Ecological Philosophy: How it operates, and how we can incorporate it into our lives and thoughts
Note: this light research and summary is a lot to think about at once. If you're unfamiliar with big words (seriously, no shame, I had to google this stuff too) and have trouble digesting abstract concepts, feel okay with coming back to this post later once you feel confident in understanding the smaller parts of the greater whole.
For accessibility purposes, this is a list of some somewhat complex words and their definitions you should know to fully understand this information. Other words or phrases that may be complex will have a small link after they are said.
Ethics: moral principles that govern a person's behavior or the conducting of an activity.
Philosophy: the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.
Metaphysics: the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space.
Ontological: relating to the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
Holism: the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts.
Reductionism: [sometimes used derogatorily] the practice of analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of phenomena that are held to represent a simpler or more fundamental level, especially when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation.
Epistemic: relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation.
Rationalism: a belief or theory that opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response.
Empiricism: the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience.
Wikipedia defines ecological philosophy as (somewhat paraphrased) "a concept under the philosophy of science centred on the practice and application of ecology, its moral issues, and the intersectionality between the position of humans and other entities [x].
The Methodology[x] of Ecological Philosophy centers around two debates. Though ecological philosophers today are more pluralist[x] and eclectic, it's valuable to understand these two debates. The first is Holism vs Reductionism [x], which feuds over the basic foundation of investigation in this area of philosophy, and the relationship of it between things like chemistry or physics. Though the debate, by nature, goes nowhere, as nothing in the physical world can resolve it, it's worth dissecting. The debate itself has progressed in the past and present as follows:
Both sides developed the theoretical foundation for their way of thinking, and therefore fleshed out their respective assumptions and views about reality.
Holists, however, struggled to build upon their foundation with models, tools, or experimental techniques, which somewhat conceded that the foundation itself didn't really correlate to the real world.
Two ontologies, one methodology (the reductionist one).
Most ecologists (philosophical and otherwise) accepted this dichotomy[x], but were unconvinced of its relation to the real world, the down-and-dirty ecology, since both sides were attempting to or using mixed strategies, simply superimposing their ontology on top and therefore not really adding anything of physical value to ecology.
Because of that, eclecticism[x] was a common practice.
Physical ecologists were starving for a good philosophy, but the philosophers weren't coming up with anything of substance.
To add to that, the physical ecologists and philosophers weren't on the same page about what "Holism" and "Reductionism" even meant.
In short, the more analytical and arguably more philosophical Holists built a foundation for their ontology based on the analysis of the systems and individual parts of the greater whole - the whole of nature and ecology. However, the Reductionists on their own foundation were more pragmatic[x] about ecology, and thus had more ability to apply their ontology to physical ecology (My ap-ology for all these -ology words. Ha.)
The second debate is between Rationalism and Empiricism. This debate is less concerned with the ontology, but more, rather, with the mindset each side thinks is needed when going into ecological work. For this reason, it's much easier to explain in short. The Rationalists are mathematical, and believe in using ecological theory as a guide to create logistic[x] models for ecology. Rationalism in ecology was most pronounced around the 1920s, through the work of Vito Volterra and later by Alfred Lotka, combined creating what is known as Lotka-Volterra equations by which Rationalist activities are used and done. Empiricism, on the other hand, was less focused on theoretical mathematical models and more interested in gathering empirical[x] scientific data from the real world. Once again, the dichotomy is understandable and accepted, but the practice of combining the two is important. Mathematical theories can be made to predict the empirical data. Once the empirical data is physically collected and recorded, the discrepancies[x] between the theory and the reality can be compared and corrected, allowing the mathematics to further accurately predict how the environment is actually doing, and the process repeats. That said, a pluralistic combination model of Rationalism and Empiricism has yet to be developed, and I'm speaking purely in speculation.
The ethics of ecological philosophy are encompassed, by, well, Environmental Ethics. Environmental Ethics was developed in the 1970s as a response to the classical anthropocentrism[x]. You're likely already familiar with Environmental Ethics without having the name for it. It's concerned with the human proclivity[x] of polluting the planet, and the act of preserving the life on the planet for its own sake, believing that Earth itself is a moral motivation, the survival of humanity simply being a nice side effect.
Further explanation and exploration of environmental ethics will come with later posts, so follow for more climate communication, information, and activism.
