Ecological philosophy

An exploration of Hannah Arendt's philosophy in terms of issues related to the earth, earth and world alienation, space, place, and nature.  I examine her work in The Human Condition and other books and essays, connecting it to developments in ecological thought and critical social theory.  I provide a historical, philosophical, and political perspective on these topics and argue for the relevance of her ideas.

"We are Petroleum". Tabula Rasa [online]. 2017, n.26, pp.101-122. ISSN 1794-2489.  http://dx.doi.org/10.25058/20112742.190.

"We are Petroleum" is a practices-as-research participatory performance experiment created to research how North Americans conceptualize their relationships with petroleum. During the performance, participants read aloud emulations of Gwich'in diplomatic testimony about being caribou people. In the emulations, the text is the same except the word "caribou" has been replaced with "petroleum." The Gwich'in are an indigenous people whose homelands are in northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada. For decades, they have been preventing oil and gas development in the calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou herd. The herd sustains them and their identity. This paper examines the original Gwich'in testimony and the performance emulating their testimony to cast petroleum human relations in terms of caribou-Gwich'in relations. The paper and performance use indigenous theories of law and ecological figuration to provoke considering petroleum relations as substantive kinship, structuring legal order, and a cosmology.

Keywords : indigenous jurisprudence; petroleum cosmology; Gwich'in; caribou people; performance emulation; performance practice-as-research.

Este libro constituye un aporte significativo al campo del pensamiento ambiental y la ecología política. Con un estilo ameno y un hilo argumentativo original, coherente, claro y profundo, el texto aborda la dimensión afectiva, sensible, sintiente y estética propia de la crisis ambiental contemporánea, así como las relaciones que requerimos tejer para reorganizar los afectos en sintonía con los ciclos vitales del planeta.
La afectividad ambiental propuesta por los autores, es una invitación a cultivar la sensibilidad en forma común, a enseñarnos a ser tocados por la emoción de otros cuerpos, a recobrar la confianza en nuestros sentidos a través del contacto con los diversos modos de vida, a llenar el lenguaje de tierra, y a despertar nuestra percepción sensible anestesiada por los reduccionismos ontológicos, las ecologías de la crueldad y el régimen afectivo del mercado.
Este ensayo es un manifiesto sobre el lugar político de la producción del sentir, una consigna ética acerca de la urgencia de recuperar los saberes ambientales de los pueblos, y un faro epistémico que nos estimula a comprender de otro modo nuestro estar en el cosmos en medio de esta guerra civilizatoria contra la vida.

Abstract

This dissertation is divided into two parts.  In part I the argument is put forward that the ideas and practices informing life and work (with a special focus upon work within the human services industries, including education) must emerge from and find ways to return to the specific relational and ecological assemblages that include the land, air, and water with which we live and work.  The term geophilosophy is explored to help unpack such an assemblage of land and thought, ecology and history.  In Part II of this thesis the reader is invited into a succession of explorations with a geophilosophy.  These explorations involve a kind of pilgrimage with a river, in particular with the Fraser River – a geological entity with which the author has close personal ties.  In articulating the concept of geophilosophy, the author takes guidance from a diverse group of  thinkers, such as: Deleuze and Guattari, Gregory Bateson, Lynn Hoffman, Jacques Derrida, Tompson Highway, John Kelley, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Dianne Chisholm, Brian Massumi, Eduardo Galeano, and Bruce Alexander. 

Part II of this geophilosophical journey involves two forms of chapters.  First, there is what the author calls the Dérive-Prayer, a process which requires travel with the river accompanied by a series of reflective essays focusing upon the relations that emerge between a specific location along the river and spiritual, political, and ecological realities that also come to life within the same area of the river.  Secondly, there is a series of essays that the author describes as Experiments – these are geophilosophical experiments. Significant philosophical concepts are tied to the geographies connected with the river.  This pilgrimage with the Fraser River watershed follows a particular path -- beginning at Sts’ailes First Nation and moving upstream along the Fraser’s watershed, through Kamloops, the Thompson and the North Thompson Rivers, all the way to the Fraser’s headwaters at the continental divide.  The Fraser is then followed downstream through its Eastern reaches, past the Cariboo, past the town of Lillooet, through the Fraser Canyon and the Fraser Valley, rolling on through Vancouver and into the Salish Sea.  This pilgrimage ends in the same place the river begins, far out in the cold waters of the Pacific.

