Afterword: Working in an Ecotone

Abstract

An ecotone is a transitional space that marks a shift from one ecosystem to another. In the Afterword, Stormer uses the concept of ecotone to describe how rhetoric and ecology coexist in varying degrees of transition, each fading into the other, across the authors’ chapters. He argues that the ontological blending and separation of rhetoric and ecology should be accounted for stochastically and emergently. To appreciate the mutual immanence of rhetoric and ecology, he suggests looking to the convergence of communities of scholars from rhetoric and ecology around shared problems, or to the manner by which active elements of a milieu are both interdependent and expressive.

Even within the circle of the special science we may find diversities of functioning not to be explained in terms of that science. But these diversities can be explained when we consider the variety of wider relationships of the pattern in question.

Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought