Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University
Amy Lavender Harris, B.A. (Hons.), M.PL., PhD Candidate
Copyright April 2004
Please do not use this paper without permission and attribution. Amy Lavender Harris may be contacted at
alharris@yorku.ca or amy.harris@utoronto.ca .
Comprehensive Paper
Ecological Phenomenology
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting
For something whose appearance would be its vanishing –
The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,
Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.
Mark Strand, from “The Night, The Porch”
1.
Invocation
The truest measure of spring is not the chorus of spring peepers calling beyond the fold of the river, nor geese
lamenting northward, nor the sound of their wings. These are memories only. But last night, after a rain, I stood on the
step and listened to earthworms drawing leaves into the soil beneath the lawn. This sound is the slow repair of the
season, the truest measure of spring.
And beneath the ivory tower, amid drifts of literature and the drawing inward and digestion of words, perhaps the
shape of these leaves may augur the slow repair of the work, the truest measure of the idea.
And perhaps, as Neil Evernden suggests, we may enter an ivory tunnel, a “viaduct to the roots of social
understanding”, where we may join “those who undertake the task of describing the fragments and aromas that drift
past in the ivory gloom ... with the hope of sufficiently changing the landscape of assumptions that new questions can
be asked.” (1992: x)
*
Ecological phenomenology calls. It calls for originative thinking and openness to the “laying bare [of] ...
essential elements of human experience with the world” (Leman Stefanovic, 1994: 68). It calls “to enter, ever more
deeply, into the sensorial present” (Abram, 1996: 272), and to “recover the moral sense of our humanity” by
“recover[ing] first the moral sense of nature” (Kohak, 1984: 13). It is also a call to “challenge the astonishing
assumption that only utility to industrialized society can justify the existence of anything on the planet” (Evernden,
1985: 12), and an invocation to adopt “a kind of deliberate naivety through which it is possible to encounter a world
unencumbered with presuppositions.” (ibid: 57).
1
In making and responding to these calls, ecological phenomenologists argue that the environmental crisis is
equally physical and metaphysical, and that a fundamental re-conceptualisation of human relationships with the
natural earth is necessary to help undo the damage stemming from a contemporary western history of separation from
and utilitarian valuation and exploitation of the natural world. In doing so, ecological phenomenologists probe beneath
western understandings of philosophy, temporality, and teleology, as well as economic, social, and scientific
valuations of nature. They seek to reach both through and behind these understandings to touch the primordial
encounters which underlie and precede theories about nature, encounters which are embodied, temporal, reciprocal,
and pervasive, and which are the foundation of our dwelling on, in, and with the earth. Without them, and without a
valuing of them, we do not dwell.
This paper traces major currents of ecological phenomenology and their contributions to environmental
thought. Because my doctoral work is a phenomenological enquiry into finitude conducted through an examination of
contemporary western narratives of nature and dwelling, this paper is predicated on a claim that the environmental
crisis may be understood fundamentally as a crisis of dwelling. In doing so, the paper focuses on Heideggerian and
post-Heideggerian contributions to ecological phenomenology, particularly interpretations of dwelling and the role of
Dasein (Human Being-present-with-and-toward) in preserving the four-fold of earth, sky, mortals, and gods. In
addition, the paper considers two additional questions: whether ecological phenomenology proposes to recover an old
way of seeing, or whether it requires a new one; and how a field without a conventional methodology might be useful
in conducting environmental research and responding to environmental concerns.
2.
Encountering Ecological Phenomenology: A History of the Encounter and its Naming
If environmental philosophy is a young field, ecological phenomenology as such 1 is even younger, dating
1
Although ecological phenomenology follows, temporally, the development of phenomenology of place, and while
many phenomenologists might consider themselves part of both traditions given the significant overlap of concerns,
these two branches of phenomenology have distinctive histories and trajectories. Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, for
example, cites Edward Relph’s 1976 work, Place and Placelessness, as pioneering in phenomenology of place, but
ecological phenomenologists do not routinely refer to him nor to other geographers writing (or arguably writing) in the
phenomenological tradition, such as Yi-Fu Tuan. Instead, ecological phenomenologists’ particular concern with
nature is traceable to pioneers of the philosophical tradition in the ecological movement like Aldo Leopold (land
ethics) and Arne Naess (deep ecology). Robert Mugerauer, David Seamon, and Edward Casey, on the other hand, have
published phenomenological works on both place/space and (in recent years) on ecology, and perhaps their work,
along with the contributions of Leman Stefanovic, Ted Toadvine, and others, may signify an increasing conjunction of
these spheres.
