Ecology Related Quotes

More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands..... Relations are what matter most.

Trolls have a longstanding animosity for goats--"Who's that trip-tapping across my bridge!?"--and this led me to think that perhaps trolls are related to goats, since it seems a lot more plausible to me that your relatives would make you insane than some random hooved mammal, however ecologically destructive it might be. What if trolls evolved from goats? Or, no, better yet, what if goats evolved from trolls? Or were domesticated from trolls by human shepherds? And the trolls despise their domesticated cousins as a disgrace to the once-proud troll race, (much as I assume wolves would despise Chihuahuas if they ever gave them much thought) and eat them at every opportunity.

The decoding of the human genome tells us that we are indeed related to the animals, the insects, and the plants, and that, like it or not, Earth is where we belong.

That all species are related in the flow of life and death is a keystone of evolutionary theory. The grandeur displayed in this view of life is ecological in character.

Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows." Essay on the Biological Sciences, in: Good Reading (1958)

The decline of geography in academia is easy to understand: we live in an age of ever-increasing specialization, and geography is a generalist's discipline. Imagine the poor geographer trying to explain to someone at a campus cocktail party (or even to an unsympathetic adminitrator) exactly what it is he or she studies. "Geography is Greek for 'writing about the earth.' We study the Earth." "Right, like geologists." "Well, yes, but we're interested in the whole world, not just the rocky bits. Geographers also study oceans, lakes, the water cycle..." "So, it's like oceanography or hydrology." "And the atmosphere." "Meteorology, climatology..." "It's broader than just physical geography. We're also interested in how humans relate to their planet." "How is that different from ecology or environmental science?" "Well, it encompasses them. Aspects of them. But we also study the social and economic and cultural and geopolitical sides of--" "Sociology, economics, cultural studies, poli sci." "Some geographers specialize in different world regions." "Ah, right, we have Asian and African and Latin American studies programs here. But I didn't know they were part of the geography department." "They're not." (Long pause.) "So, uh, what is it that do study then?

Social Ecology: The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man… But it was not until organic community relation … dissolved into market relationships that the planet itself was reduced to a resource for exploitation. This centuries-long tendency finds its most exacerbating development in modern capitalism. Owing to its inherently competitive nature, bourgeois society not only pits humans against each other, it also pits the mass of humanity against the natural world. Just as men are converted into commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised wantonly. … The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.

Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.

Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are "true" or "false," but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with the rest of nature. A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth. The ways of speaking common to that community—the claims and beliefs that enable such reciprocity to perpetuate itself—are, in this important sense, true. They are in accord with a right relation between these people and their world. Statements and beliefs, meanwhile, that foster violence toward the land, ways of speaking that enable the impairment or ruination of the surrounding field of beings, can be described as false ways of speaking—ways that encourage an unsustainable relation with the encompassing earth. A civilization that relentlessly destroys the living land it inhabits is not well acquainted with truth, regardless of how many supported facts it has amassed regarding the calculable properties of its world.

Soon after I left the Canton I read, in an otherwise unsuccint paper on ecology: "Organisms themselves are relatively transient entities through which materials and energy flow and eventually return to the environment." In my more skittish moments I am currently inclined to think that I would rather like this sentence as my epitaph.

No one is an outside observer of nature, We're defined by our environment and our interaction with that environment -- by our ecology. And that ecology is necessarily relative, historical and empirical.

It's interesting that economy and ecosystem share a root prefix — eco; which is defined as relating to ecology. And ecology is defined as dealing with the relations of organisms to one another and to their surroundings. Swap out the word organisms for the word businesses and you can see how economies and ecosystems have a lot in common.

For all the successes of Western civilization, the world paid a dear price in terms of the most crucial component of existence - the human spirit. The shadow side of high technology - modern warfare and thoughtless homicide and suicide, urban blight, ecological mayhem, cataclysmic climate change, polarization of economic resources - is bad enough. Much worse, our focus on exponential progress in science and technology has left many of us relatively bereft in the realm of meaning and joy, and of knowing how our lives fit into the grand scheme of existence for all eternity.

The chief causes of the environmental destruction that faces us today are not biological, or the product of individual human choice. They are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system. Hence, what is ignored or downplayed in most proposals to remedy the environmental crisis is the most critical challenge of all: the need to transform the major social bases of environmental degradation, and not simply to tinker with its minor technical bases. As long as prevailing social relations remain unquestioned, those who are concerned about what is happening are left with few visible avenues for environmental action other than purely personal commitments to recycling and green shopping, socially untenable choices between jobs and the environment, or broad appeals to corporations, political policy-makers, and the scientific establishment--the very interests most responsible for the current ecological mess.

Discovering the threads that constitute actual interactions is an essential means of making sense of the world. But perception of overall patterns of things that are contextually related is equally important.

Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation. In school classrooms children are shown anatomical charts, each depicting different aspects of the human body. One chart reveals the body as a skeleton, another the body as a network of blood vessels, another the nerves, another the muscles. If we made equivalent sets of diagrams to portray ecosystems, one of the layers would show the fungal mycelium that runs through them. We would see sprawling, interlaced webs strung through the soil, through sulfurous sediments hundreds of meters below the surface of the ocean, along coral reefs, through plant and animal bodies both alive and dead, in

Whatever the nature of organizing relations may be,' J. Needham wrote in 1932, 'they form the central problem of biology, and biology will be fruitful in the future only if this is recognized. The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon compounds to the equilibrium of species and ecological wholes, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future.

We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it... But it has become our historic responsibility to acknowledge the continuing importance of myth, at a level beyond science, in realizing a more organic, holistic relation to the world. A future social ecology would transcend both anti-Enlightenment reaction and [a] reified Enlightenment counter-reaction, which remain only fragmented polarities within bourgeois modernity.

The truth is that man has produced imbalances not only in nature but more fundamentally in his relations with his fellow man--in the very structure of his society. To state this thought more precisely: the imbalances man has produced in the natural world are caused by the imbalances he has produced in the social world.

GNP is therefore in a certain sense a value-neutral quantity: a measure of activity, not of activity of any kind of value. A first argument against continued growth is just this. The GNP does not give any guarantee of meaningfulness of that which is created. Growth in GNP does not imply any growth in access to intrinsic values and progress along the course of self-realization. Obviously any kind of economic growth which is not related to intrinsic values is neutral or detrimental. The measure of GNP is somehow related to the fierceness of activity in the society but this fierceness may very well have more to do with a lack of ability of the members of the society to engage in meaningful activity than a measure of something humanity should look upon with joy. There is no clear relation to life quality.

It is very easy to grow tired at collecting; the period of a low tide is about all men can endure. At first the rocks are bright and every moving animal makes his mark on the attention. The picture is wide and colored and beautiful. But after an hour and a half the attention centers weary, the color fades, and the field is likely to narrow to an individual animal. Here one may observe his own world narrowed down until interest and, with it, observation, flicker and go out. And what if with age this weariness becomes permanent and observation dim out and not recover? Can this be what happens to so many men of science? Enthusiasm, interest, sharpness, dulled with a weariness until finally they retire into easy didacticism? With this weariness, this stultification of attention centers, perhaps there comes the pained and sad memory of what the old excitement was like, and regret might turn to envy of the men who still have it. Then out of the shell of didacticism, such a used-up man might attack the unwearied, and he would have in his hands proper weapons of attack. It does seem certain that to a wearied man an error in a mass of correct data wipes out all the correctness and is a focus for attack; whereas the unwearied man, in his energy and receptivity, might consider the little dross of error a by-product of his effort. These two may balance and produce a purer thing than either in the end. These two may be the stresses which hold up the structure, but it is a sad thing to see the interest in interested men thin out and weaken and die. We have known so many professors who once carried their listeners high on their single enthusiasm, and have seen these same men finally settle back comfortably into lectures prepared years before and never vary them again. Perhaps this is the same narrowing we observe in relation to ourselves and the tide pool—a man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL.

