Ecology is the study of the interactions of organisms and their environments. The methods of ecology fall roughly into three categories: descriptive surveys of patterns of species and resource distribution and abundance, theoretical modeling, and experimental manipulations. Ecological systems are “open” systems, and patterns and processes are products of a huge number of interacting forces. Ecology and the environmental sciences have made enormous advances since the mid-twentieth century in the understanding of ecological systems, as well as in (...) the human impact on the environment. Theory in ecology usually centers on the development of models. Environmental outcomes are uncertain and when making decisions under uncertainty, there are a variety of options available. One option is to carry out a cost benefit analysis based upon expected utilities and other is to adopt the precautionary principle. Uncertainty and under determination of theory by evidence is a fact of life in science. (shrink)

"Examines ethical, religious, and aesthetic dimensions of the environment from several different disciplines related to the humanities including anthropology, literature, philosophy, religious studies, and history, with examples drawn from Confucianism, aboriginal Australia, Moby-Dick, liberal democracies, Ken Wilber, Joanna Macy, and Gary Snyder"--Provided by publisher.

This is the first book-length treatment of the relationship between citizenship and the environment. Andrew Dobson argues that ecological citizenship cannot be fully articulated in terms of the two great traditions of citizenship - liberal and civic republican - with which we have been bequeathed. He develops an original theory of citizenship, which he calls 'post-cosmopolitan', and argues that ecological citizenship is an example and an inflection of it. Ecological citizenship focuses on duties as well as rights, and these (...) duties are owed non-reciprocally, by those individuals and communities who occupy unsustainable amounts of ecological space, to those who occupy too little. (shrink)

I would like to discuss the possibility of a parallactic view of ecology and the environment. There is very little discussion of theoretical approaches to ecocriticism that is not either polarizing dualism or reactionary attempts to dissolve important boundaries between us and the space around us. I draw significantly on the work of Timothy Morton who in turn utilizes new readings of Descartes, Heidegger and other phenomenologists, Marx, and Lacan, among others, to discuss the aesthetic in eco-critique. This (...) has significant links to Zizek’s description of parallax and his positioning of Hegelian dialectics, in particular the need for tension between positions, determinate negation, and resurrection of irony as necessary for understanding paradox. (shrink)

The work of seventeenth-century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz has proved inspirational to philosophers and scientists alike. In this thought-provoking book, Pauline Phemister explores the ecological potential of Leibniz’s dynamic, pluralist, panpsychist, metaphysical system. She argues that Leibniz’s philosophy has a renewed relevance in the twenty-first century, particularly in relation to the environmental change and crises that threaten human and non-human life on earth. Drawing on Leibniz’s theory of soul-like, interconnected metaphysical entities he termed 'monads', Phemister explains how an individual’s true (...) good is inextricably linked to the good of all. Phemister also finds in Leibniz’s works the rudiments of a theory of empathy and strategies for strengthening human feelings of compassion towards all living things. Leibniz and the Environment is essential reading for historians of philosophy and environmental philosophers, and will also be of interest to anyone seeking a metaphysical perspective from which to pursue environmental action and policy. (shrink)

Traditional moral explorations of sexual violation are dyadic: they focus on the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, considered in relative isolation. We argue that the moral texture of sexual violation and its fallout only shows up once we see acts of sexual violation as acts that occur within an ecosystem. An ecosystem is made up of dwellers and an environment embedded in a broad, thick, interdependent, and relatively stable web of norms, practices, environments, material and institutional structures. (...) We argue that many of the important and interesting harms wrought by sexual violation can only be understood as ecological harms. To illustrate this, we focus on sexual violations that occur within a specific type of ecosystem, namely an academic department with a graduate program. We examine the possible damaging effects of sexual violation on the ecology of a department. We also consider what makes an ecosystem resilient and relatively able to self-repair, and how sexual violation within an ecosystem may weaken its self-repairing resources. We show that looking at sexual violation through this ecological lens lets us identify harms that are otherwise obscured or difficult to locate. (shrink)