This study is seen as having an ontological focus in that it attempts to open-up possible worlds in which those who recognize their relations with these geographies can learn to live and take action.  Such ontological unfoldings hold much diverse relevance for the assortments of living beings who reside with the river, and it holds particular relevance for those of us who work within the various human service industries connected with these lands.  The author offers this work as a form of contemplative inquiry placed philosophically before the creation of ethical imperatives, yet after, or in the midst of, its ontological unfolding.

Keywords:  geophilosophy, philosophy of education, ecological philosophy, philosopher naturalist, contemplative inquiry, Fraser River, Stó:lō, Sumas Lake, Sts’ailes, overlanders, Deleuze and Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Lynn Hoffman, Gregory Bateson, Jacques Derrida, rhizome, arborescence, lines of flight, ontology, lyrical ontology, relational ontology, posthuman, affect theory, Gaia, ecology, smooth space, striated space, withness, derive, death of god, will to power, neoliberalism.

[i just wish those ideas were challenged, and i hope the reading will be interesting in some way or an other. thanks]

Chapitre I : Technique et matérialisme historique
1 : La technique au cœur de la pensée de Marx
2 : Simondon : pour une philosophie de la technique

Chapitre II : L'aliénation, cristallisation d'une divergence
1 : De l'origine et des fondements du problème
2 : La machine et la connaissance technique

Chapitre III : La politique dans la métaphysique
1 : Pensées du temps et ontologies sociales
2 : Révolution et empowerment : sortir des rapports de force
3 : Simondon ou la fin de Marx ? De l'écologie

Sous la direction d'Anne Sauvagnargues.

Breves piezas de filosofía emitidas en el programa de RNE “Venga la radio”. Se refieren autores como Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Walter Benjamin, José Ortega y Gasset, Hans Georg Gadamer, María Zambrano, Eugenio Trías, Paul Ricoeur, Michel Foucault, Peter Sloterdijk, Byung-Chul Han, etc.

L'attuale epoca di crisi ecologica ci pone di fronte a seri interrogativi sul nostro modo di rapportarci all'ambiente. È ancora attuale, e filosoficamente percorribile, il modello tradizionale che considera essere umano e natura in opposizione? Qual è la posizione della specie umana all'interno del mondo naturale? Qual è il ruolo dell'ambiente nella definizione dell'identità del soggetto umano? Chi detiene lo statuto morale atto ad orientare le scelte etico-pratiche: gli esseri umani, o anche gli esseri nonumani, quali animali, piante, natura, ambiente? Come sviluppare un modo ecocompatibile di essere e pensare? Dalla risposta a queste questioni dipendono non solo la visione del mondo per gli anni a venire, ma anche la concezione di sè che gli esseri umani hanno in rapporto al tutto e, ancor più, le pratiche umane di relazione ad un ambiente rispetto a cui il legame di interdipendenza non è più negabile. Il presente volume percorre il ricco terreno del pensare ambientalista, che si è dato forma teorica e pratica in movimenti quali, tra gli altri, l'ecologia profonda, l'ecologia sociale, l'ecofemminismo, il bioregionalismo, nel suo confronto con questi interrogativi e nella sua elaborazione di varie proposte di soluzione.

La presente contribución plantea una ontología del mal en la Tierra a partir de Laudato Sì', carta pastoral del Obispo de Roma. El extremo humanismo secular del documento del Papa, así como sus involuntarios alcances filosóficos, sirven de constatación fáctica (faktum) de un horizonte de mal histórico anterior, esto es, un mal que, siendo histórico, opera al modo de una esencia, de tal naturaleza que no es posible sustraerse de él por medios al alcance de la voluntad humana. Esta esencia maligna no operaría solo en el nivel ecológico, sino en un nivel total, constituyendo el relieve terrestre del mal. Si uno se pregunta sobre el arché que hace de motor del mal que los hombres actúan como ministros y operarios, subyace, oculta a la mirada de los hombres, una nada activa, el motor móvil del nihilismo.

One challenge for ecological thinking today is how to disentangle our understandings of time from the colonial and European cosmology that takes clock time as absolute, the linear progression of measurable horizontal time as the basis for an entire way of life. Indeed, the founding myths of Western civilization are based upon the development of the linear model in direct opposition to cyclical and rhythmic place-based cosmologies (Abram 194-195). As is well known, this way of life remains present to us in the extractive and destructive relationship to the non-human world dominant today. If cosmology is to be understood as a set of beliefs and practices that reflect upon the totality of the universe and its meaningful relation to human life (Toulmin), how might a renewed philosophy of time inform an ecological cosmology?

This research is to find the philosophical and historical base of the ecological paradigm, and explore the architectural ramification of the paradigm. To understand the effect of the paradigm shift in a historical and philosophical context, the contrasting, Descartes-Newtonian mechanical paradigm and ecological paradigm are comparatively analyzed to reveal the influence of each respective paradigm in various fields of science, such as logic, physics, bio-medical sciences, psychology, social sciences, and architecture. The affect in architectural ream is studied to find out the patterns of how the two contrasting paradigms have been materialized since the era of modern architecture and later. At the end, this paper proposes the possible ecological design process in architecture.

I examine the ancient and perennial notion of the elements (stoicheia) and its relation to an idea of place proper (topos) and natural place (topos oikeios) in Aristotle's work. Through an exploration of his accounts, I argue that Aristotle develops a robust theory of place that is relevant to current environmental and geographical thought. In the process, he provides a domestic household and home for earth, air, fire and water that offers a supplement or an alternative to more abstract and controversial uses of a conception of 'nature' (physis). I identify and elaborate upon environmental aspects of place-based and elemental philosophy.

This paper aims to identify elements of Peircean Pragmatism that contribute to the study of direct perception present in the Ecological approach. To do so, we develop a discussion of possible approximations between such accounts in relation to the study of perception. First, we will present the Peircean approach of perception, which involves three elements: percept, percipuum and perceptual  judgment. Next, we will show the Ecological approach of perception, which is based on the notions of affordance and reciprocity. In a final moment, we make a review of  the possibility of approximation between Ecological and Pragmatist accounts and to what extent Peircean Pragmatism contributes to the study of perception of organisms in a direct way.

En este artículo abordamos la estrecha relación que el filósofo canadiense estableció entre la concepción heideggeriana del lenguaje y nuestro modo de habitación en el mundo. Contrastamos las nociones de diversas ecofilosofías: la " ecología superficial " y la Ecología profunda, tal como estas fueron articuladas por el filósofo noruego Arne Naess. Finalmente, contrastamos el posicionamiento de Heidegger con la noción de Nagarjuna de sunyata.

In this article we take into consideration the close relation established by the Canadian Philosopher Charles Taylor between the heideggerian notion of language and our habitation in the world. We contrast these notions with diverse eco-philosophies: the " shallow ecology " and the Deep Ecology, as they were identified by the Norwegian Philosopher Arne Naess. Finally, we contrast Heidegger's position to Nagarjuna's notion of sunyata.

This multimedia essay weaves together reflexive discourse and conceptual discussion on the reciprocity of perception with textual, photographic, and audiovisual materials from the author's somatic explorations in nature. Drawing on Natasha Myers's studies of plant sensing and David Abram's eco-phenomenology of perception, "sensing with trees" is engaged as a slow improvisational dance of listening and attunement through which the human sensorium is imbued with arboreal attention and trees are recognized and honored as intimate companions of becoming. In opening the senses and the imagination to the bodily earthly ground, reciprocity emerges through the awareness of a deep perceptual shift: we are not only sensing and witnessing trees, we are also being sensed and witnessed by them.

Biosemiotics is considered in the article from the moment of its birth at the beginning of the 20th century (J. von Uexküll, Th. Sebeok, G. Prodi, H. Pattie, et al.); its reception in the philosophical anthropology and science of the 20th century and the prospects of its further development are analyzed. It is with the name of Sebeok that the popularization of Uexküll's study and the attribution of a special status to biosemiotics as a promising interdisciplinary (transdisciplinary) area of research are related. Biosemiotics is close nowadays in its conceptual arsenal to the theory of complex adaptive systems, bio-cybernetics, and the conception of enactivism in cognitive science and in non-classical epistemology. Considering living systems as operating signs, distinguishing signs and acquiring the ability to interpret them, biosemiotics seeks to penetrate into the deep sources of the origins of meaning in the Universe and thereby contributes to the development of the methodological foundations of communication theory and an extended ecological approach. It is substantiated that biosemiotics offers new concep-tual and methodological tools for scientific understanding of mind (consciousness) and sense, for studying the rich variety of nonverbal human, animal and plant communicative processes, the intrinsic connection between perception and action, the nature of the vital world of or-ganisms and the configuration of their semantic landscapes. The historical analysis of the emergence and development of biosemiotics makes it possible to evaluate its contribution to the development of modern interdisciplinary research strategies that have integrative capabil-ities, outlining the ways of synthesizing natural scientific (primarily biological) and the hu-manitarian knowledge, as well as pointing to promising steps in studying the mutual penetra-tion of the human natural world and the world of technology, natural and artificial intelli-gence, ways of constructing modern cyberphysical systems.