What finally turned me back toward the older traditions of my own [Chickasaw] and other Native peoples was the inhumanity of the Western world, the places--both inside and out--where the culture's knowledge and language don't go, and the despair, even desperation, it has spawned. We live, I see now, by different stories, the Western mind and the indigenous. In the older, more mature cultures where people still live within the kinship circles of animals and human beings there is a connection with animals, not only as food, but as 'powers,' a word which can be taken to mean states of being, gifts, or capabilities. I've found, too, that the ancient intellectual traditions are not merely about belief, as some would say. Belief is not a strong enough word. They are more than that: They are part of lived experience, the on-going experience of people rooted in centuries-old knowledge that is held deep and strong, knowledge about the natural laws of Earth, from the beginning of creation, and the magnificent terrestrial intelligence still at work, an intelligence now newly called ecology by the Western science that tells us what our oldest tribal stories maintain--the human animal is a relatively new creation here; animal and plant presences were here before us; and we are truly the younger sisters and brothers of the other animal species, not quite as well developed as we thought we were. It is through our relationships with animals and plants that we maintain a way of living, a cultural ethics shaped from an ancient understanding of the world, and this is remembered in stories that are the deepest reflections of our shared lives on Earth. That we held, and still hold, treaties with the animals and plant species is a known part of tribal culture. The relationship between human people and animals is still alive and resonant in the world, the ancient tellings carried on by a constellation of stories, songs, and ceremonies, all shaped by lived knowledge of the world and its many interwoven, unending relationships. These stories and ceremonies keep open the bridge between one kind of intelligence and another, one species and another. (from her essay "First People")

There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-war politics. The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a “person”; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions.

resolve and commitment. As a feminist, I wish the pope had addressed the ways that patriarchy, power-over relationships, and the church’s history of misogyny have all contributed to our ecological crisis. We have

. . . Neither ecological nor social engineering will lead us to a conflict-free, simple path . . . Utilitarians and others who simply advise us to be happy are unhelpful, because we almost always have to make a choice either between different kinds of happiness--different things to be happy _about_--or between these and other things we want, which nothing to do with happiness. . . . Do we find ourselves a species naturally free from conflict? We do not. There has not, apparently, been in our evolution a kind of rationalization which might seem a possible solution to problems of conflict--namely, a takeover by some major motive, such as the desire for future pleasure, which would automatically rule out all competing desires. Instead, what has developed is our intelligence. And this in some ways makes matters worse, since it shows us many desirable things that we would not otherwise have thought of, as well as the quite sufficient number we knew about for a start. In compensation, however, it does help us to arbitrate. Rules and principles, standards and ideals emerge as part of a priority system by which we guide ourselves through the jungle. They never make the job easy--desires that we put low on our priority system do not merely vanish--but they make it possible. And it is in working out these concepts more fully, in trying to extend their usefulness, that moral philosophy begins. Were there no conflict, it [moral philosophy] could never have arisen. The motivation of living creatures does got boil down to any single basic force, not even an 'instinct of self-preservation.' It is a complex pattern of separate elements, balanced roughly in the constitution of the species, but always liable to need adjusting. Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means to survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict. Motivation is fundamentally plural. . . An obsessive creature dominated constantly by one kind of motive, would not survive. All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like. The traditional business of moral philosophy is attempting to understand, clarify, relate, and harmonize so far as possible the claims arising from different sides of our nature. . . . One motive does not necessarily replace another smoothly and unremarked. There is _ambivalence_, conflict behavior.

With the hollowing out of community by the market system, with its loss of structure, articulation, and form, comes the concomitant hollowing out of personality itself. Just as the spiritual and institutional ties that linked human beings together into vibrant social relations are eroded by the mass market, so the sinews that make for subjectivity, character, and self-definition are divested of form and meaning. The isolated, seemingly autonomous ego that bourgeois society celebrated as the highest achievement of "modernity" turns out to be the mere husk of a once fairly rounded individual whose very completeness as an ego was responsible because he or she was rooted in a fairly rounded and complete community.

Customs are better understood as a living, negotiated tissue of practices which are continually being adapted to new ecological and social circumstances—including, of course, power relations. Customary systems of tenure should not be romanticized; they are usually riven with inequalities based on gender, status, and lineage. But because they are strongly local, particular, and adaptable, their plasticity can be the source of microadjustments that lead to shifts in prevailing practice.

Ecology is beginning to slowly shift focus with tentative explorations of what the world would look like if process, rather than matter were the basis for reality What if we defined a species in terms of its life processes? We might seriously doubt whether the California condor or the tall grass prairie can be 'saved' or even 'restored.' Perhaps we can re-create some local conditions that foster a few nests of condors or a few acres of prairie. But the life process of the condor ended with the urbanization of the California foothills and the living ebb and flow of the tall grass prairies died with the plowing of the Great Plains. What if we suggested that a thing is what it does? In this light, the Rocky Mountain locust was a immense aperiodic energy flow that linked life processes on a continental scale. This notion of life-as-process might seem unusual in a society in which material existence is primary. But such a perception informs our deepest understanding of life. Indeed, life-as-process underlies our notion of euthanasia. When loved ones are simply bodies, devoid of the capacity to care, respond, or relate again a away that we can recognize as being "them," we understand that they are gone even before they are dead.

Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment. Again and again, his thoughts returned to nature as a complex web of life but also to man’s place within it. At the Rio Apure, he had seen the devastation caused by the Spanish who had tried to control the annual flooding by building a dam. To make matters worse, they had also felled the trees that had held the riverbanks together like ‘a very tight wall’ with the result that the raging river carried more land away each year. On the high plateau of Mexico City, Humboldt had observed how a lake that fed the local irrigation system had shrunk into a shallow puddle, leaving the valleys beneath barren. Everywhere in the world, Humboldt said, water engineers were guilty of such short-sighted follies. He debated nature, ecological issues, imperial power and politics in relation to each other. He criticized unjust land distribution, monocultures, violence against tribal groups and indigenous work conditions – all powerfully relevant issues today. As a former mining inspector, Humboldt had a unique insight into the environmental and economic consequences of the exploitation of nature’s riches. He questioned Mexico’s dependence on cash crops and mining, for example, because it bound the country to fluctuating international market prices. ‘The only capital,’ he said, that ‘increases with time, consists in the produce of agriculture’. All problems in the colonies, he was certain, were the result of the ‘imprudent activities of the Europeans’.

In the Amazon, the turn to swidden was unfortunate. Slash-and-burn cultivation has become one of the driving forces behind the loss of tropical forest. Although swidden does permit the forest to regrow, it is wildly inefficient and environmentally unsound. The burning sends up in smoke most of the nutrients in the vegetation—almost all of the nitrogen and half the phosphorus and potassium. At the same time, it pours huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, a factor in global warming. (Large cattle ranches are the major offenders in the Amazon, but small-scale farmers are responsible for up to a third of the clearing.) Fortunately, it is a relatively new practice, which means it has not yet had much time to cause damage. More important, the very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.

From the ecological point of view an outbreak can be defined as an explosive increase in the abundance of a particular species that occurs over a relatively short period of time.” Then, in the same bland tone, he noted: “From this perspective, the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.

Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority. I began with the point that while both humans and animals have histories of their mutual relations, only humans narrate such histories. But to construct a narrative, one must already dwell in the world and, in the dwelling, enter into relationships with its constituents, both human and non-human. I am suggesting that we rewrite the history of human-animal relations, taking this condition of active engagement, of being-in-the-world, as our starting point. We might speak of it as a history of human concern with animals, insofar as this notion conveys a caring, attentive regard, a 'being with'. And I am suggesting that those of us who are 'with' animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed.