An oasis of authorized criticism in the 1960s and the 1970s, and a privileged public arena for ‘extreme non-conformist’ intellectuals in the same period, ecology was also the matrix for the national movements which precipitated the end of the decaying party-state at the end of the 1980s and which had been in gestation since the late 1960s. Ideal metaphor for the fall of a system emblematized by the catastrophe at Chernobyl (April 1986), the ecological crisis - the crisis in (...) the relationship between nature and urban space - made it possible to understand the full extent of the post-war upheavals that had taken place at the heart of Soviet society. The rapid, huge-scale industrialization and urbanization of the country had produced a new educated middle class of ‘specialists’ (technicians, engineers, applied research managers, economists and administrators, and so on), which in the early 1960s constituted the hard core of the first generation of Soviets to be a majority of urban-dwellers. If it was not embodied, as in Western countries, in political movements or parties, the ecological cause was no less institutionalized. The horticultural societies (tovariscestva) on the edge of towns (ogorodniki), the ‘nature protection brigades’ which organized reafforestation campaigns (DOP), the Society for the Protection of Nature (VOOP), or local historical and ethnographical societies (kraevedenie) had a considerable number of supporters. It allowed the expression of a very extensive range of individual and collective sentiments, and of reactions both rejecting and adapting to a radically new natural, social and cultural environment - that of the town and a larger community. For a disorientated society, it was a question of re-appropriating its immediate, daily environment, of attempting to impose, individually or collectively, meaning on its existence and its social trajectory. Ecological sentiment was thus intimately bound up with the emergence of an ‘urban civilization’ in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. (shrink)

This essay discusses three recent books which each offer an integrative account of religious ethics and the environment. Religious environmental ethics is an area of inquiry within the larger field of religion and ecology. After a narrative that contextualizes the development of religious environmental ethics in relation to the environmental social movement, I describe the formation of the field including its focus on worldview, the “cosmological turn,” and its engagement with science, the “cosmic turn.” Elizabeth Johnson exemplifies the (...) cosmic turn by developing a Christian theology of life in nature which explicitly accepts Darwin's theory of evolution. Willis Jenkins advocates a prophetic pragmatism and critiques a focus on worldview that is abstracted from practice and defers moral responsibility. Larry Rasmussen joins analysis of worldview with reflection on cross-cultural resources for “anticipatory communities” of moral formation to catalyze change. I argue with Rasmussen that religious environmental ethics needs multiple approaches and should allow room for methodological pluralism. (shrink)

The concern people are now expressing about the human environment, ecology, pollution, and overpopulation, though admittedly legitimate from a moral point of view, has not attracted much attention from philosophers. This is notable particularly inasmuch as the United States civil rights struggle, the Vietnam War, and various responses of civil disobedience and violence to social problems have all aroused philosophers to careful thought on rights and obligations. I do not want to suggest that a social problem is interesting (...) only if it is philosophically interesting; nor do I want to make light of the way in which the problems of waste, noise, and overcrowding have captured the popular imagination. Yes, we must protect and use wisely the human environment and natural resources. But still, saying it seems banal, and philosophers do not feed on banalities. Here we have a modern moral commandment which speaks to an urgent and serious matter but which, like “Do not steal,” seems so obvious as to be trite. Yes, we must plan the world’s population in a rational way. Even that commandment, though disputed by some, seems trite. (shrink)

The way we understand the environment is analogous to the way we draw a map. Drawing insights from this analogy, this paper shows how the abstraction that occurs in ecological explanation can lead to damaging distortion. It is mistaken, therefore, to assume that by abstraction we can easily determine the correct variables for controlling a given ecosystem as if it were ideally closed. Recent work shows that the environment is a global composite with a very high degree of (...) internal dependence between its parts, a kind of dependence that makes it more holistic than a machine and perhaps even as holistic as an organism. This paper was presented at the 6th European Meeting of Jesuits in Science on “Science and Culture”, Frankfurt a. M., Germany (8th - 12th September 1999). (shrink)

Sustainable development and biodiversity initiatives increasingly include ethnoscience, yet the gendered nature of rural people's knowledge goes largely unrecognized. The paper notes the current resurgence of ethnoscience research and states the case for including gendered knowledge and skills, supported by a brief review of relevant cultural ecology and ecofeminist field studies. The author argues the case from the point of view of better, more complete science as well as from the ethical imperative to serve women's interests as the “daily (...) managers of the living environment”. In the interests of both objectives the paper advocates an ethnoscience research approach based on empowerment of rural people, rather than simple extraction of their knowledge. The Kenyan case study of women's agroforestry work follows their response to the drought and famine of 1985 and chronicles the unfolding discovery of women's ecological, political, and social science as gendered survival skills. The case is re-counted as a story, in keeping with an explicit choice to learn through participation and to report through storytelling. The experience of rural women and researchers during the drought provides several lessons for both groups about their respective knowledge systems, their agroforestry work, and the relationship of both to local and national political economy. (shrink)

