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This study explores the increasingly troubled relationship between humankind and the Earth, with the help of a simple example and a complicated interlocutor. The example is a pond, which, it turns out, is not so simple as it seems. The interlocutor is Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, and, despite his several disavowals, doyen of twentieth-century existentialism. Standing with the great humanist at the edge of the pond, the author examines contemporary experience in the light of several familiar conceptual pairs: nature and culture, fact and value, reality and imagination, human and nonhuman, society and ecology, Earth and world. The theoretical challenge is to reveal the critical complementarity and experiential unity of this family of ideas. The practical task is to discern the heuristic implications of this lived unity-in-diversity in these times of social and ecological crisis. Interdisciplinary in its aspirations, the study draws upon recent developments in biology and ecology, complexity science and systems theory, ecological and Marxist economics, and environmental history. Comprehensive in its engagement of Sartre’s oeuvre, the study builds upon his best-known existentialist writings, and also his critique of colonialism, voluminous ethical writings, early studies of the imaginary, and mature dialectical philosophy. In addition to overviews of Sartre’s distinctive inflections of phenomenology and dialectics and his unique theories of praxis and imagination, the study also articulates for the first time Sartre’s incipient philosophical ecology. In keeping with Sartre’s lifelong commitment to freedom and liberation, the study concludes with a programmatic look at the relative merits of pragmatist, prefigurative, and revolutionary activism within the burgeoning global struggle for social and ecological justice. We learn much by thinking with Sartre at the water’s edge: surprising lessons about our changing humanity and how we have come to where we are; timely lessons about the shifting relation between us and the broader community of life to which we belong; difficult lessons about our brutal degradation of the planetary system upon which life depends; and auspicious lessons, too, about a participatory path forward as we work to preserve a habitable planet and build a livable world for all earthlings.
An examination of longstanding foundational controversies in the philosophy of ecology.
A philosophical and narrative memoir, Ecology and Experience is a thoughtful, engaging recounting of author Richard J. Borden’s life entwined in an overview of the intellectual and institutional history of human ecology—a story of life wrapped in a life story. Borden shows that attempts to bridge the mental and environmental arenas are uncertain, but that rigid conventions and narrow views have their dangers too. Human experience and the natural world exist on many levels and gathering from both realms gives rise to novel constellations. In a blend of themes and approaches based on a lifetime of interdisciplinary inquiry, the author wanders these intersections and invites us to exercise our capacities for ecological insight, to deepen the experience of being alive, and, most of all, to more fully enrich our lives. Contents Foreword by Darron Collins, president of the College of the Atlantic Preface Part I. Transects and Plots 1. The Arc of Life 2. Ecology 3. Experience 4. Human Ecology 5. Education Part II. Facets of Life 6. Time and Space 7. Death in Life 8. Personal Ecology 9. Context 10. Metaphor and Meaning Part III. Wider Points of View 11. Kinds of Minds 12. Insight 13. Imagination 14. Keyholes 15. Ecology and Identity 16. The Unfinished Course Part IV. Coda
A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division—which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation.
In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature itself. Ecological writers propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the "nature" they revere. The problem is a symptom of the ecological catastrophe in which we are living. Morton sets out a seeming paradox: to have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish the idea of nature once and for all. Ecology without Nature investigates our ecological assumptions in a way that is provocative and deeply engaging. Ranging widely in eighteenth-century through contemporary philosophy, culture, and history, he explores the value of art in imagining environmental projects for the future. Morton develops a fresh vocabulary for reading "environmentality" in artistic form as well as content, and traces the contexts of ecological constructs through the history of capitalism. From John Clare to John Cage, from Kierkegaard to Kristeva, from The Lord of the Rings to electronic life forms, Ecology without Nature widens our view of ecological criticism, and deepens our understanding of ecology itself. Instead of trying to use an idea of nature to heal what society has damaged, Morton sets out a radical new form of ecological criticism: "dark ecology."
Understanding the political and ecological implications of Heidegger’s work without ignoring his noxious public engagements The most controversial philosopher of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger has influenced generations of intellectuals even as his involvement with Nazism and blatant anti-Semitism, made even clearer after the publication of his Black Notebooks, have recently prompted some to discard his contributions entirely. For Michael Marder, Heidegger’s thought remains critical for interpretations of contemporary politics and our relation to the natural environment. Bringing together and reframing more than a decade of Marder’s work on Heidegger, this volume questions the wholesale rejection of Heidegger, arguing that dismissive readings of his project overlook the fact that it is impossible to grasp without appreciating his lifelong commitment to phenomenology and that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is an aberration in his still-relevant ecological and political thought, rather than a defining characteristic. Through close readings of Heidegger’s books and seminars, along with writings by other key phenomenologists and political philosophers, Marder contends that neither Heidegger’s politics nor his reflections on ecology should be considered in isolation from his phenomenology. By demonstrating the codetermination of his phenomenological, ecological, and political thinking, Marder accounts for Heidegger’s failures without either justifying them or suggesting that they invalidate his philosophical endeavor as a whole.
A plethora of different theories, models, and concepts make up the field of community ecology. Amid this vast body of work, is it possible to build one general theory of ecological communities? What other scientific areas might serve as a guiding framework? As it turns out, the core focus of community ecology—understanding patterns of diversity and composition of biological variants across space and time—is shared by evolutionary biology and its very coherent conceptual framework, population genetics theory. The Theory of Ecological Communities takes this as a starting point to pull together community ecology's various perspectives into a more unified whole. Mark Vellend builds a theory of ecological communities based on four overarching processes: selection among species, drift, dispersal, and speciation. These are analogues of the four central processes in population genetics theory—selection within species, drift, gene flow, and mutation—and together they subsume almost all of the many dozens of more specific models built to describe the dynamics of communities of interacting species. The result is a theory that allows the effects of many low-level processes, such as competition, facilitation, predation, disturbance, stress, succession, colonization, and local extinction to be understood as the underpinnings of high-level processes with widely applicable consequences for ecological communities. Reframing the numerous existing ideas in community ecology, The Theory of Ecological Communities provides a new way for thinking about biological composition and diversity.
The need to understand and address large-scale environmental problems that are difficult to study in controlled environments—issues ranging from climate change to overfishing to invasive species—is driving the field of ecology in new and important directions. Observation and Ecology documents that transformation, exploring how scientists and researchers are expanding their methodological toolbox to incorporate an array of new and reexamined observational approaches—from traditional ecological knowledge to animal-borne sensors to genomic and remote-sensing technologies—to track, study, and understand current environmental problems and their implications. The authors paint a clear picture of what observational approaches to ecology are and where they fit in the context of ecological science. They consider the full range of observational abilities we have available to us and explore the challenges and practical difficulties of using a primarily observational approach to achieve scientific understanding. They also show how observations can be a bridge from ecological science to education, environmental policy, and resource management. Observations in ecology can play a key role in understanding our changing planet and the consequences of human activities on ecological processes. This book will serve as an important resource for future scientists and conservation leaders who are seeking a more holistic and applicable approach to ecological science.
In this passionate, lucid, and surprising book, Timothy Morton argues that all forms of life are connected in a vast, entangling mesh. This interconnectedness penetrates all dimensions of life. No being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement, Morton contends, nor does ÒNatureÓ exist as an entity separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life.
What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, Monique Allewaert contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, Ariel’s Ecology explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. Allewaert’s examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings’ interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare’s Tempest and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws to Spivak’s theories of subalternity. In Allewaert’s interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara’s dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with “perfect knowledge of the ground.”