2
back perhaps two decades to foundational works, most notably Erazim Kohak’s The Embers and the Stars (1984) and
Neil Evernden’s The Natural Alien (1985). Both works offer remarkably similar invocations to an encounter of
environmental thought with phenomenology. In a lyrical and deeply personal paean to the “moral sense of nature”
(13), Kohak asserts that “[we] must approach nature anew, undertaking no less than a phenomenology of nature as the
counterpart of our moral humanity” (22). Evernden directly addresses the vitiation (and the possibility of redemption)
of the environmental movement, observing that “[i]f what we are is entailed in the story we create for ourselves, then
only a new story will alter us and our actions. ... And if we can side-step the protective barriers of common sense, there
is the possibility that we can become fertile ground for a new start, a new story, and a redefining of our place in the
world.” (141). To both Kohak and Evernden, a phenomenological approach represents more than an alternative: it is a
required response to the western preoccupation with techne, to reductively quantitative accounts of nature, and to
utility-based valuations of the natural world. Also to both, the encounter of environmental philosophy with
phenomenology necessarily has both methodological and epistemological implications for the understanding of the
meaning of phenomenology as well as the understanding of the meaning of nature.
If, as Kohak asserts, what is called for is “nothing less than a phenomenology of nature” (22), what forms
might such a phenomenology take, and in what modes might its enquiries take shape? What might it be called? In a
public lecture in 1975, Joseph Grange pointed out that the emerging way of understanding ecology “ha[d] yet to be
structured, organized and given a name” (1977: 136). He proposed ‘foundational ecology’ (ibid). Kohak suggested
that the “radical opening of our life and thought to the world of others, human, animate, inanimate, in the integrity of
its otherness and the meaningfulness of its being” (207) might produce an ‘ecological ethics’ (213). Citing Heidegger
and the deep ecologist Michael Zimmerman on the need for a new ethos, Evernden, however, cautioned that ‘ethics’ is
too often reduced to a “behavioural credo” (69), and declaimed that “[t]here is no possibility of an environmental
ethic, then, in a society dominated by the technological vision of the world” (69). To Evernden, a phenomenological
approach to environment had more in common with Grange’s ‘foundational ecology’ and the ‘deep ecology’ 2 Arne
2
An interesting and potentially messy question concerns the relationship of ecological phenomenology to deep
ecology. I will suggest, simply and for the meantime, that while ecological phenomenology has much in common with
deep ecology (and is sometimes claimed to fit under the umbrella of deep ecology: Michael Zimmerman, for example,
has written prolifically about intersections between deep ecology and phenomenology, although he has backtracked
somewhat on Heidegger’s contributions to such enquiries; see Zimmerman, 1993), a close consideration of their
commonalities and differences is beyond the scope of this paper. References to deep ecology / deep ecologists in this
paper are significant insofar as these references illuminate aspects of ecological phenomenology.
3
Naess identified as characterizing a metaphysical shift in ecological consciousness away from anthropocentric
perspectives (68). But like Kohak, however, Evernden stopped short of naming the encounter, focusing instead on its
programmatic aspects in affirming that phenomenology “has much to say of the human commitment to the immediate
environment and the world at large. ... It may also speak directly to the concerns of the environmental movement ...”
(57). It may be observed, then, that ecological phenomenology grew out of a gap between culture and nature, between
action and thought, between techne and a new ethos. Or as David Wood has pointed out in a retrospective essay, out of
“the gap between naturalism and phenomenology” (2003: 221).