В статье рассматривается биосемиотика с момента ее рождения в начале XX в. (Я. фон Икскюль, Т. Себеок, Дж. Проди, Х. Патти и др.), ее рецепция в философской антропологии и науке XX в. и перспективы ее современного развития. Именно с именем Себеока связаны популяризация учения Икскюля и придание биосемиотике особого статуса как перспективного междисциплинарного (или трансдисциплинарного) направления исследований. Биосемиотика сегодня по своему концептуальному арсеналу близка теории сложных адаптивных систем, биокибернетике, концепции энактивизма в когнитивной науке и неклассической эпистемологии. Исследуя живые системы как оперирующие знаками, выделяющие знаки и обретающие способность их интерпретировать, биосемиотика стремится проникнуть в глубинные истоки происхождения смысла во Вселенной и тем самым способствует развитию методологических основ теории коммуникации и расширенного экологического подхода. Обосновывается, что биосемиотика предлагает новые концептуальные и методологические средства для научного понимания ума (сознания) и смысла, для изучения богатого разнообразия невербальных человеческих, животных и растительных коммуникативных процессов, синкретической связи восприятия и действия, природы жизненного мира организмов и конфигурации их семантических ландшафтов. Исторический анализ становления и развития биосемиотики позволяет оценить ее вклад в развитие современных междисциплинарных исследовательских стратегий, обладающих интегративными возможностями, намечающих пути синтеза естественнонаучного (прежде всего, биологического) и гуманитарного знания, а также указывающих на перспективные шаги в изучении взаимного проникновения природного мира человека и техносферы, естественного и искусственного интеллекта, способов конструирования современных киберфизических систем.

My review of one of Paul Thompson's key early works on agricultural environmental ethics. At the time of writing I little knew, as biographers say, that Paul would become a valued friend, colleague and fellow pragmatist a decade later across the water at Michigan State.

I connect nature experience to human liberty in a four part argument. Firstly, I discuss two pre-modern traditions of thought, agrarianism and sylvan liberty, in which nature experience was associated with the stimulation, construction and defense of human liberty, each tradition connecting to different concepts of human freedom and flourishing. Secondly I link these traditions to Bryan Norton’s work on sustainability and preserving options for human developmental growth, arguing that the transformative possibilities of nature experience may help defend the nonhuman world, thus connecting the continued existence and experience of nonhuman nature to a particular conception of human liberty. Thirdly, I then argue for an ontology of nature that avoids man/nature dualisms on one side and pure naturalism or social constructionism on the other, regarding naturalness as present in relative terms on a tripartite spectrum, defined according to the extent that an item or area has not been transformed in accordance with certain historically specific, objectifying and anti-naturalistic types of human instrumental rationality. Finally, I maintain that combining the liberty and ontology arguments shows the worth of some ontological conceptions of nonhuman nature in the Anthropocene, and reaffirms linkage between nature experience and human liberty.

A critique of "The Politics of Cosmology," a thousand-page manuscript by social ecologist and political theorist Murray Bookchin, based on his study of the history of philosophy and his lectures on that topic. It appears on my PM Press blog and my "It Is What It Isn't" blog from Changing Suns Press.

Autopoiesis was introduced into the literature by Maturana and Varela as the name for a particular system description which they claimed was necessary and sufficient to define the living and also explain it.  The term has been widely applied in the literature instead to spontaneous order production or self-organization in general, whether living or not.  Zeleny and Hufford, authors of the focal paper for this volume, would like to continue this tradition.  While their effort to seek the generic behavior of spontaneous order is to be commended, this particular move must be rejected.  In the first place, if the concept of auotopoiesis can be used in this way it immediately shows the concepts failure to define and explain the living, making it enigmatic what is being generalized.  In the second place, the whole concept of autopoiesis is contrived at its foundations where it is miraculously decoupled from the physical world to promulgate a solipsistic epistemology with abhorrent social consequences.                                                  .  An alternative ecological physical view is presented here which shows that purposive, creative behavior is a consquence of natural law itself where order is produced such that order acts back upon order to produce more order.  The ecological view rejects subject vs. object debates ("us" vs. "reality") as academic; all ordered states are higher-order symmetry states of the wold itself.  Social praxis and evolutionary competence have an amplified meaning in such a world, one that is not yet fully determined and wheres small actions, intended or unintended, can produce large consequences.