The reality is that the major environmental problems we face today - of which climate change is only one - cannot be solved by means of technological or market-based solutions while keeping existing social relations intact. Rather, what is needed most is a transformation in social relations: in community, culture, and economy, in how we relate to each other as human beings, and how we relate to the planet. What is needed, in other words, is an ecological revolution.

It is modern narrow-mindedness to relate the church only to the world of human beings; it has always been cosmos-orientated too, and is so still. If the church sees itself as the beginning and germ of the new creation, then the present ecological crisis is not just a crisis of modern civilization. It is the church’s crisis in this civilization as well. The suffering of weaker creatures is the church’s suffering too. ‘If one member suffers, all suffer together.’ What suffers is not just ‘our natural environment’; it is God’s environment as well. The modern nihilistic destruction of nature is nothing other than practised atheism. The perpetrators are excommunicating themselves from the community of creation. In the face of this danger, a new cosmic spirituality is developing in many groups and churches today, a spirituality in which we reverence God’s hidden presence in all living things and hope for their future in the kingdom of God.

The congressional investigation found that Cooney and others at CEQ made 181 edits to a strategic plan for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program with the effect of “exaggerating or emphasizing scientific uncertainties related to global warming.” They made 113 more edits that “deemphasized or diminished the importance of the human role in global warming.” As Dickenson reports, after the 2002 fiasco with EPA’s adverse report, “Cooney wielded a heavier pen when editing official reports on global warming. Not content obscuring science with uncertainty, he began to rewrite the science itself.

Are we headed toward the end of growth for technological or ecological reasons, or perhaps both at once? Before trying to answer this question, it is important to recall that past growth, as spectacular as it was, almost always occurred at relatively slow annual rates, generally no more than 1–1.5 percent per year. The only historical examples of noticeably more rapid growth—3–4 percent or more—occurred in countries that were experiencing accelerated catch-up with other countries. This is a process that by definition ends when catch-up is achieved and therefore can only be transitional and time limited.

Humans have adopted such an extreme form of the peak-late strategy because, as a species, we have come to inhabit an equally extreme ecological niche. The main demands imposed upon us by the odd, crowded cave to which we have adapted can be summed up with what I’ll call the Three Cs: we are required to be creative, cultural, and communal. The demands of the Three Cs make us, like the helpless, blind, altricial crow chicks, more vulnerable than robust and less complicated animals. For instance: sharks. You’d never want to put a four-year-old human up against a four-year-old shark. Yet it remains the fact that our weak, mewling infants grow into relative masters of the universe, putting sharks in aquariums, eating their fins in soups, and now, unfortunately, driving them to extinction in many regions of the world.

Those who nowadays see inconveniences to living in this laboratory often come up against the incomprehension and disapproval of their peers. They are accused of opposing the technological society on which they are nonetheless dependent and the comforts of which they enjoy—even if this argument is losing credence as the effects of the ecological crisis become ever more direct and flagrant. This logic follows the same pattern as attempts to silence patients criticizing the medical system on the pretext that their health and sometimes their lives depend on it. We are thus to be neutralized by guilt and condemned to submission and resignation. Can we be held responsible for the society into which we were born and in relation to which our room for maneuver is inevitably limited? To use this as grounds to ban all critique of our society amounts to tying our hands in the face of disaster, hamstringing thought and, more broadly, stifling imagination, desire and the capacity to recall that things are not doomed to be as they currently are.

The investigation described in the subsequent pages bears close relation to three sciences. It was approached by the author from the standpoint of astronomy and a desire to understand the variations of the sun. It was hoped that these variations could be more accurately studied by correlation with climatic phenomena. But the science of meteorology is still comparatively new and supplies us only with a few decades of records on which to base our conclusions. So botanical aid was sought in order to extend our knowledge of weather changes over hundreds and even thousands of years by making use of the dependence of the annual rings of trees in dry climates on the annual rainfall. If the relationship sought proves to be real, the rings in the trunks of trees give us not only a means of studying climatic changes through long periods of years, but perhaps also of tracing changes in solar activity during the same time. Thus astronomy, meteorology, and botany join in a study to which each contributes essential parts and from which, it is hoped, each may gain a small measure of benefit.

To be critical of pronatalism is not equivalent to condemning parenthood; it is to shed light on its prescriptive nature and propose that it would be socially and ecologically desirable that parenthood cease to be considered as a natural instinct and/or a religious or a social duty. The ‘biological clock’ that some women claim to hear ticking is also a ‘social clock’ reminding them that whatever else may be going on in their lives, motherhood is their destiny, the road to social acceptance and integration. It is because parenthood is not a natural instinct, but socially and prescriptively imposed, that many people unsuited for family formation bear or adopt children; domestic violence and child abuse result from the often deadly interaction between sexual inequality and pronatalism. Today, pronatalist ideologies and social pressures continue to curtail women’s opportunities and ability to shape their future, and place them in a disadvantaged position relative to men, thus sustaining the inequality between men and women despite considerable gains in sexual liberation, civil rights, and economic opportunities for women.

Indeed, for those in the West inclined to be critical of China, here are few cautionary facts. With its absolutely massive population (1.33 billion or one-fifth of the world's population) it's obvious that China should have a massive impact on the world. Yet, it's one-child policy, for all the uncomfortable ethical questions it raises and the painful sacrifice made by millions of Chinese families, means that China's annual percentage growth rate is low relative to the global average (0.49 per cent versus 1.13 per cent). Even with a population more than four times that of the United States (1.3 billion versus 0.3 billion), China's ecological footprint is still less than that of the US (2456 million global hectares versus 2730 million global hectares). In 2009, China invested far more than any other country in the clean energy industry – $34.6 billion or 0.39 per cent of its gross domestic product compared to United States' $18.6 billion or 0.13 per cent of GDP. When it comes to reforestation, China punches way above its numerical and geographical weight, with massive initiatives like the NFPP and SLCP helping seed some 4 million hectares of forest every year, which is probably more tree planting than the rest of the world put together.

The question is not whether the world’s problems will become everyone’s problems, but on what terms they will. Militarized borders, resource wars, and inequality that grows as its ecological and economic faces interact: These are the features of a re-barbarized world, in which people and peoples do not even try to live in reciprocity or aim at any shared horizon beyond the ecological scarcity that presses down inequitably on everyone. The ways the world’s respectable powers have been pretending to build a global commonwealth, by growth and trade, have brought us here. Although the polite official response to global inequality is still to regret it and seek ways to mitigate it, the rising political tide is a cruder and more candid call to maintain your own relatively and (temporarily) secure place in it against whoever would take it away. There is neither time enough nor world enough—we would need several worlds with comparable resources—to grow and trade our way to a global capitalist version of commonwealth. But the notorious fact that in the long run we are all dead, and so is the world, has become a perverse source of comfort to those who think they can ride out disaster long enough for their own purposes, until their own lights go out.

Here we immediately face the danger of slipping into another but equally untenable romanticism, namely a call for humans to be humble and come to terms with or appreciate their finitude. The acknowledgement of the inherent lack of unity in the metabolism of humans and the rest of nature should not lead us to conceive of humans as fragile, vulnerable and ontologically homeless creatures destined to remain caught in opaque mediations. Such a way of thinking amounts to a secularisation of the religious demand for humans to display their submissiveness and obedience to God. One finds examples of this in existentialist philosophies of the Heideggerian variant or in Arnold Gehlen's conservative philosophical anthropology, according to which the natural incompleteness of human beings justify the call for stable social institutions (i.e., the shepherd-God is replaced with the shepherd-State). The key to avoid such an ideology of finitude is to recall that it is the very fragility and porosity of the human metabolism which has made humans so evolutionarily successful. Human corporeal organisation is the source of an immense flexibility and has enabled this animal to "break out of a narrow ecological niche". Far from being the sign of an inherent finitude of the human being, the loss of immediacy at the centre of its being is rather a sign of its infinity in the sense that it enables humans to socially mediate their relation to the rest of nature in an infinite number of ways.