As late as 1988, Joseph Compton captured the novelty not merely of adding phenomenological enquiries to
the philosophy of nature3, but of having a philosophy of nature at all:
I have become accustomed to introducing lectures or papers on
phenomenology and the natural sciences with some apologetic
acknowledgement to the effect that even putting the words
“phenomenology” and “natural science” together is likely to be
heard as a bad joke – a sort of cultural impropriety, not something
that is “done”. This is because, as I usually go on to say, “we all
know” that the two could have no constructive and probably not
even an interesting connection with one another. (65)
Compton goes on to assert that “none of us – including phenomenological and existential philosophers – any longer
knows what a “philosophy of nature” might mean, much less a phenomenological one. ... we do not understand by
“philosophy of nature” any inclusive, continuing, or compelling philosophical agenda.” (66) Yet, Compton continues,
Natural science does not tell us all we know about the natural
world. We bring to scientific work a rich pre-scientific understanding
of nature which informs and conditions it. I want to suggest that
there is a task that we may properly call the philosophy of nature
which is to evoke this pre-scientific understanding of nature and, in
a continual dialectic with scientific developments, to interpret these
developments as natural knowledge, as knowledge of the very same
natural world in which we live and move and have our being
even before we have ever heard of science. (66-67)
3
Compton was referring to the natural sciences in particular, but his comments also characterize the environmental
disciplines, which as a whole (despite the periodic ascendency of ‘deep ecology’ perspectives and various efforts to
explicate elements of a variety of philosophies of nature’) have persistently emphasized scientific or economic
approaches to environmental problems over more qualitative ones. In bids for public credibility, environmentalists of
nearly all stripes still retain some unease about philosophical (not to mention phenomenological) approaches to the
environmental crisis. Hence the much greater focus (even in academic environmental studies faculties like the one in
which I work) on supporting scientific and social science research about climate change, habitat destruction, economic
impacts, and the need for hard-hitting policy responses, etc. than on paying attention to flaky assertions about the
intrinsic value of weather and trees. Despite ecological philosophers’ claims that reconsidering how we value nature is
a crucial part of addressing environmental problems, efforts to imbue the environmental disciplines with a philosophy
of nature remain provisional.
4
To Compton, a philosophy of nature undertaken as a phenomenological project contributes to understandings that
cannot be achieved through natural science (or even the philosophy of science) alone. A philosophy of nature requires
a reversal of the conventional epistemological order in which facts determined by science precede reflections on their
meaning and implications. A (phenomenological) philosophy of nature begins not with (derived) facts but with the
encounter that precedes and engenders them. Accordingly to Compton, a phenomenological philosophy of nature
acknowledges the pre-scientific encounter of self with world as
a field extended in a horizon of space and time, revealing re-identifiable
events, relations of events, processes, and things, open to exploration and determination, but always
transcending any of its presented aspects, and constituting the referent and inclusive situation of all
our embodied,
intersubjective praxis. (74)
In doing so, a phenomenological philosophy of nature not only deepens our appreciation of nature; it simultaneously
defines and enlarges the program of the natural sciences. Perhaps above all, it provides a paradigm in which scientific
explanations may not only correspond to (in a referential sense) but cohere with (in an inferential -- or perhaps
reverential -- sense) pre-scientific experiences of nature. As Compton points out (with reference to philosopher of
science Dudley Shapere’s list of existence claims in physics) , the criteria for existence in scientific and pre-scientific
(or primordial) experience are remarkably similar:
Now the criteria indicated here are strangely familiar. ... as we earlier
saw, one of the essential structures of the pre-scientifically experienced
world is precisely that it is peopled with entities and processes which
(i) act on us and on which we act, which (ii) constitute “inexhaustible”
sources of perspectives or properties that ever surprise us, and which
(iii) remain constant or have some unity through and transcending
