Connecting with ecological futures

Abstract

Open any newspaper or magazine on any day of the week in the year 2001 and you will find stories that discuss some aspect of global environmental crisis. It might be global warming, and the politics of greenhouse gas emissions. It might salinity, or blue green algae, water rights and catchment flows. It might be endangered species and biodiversity. It might be famine, warfare, guns for timber, and diseases that are resistant to antibiotics; it might be floods, frogs, butterflies and rainforests. The concept of crisis alerts us to the existence of major changes which are running out of control. Most scholars assert that the driving forces in out of control processes are primarily social and cultural, although environmental processes have their own internal dynamics that can turn into runaway systems. Major ecological change, much of it in crisis, is situated across the nature/culture divide. Our academic division between arts and sciences compounds the problems of that divide, inhibiting the work we need to be doing to address crisis. It would be nice if this were the full extent of the problem, but it is not. In the twentieth century a radical break occurred within the west s understanding of the world. The repercussions of that break are very much with us, and we are in the uneasy position of living with several conflicting worldviews, none of which fully meshes with, and gives guidance for how to live in, the world as we are now learning to understand it.