process that is embodied, multimodal, and integrated across multiple space-time scales. Thibault argues that we need to think of human languaging as the distinctively human mode of our becoming and being selves in the extended human ecology and the kinds of experiencing that this makes possible. Paradoxically, this also means thinking about language in non-linguistic ways that break the grip of the conventional meta-languages for thinking about human languaging. Thibault's book grounds languaging in process theory: languaging and the forms of experience it actualizes is always an event, not a thing that we 'use'. In taking a distinctively interdisciplinary approach, the book relates dialogical theories of human sense-making to the distributed view of human cognition, to recent thinking about distributed language, to ecological psychology, and to languaging as inter-individual affective dynamics grounded in the subjective lives of selves. In taking this approach, the book considers the coordination of selves in social encounters, the emergent forms of self-reflexivity that characterise these encounters, and the implications for how we think of and live our human sociality, not as something that is mediated by over-arching codes and systems, but as emerging from the endogenous subjectivities of selves when they seek to coordinate with other selves and with the situations, artefacts, social institutions, and technologies that populate the extended human ecology. The two volumes aim to bring our understanding of human languaging closer to human embodiment, experience, and feeling while also showing how languaging enables humans to transcend local circumstances and thus to dialogue with cultural tradition. Volume 1 focuses on the shorter timescales of bodily dynamics in languaging activity. Volume II integrates the shorter timescales of body dynamics to the longer cultural-historical timescales of the linguistic and cultural norms and patterns to which bodily dynamics are integrated. (shrink)

Environment is essentially in the category of culture and environmental research should be based on human value and culture. The study of the relationship between humans and their natural environment should also refer to human relations. Since the operational logic of social capital is the root of ecological crisis, the ultimate solution to this problem lies in human’s correct thinking, institutional, political and behavioral patterns in dealing with nature. Re-establishing human ecology therefore provides a (...) cultural basis for the harmony between human and nature and realistic basis for the psycho-physical harmony and spiritualization of humans. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology ed. by John HartDannis M. MattesonThe Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology Edited by John Hart OXFORD: JOHN WILEY & SONS LTD, 2017. 560 pp. $195.00If ecology is the study of "relationships in a place," as John Hart reminds readers in the preface of the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology, it is (...) fitting that this volume centers its thrust relationally (xxiv). Throughout its pages, a diverse community of authors explores the relationships among religious and spiritual traditions, human life, and care for the Earth. Defining religion as a language with which to grapple with meanings assigned to cultural values (xxi), this volume turns to the meanings that humans have historically placed on their relationship to the Earth within spiritual and religious frameworks. It further ponders how our religions and spiritual traditions reflect a relationship to the Earth that is conscious of the status of our planet's health today. Offering insights from Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Eastern and Western Christianity, and indigenous perspectives, the authors reflect on new and old insights from within their tradition that speak to specific ecological issues. The volume is split into four parts, flowing thematically from conceptual and descriptive, to concrete visions for practical steps toward healing the Earth. [End Page 199]Part 1 describes the various ways religious and spiritual traditions enhance ecological consciousness. Seyyed Hossein Nasr shows how the Qur'an depicts the created order as a reflection of God's face, suggesting that we are literally defacing the face of God in our industrial recklessness. David Mevorach Seidenberg presents a Jewish eco-theology, which decenters the human as the pinnacle of creation. In part 2, the authors further draw out the socioecological implications of religious teachings. Melanie Harris argues that religious communities must open their eyes to the link between structural violence against black women to structural violence against the Earth. She maintains that this analysis is key to finding solutions for ecological reparations. When Harris argues that social justice is Earth justice, she is claiming that the dismantling of both white supremacy and colonial ecology go hand in hand.Part 3, titled "Ecological Commitment," highlights the specific contexts in which the relationship between religion and ecology are embedded. Myrna Perez Sheldon and Naomi Oreskes trace the entanglement of evangelical identity with the politics of scientific doubt. In response, they suggest a new framework for evangelical participation in environmental restoration that moves beyond a political identity that is chained to right-wing doubt about climate change. In asking how "Korean Christianity can become more Nature-conscious, Nature-related, and Nature-integrated," Yong Bum Park points to Chondogyo, a Korean indigenous religion (333). This tradition is shown to take seriously the ecological crisis as a "crisis of consciousness and conduct," encouraging religious people to foster a socioecological vision of restoration (333).Part 4, which provides examples of concrete visions and projects on the ground, ends with John Hart's reimagining of the Earth as a "common commons." The notion that the Earth is a sacred "common commons" of "interdependent, integral, evolving relational community" requires conversion in light of how religious people relate to the Earth today (437). According to this commons ethic, land should be "commonized and communalized" rather than rendered private property (476).I highly recommend this volume for teaching undergraduate and graduate courses that are exploring the intersection of religion and ecology, especially courses focusing on religious ethics. Though the breadth of this work might strike the reader as boundless, herein lies its strength, especially for teachers of Christian ethics. This resource broadens the conversation recently highlighted by Pope Francis in Laudato Si' beyond the Christian perspective on ecology. The Companion models interreligious dialogue, opening to the diverse ways many different religious and spiritual traditions demand action for environmental restoration. [End Page 200]Dannis M. MattesonLoyola University ChicagoCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Polanyi is widely known for his development of personal knowledge, but he was also keenly inter­ested in what can be called, personal existence. The historical backdrop of reviving, the once dead language of, Egyptian Hieroglyphics provides valuable insights into Polanyi’s critique of objectiv­ism and deciphering a human ontology. From applying physiognostic to telegnostic information to understanding static and dynamic meaning, Polanyi’s philosophy of language and machines provides a wealth of vantage points from which to study who and what (...) we are. (shrink)