different perspectives – that is, under different transformations. Reality,
as we experience it, is always this perspectival unity; that which is
more than we see, which has another side, an inside, and as yet
unexpressed capacities; that which relates to and interacts with
other things. (79)
To Compton it is not at all surprising that the ‘existence claims’ of science and the pre-scientific experience of nature
are similar: this is because the “operative criteria of existence in physical enquiry .... presuppose reference to the lived
perceptual world.” To the extent that scientific enquiry “misdescribes” or ignores the primordial encounter, as
(according to Compton) classical empiricism and operationalism do, it remains partial and risks denying whole
avenues of existence, experience, enquiry, and understanding. To Compton, a “continuing, critical, and constructive
5
interplay between philosophical reflection, on the one hand, and concrete scientific theorizing on the other” will foster
a “dialectic of interpretation” and enrich both scientific and philosophical enquiry. (79)
Although his interests in the philosophy of nature are oriented toward the natural sciences rather than
exploring ecology or ecological thought per se, in this loosely chronological but retrospective section I have chosen to
focus on Compton’s comments at some length for two substantive reasons and a third historical one. First, Compton’s
characterization of the gap between naturalistic and philosophical accounts of nature is particularly instructive because
it probes directly into the methods and approaches of the natural sciences rather than focusing (only or primarily) on
their effects on understandings, policies, and valuations of nature, as ecological philosophers tend to. By doing so,
Compton challenges the gap itself, pointing out that scientific and phenomenological approaches to phenomena (such
as existence claims in and about nature) are actually remarkably similar, despite how they are conventionally
characterized. Secondly, Compton argues that phenomenological approaches function not only philosophically but
scientifically as well:
Taking pre-scientific experience seriously may suggest that
science must eventually modify certain of its explanatory
constructs which appear incompatible with that experience. On
the other hand, taking those constructs seriously may lead to
a revised and more adequate understanding of pre-scientific
experience itself. Usually, both things will happen. (80)
In short, while advancing a phenomenological philosophy of nature, Compton avoids two limitations evident in most
efforts to justify ecological phenomenological perspectives; the first being their tendency to shout across the gap while
decrying it as harmful (an approach which may simply entrench real and perceived divisions between scientific /
quantitative / naturalistic inquiries and philosophical / phenomenological approaches to nature); and the second being
the problem of value, a similar ‘two-solitudes’ situation in which proponents of intrinsic or utilitarian valuations seem
doomed to do battle, wielding their warring axiologies in infinite regress.
To me, a third reason for reading Compton alongside the evolving body of ecological phenomenology
literature, especially retrospectively, is because doing so helps in appraising (rather than simply describing) theoretical
and methodological challenges that ecological phenomenologists have had to confront (particularly the two I have just
mentioned), as well as their responses to those challenges in the development of this program of research and thought.
If the ecological phenomenological literature is divided into two periods, the first being defined by the ‘call’ to include
6
phenomenological perspectives in the body of responses to ecological crisis and the initial ‘encounter’ between
environmental philosophy and phenomenology, and the second consisting of the development and exploration of
ecological phenomenology perspectives, preoccupations, and methods, then Compton might be used to provide both
historical perspective and a demarcation point.
In such a division, Neil Evernden’s The Natural Alien and Erazim Kohak’s The Embers and the Stars fall into
the first period, along with earlier work pursuing ‘foundational’ ecology (Joseph Grange), deep ecology (Arne Naess),
and phenomenological deep ecology (e.g., Michael Zimmerman, who continues to publish widely) approaches to
ecological philosophy in the 1970s and early to mid 1980s. These works begin with two principal problems: the first
being the matter of the gap between naturalistic 4 and phenomenological accounts of nature, and the second being
questions about the value of nature. Ecological philosophers’ responses to both problems emerged as responses to
historical realities confronted by the environmental movement.