This Padre Antonio doubted, probably after his training in modern theology or as a practitioner of Catholicism. He argued that those practices were spurious; they did not derive from a true belief in earth-beings. “They do it for money, it’s not real,” he repeated stubbornly. But for Nazario, beliefs are a requirement with Jesus and the Virgin. They are part of faith, or iñi, a Quechua word (and a sixteenth-century neologism).6 Faith, he explained, is not necessary with earth-beings; they require despachos, coca leaves, and words and are present when respectfully invited to participate in runakuna lives—always. They are different, always there and acting with plants, water, animals. Their being does not need to be mediated by faith, but Jesus’s does. And just as Padre Antonio and I talked about Nazario, Nazario and I commented about how our dear Padre thought practices with earth-beings were like religion, like belief or kriyihina—another combination of a Spanish verb (kriyi is the Quechua form of the Spanish creer, to believe) and a Quechua suffix (hina, or like) used to express a condition that Quechua alone cannot convey. Nazario thought earth-beings and Jesus were different, but he was not sure that Antonio was wrong: could they be the same? And finally, neither Nazario nor I were sure that Padre Antonio’s relationship with earth-beings was only like his relationship with Jesus. We speculated that having been in the region for so long, and having been a close friend of Mariano, Padre Antonio must have learned from Mariano’s relations with earth-beings. I still think so; Padre Antonio is a complex religious man, and so are the other Jesuits who live in the region. Some of their Catholic practices may have become partially connected with despachos, and thus less than many and still different. I liked, and still do like, having these priests as friends.

Laruelle endorses identity of the same, not heterogeneity or difference; his non-standard method requires ascetic withdrawal, not the kind of self-realization associated with the “me generation” of post-1968 philosophy; his ontology is rooted in a cryptography of being, not the more popular pornography of being (evident in the virtues of transparency, the strategies of capture, or the logics of aletheia); he requires a unilateral relation, not today’s hegemony of multilateral ecologies of difference (assemblages, rhizomes, networks). No wonder that Laruelle has been overlooked for so many years.

The whole concept of absolute individuals with absolute rights, and with a contractual power of forming fully defined external relations, has broken down. The human being is inseparable from its environment in each occasion of its existence. The environment which the occasion inherits is immanent in it, and conversely it is immanent in the environment which it helps to transmit.28

During the past thirteen billion years humanity has become an enormous presence on earth, as if it were an envelope surrounding the planet. All other species are now influenced by humanity, and humanity is literally determining the genome of the earth community. We affect how the rest of the planet survives—or not. The one notion that not only envelops but suffocates the planet is that of industrial growth, which inherently fosters the perspective of the earth as a resource rather than as a relationship we must cultivate. Humanity is now being challenged to replace the resource concept with a deeply emotional experience of the earth as a being with which we are related.

Friends (at least good ones) like one another, enjoy one another’s company, and maintain mutual goodwill. They help one another in times of need, listen to one another’s problems, make sacrifices, and provide emotional support when necessary. They share confidences and can be trusted not to divulge important secrets. Their relationship is personal and private, and it does not answer to a higher authority. They engage in constructive conflict management, and they try to resolve differences among themselves. Friends should not go to court to resolve a dispute. Ideally, friends do not care what they get out of the relationship but value the friendship for its own sake. They are honest with one another, feel free to express themselves to one another, but do not pass judgment. Finally, unlike partners in kin or work relations, one can choose one’s friends.

Quoting from page 308: The Competitive Exclusion Principle. No two organisms that compete in every activity can coexist indefinitely in the same environment. To coexist in time, organisms that are potentially completely competitive must be geographically isolated from each other. Otherwise, the one that is the less efficient yields to the more efficient, no matter how slight the difference. When two competing organisms coexist in the same geographical region, close examination always shows that they are not complete competitors, that one of them draws on a resource of the environment that is not available to the other. The corollary of the principle is that where there is no geographical isolation of genetically and reproductively isolated populations, there must be as many ecological niches as there are populations. The necessary condition for geographical coexistence is ecological specialization. Quoting page 86: The Exclusion Principle in biology plays a role similar to that of the Newtonian laws of motion in physics. It is a prime guide to the discovery of facts. We use the principle coupled with an axiom that is equally fundamental but which is almost never explicitly stated. We may call this the Inequality Axiom, and it states: If two populations are distinguishable, they are competitively unequal. Quoting page 87: Because of the compound-interest effect, no difference between competing populations is trivial. The slightest difference--and our acceptance of the Inequality Axiom asserts that a difference always exists--will result in the eventual extinction of one population by another. Put in another way, the Exclusion Principle tells us that two distinguishable populations can coexist in the same geographical region only if they live in different ecological worlds (thus avoiding complete competition and strict coexistence). Quoting page 88-89: Recall now the sequence of development in the process of speciation. Initially, the freshly isolated populations are nearly the same genetically; as time goes on, they diverge more and more. When they are distinguishably different, but still capable of interbreeding (if put together), we may speak of them as races. Ultimately, if the physical isolation endures long enough, they become so different from each other that interbreeding is impossible; we then say that the two populations are reproductively isolated from each other, and we speak of them as distinct species. ... What are the various possible outcomes of the speciation process, and what their relative frequencies? In the light of our assumption, it is clear that, most often, the speciation process will go no further than the formation of races before the physical isolation comes to an end and the germ plasm of the two races is melded into one by interbreeding. If, however, the speciation process continues until separate species are formed before the physical barrier breaks down, then what happens? The outcome is plainly dependent on the extent to which ecological differentiation has occurred: Do the two species occupy the same ecological niche, or not--that is, are they completely competitive? It seems probable that the degree of ecological differentiation will also increase with time spent in physical isolation. On this assumption, we would predict that, more often than not, "sister species" will be incapable of coexistence: when the physical isolation is at an end, one sister species will extinguish the other. Quoting page 253: The example illustrates the general rule that as a species becomes increasingly "successful," its struggle for existence ceases to be one of struggle with the physical environment or with other species and come to be almost exclusively competition with its own kind. We call that species most successful that has made its own kind its worst enemy. Man enjoys this kind of success.

As the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of their (ecology students, any young people) vision. When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like? If we can’t imagine the generosity of geese?