The central theme and core objective of this comprehensive resource for elementary teachers on climate change and children’s emotions and resiliency is supporting children’s understanding of and respect for the interconnectedness all life: human, animal, plant, and clean air, water, and soil. Its broad social/cultural perspective emphasizes that social and ecological justice are interrelated. Challenging elementary teachers to more explicitly address current environmental issues with students in their classrooms, the book presents a diverse set of topics from a variety (...) of perspectives. Coverage includes descriptions of environmental education pedagogies such as nature-based experiences and place-based studies; peace-education practices; children doing environmental activism; and teachers supporting children emotionally in times of climate disruption and tumult. The pedagogies described invite student engagement and action in the public sphere. Children are represented as ‘agents of change’ engaged in social and environmental issues and problems through their actions both local and global. (shrink)

Introducción: Se presenta un análisis cualitativo del acompañamiento psicosocial a jóvenes en condiciones de vulnerabilidad desde la ecología humana durante 12 meses entre 2010 a 2011; utilizando técnicas pedagógicas evaluativas participativas. Éstas, son una alternativa para crear espacios reflexivos con el propósito de potenciar la resiliencia en las relaciones comunicativas y formar en el respeto. Objetivo: Generar bienestar, prevenir la farmacodependencia y contribuir a la promoción de la salud. Material y Métodos: Se revisaron los antecedentes temáticos, fueron seleccionados 100 estudiantes (...) entre 11 y 19 años de dos instituciones educativas públicas en condiciones vulnerables;se desarrollaron cuatro talleres reflexivos y cuatro prácticas lúdicas y se realizaron tres grupos focales con estudiantes, profesores y padres de familia. Resultados y Discusión: El contexto social de la población intervenida, revela problemas de abuso sexual, violencia intrafamiliar y eventos violentos en el vecindario por grupos armados ilegales, entre otros, que constituyen factores de riesgo importantes para la farmacodependencia. Conclusión: Se infiere que lo psicosocial incide en la farmacodependencia, afectando la convivencia de la población estudiada por múltiples causas del orden psicoafectivo, sociocultural, económico y político que van desde el consumo cultural hasta la seguridad alimentaria. Introduction: A qualitative analysis of the psycho-social support to young people in situations of vulnerability from human ecology is presented for 12 months between 2010 to 2011; using participatory evaluative pedagogical techniques. These are an alternative to create reflective spaces with the purpose of enhancing resilience in communicative relationships and working in respect. Objective: to generate well-being, prevent drug abuse and contribute to the health promotion. Material aids and methods: the thematic background was reviewed, 100 students between 11 and 19 years of two public schools in vulnerable conditionswere selected; four reflective workshops and four playful practices were developed and three focus groups with students, teachers and parentswere conducted. Results and discussion: the social context of the manipulated population reveals sexual abuse problems, domestic violence and violent events in the neighborhood by illegal armed groups, among others, which constitutemajor risk factors for drug abuse. Conclusion: It can be inferred that the psychosocial factors impact on drug dependence, affecting the coexistence of the population studied by multiple causes of the psychological, socio-cultural, economic and political order, ranging from cultural consumption to food security. (shrink)

Human ecology, it is argued, even when embracing recent developments in the natural sciences and granting a place to culture, tends to justify excessively pessimistic conclusions about the prospects for creating a sustainable world order. This is illustrated through a study of the work and assumptions of Richard Newbold Adams and Stephen Bunker. It is argued that embracing hierarchy theory as this has been proposed and elaborated by Herbert Simon, Howard Pattee, T.F.H. Allen and others enables (...) class='Hi'>human ecology to conceive humans both as part of nature and as cultural beings in a way that gives due regard to the ethical development of humanity. That is, ethical constraints need no longer be conceived of as 'unnatural'. Characterizing the nature of such constraints, conceived of as emerging from the Hegelian 'struggle for recognition', this argument is shown to justify some optimism about the future, and to give some idea of how society should be organized if ethical constraints, able to constrain humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature, are to prevail. (shrink)

Teaching is hypothesized to be a species-typical behavior in humans that contributed to the emergence of cumulative culture. Several within-culture studies indicate that foragers depend heavily on social learning to acquire practical skills and knowledge, but it is unknown whether teaching is universal across forager populations. Teaching can be defined ethologically as the modification of behavior by an expert in the presence of a novice, such that the expert incurs a cost and the novice acquires skills/knowledge more (...) efficiently or that it would not acquire otherwise. One behavioral modification hypothesized to be an adaptation for teaching is ostensive communication—exaggerations of prosody and gesture that signal intent to transmit generalizable knowledge and indicate the intended receiver. On this view, the use of ostensive communication in conjunction with the transmission of generalizable knowledge constitutes evidence of teaching. Oral storytelling appears to meet these criteria: Indigenous peoples regard their traditions as important sources of ecological and social knowledge, and oral storytelling is widely reported to employ paralinguistic communication. To test this hypothesis, descriptions of performed narrative in forager societies were coded for the use of 14 ostensive-communicative behaviors and the presence of generalizable knowledge. Although biased toward North America, the study sample comprised 53 forager cultures spanning five continents, 34 language families, and diverse biomes. All cultures evinced the predicted behaviors. Results suggest that foragers use storytelling as a mode of instruction, thus providing cross-cultural evidence of teaching in forager populations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 3-22 [Access article in PDF] Ecological Consciousness and the Symbol "God" 1 Gordon D. KaufmanHarvard UniversityI am a Christian theologian. This does not mean, however, that I understand my work as being essentially a matter of explaining and defending Christian faith and the Christian set of symbols for interpreting human life and the world. The task of the Christian theologian is rather, as I (...) understand it, to scrutinize carefully, critically evaluate, and reconstruct (in whatever ways seem appropriate and necessary) the central Christian symbols, so they will encourage and support a faith and life appropriate for today. 2 In our time it is no longer sufficient for theologians simply to take it for granted that the basic structure and commitments of traditional Christian faith are--in all of their main lines--right and proper; and to proceed, then, to expound and reinterpret them in whatever ways seem intelligible and persuasive. Whatever may have been the value and justification of this sort of theologizing in the past, the crises of the twentieth century (to many of which Christian symbols, institutions, and practices have themselves contributed) have made it clear that thorough reassessment of the traditional Christian symbol-system, with an eye to its (possibly drastic) reconstruction or even to the total rejection of some of its principal features, is required--if it is to continue to contribute to human well-being, and to the well-being of the rest of life, on planet Earth. It is with this thoroughly critical and open understanding of the task of Christian theologians today that this contribution to our Buddhist-Christian dialogue has been prepared. And I hope a similar spirit will animate the responses to this paper, whether offered from the Christian or the Buddhist side of our conversation. I My assignment here is to examine the topic of "Christianity and Ecology." This is, of course, a very broad topic, much too large for a paper of this sort. I have taken the liberty, therefore, to confine my discussion to only one of the many questions that might be considered under this heading. The central symbol in terms of which Christian faith and Christian life (as well as most other western religious traditions) understand and order themselves is God, usually thought of as designating the creator and governor of the world, the only One to whom unqualified devotion, love, [End Page 3] and service are due. If we can come to some understanding of how this symbol has functioned in the past, and might be conceived properly to function today with respect to ecological concerns, we will have made a large step toward understanding the overall topic of Christianity and ecology. I am devoting this paper, therefore, to the question of "Ecological Consciousness and the Symbol 'God.'"Throughout my professional life I have been concerned with the problem of the continuing viability (or lack of viability) in our contemporary world of the symbol "God," as that symbol has been understood through most of western history (not only by Christians and Jews, but also by many humanists and secularists). And for the last thirty years or so, I have been reflecting on the issues which our growing ecological consciousness poses for our understanding of--and our ordering of life in terms of--this symbol. My earliest writing directly concerned with this question is in a paper entitled "The Concept of Nature: A Problem for Theology" published in the Harvard Theological Review in 1972. 3 In that paper I attempted to show that there is a fundamental tension--indeed, a conceptual and logical incompatibility--between, on the one hand, the understanding of God, and of the intimate relation of humanity to God (as seen in our western religious and philosophical traditions), and on the other hand, our growing awareness that human existence is essentially constituted by, and could not exist apart from, the complex ecological ordering of life that has evolved on planet Earth over many millennia. 4The main emphasis in that paper remains largely correct in my view. Hence, I would like to... (shrink)