In this volume leading international environmental philosophers further the debate about the value of nature, the concept of the environment, and the metaphysical, ethical, social and international implications of these concepts. Philosophers have to some extent neglected the study of nature and the natural environment, and this collection not only provides a long-overdue contribution to that study, but also points to inadequacies of much contemporary ethical and political theory. For environmentalists who are not philosophers, it will stimulate reflection (...) on their own concepts and principles. [Book Synopsis]. (shrink)

Equally important, he offers much insight into why our own environmental policies have failed and what we can do to better manage our resources.

This article examines early critiques of ecofeminism, including those usefully articulated by pathfinding ecofeminist philosopher Victoria Davion, and argues that concerns over essentialist tendencies in ecofeminism are misplaced. The article holds that the term "ecofeminism" performs theoretically and politically useful work by allowing us to think of feminism and environmentalism together—the term ought not be jettisoned in favor of other terms such as, for example, environmental feminism. While taking this stance, this article nonetheless explores in depth the productive effects and (...) development of such critiques into the current era of ecofeminist writings and activisms, paying significant attention to the role Davion's ovial 1994 essay "Is Ecofeminism Feminist?" and the other works it inspired have played in indelibly altering ecofeminism for the better, producing a more nuanced theoretical stance regarding gender and ecological degradation and oppression that is now, more than three decades later, shedding important light on specific environmental problems and how such problems are, as all ecofeminisms argue, conceptually and materially connected to social oppressions. (shrink)

This article contributes to understanding the effect of complexity theory on the social sciences. It analyses the relationships between complex processes of self-organization and the environment or ecology in which these dynamics take place. Two factors are prioritized: the role of information in the formation of complex structure and the development of ‘landscapes’ or topologies of possibility (and impossibility). The authors argue for an ontology that founds both material and informational structures, and for a radical continuity between the (...) general thermodynamics of emergent complex orders, cognitive theory and the complex structures of human thought and culture. (shrink)

"Contemporary earth and animal activists often seem to think and operate independently and neither seems to have much understanding of the other. Instead of continuing this lack of engagement, this eclectic anthology highlights important areas of common ground"--.

Recent discoveries of geographical patterns in microbial distribution are undermining microbiology’s exclusively ecological explanations of biogeography and their fundamental assumption that ‘everything is everywhere: but the environment selects’. This statement was generally promulgated by Dutch microbiologist Martinus Wilhelm Beijerinck early in the twentieth century and specifically articulated in 1934 by his compatriot, Lourens G. M. Baas Becking. The persistence of this precept throughout twentieth-century microbiology raises a number of issues in relation to its formulation and widespread acceptance. This paper (...) will trace the conceptual history of Beijerinck’s claim that ‘everything is everywhere’ in relation to a more general account of its theoretical, experimental and institutional context. His principle also needs to be situated in relationship to plant and animal biogeography, which, this paper will argue, forms a continuum of thought with microbial biogeography. Finally, a brief overview of the contemporary microbiological research challenging ‘everything is everywhere’ reveals that philosophical issues from Beijerinck’s era of microbiology still provoke intense discussion in twenty-first century investigations of microbial biogeography. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to introduce the concept of dissensus as an important perspective for making current organizational discourses of environmental sustainability more radically democratic. It presents the Anthropocene as a force for social naturalization—one that paradoxically acknowledges humanity’s role in negatively impacting the environment while restricting their agency to address this problem to those compatible with a market ideology. Radical democratic theories of agonism help to denaturalize the relation of organizations to the environment yet risk (...) reproducing values of anthropocentrism and patriarchy in doing so. Dissensus, by contrast, emphasizes the need to ‘redistribute the sensible’, treating organizations as a space for continually denaturalizing and renaturalizing our socio-material relation with the world. Yet it also puts forward a radically democratic political ethics demanding that firms ecologically preserve the environment to allow for positive dissensus while internally resisting institutional power structures that naturalize these organizational environments. This paper, thus, seeks to show the significance of dissensus for enhancing radical democracy both in regards to discourses of environmental sustainability specifically and more generally within organizations. (shrink)

The contributors to this volume move through time and space--from prehistoric Europe to the Enlightenment, and from industrial Victorian England to Aboriginal Australia--to compare the ways in which the environment is constructed in different ways across cultures.