Being responsible front of the other. (part1) We live in a historical period which, without too many difficulties, can be defined as a transition period. In many respects, in fact, the world as it appeared a few decades ago has almost completely disappeared. In its place, however, no paradigm that can be said to be truly new has yet materialized. The era to come, which always seems to be on the verge of a future driven by perhaps too naively acclaimed technological development, is as if it were slowed down by ideas, visions and practices that still belong to the past. Take for example the urgent need to convert industrial production, but also individual consumption, through sustainable, ecological, greener and more aware practices. It is our own planet that requires us to make a change in this sense: climate change is there for all to see, but the political institutions that should deal with the issue are unable to be decided and united to stem the problem. We know that the resources we have are limited but we continue to exploit them even though there are already alternatives, so we squander what nature can offer us in a year well before this year is over because we still believe in the mad and blind race of progress. We also take the incredible technological development that information technology has made possible. We can store an incredible amount of information in devices that we can put in our pockets, we have at our fingertips practically much of all the knowledge that humanity has produced throughout its history, but ignorance continues to spread like a river in full. The areas in which it is possible to recognize that much the current historical period is a period of transition are still many others, from the political one, with the crisis of representative democracies but also with the absence of a real alternative, to the economic one, social, with the giants of the web that increasingly impoverish small businesses, thus contributing to widening the gap, now almost unbridgeable, between the few who have too much and the many who have less and less. Or with the appearance of a new precious commodity: our personal data that is exchanged too lightly, as if they were a traditional market product. In this framework, already quite unstable in itself, the Covid-19 pandemic, directly or indirectly, is also radically changing our sociality. In fact, the spread of the virus has highlighted not only the fragility of the world economic-social system, in which if you break a link in the chain it is the whole chain that breaks, but it has also made clear, by difference, how much the our way of relating to others, even the most banal, even the most everyday. Especially in a country like ours, which has made conviviality its distinctive feature. What seemed natural to us, like hugging and greeting each other with a kiss with an acquaintance or going to a concert piled on top of each other, now that we are discouraged - if not forbidden - takes on even more value. Probably a value that we didn't even know, so obvious and taken for granted, was there before. In other words: we only discover what our social freedom was worth now that it is being restricted to us. And we discover it, precisely, by difference, by comparing what we could have done before with what we must do now. In this regard, I would like to ask a question: why should all of us accept that our way of life, our daily habits and our social freedom are limited? The question is deliberately provocative. His answer, quite obvious. In some cases, however, even the question whose answer seems obvious and obvious must still be formulated. It must be formulated in order to attempt to review the question posed in a clearer and more profound way, that is, to better understand the underlying reasons. Therefore, although the answer is evident as well as common sense, I believe that asking this question can help to better understand some intrinsic reasons.

In related ways, 24/7 is inseparable from environmental catastrophe in its declaration of permanent expenditure, of endless wastefulness for its sustenance, in its terminal disruption of the cycles and seasons on which ecological integrity depends.

Because it was part of old Gondwana and because it is insular and was isolated for tens of millions of years, New Zealand has a quirky evolutionary history. There seems to have been no mammalian stock from which to evolve on the Gondwanan fragment, and so, until the arrival of humans, there were no terrestrial mammals, nor were there any of the curious marsupials of nearby Australia—no wombats or koalas or kangaroos, no rodents or ruminants, no wild cats or dogs. The only mammals that could reach New Zealand were those that could swim (like seals) or fly (like bats), and even then there are questions about how the bats got there. Two of New Zealand’s three bat species are apparently descended from a South American bat, which, it is imagined, must have been blown across the Pacific in a giant prehistoric storm. Among New Zealand’s indigenous plants and animals are a number of curious relics, including a truly enormous conifer and a lizard-like creature that is the world’s only surviving representative of an order so ancient it predates many dinosaurs. But the really odd thing about New Zealand is what happened to the birds. In the absence of predators and competitors, birds evolved to fill all the major ecological niches, becoming the “ecological equivalent of giraffes, kangaroos, sheep, striped possums, long-beaked echidnas and tigers.” Many of these birds were flightless, and some were huge. The largest species of moa—a now extinct flightless giant related to the ostrich, the emu, and the rhea—stood nearly twelve feet tall and weighed more than five hundred pounds. The moa was an herbivore, but there were also predators among these prehistoric birds, including a giant eagle with claws like a panther’s. There were grass-eating parrots and flightless ducks and birds that grazed like sheep in alpine meadows, as well as a little wren-like bird that scampered about the underbrush like a mouse. None of these creatures were seen by the first Europeans to reach New Zealand, for two very simple reasons. The first is that many of them were already extinct. Although known to have survived long enough to coexist with humans, all twelve species of moa, the Haast’s eagle, two species of adzebills, and many others had vanished by the mid-seventeenth century, when Europeans arrived. The second is that, even if there had still been moas lumbering about the woods, the European discoverers of New Zealand would have missed them because they never actually set foot on shore.

She’s here on Blue Ant’s ticket. Relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational, the agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores.

A long-standing question in the assembly of communities, ecosystems and regional biotas concerns the relative contributions of abiotic environmental conditions (such as climate), species interactions (such as competition and predation), evolutionary and coevolutionary adjustments, and stochastic processes (such as population demography) [32]. This question has increased importance in a world where species ranges are rapidly shifting in response to climate change and human transport [14,34]. In this context it is important to ask whether species assemblages with novel combinations of species (including both native and exotic species) function in the same way as native assemblages, even when many of the constituent species do not have a shared evolutionary history. The answer to this question, although pressing, is still unclear [16,35–37]. What is becoming clear, however, is that assemblages composed largely of exotic species can and do occur (e.g. plant communities that dominate portions of many oceanic islands, such as Ascension Island [16,36]), and that assemblages dominated by exotic species, such as Eucalyptus globulus woodlands in California, can be as species-rich as those dominated by native species [38]. We believe that these findings support Janzen’s [39] conjecture, which was based largely on patterns observed with native species, that diverse assemblages of species with complex ecological relationships can be formed by the ecological ‘fitting’ [40] and ‘sorting’ of species (sensu Ackerly [41]), that is, solely through ecological interactions among species, and that a long history of coevolution is not always necessary to explain the species composition of communities. Although species coexisting in such recently formed assemblages might not have a prolonged history of evolutionary coadaptation, rapid evolutionary adjustments might still have occurred over timescales of decades to centuries.

One interesting aspect of his book is that it argued that the more specialized a species is, the less likely it is to continue to recognize appropriate habitats as conditions change. Species displaying a less plastic/diverse inventory of behavioral choices, such as those focusing on a single type of food, are the most susceptible. For instance, parasites often have a single host species, which does not present any problems for them as long as the host species does not become extinct. That is why, according to Eldredge, ecologically specialized species become extinct at much higher rates than do ecologically generalized species in the fossil record. The concept that specialization often leads to an evolutionary dead end was first proposed by Cope as the “law of the unspecialized” and has continued to be key for evolutionary biology since then. In Eldredge’s view, the balance of life will tend to produce ecologically specialized organisms because they often flourish more than generalists in the short run, but extinction then normally affects more the ranks of the specialists. In the long run, the generalists thus hang on—‘living fossils’ often being generalists—whereas the ranks of specialists are quickly refilled by the continuous evolution of new taxa. For him, taxa that descend from species that are already somewhat specialized tend to have a greater chance of focusing on a specific portion of the resources not completely exploited by the parental taxa. He designated this as a “ratchet-like mechanism” of the quick accumulation of evolutionary change as lineages keep splitting and new taxa are formed from old ones within specialized lineages. Thus, he directly connects behavioral/ecological specializations to cladogenesis and the rapid evolutionary events predicted in punctuated equilibrium. In turn, he argues that stasis is often related to generalist lineages because without a comparable degree of successful speciation, these lineages tend to have far fewer extant species at any one time than their specialized counterparts. That is, generalists are not really evolving at slower morphological rates: they are simply not generating so many new species. As a result, the gradual fluctuation of form among the members of the generalized taxa is not being fixed by cladogenesis, thus leading to new species.

