Abstract
In spite of its frivolous title, this paper has a serious purpose. I would like to suggest that, in their original intent, phenomenology and ecology are mutually supportive, but that whenever they yield to a nostalgic longing to return to a purity of Beyng or Nature, their interrelation becomes destructive. An ecological philosophy appears to me viable only within reality perceived phenomenologically, as life’s world, while the moral implications of such a conception inevitably lead to ecological conclusions. However, in their romantic mode, phenomenology and ecology can become locked in a pathological co-dependency which ultimately leads to a metacrisis.
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Notes
Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984), note esp pp. 27ff. As evidence I was not alone, see Max Oelschläger, ed., The Wilderness Condition ( San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1992 ).
Locus classicus is Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (New York: Scribners, 1973) which condemns agriculture as the source of the environmental crisis and holds out a hunter/gatherer model as the once and future option.
Martin Heidegger appears to me as the towering example of romantic phenomenology. While it is his work as a whole I have in mind, the most relevant texts appear in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (trans. William Lovitt; New York: Harper & Row, 1977 ).
Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien: Humankind and the Environment ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985 ).
Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Life Style ( Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1988 ).
Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered ( Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985 ).
John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, Arne Naess, Thinking like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1988), note esp. 45–52. Not to be confused with study by same title noted in note 13 below.
Susan L. Flader, Thinking like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves and Forests (Colombia, MO: The University of Missouri Press, 1974). No relation to work by same title mentioned in note 11 above.
The classic statement of the position, capturing its sensitivity without sliding into irrationality, is Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution ( San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980 ).
Cf. the analysis of the front line experience in Jan Patoeka, Heretical Essays in the History of Philosophy ( Chicago: Open Court Press, 1997 ): 119–37.
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Kohák, E. (1998). Phenomenology and Ecology: Dependence and Co-Dependency. In: Cohen, R.S., Tauber, A.I. (eds) Philosophies of Nature: The Human Dimension. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 195. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2614-6_15
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