Waiting for Geotropic Forces: Bergsonian Duration and the Ecological Sympathies of Biodesign

Biodesign disrupts the traditional temporalities of expectation and demand in wider design economies because designers are not selecting from a range of prefabricated samples from which they manufacture a product. Instead, they are plunged into the durations of other organisms for the simple reason that they must wait for something to grow. Situated in this context, this article considers how we might conceptualize these events of “waiting” such that we intensify their importance for ecological thought. In the philosophy of Henri Bergson, events of waiting are important as a mode of intuiting a register of movement beyond human habits of perception, what he refers to as duration. In this article, I suggest that thinking events of waiting in biodesign via Bergson intervenes in debates surrounding posthuman creativity, not because it multiplies creative agents but because it cultivates a sympathy for temporal ecologies from which human perception is alienated.

General Introduction to Environmental Humanities in India The Ecocritical Discourse in Hindu Literature

The article offers a general overview of the ecological debate and Environmental Humanities in India. After an introduction on the legacy of Gandhian ecological thought and contemporary literature, the essay focuses on the most discussed themes of the Indian classical tradition, with particular references to sacred texts (Vedas, Puranas, the epics). The sum of this knowledge is placed on the recursive perspective of Indian time: as yugas change, new structures of social life arise, reformulating society and its environment in a more holistic and sustainable way. This would be possible without ever denying the responsibility we all have in maintaining that personal empathy towards the environment that is reflected in Indian classical texts.

Ecology without Civilization

While Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy has been read through the uncanny human traumas and tropes of “contamination” in its first novel, Annihilation, the trilogy’s radical ecological thought emerges more clearly through cosmic and transformative trauma in the final novel, Acceptance. Rather than some contaminated space, Area X is restoring Earth’s ecosystems to a “pristine” state, but in a process of guided succession that traumatizes human life as lived under ecologically destructive neoliberal economies of extraction. Reading the twinned falls of Saul and Control, this article shows how Acceptance reimagines uncanny trauma for a new form that is painful but also familiar, human but also posthuman, and utterly necessary for planetary survival.

Aporias of Ecological Thought

Debates in ecological social theory are characterised by dualisms of nature and society. The author proposes the notion of ‘ecological aporias’ to account for these dualisms, focusing on three landmark examples of ecological thought over the past four decades from Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour and Jason W. Moore. He shows the persistence in this work of paradoxes and intractable contradictions revolving around the nature/society dualism. Rather than trying to dissolve these ecological aporias, he draws on recent work in eco-deconstruction to suggest that the ecological is itself an aporetic category and that this enables a new perspective for political ecology in an age of climate crisis. Rejecting Latour’s identification of political ecology with the politics of dwelling, he argues that climate change demands we recognise forms of life irreducible to the ontological security on which the concept of the ecological has long been based.

Teaching multiple approaches to management to facilitate prosocial and environmental well-being

Friedman’s maxim “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” (p. 32) has shaped what managers consider effective management. This Financial Bottom Line approach to management has been challenged by both Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) and Critical Management Studies (CMS). POS highlights how enhancing prosocial and other nonfinancial considerations can increase profits, consistent with the current dominant Triple Bottom Line approach. In contrast, CMS tends to critique any approach that seeks to maximize profits by creating dysfunctional power symmetries and marginalization. This study introduces a third option, the Social and Ecological Thought approach, which promotes maximizing social and ecological well-being while remaining financially viable. A longitudinal pre-post intervention in a sample of undergraduate management students showed that teaching multiple approaches to management—Financial Bottom Line, Triple Bottom Line, and Social and Ecological Thought—resulted in learners becoming less likely to espouse profit-related goals (e.g. to maximize efficiency, productivity, profitability) and more likely to identify nonfinancial ones (e.g. extra-organizational prosociality and reduction of marginalization) when characterizing effective management. However, the results did not support predictions regarding intra-organizational prosociality and marginalization, or power asymmetries. We discuss implications for pedagogy and the future development of POS and CMS.

Is sustainable marketing based on virtue ethics the answer to addressing socio-ecological challenges facing humankind?

This commentary provides a review of Dyck and Manchanda’s work on the use of virtue ethics, through Sociological and Ecological Thought (SET) Oriented Marketing, in tackling socio-ecological challenges within society. While we concur with the focus of the paper on moving away from a central emphasis on profit maximization, we differ in how we believe this can be achieved. We critique the SET approach put forward from three key positions: (a) the SET approach and the application of virtue ethics; (b) the SET approach and the use of the marketing mix to operationalize it in practice; and, (c) the missing systemic and institutional barriers which we believe render SET problematic both theoretically and in practical terms. We conclude by suggesting that instead of utilising normative ethical theories to address socio-ecological challenges marketing researchers turn to other perspectives, such as ecofeminism.

Introduction: Ecologising Taiwan

Ecologising Taiwan means to think ecologically about, from, as well as by way of Taiwan. On the one hand, we ecologise Taiwan by viewing it through an ecological perspective; on the other hand, we also want to treat Taiwan itself as an agent that drives our thinking, no longer merely an object of our anthropocentric and anthropocenic gaze. Taiwan, as an island that encompasses a particularly wide range of biotopes, redefines insularity in its connectivity to other global spaces and networks: it pits its infinite potential for different encounters, relations, and comparisons against any bias of smallness and isolation. Culturally specific representations—the stories we tell about the environment and how we tell them—are important in environmental thinking. Thus ecologising Taiwan is not only about what ecological thinking can do for Taiwan but also about what Taiwan can do for ecological thought. In order to sound out the different resonances of what ecologising Taiwan might mean, this special issue brings together six essays that explore flexible links between ecological thought and Taiwanese culture. As such, this special issue is part of the ecological chain of Taiwan studies, featuring topics (even topoi) on languages, genres, media forms, and methodologies in contestation and transformation.

Relations, Aliveness, Love: Curriculum in the Spirit of the Earth

Images and practices of relations, aliveness, and love provide a way to reconcile knowledge and its schooled pursuit with the wisdom required in our current, ecologically desperate times. This desperation is rooted, in part, in threads of the efficiency movement that were inherited by education in the early 1900s and left schools with a curriculum legacy that has become exhausted and counterproductive. This inheritance can be countered with ideas from the traditions of hermeneutics and ecological thought. But they are also countered with life-affirming and life-sustaining Cree ideas: wahkohtowin, wicihitowin, and sakihitowin. Practicing these ideas can help align work inside and outside schools with the characteristic spirit (ethos) of our earthly being, and can provide the grounds for a pointed critique of, and alternative to, the regnant regimes of contemporary schooling. wahkohtowin means, briefly put, “all things are related/all things are our relations” and wicihitowin refers to “the life-giving energy that is generated when people face each other as relatives and build trusting relationships by connecting with others in respectful ways.” sakihitowin means “love.” Reimagining curriculum as constituted by living fields of relations while also considering not only the energeia, the “aliveness” that is generated in the face-to-face care of and learning the ways of such living fields, but also the deep affection that is both needed for and produced by such reimagining, increases the prospects of our ecological future and the future of the more-than-human world.