This collection offers a sympathetic but critical perspective on contemporary ecological political theory, and gives proposals for a reorientation of some of its key aspects.

Exploring Nature's Texture brings together a collection of internationally-known group of artists, theologians, anthropologists and philosophers to look at the imaginative possibilities of using the visual arts to address the breakdown of the human relationship with the environment.

Technologies like CRISPR and gene drives are ushering in a new era of genetic engineering, wherein the technical means to modify DNA are cheaper, faster, more accurate, more widely accessible, and with more far-reaching effects than ever before. These cutting-edge technologies raise legal, ethical, cultural, and ecological questions that are so broad and consequential for both human and other-than-human life that they can be difficult to grasp. What is clear, however, is that the power to directly alter not just a (...) singular form of life but also the genetics of entire species and thus the composition of ecosystems is currently both inadequately regulated and undertheorized. In Gene Editing, Law, and the Environment, distinguished scholars from law, the life sciences, philosophy, environmental studies, science and technology studies, animal health, and religious studies examine what is at stake with these new biotechnologies for life and law, both human and beyond. (shrink)

Educated people everywhere now acknowledge that ecological destruction is threatening the future of civilization. While philosophers have concerned themselves with environmental problems, they appear to offer little to deal with this crisis. Despite this, I will argue that philosophy, and ethics, are absolutely crucial to overcoming this crisis. Philosophy has to recover its grand ambitions to achieve a comprehensive understanding of nature and the place of humanity within it, and ethics needs to be centrally concerned with the virtues required to (...) create and then sustain economic, social and political formations that augment the life of ecological communities. Achieving these ends will involve reviving speculative philosophy and its quest to forge a synthesis of natural philosophy, history and art to enable humanity to redefine its place in the world, both collectively and as individuals, in very practical ways. Such a synthesis is required to oppose the corrosion of democracy and to revive the virtues of citizenship and the sense of responsibility citizenship entails, but more fundamentally and intimately related to such citizenship, to oppose managerialism and the proletarianization of the workforce and to revive workmanship and professionalism as the foundations of not only economic life, but social and political life. (shrink)

A fact of life for farmers, hunter-gatherers, and fishermen in the rural parts of the world are that crops fail, wild resources become scarce, and winds discourage fishing. In this article we approach subsistence risk from the perspective of "coexistence thinking," the simultaneous application of natural and supernatural causal models to explain subsistence success and failure. In southwestern Madagascar, the ecological world is characterized by extreme variability and unpredictability, and the cosmological world is characterized by anxiety about supernatural dangers. Ecological (...) and cosmological causes seem to point to different risk minimizing strategies: to avoid losses from drought, flood, or heavy winds, one should diversify activities and be flexible; but to avoid losses caused by disrespected spirits one should narrow one's range of behaviors to follow the code of taboos and offerings. We address this paradox by investigating whether southwestern Malagasy understand natural and supernatural causes as occupying separate, contradictory explanatory systems (target dependence), whether they make no categorical distinction between natural and supernatural forces and combine them within a single explanatory system (synthetic thinking), or whether they have separate natural and supernatural categories of causes that are integrated into one explanatory system so that supernatural forces drive natural forces (integrative thinking). Results from three field studies suggest that (a) informants explain why crops, prey, and market activities succeed or fail with reference to natural causal forces like rainfall and pests, (b) they explain why individual persons experience success or failure primarily with supernatural factors like God and ancestors, and (c) they understand supernatural forces as driving natural forces, so that ecology and cosmology represent distinct sets of causes within a single explanatory framework. We expect that future cross-cultural analyses may find that this form of "integrative thinking" is common in unpredictable environments and is a cognitive strategy that accompanies economic diversification. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: This commentary highlights some controversial aspects of enactivism and ecological psychology, specifically the notions of subjectivity and ecological information. I argue that, instead of choosing between them, both theories could complement each other at different levels of analysis in a single research framework for explaining cognition from a situated perspective.

This chapter provides examples of European and local programmes and policies deriving from the education and cultural policies, and focuses on the ecological subject. These examples further illustrate not only the way in which the citizen is addressed, but also the construction of citizenship in a particular relationship to space and time. To begin the analysis of space in the construction of European citizenship, the chapter focuses on Foucault's account of governmentality, which shows the historical shift in the object of (...) government from territory to population, and thus the emergence of liberalism. More recent accounts draw attention to the subsequent shift to environments. In light of the environmental self‐understanding of the active learning citizen, the chapter considers the relationship to history seen in the promotion of heritage in European cultural policy. This entails placing the citizen in a particular spatial and temporal relationship to Europe. (shrink)

Nature has been widely represented in literature and culture as healing, redemptive, unspoilt, and restorative. In the aftermath of the First World War, writers grappled with long cultural associations between nature and healing. Having survived a conflict in which relations between people, and the living environment had been catastrophically ruptured, writers asked: could rural and wild places offer meaningful sites of solace and recovery for traumatised soldiers? In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (...) (1918), Nan Shepherd’s The Weatherhouse (1930) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932), trauma severs emotional, social, and cultural relationships with the natural world. These interwar literatures offer counter-narratives to simplistic depictions of nature as a healing space and highlight the difficulties of returning to rural environments and ‘reconnecting’ with known and natural places. (shrink)

The concept of an ecological niche (econiche) has been used in a variety of ways, some of which are incompatible with a relational or functional interpretation of the term. This essay seeks to standardize usage by limiting the concept to functional relations between organisms and their surroundings, and to revise the concept to include epistemic relations. For most organisms, epistemics are a vital aspect of their functional relationships to their surroundings and, hence, a major determinant of their econiche. Rejecting the (...) traditional dualism of organism and environment, an econiche is defined as the reciprocal (dual) of a functionally specified class of organisms (FSTU). From this perspective, an econiche necessarily implies a certain type of organism, and a class of functionally similar organisms implies a special econiche.The econiche concept is also discussed in relation to other ecological terms that reflect the distributional patterns of organisms, such as habitat, and the concept of an empty niche is criticized. (shrink)

The Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin called for a “psychological ecology” that would bring to light the social structures serving as the context for individual action and choice in everyday life. He envisioned social and physical environmental structures affecting the individual at a “boundary” within psychological experience. But how are we to conceptualize the manner in which such environmental structures influence individual experience and action? After all, the “nonpsychological” and the psychological domains are typically framed in quite different conceptual language, (...) and, in some cases, at different levels of analysis. This paper examines this question with respect to two bodies of work. In the case of perception, Fritz Heider’s pioneering analysis of perception, followed decades later by James Gibson’s ecological approach to perception, illuminated the significance of a medium for perceiving that conveys structure specific to environmental entities. As for action among community structures, Roger Barker’s research revealed the significance of the hierarchical structure of the environment of community life, and how some higher-order structures can influence and constrain individual constituent actions nested within them. Recent treatment of the psychological boundary within the 4E cognition literature is also briefly and critically examined. (shrink)

The interaction between science and theology is often seen as an interaction concerning their claims. This article examines how this interaction may also concern their questions. The focus will be on environmental issues because the relevance of these issues has increased tremendously during these last decades. Recent studies have focused on the way a question can become real for any community of inquirers, both in science and in theology. Reality here refers to the way a question emerges as one that (...) can, and should, be dealt with. The paper explores how this idea is applicable to questions concerning the environment, how they have become real, and how this fact will impact our moral deliberation about what we ought to do, personally and globally. (shrink)

(2013). An Ethics of Biodiversity: Christianity, Ecology, and the Variety of Life. Ethics, Policy & Environment: Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 224-226. doi: 10.1080/21550085.2013.801211.

In Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment, Partha Dasgupta explores ways to measure the quality of life. In developing quality-of-life indices, he pays particular attention to the natural environment, illustrating how it can be incorporated, more generally, into economic reasoning in a seamless manner. Professor Dasgupta puts the theory that he develops to use in extended commentaries on the economics of population, poverty traps, global warming, structural adjustment programmes, and free trade, particularly in relation to poor countries. The (...) result is a treatise that goes beyond quality-of-life measures and offers a comprehensive account of the newly emergent subject of ecological economics. (shrink)

Philosophical reflections on the environment began with early philosophers' invocation of a cosmology that mixed natural and supernatural phenomena. Today, the central philosophical problem posed by the environment involves not what it can teach us about ourselves and our place in the cosmic order but rather how we can understand its workings in order to make better decisions about our own conduct regarding it. The resulting inquiry spans different areas of contemporary philosophy, many of which are represented by (...) the fifteen original essays in this volume. The contributors first consider conceptual problems generated by rapid advances in biology and ecology, examining such topics as ecological communities, adaptation, and scientific consensus. The contributors then turn to epistemic and axiological issues, first considering philosophical aspects of environmental decision making and then assessing particular environmental policies, including reparations, remediation, and nuclear power, from a normative perspective. (shrink)

"This book is about the way shifting conceptions of ecology, biology and technology significantly alter what it means to write poetry about nature in a time of environmental crisis. It offers a radical re-reading of three major British poets, Ted Hughes, Derek Mahon and JH Prynne, and their aesthetic strategies for negotiating the complex feedbacks between organisms and their environments in a technological world. Their poetry not only provides ways of thinking and communicating about ecology and biology, but (...) shows how the unpredictable processes of thought and communication impact on organic life in the Anthropocene, providing a substantial challenge to aesthetics, ethics and politics" --. (shrink)

In this paper we conduct an analysis of the critical narratives of Stardew Valley and compare them to other relevant videogames in order to develop new possibilities for an ecological critique of capitalist extractive econo­mies. Critical narratives of this game are aimed primarily at the alienating conditions of labour and deeply devastating modes of production under capitalism that impact and severely damage the environment. Analysing these narratives, we superimpose the immediate messages of the game with the procedural rhetoric and (...) material conditions of their existence. Over the course of our analysis, we highlight a material-narrative disso­nance which, in the case of Stardew Valley, fails to function as a commu­nicative strategy of the game and remains its mere external contradiction. Although the game’s critical narrative may seem overly utopian and its political imaginary a bit underdeveloped, the game elaborates on concrete ways to tackle the alienation of labour and resolve the ecological crisis. In addition to this, the paper covers the history of the interplay between the video game industry and the field of global ecological crisis research. We compare the attempts to raise awareness of the videogames’ own material­ity that preceded Stardew Valley. We conclude that Stardew Valley utilises the language of sustainable co-existence and wasteless local production, expanding this logic both to the sphere of labour and the spectrum of en­vironmental problems. In the case of ecological critique, some gameplay decisions in Stardew Valley enable us to come up with new strategies aimed at creating critical narratives about the environment in videogames. Thus supplementing Stardew Valley’s findings with critical tropes derived from other games (mainly, Rain World), we were able to gather a set of theoretical instruments that could facilitate the creation of games about ecosystems. Following Donna Haraway’s emphasis on the crucial role of narrative fram­ing (“it matters which stories tell stories”), we highlight new opportunities for the entire medium of videogames. (shrink)

According to the free energy principle all living systems aim to minimise free energy in their sensory exchanges with the environment. Processes of free energy minimisation are thus ubiquitous in the biological world. Indeed it has been argued that even plants engage in free energy minimisation. Not all living things however feel alive. How then did the feeling of being alive get started? In line with the arguments of the phenomenologists, I will claim that every feeling must be felt (...) by someone. It must have mineness built into it if it is to feel a particular way. The question I take up in this paper asks how mineness might have arisen out of processes of free energy minimisation, given that many systems that keep themselves alive lack mineness. The hypothesis I develop in this paper is that the life of an organism can be seen as an inferential process. Every living system embodies a probability distribution conditioned on a model of the sensory, physiological, and morphological states that are highly probably given the life it leads and the niche it inhabits. I argue for an ecological and enactive interpretation of free energy. I show how once the life of an organism reaches a certain level of complexity mineness emerges as an intrinsic part of the process of life itself. (shrink)

Enactive and ecological approaches to cognitive science both claim a “mutuality” between agents and their environments – that they have a complementary nature and should be addressed as a single whole system. Despite this apparent agreement, each offers criticisms of the other on precisely this point – enactivists claiming that ecological psychologists over-emphasise the environment, while the complementary criticism, of agent-centred constructivism, is levelled by ecological psychologists at enactivists. In this paper I suggest that underlying the confusion between the (...) two approaches is the complexity of agency, which comes in different forms, at different scales or levels of analysis. Cognitive science has not theorised the relationship between these different forms in a sufficiently disciplined manner, and a task therefore remains of finding a way to map the complex territory of agency. (shrink)

Over the past 25 years, no religious institution in America has done more to explore the link between the environment and spirituality than the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Now, for the first time, a selection of the finest of the Cathedral's ecological sermons appears in a single volume.

Pope Francis’ Encyclical Laudato Si’ invites scholars of all sciences to a dialogue on the ecological crisis in order to find better solutions before it is too late. Thus it is not surprising that in this collection of essays twelve scholars in religious and social sciences respond to his much appreciated encyclical. Editor Robert McKim, emeritus professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Illinois, opens the discussion with a proposal of inquiry into the challenges posed by the ecological (...) crisis and how the world religions can and have responded to it in providing guidance and inspiration, and in what they have accomplished both as entire religious traditions and on a micro-level through particular religious communities, and also in giving birth to new environmentally constructive practices and rituals. (shrink)

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Digital technology has transformed the way that we visualise the natural world, the art we create and the stories we tell about our environments. Exploring contemporary digital art and literature through an ecocritical lens, Digital Vision and the Ecological Aesthetic (1968-2018) demonstrates the many ways in which critical ideas of the sublime, the pastoral and the picturesque have been renewed and shaped in (...) digital media, from electronic literature to music and the visual arts. The book goes on to explore the ecological implications of these new forms of cultural representation in the digital age and in so doing makes a profound contribution to our understanding of digital art practice in the 21st century. (shrink)

A tradição bíblica tem inspirado leituras e interpretações ecológicas por parte de teólogos de vertentes cristãs diversas, dentre os quais podemos destacar: Carriker, Reimer, Schaeffer e Stott. O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar alguns textos das Escrituras Sagradas judaico-cristãs e o modo como estes têm sido interpretados por teólogos cristãos vinculados à vertente reformada à luz de uma leitura ecológica. Um corte epistemológico foi feito reconhecendo nestes teólogos posições ideológicas heterogêneas a fim de preservar a re(leitura) dos textos bíblicos escolhidos (...) sob a perspectiva ecológica. White Júnior (1967), historiador americano, escreveu um artigo em que responsabilizava o Cristianismo pela crise ambiental. Este discurso tem sido confrontado ao longo das últimas décadas por várias vertentes cristãs e os teólogos escolhidos para o diálogo neste artigo defendem posições contrárias ao que foi declarado por White Júnior, à época. O caminho para o diálogo entre estes teólogos foi buscado a partir da concepção de que o discurso é uma construção social (Foucault, 2009). A partir da análise dos diálogos estabelecidos entre os teólogos escolhidos e suas re(leituras) dos textos bíblicos é possível concluir que esta nova teologia tem o papel de conscientização, como resposta à crise ambiental, no âmbito das igrejas evangélicas. Palavras-Chave : Discurso. Ecologia. Bíblia. Teologia.: The biblical tradition has inspired environmental readings and interpretations by Christian theologians of various aspects, among which we highlight: Carriker, Reimer, Schaeffer and Stott. The aim of this paper is to present a brief overview of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and how they have been interpreted by Christian theologians linked to strand reformed in the light of an ecological reading. An epistemological cut was made recognizing these theologians and their heterogeneous ideological positions in order to preserve the re(read) of the biblical texts chosen under the ecological perspective. White Jr. (1967), American historian, wrote an article that blamed Christianity for the environmental crisis. This speech has been confronted over the past several decades by the Christian spectrum and the theologians chosen for dialogue in this article advocate contrary positions to what was stated by White Jr., at the time. The path to the dialogue between these theologians was sought from the idea that speech is a social construction (Foucault, 2009). From the analysis of the dialogue established between the theologians and their chosen re(readings) biblical texts is possible to conclude that this new theology has the role of awareness in response to environmental crisis within the evangelical churches. Key-words: Speech. Ecology. Bible. Theology. (shrink)