In an early characterization of the gap, Neil Evernden commences The Natural Alien with a statement that,
despite perceptions to the contrary, the environmental movement has failed. According to Evernden,
[A] shift in tactics has constituted a change in emphasis as well, from
the personal testimony of experienced value to an ‘objective’ elucidation
of public interest. That is, while in the past the naturalist-orator
tried to evoke in his listener a sensation reminiscent of his own
in the presence of nature, it is now possible simply to show the man
in the street what’s in it for him. By excising emotion and concentrating
on numbers the environmentalist can show even the disinterested that
it is prudent, economic, to retain a particular mountain in its
4
It is worth offering a brief definition of naturalism, which refers to the philosophical/ scientific view that all entities
are natural entities whose character may be disclosed by science and reflects causal laws. Erazim Kohak describes
naturalism as “reflect[ing] the late medieval division of reality into two realms, conceived of as almost two distinct
natures, one “natural”, the other “supernatural”. .... Thus “naturalism” came to mean a philosophy which accepted as
normative of “reality” the reality construct of the science favoured by a given “naturalistic” thinker”. (1984: 7)
Ecological phenomenology is by mandate non- or anti-naturalistic in orientation. David Wood, for example, writes
that “phenomenology was born out of resistance to the threat of naturalism” and speaks of “the need to rescue Nature
from naturalism.” (2003: 211). Heidegger underscores this need in Being and Time, observing,
If one understands Nature ontologico-categorically, one finds that
Nature is a limiting case of the Being of possible entities within-theworld. Only in some definite mode of its own Being-in-the-world can
Dasein discover entities as Nature. This manner of knowing them has
the character of depriving the world of its worldhood in a definite way.
‘Nature’, as the categorical aggregate of those structures of Being which
a definite entity encountered within-the-world may possess, can never
make worldhood intelligible. But even the phenomenon of ‘Nature’ ...
can be grasped ontologically only in terms of the concept of the world –
that is to say, in terms of the analytic of Dasein. (93-94)
7
present state. ... Through such arguments the new managerial form
of environmental action attempts to accomplish what decades of
inspired prose and rhetoric could not. (9)
According to Evernden, however, “something is lost or compromised in this change of emphasis” (ibid). What is lost
is a sense of nature as a whole. Nature is reduced, instead, to a raw resource: “the ecologist is forced to treat nature as
essentially non-living, as a machine to be dissected, interpreted, and manipulated,” (20). Evernden calls this a process
of ‘resourcism and reification’ (22) which “casts all of creation into categories of utility” (23). He calls it “the Trojan
horse of the industrial state.” (24). To Evernden, the environmental movement has failed because environmentalists
have “come to adopt the strategy and assumptions of their opponents” (10) and learned to treat nature as no more than
the sum of quantifiable parts whose value is limited to their economic or scientific utility. Because environmentalists
who argue otherwise are caricatured as anti-progressives, ultimately “they accept the futility of trying to defend that
which is not even admitted to exist” (26). For Evernden, even the term ‘ecology’ has been absorbed wholly into
naturalism.
Hence the call for a reversal and a fundamentally different approach to environmentalism and ecological
thinking. Evernden acknowledges that while environmentalists vary widely in their goals, there are “two different
types of ‘ecologies’, vying for attention.” (6). Evernden is not the first to identify such divisions in the environmental
movement: he identifies Arne Naess’ shallow/deep ecology classification (which dates to 1973) and Joseph Grange’s
dividend/foundational ecology (which appeared in print in 1977). In his comprehensive text on deep ecology (which
itself rests partly on an anthropocentrism/non-anthropocentrism distinction), Warwick Fox identifies additional
typologies, including Leo Marx’s conservationist viewpoint/ecological perspective (which dates to 1970), Donald
Worster’s imperial/arcadian traditions, Jeremy Rifkin’s technological knowledge/empathetic knowledge, and
Timothy O’Riordan’s technocentric/ecocentric approaches, among others (see 1995: 26-37). Joseph Grange captures,
perhaps best, the need to clearly distinguish “fundamentally opposed ways of understanding ecology” in order to lay
bare the consequences of the dominant paradigm:
This way of understanding ecology can do little in the long run,
for it only serves to reinforce the basic mode of consciousness
that brought on our environmental disaster. Perhaps dividend ecology
[the dominant, utility-based paradigm] can postpone for awhile the
oncoming crisis in our collective consciousness, but it lacks
both the vision and resources to develop ecology as a discipline
capable of renewing both the human spirit and assisting in
its growth. (1977: 136)
8
In the ‘first period’ of ecological phenomenology, emphasizing the gap between these “different types of ‘ecologies’”
had at least two strategic purposes. First, it served to awaken environmentalists to the reality that their approaches to
environmental problems often meshed too neatly with resource extraction/management models in which
environmental protection was justified (and largely remains justifiable) only on utilitarian grounds (in other words,
pointing out that the environmental movement had allowed its territory to be defined out from under it). Second,
identifying such schisms exposed their epistemological and philosophical underpinnings to analysis, enabling, among
other things, consideration of their consequences and a full evaluation of their claims. Third, asserting that there are
“different types of ‘ecologies’” created space for the identification and naming of one or more alternatives to the
dominant paradigm (and its vested interest in denying, co-opting, or discrediting other sorts of environmental
discourse).