For Europe, as for other civilized lands, infections by familiar epidemic disease surely became more frequent, at least in the major ports and at other foci of communication; but infections that returned at more and more frequent intervals became, by necessity, childhood diseases. Older persons would have acquired suitably high and repeatedly reinforced levels of immunity through prior exposures. Thus by a paradox that is only apparent, the more diseased a community, the less destructive its epidemics become. Even very high rates of infant mortality were relatively easily borne. The costs of giving birth and rearing another child to replace one that had died were slight compared to the losses involved in massive adult mortality of the sort that epidemics attacking a population at infrequent intervals inevitably produce. Consequently, the tighter the communications net binding each part of Europe to the rest of the world, the smaller became the likelihood of really devastating disease encounter. Only genetic mutation of a disease-causing organism, or a new transfer of parasites from some other host to human beings offered the possibility of devastating epidemic when world transport and communications had attained a sufficient intimacy to assure frequent circulation of all established human diseases among the civilized populations of the world. Between 1500 and about 1700 this is what seems in fact to have occurred. Devastating epidemics of the sort that had raged so dramatically in Europe's cities between 1346 and the mid-seventeenth century tapered off toward the status of childhood diseases, or else, as in the case of both plague and malaria, notably reduced the geographic range of their incidence. The result of such systematic lightening of the microparasitic drain upon European populations (especially in northwestern Europe where both plague and malaria had about disappeared by the close of the seventeenth century) was, of course, to unleash the possibility of systematic growth. This was, however, only a possibility, since any substantial local growth quickly brought on new problems: in particular, problems of food supply, water supply, and intensification of other infections in cities that had outgrown older systems of waste disposal. After 1600 these factors began to affect European populations significantly, and their effective solution did not come before the eighteenth century - or later. All the same, the changing pattern of epidemic infection was and remains a fundamental landmark in human ecology that deserves more attention than it has ordinarily received. On the time scale of world history, indeed we should view the 'domestication' of epidemic disease that occurred between 1300 and 1700 as a fundamental breakthrough, directly resulting from the two great transportation revolutions of that age - one by land, initiated by the Mongols, and one by sea, initiated by Europeans.

The social, political, economic and ecological challenges facing us in the 21st century...cannot be resolved with the same consciousness that created them.

Preface to the Paperback Edition The coronavirus, a severe acute respiratory syndrome, has unleashed a pandemic since the original publication of Epidemics and Society. Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is still too new and too poorly understood to allow us to assess its ultimate impact, but its broad contours have become sufficiently clear, and several of its features relate closely to the themes of this book. Like all pandemics, COVID-19 is not an accidental or random event. Epidemics afflict societies through the specific vulnerabilities people have created by their relationships with the environment, other species, and each other. Microbes that ignite pandemics are those whose evolution has adapted them to fill the ecological niches that we have prepared. COVID-19 flared up and spread because it is suited to the society we have made. A world with nearly eight billion people, the majority of whom live in densely crowded cities and all linked by rapid air travel, creates innumerable opportunities for pulmonary viruses. At the same time, demographic increase and frenetic urbanization lead to the invasion and destruction of animal habitat, altering the relationship of humans to the animal world. Particularly relevant is the multiplication of contacts with bats, which are a natural reservoir of innumerable viruses capable of crossing the species barrier and spilling over to humans.

There is a widespread belief about quantum mechanics, as also about relativity, that it is something that one is entitled to ignore for most ordinary philosophical and scientific purposes, since it only seriously applies at the micro level of reality; where 'micro' means something far smaller than would show up in any conventional microscope. What sits on top of this micro level, so the assumption runs, is a sufficiently good approximation of the old classical Newtonian picture to justify our continuing, as philosophers, to think about the world in essentially classical terms. I believe this to be a fundamental mistake. What I shall be arguing...is that the world is quantum-mechanical through and through; and that the classical picture of reality is, even at the microscopic level, deeply inadequate.

Cuzco—the place that my friends and the aforementioned anthropologists inhabit—is a socionatural territory composed by relations among the people and earth-beings, and demarcated by a modern regional state government. Within it, practices that can be called indigenous and nonindigenous infiltrate and emerge in each other, shaping lives in ways that, it should be clear, do not correspond to the division between nonmodern and modern. Instead, they confuse that division and reveal the complex historicity that makes the region “never modern” (see Latour 1993b).5 What I mean, as will gradually become clear throughout this first story, is that Cuzco has never been singular or plural, never one world and therefore never many either, but a composition (perhaps a constant translation) in which the languages and practices of its worlds constantly overlap and exceed each other.

So small changes in the ambient temperature over relatively short periods of time that are not sufficiently long for adaptive processes to develop can lead to huge ecological and climatological effects. Some of these may be positive, but many will be catastrophic. Regardless, however, of the sign of the effect, significant changes are upon us, and we desperately need to understand their origins and consequences and forge strategies for adaptation and mitigation. The crucial question is not whether these effects are anthropogenic in origin because they almost certainly are, but rather to what extent they can be minimized without leading to rapid discontinuous changes in our physical and economic environment and ultimately to the potential collapse of the global socioeconomic fabric. Hence my bewilderment at those in the general public including political and corporate leaders who reject the cautionary exhortations of scientists, environmentalists, and others, and why I am continually baffled by their lack of action. Yes, we should all delight in and promote the huge successes and fruits of the free market system and of the role of human ingenuity and innovation, but we should also recognize the critical roles of energy and entropy and together act strategically to find

Rububiyyah: Lordship, the quality of being a lord. A term derived from the Qur'anic descriptions of Allah's lordship over creation. One might say the ecology of natural existence. It is an essential element in Sufic cosmology and is a most sophisticated concept which surpasses the crude specificity and mechanistic views of evolutionist biology. It is an energy system of relationships in constant change and altering dynamics. It functions through the different realms, the atomic, the mineral, the plant, and so on. It relates the levels of living organisms from the uni-cellular up to man, and the interpenetrations of organism and environment. It re-defines "event" from crude historicity to a picture of organism/event in a unified field. It is the underlying concept which allows us to abandon the dead mind/body split of the dying culture. It permits us to utilize and develop the energy concepts of Islamic/Chinese medicine - which hold a common energy concept at base. Rububiyya permits us to observe ONE PROCESS at work throughout every level of the creational realities.

Encironmentalists sometimes succumb to a joyless life that belies their concern for a better environment. This cult of dissatisfaction is apt to add to the already fairly advanced joylessness we find among socially responsible, successful people and to undermine one of the chief presuppositions of the ecological movement: that joy is related to the environment and to nature.

No one can be certain whether our civilization will be able to cope with the ecological, demographic, and spiritual dangers it has caused or whether it will fall victim to catastrophe. So we cannot tell whether the present 'anti-capitalist', 'anti-globalist', and related obscurantist movements and ideas will quietly fade away and one day come to seem as pathetic as the legendary Luddites at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or whether they will maintain their strength and fortify their trenches.

Alienation from nature and the loss of the experience of being part of the living creation is the greatest tragedy of our materialistic era. It is the causative reason for ecological devastation and climate change. Therefore I attribute absolute highest importance to consciousness change. I regard psychedelics as catalyzers for this. They are tools which are guiding our perception toward other deeper areas of human existence, so that we again become aware of our spiritual essence. Psychedelic experiences in a safe setting can help our consciousness open up to this sensation of connection and of being one with nature. LSD and related substances are not drugs in the usual

[...] two issues of the new ecology that particularly pertain to the new feminism: reproduction and its control, including the seriousness of the population explosion and new methods of fertility control, and cybernation, the future takeover by machines of increasingly complex functions, altering man's age-old relation to work and wages.

I have always thought of all creatures-all organisms, really-as relations. Whether wandering alone in deep wilderness or just leaning against a tree growing beside an urban sidewalk, I have had no difficulty feeling, as if in dreamtime, the roots of our relatedness-ecologically, yes, but also with an overlay of the sacred, the holy.

And where excess energy was being lost by lack of completely effective storage methods, people were finding more ways to use it while they had it: for desalination, or more direct air carbon capture, or seawater pumped overland into certain dry basins, and so on. On and on and on it went. So clean energy, the crux of the challenge, had been met, or was being met. Then also, another great poster: the Global Footprint Network had the world working at par in relation to the Earth’s bioproduction and waste intake and processing. World civilization was no longer using up more of the biosphere’s renewable resources than were being replaced by natural processes. What for many years had been true only for Cuba and Costa Rica had become true everywhere. Part of this achievement was due to the Half Earth projects; though this was not yet an achieved literal reality, because well more than half the Earth was still occupied and used by humans, nevertheless, broad swathes of each continent had been repurposed as wild land, and to a large extent emptied of people and their most disruptive structures, and left to the animals and plants. There were more wild animals alive on Earth than at any time in the past two centuries at least, and also there were fewer domestic beasts grown for human food, occupying far less land. Ecosystems on every continent were therefore returning to some new kind of health, just as the result of the planetary ecology doing its thing, living and dying under the sun. Most biomes were mongrels of one sort or another,

Meanders overall, are in effect considered to be dynamically stable states, that facilitate homeostatic mechanisms. They actually help to innately maintain relatively stable or constant internal conditions (e.g. biochemically, ecologically, water quality, energy required... etc), as they interact to stimulus, changes or challenges, in and around the river surrounds. What's even more astonishing too, is their ability to be simultaneously transforming their surroundings in the process; quenching thirsts, bringing nourishment and delivering new opportunities that sustains new LIFE... around every bend!

