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Many are looking to foster a relationship between ecology and philosophy as it becomes clear that the reality of our contemporary age, as well as the future that we are rushing headlong into, is determined in large part by the environmental crisis. This attempt is not unprecedented as the environmental movement and some form of environmental studies have been around at least since the writings of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau. The legacy of the relationship between ecology and philosophy has been and continues to be led by the discipline of environmental ethics and environmental aesthetics.¹ In this way philosophy prescribes ethical and aesthetic norms on the basis of facts given by scientific ecology, but philosophy itself tends to remain unchanged by the encounter. There may be some change, often favorable (a favorite is replacing the Western subordination of ethics to reason with principles from Eastern philosophy and religion), but what remains after this change is still a philosophical system, in this case based on ethics as first philosophy, developed apart from scientific ecology.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137331977_4

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