Considering the role of human interactions in infectious disease outbreaks and cooperation in mitigating natural disasters consequences, ecological threats to human survival have been among proposed drivers of collectivism. Utilizing established and novel measures of parasite stress and natural disasters, we investigated their association with collectivism in a large sample of countries (N = 188). Linear mixed-effect models indicated that after controlling for national wealth, neither natural disasters nor infectious disease can predict collectivism scores. Null results were consistent (...) across different measures of threats, suggesting that previous findings can be attributed to small, non-representative samples of cultures. When universal patterns are a major concern, drawing conclusions based on small, nonrepresentative subsets of cultures risks promoting unreliable findings. Future cross-cultural research will benefit from data-driven exploratory methods to uncover factors previously unexamined in the theory-driven studies of collectivism. (shrink)

Ecological economics is a transdisciplinary field that seeks to integrate the study of humans and the rest of nature as the basis for the creation of a sustainable and desirable future. It seeks to dissolve the barriers between the traditional disciplines and achieve a true consilience of all the sciences and humanities. This consilient, transdisciplinary science represents a rebalancing of analysis and synthesis; a recognition of the central role of envisioning in science; a pragmatic philosophy built on complex systems (...) theory, thermodynamics, and modeling; a multiscale approach; and a consistent integration of cultural and biological coevolution. It will allow us to build a world that is both sustainable and desirable and that recognizes our fundamental partnership with the rest of nature. (shrink)

Annotation New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt/M., Oxford, Wien, 2002. Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education. Vol. 210 General Editors: Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg.

The raison d’être of the humanities is widely held to reside in its unique ability to generate critical thinking and critical thinkers. But what is “critical thinking?” Is it a generalized mode of...

Mounting evidence suggests that the human impact on the planet is reaching the point where the Earth's ecosystems will not be able to support the level of human occupation. The global economy also seems to be generating income disparities that threaten the social stability of even the most developed economies. Although both these trends are rooted in the operation of the global market economy, standard economics has surprisingly little to offer in the way of policies that might allow (...) us to survive the twenty-first century with our current social and environmental systems intact. This article examines our current predicament from the point of view of neoclassical welfare economics and the alternative framework of ecological economics. We argue that ecological economics, by placing the study of economics squarely within human society and ecosystems, can lead the way to make economics both scientifically credible and policy relevant. (shrink)