Suchergebnisse

Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication. Roy Ellen and Katsuyoshi Fukui. eds. Oxford: Oxford International Publishers Ltd., 1996.664 pp.

Review of: Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games, Alenda Y. Chang (2019)
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 320 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-51790-632-0, p/bk, $27.00

'Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature' by John Bellamy Foster is reviewed.

"Nature" is a core principle in ecological political thought, & if political ecology has contributed anything new to the discipline of political theory, then part of what that consists in is the placing of the "human-nature relationship" at the center of theoretical concern. This notwithstanding, ecological political thought, & its analysis, has tended to focus upon the "ecocentric-anthropocentric divide" & the normative question on "values in nature" to the extent that conceptual differences about the "nature of nature" in ecological thought have been somewhat neglected. Here, I explore differing decontestations of nature in deep ecology & social ecology & assess their import for the different normative arguments each of these ecovariant ideologies makes for human action in the natural world. I show that these different decontestations of nature are crucial to this normative argument, & this has important implications for the study of ecological political thought. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractLife on Earth is complex and generally abounds in food webs with other living organisms in terms of an ecological community. Besides such complexity, and the fact that populations of most living organisms have never been studied in terms of their molecular ecology, it is best to tread carefully when describing a given species as a 'generalist', more especially in terms of dietary and habitat breadth. We very much doubt that population homogeneity ever exists—because populations are always undergoing molecular-genetic changes, sometimes rapid, in response to various ecological challenges (e.g. climate, intra- and interspecific competition). In any case, a population may already have begun to undergo cryptic speciation. Such entities can occupy different habitats or exhibit different dietary breadths as a result of various ecological interactions formed over different spatial scales. These scales include everything from local (including islands) to geographic. The fossil evidence reveals that specialisations have existed over vast swathes of time. Besides, as is well documented, evolution only occurs as a result of adaptations leading to specialisation, and ultimately, specialist entitles, i.e. species and lower levels of ecological-evolutionary divergence. Here, focusing on diet, we posit that the terms mono-, oligo-and polyphagous are more accurate in relation to the dietary breadth of animals, with omnivory adopted in the case of organisms with very different food items. Thus, we strongly urge that the dubious and unscientific term 'generalism' be dropped in favour of these more precise and scientifically accurate terms directly relating to levels of phagy.