This article is an attempt to interpret Yuk Hui’s ambitious and promising project of cosmotechnics and technodiversity as a kind of “critical synthesis” of the philosophies of technology of Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler, arguably his most important interlocutors besides Gilbert Simondon, whose crucial influence will have to remain undiscussed here unfortunately. It argues that the cosmotechnics–technodiversity project – motivated foremost by the concern for the relentless destruction of planetary diversity in all its forms (biological, ecological, ethnic, psychological, sociological, cultural, etc.) engendered by a globalized “mono-technological” technosphere originating from Western technology – criticizes but also aims to do justice to both Heidegger’s ontological or onto-historical understanding of technology as a singular yet universalizing imperative or claim driving the development of concrete technologies [Gestell or enframing], and Stiegler’s organological understanding of technology as an evolutionary process of technical exteriorization or exosomatization fundamentally conditioning any ontological and cosmological opening of anthropos, i.e., of what Heidegger called Dasein. Hui’s plural cosmotechnics critically acknowledges yet pluralizes both perspectives, thus teaching a pluri-ontological and pluri-cosmological conditioning of technology as well as a pluri-technological conditioning of the ontological and the cosmological. Using terms derived from Peter Sloterdijk’s interpretation of Heidegger’s “ontokinetics,” it is shown that it thus gives due to both a “vertical,” Heideggerian or “spiritual” dimension and a “horizontal,” Stieglerian or “materialist” dimension to the question concerning technology. This new and original, cosmotechnical perspective on these two fundamental views on the question concerning technology allows Hui to engage philosophy of technology in the overdue debate with contemporary anthropology’s so-called ontological turn, increasingly urgent in today’s age of the Anthropocene.

El científico que se presenta aquí ha realizado contribuciones muy significativas al desarrollo de la teoría ecológica a nivel internacional. Pero su pensamiento descansa, por un lado, sobre un evidente cañamazo filosófico y, por otro, se extiende hasta alcanzar campos como la política y la ética. Se tratará, pues, de señalar tanto su itinerario al través de la filosofía natural, como de la medida en que su legado afecta a cuestiones ambientales muy discutidas en distintos ámbitos. Para la conclusión, se confrontan sus propuestas con algunas corrientes ‘intervencionistas’ que despuntan en el actual paraguas de la ética ecológica.

A response to an International Association of Japanese Philosophy session panel, at the Eastern APA (American Philosophical Association) conference, on "Japanese Environmental Philosophy" on the book, 'Japanese Environmental Philosophy' edited by James McRae and Baird Callicot, published by University of Hawaii Press.  The panel presenters included James McRae, Yu Inutsuka, and Leah Kalmanson.

Due to human’s inability to reflect beyond its own species, animal ethics is a distorted version of human ethics with provisional “rights” handed down to animals. These fictitious rights do not cover the natural right of privacy, property, health, and protection against human interests, freedom, and especially the right to be. No human has been charged with murder of an animal. Animal’s natural rights have been replaced with and distorted by human rights. Human rights are unnatural projections of lethal power of the human species over the Earth and its inhabitants as humans see fit. Extinctions and ecocides are arguably human rights when ethics is based on human interests and cultural values. Ontologically derived ethics removes this confusion. Humans are animals, and unlike any animal, they consume the biosphere, produce millions of tons of waste, and destroy ecosystems in days, poison, burn, dump, torture animals, overpopulate, and so forth, without regret.

The article presents the results of own research concerning attitudes toward the four selected dilemmas of environmental ethics. The empirical data was collected by means of a questionnaire in 2014 and 2015 on a representative sample of 1000 inhabitants of the Kuyavian and Pomeranian province. The respondents were asked to address 16 statements that related to some of the issues of environmental ethics including: value of human life in the face of the threat of overpopulation and an ensuing need to reduce the population, validity of human interests in view of nature's needs, priorities in environmental protection, as well as the principle of redress that specifies the extent of compensation of human induced damage to the environment. Each of the mentioned problems was presented for assessment in the form of four statements

The chapter discusses cultural-evolutionary functions of attention and reveals interesting connections between Gibson's and Ingold's ecological philosophy and contemporary cognitive research on attention that both contribute to a better understanding of narrative dynamics.

I was in a slightly odd position  in the mid-1990s as a rather isolated environmental pragmatist working in Britain and trying to get people interested in the American pragmatist tradition. The name "pragmatism" has often been deemed unfortunate as a choice, and at the time of publication there had been a succession of scandals involving unprincipled UK politicians on the take, which helps explain the quip in the first paragraph.

I examine the ancient and perennial notion of the elements (stoicheia) and its relation to an idea of place proper (topos) and natural place (topos oikeios) in Aristotle's work. Through an exploration of his accounts, I argue that Aristotle develops a robust theory of place that is relevant to ...