Friday, August 6, 2010: 10:10 AM
Blrm BC, David L Lawrence Convention Center
Background/Question/Methods Global environmental change has an ethical dimension that is essential for at least two reasons. First, the ultimate causes of the current environmental crisis are rooted in prevailing types of relationships established by industrial society with the natural world. Consequently, to overcome this crisis we require ethical changes in the valuing ecosystems, human and non-human life, and the productive practices and market policies that impact both. Second, today's prevailing ethical perspectives propose that what we ought to do in order to confront global environmental change involve ethical decisions and values. From this standard perspective, the sciences contribute to identify and characterize the proximate causes of the global environmental crisis, and help define what we can do. But defining what we ought/ to do essentially involves an ethical response. Here we propose an alternative ethical approach, an eco-culturally contextualized ethic, which overcomes the dichotomy between what society ought and can do, by interrelating the ways of knowing and researching nature and the ways of dwelling. Under this approach, ecological sciences undertake a crucial role in motivating ethical changes in the ways contemporary society inhabits and values the biosphere.
Results/Conclusions From an eco-culturally contextualized ethical perspective—in which ecological sciences and environmental ethics reciprocally inform each other—the network of Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research Sites (LTSER) plays a critical scientific and ethical role. For scientists, policy-makers, educators and society generally, moment to moment, in diverse regions, LTSER networks generate an ecological image of the world. LTSER networks of sites enable research at ecological, cultural, and political local scales, while at the same time involving these research sites in a global research network. To consolidate a greater international coverage of unique eco-cultural regions, and incorporate environmental philosophy and ethics into LTSER programs, at the Omora Ethnobotanical Park (OEP), a member of the new Chilean LTSER Network, we developed a methodological approach that we call “field environmental philosophy.” It integrates ecological research and environmental ethics into biocultural education and conservation through an interrelated four-step cycle: i) interdisciplinary ecological and philosophical research, ii) composition of metaphors, and communication through simple narratives, iii) design of guided field experiences with an ecological and ethical orientation, and iv) implementation of in situ conservation areas. This field practice combines methods and concepts of environmental philosophy and socioecological research that contributes to ecologically, politically, and culturally contextualize collaborations between ecology and the humanities, particularly for education and biocultural conservation.
Results/Conclusions From an eco-culturally contextualized ethical perspective—in which ecological sciences and environmental ethics reciprocally inform each other—the network of Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research Sites (LTSER) plays a critical scientific and ethical role. For scientists, policy-makers, educators and society generally, moment to moment, in diverse regions, LTSER networks generate an ecological image of the world. LTSER networks of sites enable research at ecological, cultural, and political local scales, while at the same time involving these research sites in a global research network. To consolidate a greater international coverage of unique eco-cultural regions, and incorporate environmental philosophy and ethics into LTSER programs, at the Omora Ethnobotanical Park (OEP), a member of the new Chilean LTSER Network, we developed a methodological approach that we call “field environmental philosophy.” It integrates ecological research and environmental ethics into biocultural education and conservation through an interrelated four-step cycle: i) interdisciplinary ecological and philosophical research, ii) composition of metaphors, and communication through simple narratives, iii) design of guided field experiences with an ecological and ethical orientation, and iv) implementation of in situ conservation areas. This field practice combines methods and concepts of environmental philosophy and socioecological research that contributes to ecologically, politically, and culturally contextualize collaborations between ecology and the humanities, particularly for education and biocultural conservation.