Social ecologist Gregory Bateson foresaw how the separating of mind from matter – spirit from nature – creates all sorts of problems. For Bateson, this separation is an error of the most fundamental degree. This error, Bateson saw woven into Western habits of thought at deep and partly unconscious levels, undermining our capacity to flourish sustainably on Earth. He felt that it is what pits humanity against nature and provides for our prevalent worldview of survival through competition, in what he viewed as “an ecology of bad ideas” breeding parasitic humans, purely self-centered and destructive of their host environment. He noted that if you, “see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration, the environment will be yours to exploit…If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and over-grazing” (Bateson, 2000).

to live relationally, ecologically, you must first learn to identify your repeating pattern, your choreography, which you can describe simply in terms of the more…the more.

Alienation from nature and the loss of the experience of being part of the living creation is the greatest tragedy of our materialistic era. It is the causative reason for ecological devastation and climate change. Therefore, I attribute absolute highest importance to consciousness-change. I regard psychedelics as catalyzers for this. They are tools which are guiding our perception toward other, deeper, areas of human existence, so that we, again, become aware of our spiritual essence. Psychedelic experiences in a safe setting can help our consciousness open up to this sensation of connection and of being one with nature. LSD and related substances are not "drugs" in the usual sense, but are part of the sacred substances which have been used for thousands of years in ritual settings.

Smade’s Planet was the single companion of Smade’s Star, an undistinguished white dwarf in a relatively empty region of space. The native flora was sparse: lichen, moss, primitive vines and palodendron, pelagic algae which tinctured the sea black. The fauna was even simpler: white worms in the sea-bottom muck; a few gelatinous creatures which gathered and ingested the black algae in a ludicrously inept fashion; an assortment of simple protozoa. Smade’s alterations of the planet’s ecology could hardly, therefore, be considered detrimental.

We live in a truly uncommon age of integration. Vast amounts of knowledge are being organized and integrated in ground-breaking, systematic ways. All over the world, people are creating revolutionary models of spiritual, psychological, ecological, and cultural ways of operating, all trying to provide solutions to our current local and global crises. These are bridges to a worldview that many are sensing is coming—one where truth can be universal, relative, and developmental all at once. Each generation has an opportunity to participate in the creative, co-evolutionary unfolding of reality. Now it is our turn.

The transition to an ecological and democratic economy will be difficult and will not occur overnight. This is not a question of storming the Winter Palace. Rather, it will be a dynamic, multifaceted struggle for a new cultural compact and a new productive system. The struggle is ultimately against *the system of capital*. It must begin, however, by opposing the *logic of capital*, endeavoring in the here and now to create in the interstices of the system a new social metabolism rooted in egalitarianism, community, and a sustainable relation to the earth. The basis for the creation of sustainable human development must arise *from within* the system dominated by capital *without being part of it*, just as the bourgeoisie itself arose in the "pores" of feudal society. Eventually, these initiatives can become powerful enough to constitute the basis of a new revolutionary movement and society.

The roots of war are to be sought in politics and history, those of earthquakes in geophysics, of forest fires in patterns of weather and in the natural ecology, and those of market crashes in the principles of finance, economics, and the psychology of human behavior. Beyond the labels “disaster” and “upheaval,” each of these events erupted from the soil of its own peculiar setting. Still, there is an intriguing similarity. In each case, it seems, the organization of the system—the web of international relations, the fabric of the forests or of the Earth’s crust, or the network of linked expectations and trading perspectives of investors—made it possible for a small shock to trigger a response out of all proportion to itself. It is as if these systems had been poised on some knife-edge of instability, merely waiting to be “set off.

Although some animals are considered to be solitary rather than group-living, they can also be considered to engage in collective behavior. Even the state of aloneness is itself a relation with others. We know this from our own behavior. People who are alone are not removed from the social fabric; avoidance is a form of relation, and the use of language, even in solitude, is a social activity.

The causes of the ant’s behavior are woven into the relations link- ing the ant, the place it is searching, the other ants, the seeds, and the humidity in a web that widens as we learn more. This amounts to a more elaborate and detailed version of Aristotle’s idea that the animal is expressing its nature. The important point is that its nature is not inside it, but instead in how it reacts to and changes its situation. The view of evolution outlined in this chapter is that the causes and heredity of traits, such as behavior, are generated by the relation of inside and outside, not contained in a packet of instructions carried inside. This perspective on the evolution of collective behavior is emerging in every field of biology and underlies the hypothesis that the dynamics of collective behavior reflect adaptation to the dynamics of the environment in which the behavior evolves. To summarize: The dynamics of collective behavior are generated by how individuals interact to adjust collective outcomes to changing conditions.

Bone beds turn up sporadically elsewhere, with spectacular examples in the Dinosaur National Monument in the USA and in Mongolia’s Gobi desert. In eastern England there are several within the early Cretaceous strata, which include, as well as bones, structures termed coprolites, some of which represent the petrified faeces of dinosaurs or marine reptiles. In the middle of the 19th century, when England’s population was booming and the farmers were struggling to feed everybody, it was discovered that these fragments (which, being bone, are phosphate-rich) made a superb fertilizer when crushed and acid-treated. A thriving and highly profitable industry formed to quarry away these ‘coprolite beds’. Some considerable figures were involved in this industry. John Henslow, Charles Darwin’s beloved mentor of his time at Cambridge, seems to have first encouraged the farmers of eastern England to use such fossil manure. William Buckland also became involved. An extraordinary combination of early savant of geology at Oxford and Dean of Westminster, he was the first to scientifically describe a dinosaur ( Megalosaurus); carried out his fieldwork in academic gown; reputedly ate his way through the entire animal kingdom; and coined the term ‘coprolite’, using these petrified droppings to help reconstruct the ecology of ancient animals. Later, he energetically collaborated with the celebrated German chemist Justus Liebig (who had worked out how to chemically treat these fossil phosphates to make fertilizer) to show how they could be used by agriculturalists, once demonstrating their efficacy by exhibiting, in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, a turnip, a yard in circumference, that he had grown with such prehistoric assistance. It is related strata (geologically rare phosphate-rich deposits, usually biologically formed) that are still a mainstay—if a rapidly depleting one—of modern agriculture. In a very real sense, these particular rocks are keeping us all alive.

Initially seen as relatively benign, the seven hundred miles of bulkheads and seawalls in Puget Sound—enough to armor the entire ocean shoreline of Washington and Oregon—have become more of an “in your face” environmental issue, says Hugh Shipman, a retired Washington Department of Ecology shoreline geologist.6 Armoring shrinks beaches by changing wave dynamics and preventing the inland movement of the shoreline.

The transition to an ecological and democratic economy will be difficult and will not occur overnight. This is not a question of storming the Winter Palace. Rather, it will be a dynamic, multifaceted struggle for a new cultural compact and a new productive system. The struggle is ultimately against *the system of capital*. It must begin, however, by opposing the *logic of capital*, endeavoring in the here and now to create in the interstices of the system a new social metabolism rooted in egalitarianism, community, and a sustainable relation to the earth. The basis for the creation of sustainable human development must arise *from within* the system dominated by capital *without being part of it*, just as the bourgeoisie itself arose in the "pores" of feudal society. Eventually, these initiatives can become powerful enough to constitute the basis of a new revolutionary movement and society.

