Day 2: Capra and Naess

"The decisive advance of the systems view of life has 
been to abandon the Cartesian view of mind as a thing, 
and to realize that mind and consciousness 
are not things but processes."

-Fritjof Capra, Hidden Connections:  
A Science for Sustainable Living

Now we plunge into the material with some free writing.   We started with a request to identify and think about questions the film and early work in this course might me initiating.  For me, as a trained ecologist, I was intrigued in how the word was being utilized by the various thinkers we have been exposed to thus far.  More specifically my question is:

Ecophilosophy and Praxis:  What are these concepts and how do they relate to the field of ecology?

Given my ten year sabbatical from formal graduate work, obviously this question arises from being in this course and pursuing studies once more.  Giving how broadly used the word ecology is applied in the scientific, popular, and academic worlds, I wonder how it became so popular.  I believe its roots lie within a rising environmental consciousness that is traced back to the sixties with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.   Carson's book was a pivotal book in the importance of critiquing the rapidly expanding and often uncontrolled application of new technologies and chemical inventions like DDT.

Rachel Carson

While ecology is an old branch of the scientific tree, new buds in the fields of environmental science and risk assessment would rise out of this earlier discipline.  Although the field of environmental science has become well established in the canon of modern sciences, the world environment itself is more contentious and political.  It seems to me that people are using the term ecology as a safer or more benign harbor to use than the words environmental ethic or environmental philosophy. 

While I do not think Capra or Naess are misapplying words here, there is danger in the misapplication of langage.  In the case of ecology I agree with Capra in his break from Cartesian thinking and that cognitive  processes are wrapped around individual/shared experiences, nurobiological processes, and the nonlinear dynamics of cognition.  Naess's views on deep ecology are even more intricate and I will save this discussion for another blog after more work in class.  The danger I mentioned earlier relates to the political misapplication of the word ecology.

Although the field of environmental science is becoming increasingly institutionalized like all its predecessors in the fields of science, the political use of the word environment on  both sides of the debate (pro or anti environment) has a tendency to create drag on the field as a whole.  While I believe this field will ultimately be a useful ways of exploring human relationships within the natural world, many political and conservative sectors (in the United States) dismiss environmental science as a pseudo or mystical profession rather than a concrete and legitimate intellectual pursuit.

Fritjof Capra

Ecology faces this same dilemma today.  With the word environmental falling out of favor among the various social, political, and commercial sectors of society, it seems that ecology (or more specifically the Latin root eco)  has become a new catchphrase for a wide variety of ideas, philosophies, and commercial products unrelated to the word.  We will look at this issue, starting with the meaning of the root word eco in our next blog.