What is Eco-philosophy?

Eco-philosophy is “ecological” in the broadest sense: it sees humanity as one with nature, as an integral part of the process of evolution which carries the universe onward from inanimate matter to life, to consciousness, and ultimately to divine.

The central concept of eco-philosophy is “The World as Sanctuary”. This is offered as an alternative to the Newtonian vision of “World as a Machine”. This new worldview emphasizes the unique, precious, and sacred nature of our planet. All other principles of eco-philosophy follow from this one.

The five key tenets of eco-philosophy are:
1) The world is a sanctuary.
2) Reverence for life is our guiding value.
3) Frugality is a precondition for inner happiness.
4) Spirituality and rationality do not exclude each other, but complement each other.
5) In order to heal the planet, we must heal ourselves.

The Center for Ecoliteracy was founded in 1995 by Fritjof Capra, Peter Buckley, and Zenobia Barlow to foster the experience and understanding of the natural world. The Center is a public non-profit foundation that supports a network of Northern California grantees, many of which are schools and educational organizations engaged in habitat restoration and agriculturally-related programs, such as school gardens and food systems.

“The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities – communities that are designed in such a way that their ways of life, businesses, economies, physical structures, and technologies do not interfere with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life. The first step in this endeavor is to understand the principles of organization that ecosystems have developed to sustain the web of life. This understanding is what we call ecological literacy.

The ecosystems of the natural world are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms. There is no waste in these ecological communities, one species’ waste being another species’ food. Thus matter cycles continually through the web of life. The energy driving these ecological cycles flows from the sun, and the diversity and cooperation among its members is the source of the community’s resilience.

Being ecologically literate means understanding these basic principles of organization of ecological communities and being able to embody them in the daily life of human communities.

Teaching this ecological knowledge—which may be called ‘principles of ecology,’ ‘principles of sustainability,’ ‘principles of community,’ or even the ‘basic facts of life’—will be the most important role of education in the next century…

Being ecologically literate means understanding the basic patterns and processes by which nature sustains life and using these core concepts of ecology to create sustainable human communities, in particular, learning communities.
Applying this ecological knowledge requires systems thinking, or thinking in terms of relationships, connectedness, and context. Ecological literacy means seeing the world as an interconnected whole. Using systems theory, we see that all living systems share a set of common properties and principles of organization. Thus we discover similarities between phenomena at different levels of scale—the individual child, the classroom, the school, the district, and the surrounding human communities and ecosystems. With its intellectual grounding in systems thinking, ecoliteracy offers a powerful framework for a systemic approach to school reform.” (Fritjof Capra)

The Center for Ecoliteracy is dedicated to fostering the experience and understanding of the natural world.

Website: http://www.ecoliteracy.org/

back to the top