4 Animism and the Alphabet Lifting a brush, a burin, a pen, or a stylus is like releasing a bite or lifting a claw. –GARY SNYDER THE QUESTION REGARDING THE ORIGINS OF THE ecological crisis, or of modern civilization’s evident disregard for the needs of the natural world, has already provoked various responses from philosophers. There are those who suggest that a generally exploitative relation to the rest of nature is part and parcel of being human, and hence that the human species has from the start been at war with other organisms and the earth. Others, however, have come to recognize that long-established indigenous cultures often display a remarkable solidarity with the lands that they inhabit, as well as a basic respect, or even reverence, for the other species that inhabit those lands. Such cultures, much smaller in scale (and far less centralized) than modern Western civilization, seem to have maintained a relatively homeostatic or equilibrial relation with their local ecologies for vast periods of time, deriving their necessary sustenance from the land without seriously disrupting the ability of the earth to replenish itself. The fecundity and flourishing diversity of the North American continent led the earliest European explorers to

individuals have, rather than as a process that families, schools, communities and governments facilitate. Because resilience is related to the presence of social risk factors (we can only speak of resilience in the presence of at least one stressor),

the environment is all of the physical, chemical, and biological factors and processes that determine the growth and survival of an organism or a community of organisms. The long list of all the factors that make up your environment would include the gases in the air you breathe and the many life forms that nourish and are nourished by you. Environmental science studies all aspects of the environment. Ecology is the branch of environmental science that focuses on the abundance and distribution of organisms in relation to their environment. Earth’s environments have sustained living organisms for at least 3.8 billion years; they have sustained members of our own species for well over 100,000 years. Throughout this time, Earth’s environments and the communities of organisms that depend on them have been constantly changing. In Earth’s long history, no organism has had a greater effect on the environment than have humans. Our ability to appropriate Earth’s resources has been a major factor in the rapid growth in our numbers. Over the past century, we have come to understand that our actions have significant consequences for the well-being of the community of all living things and for ourselves in particular. This understanding is the foundation for determining human actions and behaviors that are sustainable.

The ecological situation is not a problem to be solved, but a wake-up call to a different way of being and relating.

all texts are at least potentially environmental (and therefore susceptible to ecocriticism or ecologically informed reading) in the sense that all text are literally or imaginatively situated in a place, and in the sense that their authors, consciously or not, inscribe within them a certain relation to their place.

K group is so strongly attuned to its environment, its members are more environmentally plastic: more has to be learnt and less is simply instinctive. Hence, K-strategists have longer childhoods. They are more environmentally sensitive than r-strategists; ‘culture’ – rather than instinct – is more central to their lives (Sng et al., 2017).   As the group becomes more K, its niche becomes more specific, because the harsher and more predictable the ecology is the more specifically adapted you must be to survive. In an easy ecology you can forage for food all year round, but in a harsh one you must specialize, innovating very specific techniques and systems to catch the (relatively rare) sources of food. This means that the different components of K end up being less strongly inter-correlated, because selection favours the highly environmentally specific.

An upsurge of irrationality is a mortal threat to democratic polity. Political truth is always biased to some extent, but there is a profound and crucial difference between limited rationality and complete irrationality, relative objectivity and pure fantasy, demonstrable facts and blatant lies. A sane information environment is a precondition for a workable democracy. Once reality has been hijacked, there can be no reasonable basis for either voting or legislating.

The mainstream of evolutionary thinking begins with the idea that all structures and manners of relating within the living realm must be the result of a kind of natural, self-organizing cost-benefit analysis. Competition has long been the undisputed dogma of the biological imagination. Mainstream evolutionary thinking aligns its analysis with these premises, instead of first observing the world and then drawing conclusions. It imposes onto reality the afflictions of a society in which uncalculated joy in life is at risk of being suffocated within a network of greed and oppression.

According to Leopold [in A Sand County Almanac] (1966), All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of individual parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in the community, but his ethics prompt him also to cooperate. The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, water, plants and animals, or collectively: the land. We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love and otherwise have faith in. A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land.

Throughout the over 200 years of the field of biogeography, its researchers have discovered some strikingly general patterns in biological diversity, and have advanced an equally intriguing set of explanations for the forces driving those patterns. Despite the many levels, qualitative features, and potential quantitative means of measuring biological diversity, the overwhelming majority of these studies have focused on just one or two relatively simple, but intuitively valuable measures—species richness and endemicity. Species richness is a simple count of the number of species in a particular area of interest (e.g. the number of fish in a pond, lake, or ocean basin). It is a direct, albeit simplistic expression of our innate value for the more complex. But our instinctive valuation of diversity is a bit more ecologically sophisticated than this, as it is also influenced by our apparently innate attraction to the rarest, most precious “gems” of the natural world. A simple thought experiment should bear this out: given two assemblages with the same species richness—one comprising species common to most other ecosystems, and the other solely comprising endemics (so rare that they occur nowhere else), nearly all of us would be drawn to the latter assemblage because it has high endemicity. Beyond this instinctive attraction to the most rare, there clearly is a more pragmatic reason for valuing endemic species over the more broadly distributed (cosmopolitan) ones. If an endemic is lost from its assemblage, it disappears globally and the legacy of many thousands of generations of natural selection are irrevocably lost as well.

It was an architecture of relation- ships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together. And I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.

We are deluged by information regarding our destruction of the world and hear almost nothing about how to nurture it. It is no sur- prise then that environmentalism becomes synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings. Our natural inclination to do right by the world is stifled, breeding despair when it should be inspiring action. The participatory role of people in the well-being of the land has been lost, our reciprocal relations reduced to a Keep Out sign.

Relational consciousness, by contrast, is synonymous with ecological consciousness. It corrects the delusion of dominion and replaces it with the knowledge that we are not outside and above nature but rather live within it as parts. This is ecological humility.

societal reorganization, has played out several times in modern history—largely to capital’s benefit. Seeking to restore profitability, its champions have reinvented capitalism time and again—reconfiguring not only the official economy, but also politics, social reproduction, and our relation to nonhuman nature. In so doing, they have reorganized not only class exploitation, but also gender and racial oppression,

You have to help your partner come through for you. Tell them how you'd like them to be. Help them win. Help your partner succeed, because it's in your interest to act like a team. In our individualistic culture, your partner either comes through for you or they don't. But when you begin thinking relationally, ecologically, you realize that you have something to say about how things go between you. "What can I do to help you come through for me?" is an entirely relational question. Thinking like a team is the clear antidote to thinking like two individuals. It's a shift from "I don't like how you're talking to me" to "Honey, I want to hear what you're saying. Could you please lower your voice so I can hear it?" A shift from "I need more sex" to "We both deserve a healthy sex life. What should we do about it?

You may not realize it, but English contains many idioms that relate sequences to energy. Talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words. We often use idioms like these without much reflection on their deeper meaning, but I invite you to consider in more detail what expressions like these are really getting at. You may conclude that it is easier said than done.

Basically put, the "multiple souls" or the "two souls" model posits that each person is a triad of communicating, relating powers- a body alongside two souls- a breath soul, and a free soul (also called a wandering soul.) These terms have become standard anthropological terms used in studies of primal anthropologies. Several of the above authors mentioned utilize these terms in their own studies. I will commence now in describing the two-souls perspective. It will be important to quote Merkur here, before I begin. "In all, Soul dualism is an ideological system, designed not to describe but to explain psychological phenomenon. It is a system of psychology that is based on phenomenological data of psychic experience and systematized through philosophical speculation.