Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was a German zoologist and follower of Charles Darwin. Haeckel defined ecology as “the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and to its organic environment.” Murray Bookchin felt that although "modern science has lost its critical edge" and that "the branches of science that once tore at the chains of man are now used to perpetuate and gild them", ecology remains the one science "that may yet restore and even transcend the liberatory estate of the traditional sciences and philosophies." Bookchin attributes ecology's power as a "critical" rather than "docile" science to its belief in "the sovereignty of nature over man and all his activities." It is thus the first science to challenge anthropocentrism and the great chain of being which puts humanity at the top. > Modern man’s despoliation of the environment is global in scope, like his imperialism. It is even extraterrestrial, as witness the disturbances of the Van Allen Belt a few years ago. Today human parasitism disrupts more than the atmosphere, climate, water resources, soil, flora, and fauna of a region; it upsets virtually all the basic cycles of nature and threatens to undermine the stability of the environment on a worldwide scale. Source: [Bookchin 1964 - Ecology and Revolutionary Thought](zotero://select/items/1_58XHQRCK) --- From [[Reference Notes/Books/Rooted|Rooted]] > The thirteenth-century Italian saint Francis of Assisi is the patron of ecology, beloved far beyond the Christian faith. Francis sings praise to the divine, in his words, “through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us.” Note that Francis does not speak of an earth that is a gift to humans from a creator-God, nor a garden of resources over which we have dominion, nor even a landscape that we are called to steward benevolently. It is the earth, a mother, our sister, who governs us. We find the sacred not simply upon the earth, but through the earth. Francis was known for calling all things sister and brother—not just the monks and sisters of the monasteries he cofounded with Clare of Assisi, but everything. The sun, the moon, famously. But also crickets, grasses, mice, trout, ravens. Wolves. From [[Reference Notes/Books/The Patterning Instinct|The Patterning Instinct]] > Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch Jewish philosopher, was ostracized from his community for his pantheistic views. Spinoza, considered by some to be the spiritual grandfather of ecology, saw God as identical with nature and believed everything in the universe to be an expression of the thought of God. --- Fritjof Capra: > “Ecological science contributes to a paradigm shift: from separation and control to interdependence and participation.” — Capra, F., & Luisi, P.L. (2014). _The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision._ Cambridge University Press. --- Theodore Roszak, in his 1973 book [[Where the Wasteland Ends]], writes: > Ecology has been called 'the subversive science' — and with good reason. Its sensibility —wholistic, receptive, trustful, largely non-tampering, deeply grounded in aesthetic intuition — is a radical deviation from traditional science. Ecology does not systematize by mathematical generalization or materialist reductionism, but by the almost sensuous intuiting of natural harmonies on the largest scale. Its patterns are not those of numbers, but of unity in process; its psychology borrows from Gestalt and is an awakening awareness of wholes greater than the sum of their parts. However, Neil Evernden challeges this idealized version of ecology in his 1993 book, The Natural Alien: > In contrast to Roszak's ideal, contemporary ecology ishighly reliant on statistical inference. Even a cursory glance through the literature would persuade the novice of the value of learning to comprehend differential equations before tackling the science of ecology, and a look at the job advertisements would convince him of the importance of being able to call himself a quantitative ecologist. There may well be subversive insights emerging from ecology, but the discipline itself is precisely what Roszak claims it is not. And while the environmentalist may sympathize with Roszak's version, it is to the scientific one that he turns for authoritative support of his endeavour.