At the same time, however, there have been costs to focusing on the gap between these different ecologies,
such as the increasingly sophisticated caricaturing both of and within the environmental movement. Corporations and
institutions have simply extended their adoption of the language of environmentalism, offering policy and fiscal
analyses of the new typologies of ecological thought (the language of sustainability is one prominent example), while
pushing deep ecologists into the murky end of their own pool. Similarly, ecological views have been divided
increasingly along theoretical / practical lines. Adherents of resource management/extraction models assign the
greatest credibility to ecological perspectives offering practical methods and outcomes, while deep ecologists are
sometimes criticised ( even as fascists; see Zimmerman, 1993) for their strident exhibition of a “greener than thou”
attitude (see, for example, Warwick Fox’s recounting of the vitriol traded between proponents of social ecology and
advocates of deep ecology, 1995: 49).
In this ‘historical’ reading which has sought to distinguish the initial ‘call’ to ecological phenomenological
perspectives from its subsequent unfolding into increasingly complex and self-critical fields of enquiry, Compton’s
assertions about the ‘dialectic’ between phenomenological perspectives and the natural sciences might be seen to offer
a way past the charges of irrelevancy and Luddism levelled whenever ecological philosophers seek to meddle in
‘practical’ environmental problems. Although it seems clear that emphasizing the existence of epistemic gaps was a
crucial step in making room for ecological phenomenological perspectives in the crowded and contested territory of
9
environmental discourse, a next step might involve finding ways to invite more conventional approaches / institutions
across the gap, possibly by focusing (as Compton does) on the ‘dialectic’ between phenomenology and other
ecological / scientific approaches to the environmental crisis. Indeed, there is evidence that as its enquiries develop
and mature, ecological phenomenology is doing just that: in their introduction to Ecophenomenology: Back to the
Earth Itself, Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine observe:
The intersection of ecological thinking with phenomenology,
the momentum that drives each toward the other, begets a new
cross-disciplinary inquiry: eco-phenomenology. Eco-phenomenology
is based on a double claim: first, that an adequate account of our
ecological situation requires the methods and insights of phenomenology;
and, second, that phenomenology, led by its own momentum,
becomes a philosophical ecology, that is, a study of the interrelationship
between organism and world in its metaphysical and axiological
dimensions. (2003: xii-xiii)
This is a bold prescription for an expanding interdisciplinary field of enquiry only two decades after the publication of
its foundational works. It does, however, suggest that ecological phenomenology has found a variety of ways to
respond to the call made initially by Kohak and Evernden. One example comes from David Wood, who suggests that
one such “middle ground between phenomenology and naturalism” (2003: 231) lies somewhere between
intentionality and causality, based in part on a rethinking of consciousness: “if we accept that [a] connection to
practical agency is central to intentional meaning, it does locate intentionality within an interactive nexus from which
causal powers cannot be separated. ... If this is so, intentionality is firmly lodged within my bodily existence, within
the natural world.” (ibid: 222). Another example is Ingrid Leman Stefanovic’s phenomenological enquiry into
sustainability, in which phenomenological perspectives are shown to both clarify and challenge the basis and
recommendations of the World Commission on Environment and Development’s ‘Brundtland report’, Our Common
Future (Stefanovic, 2000).
Returning to an analysis of the first period in the encounter between phenomenology and ecological
philosophy in light of Compton’s considerations (on the role of phenomenology in a philosophy of nature informed by
the natural sciences), a second challenge ecological phenomenologists have faced is the matter of how nature is
valued, a challenge whose implications I think are worth considering, even if only briefly in this paper 5. Questions of
Callicott gives some sense of the significance of intrinsic value questions by observing that the question of “how to
discover intrinsic value in nature is the defining problem for environmental ethics.” (1995: 2)
5
10
value are inherently tricky, especially when ‘intrinsic’ value enters the discussion. The most eloquent pleas for the
preservation of species or landscapes for their own value do not in practice often trump the authority of an
environmental assessment based on species counts or test pits, nor are claims that paving a wood-lot will reduce our
essential humanity likely to sway the Ontario Municipal Board. Ecological phenomenologists must do more than find
an alternative to naturalistic valuations of nature. Neil Evernden’s claim that “the values at issue are not economic in
the first place” (1985: 10) is undoubtedly true, but re-evaluating must go beyond a “protest on behalf of value” (33),
and even beyond being “true to one’s own experience of value in the world” (37), if ecological phenomenology is to be
more than an obscure way of thinking about environmental problems. As with the gap between naturalistic and holistic
approaches, there is a need for strategy, a need to more clearly define and occupy the territory.
Basing much of his analysis on how questions of value are dealt with in the environmental literature, in “The
Identity Crisis in Environmental Philosophy” Richard Watson argues that many environmental philosophers’
assertions about the intrinsic value of nature are “vacuous tautolog[ies]” and observes, “it is as though some
environmental philosophers have never heard of systemic coherence or philosophical analysis, and believe that the
confident and forceful assertion of a statement makes it true.” (1995: 203). Although Watson may be imposing the
methods of the analytic philosophical tradition on a field of enquiry housed within its philosophical successor, it does
seem to me that ecological phenomenologists are no less guilty than other ecological philosophers of hedging or
glossing over language and meaning with italicized assertions. On the question of value, for example, Watson points
out that “it may not be a fallacy to go from fact to value [i.e., saying that a thing’s value follows from its being], but it
is still necessary to give an argument showing how it is done.” (Ibid: 204). In this light, the forerunners of the
ecological phenomenological tradition might be criticised for playing loose with philosophy, or for basing their
accounts on a loose history of philosophical ideas about nature. Yet, as Joseph Grange avers, a new philosophical
approach to ecology has precisely the job of challenging the old one by
uncovering the false base of our present world-view:
over-reliance on abstract intellectual principles. What is required
is the refounding of consciousness of the concrete bed of lived
human experience. To achieve this end, we must let certain
foundational experiences show themselves to us once more. We
must, in other words, see our world exactly as we experience it
rather than as we construct it through our rational presuppositions
and socialized modes of consciousness. (1977: 142)
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One response is that instrumental value is only one element of valuation; Callicott, for example, points out that most
people consider their total value as exceeding their instrumental value, and that the real challenge is “bring[ing] one’s
own intrinsic value to one’s attention.” (1995: 2). Callicott rules out the “convergence hypothesis” in which
anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric valuations of nature produce the same ends in environmental policies and
species protection strategies (he points out, for example, that insects are far less likely to receive shelter under species
protection laws than “charismatic megafauna” like Bengal tigers (3)). He also identifies difficulties in valuations
grounded in conventional moral explanations. Callicott suggests that we must get beyond the (modernist) view that
value (even intrinsic value) is always ultimately conferred; he suggests that the process of doing so is bound up in the
historical breakdown of Cartesian subject-object distinctions. My own sense, somewhat pre-reflective but informed by
Heidegger’s claims about dwelling (explored later in this paper), is that intrinsic value is necessarily distinct from
conferred value, in the sense that it is an inherent part of the integrity or wholeness of any entity 6. In this sense we
de-value nature by the very process of assigning utilitarian or instrumental values to it that fail to account for the
intrinsic wholeness of nature, including those ineffable qualities we can only glimpse. I see the question of value as an
ontological matter. C.F. Sapontzis, on the other hand, does away with all these categorizations in favour of various
forms of derivative and non-derivative value (see Sapontzis, 1995). Clearly, for the second and subsequent generations
of ecological phenomenologists, one challenge is to find ways of directly addressing questions of value. This does not
mean making an irrevocable or singular choice among any of the methods endorsed by the various analytical or
continental schools, but it does require the clear definition and re-definition of concepts, methods, and terms.
In Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes between Things of Nature and Things ‘invested with value’, holding that
the “Thinghold of Things” ‘invested with value’ is based on the Thinghold of Nature. (1962: 91). In this reading,
assigned value is ontical; it does not have the ontological significance of Nature as such. In considering the Being of
“Things ‘invested with value’” (1962: 96), which he traces to their Greek origin as “‘mere Things’”, things we
encounter as ‘equipment’ (97), Heidegger comments, “to the Being of any equipment there is always a totality of
equipment ... constituted by various ways of the ‘in-order-to’, such as serviceability, condusiveness, usability,
manipulability. ... These things never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves.” (97) It is possible to
interpret value and the “in order to” ontologically; Heidegger uses a hammer as an example, commenting, “the less we
just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to
it become ... the kind of Being which equipment possesses – in which it manifests itself in its own right – we call
“readiness-to-hand.” (98) The early Heidegger does not directly address moral implications arising from this sort of
valuing, although in his later work Heidegger concerns himself greatly with the “sickness” arising from (a
metaphysics of) modern Technology, in which Being is reduced to “standing reserve.” (See “The Question
Concerning Technology”, collected in Basic Writings, 1993: 311-341; see also Young, 2002, particularly Chapter 3.
Young describes Heidegger as the “‘physician’ of modern Western culture)
6
12
I shall complete this section by observing that the name “eco-phenomenology” seems to have appeared
around the millennial turn, thus simplifying the list of titles and typologies previously applied to this field of enquiry7.
Explaining the etymology, Ted Toadvine suggests that, initially, the originary meaning of ‘ecology’ might be
re-appropriated8:
Usage aside, what is attractive about the term “ecology,” in my
opinion, is precisely its origin, like that of “economy,” in the Greek
oikos home or dwelling. “Ecology” is literally the logos of the
dwelling, a conjunction of concepts that retains a usefully rich
ambiguity. .... perhaps the reappropriation of this term, over and
against the hegemony of naturalistic reduction, can open new ways
to consider ourselves at home in nature, or to consider nature at
home with itself. Ecology in the sense of the logos of home is a
broad notion, and concerns at least the conjunction of (human
and nonhuman) self and world, their boundaries and exchanges, the
dimensions that relate and divide them, and the practical, axiological
epistemological, and metaphysical issues raised at this meeting point.
(2001: 76-77)
Re-appropriation accomplished, Toadvine goes on, “We arrive then at the point where phenomenology can play an
essential role, precisely through the alternative it can offer for exploring such a conjunction of self and world.” (Ibid:
77). He suggests that what might result is a two-sided conversation between ecology and phenomenology, in which the
concerns of a ‘phenomenology of ecology’ (phenomenology applied to ecological issues) and an ‘ecological
phenomenology’ (in which ecological insights might be applied to the understanding of phenomenological method).
Toadvine acknowledges that these might not be separable in practice, and suggests that the wide range of enquiries
which explore both facets be called “ecophenomenology9”.
Despite Toadvine’s nomenclature, I have chosen to title this paper ‘ecological phenomenology’ and use this term
throughout. In part this reflects a personal aversion to contractions and acronyms, regardless how apt they may be.
Secondly, I think Toadvine’s re-appropriation of the term ‘ecology’ deserves representation in full (i.e., “logos of the
dwelling”). Perhaps ecological phenomenologists might use the full title in formal scholarly environments, and
reserve ‘ecophenomenology’ for communications within the field. ‘Environmental phenomenology’, while consisting
of very similar enquiries, is the title used by phenomenologists more closely linked to inquiries in geography and
architecture (which often but do not always incorporate ecological analyses). I was interested to note as well (thanks to
google.com) that ‘environmental phenomenology’ is also used to refer to geo-environmental sensing, such as in the
detection of buried land mines. An amusing overlap.
7
Toadvine’s view echoes that of the deep ecologist Warwick Fox, who (in laying out his ‘ecophilosophical’ program
of deep ecology), comments, “environment’ refers to the external conditions or surroundings of organisms, whereas
ecology refers to the relationships between organisms and their external conditions or surroundings ...” (1995: 8). Fox
adds, “this approach attempts to foster a greater awareness of the intimate and manifold relationships that exist
between what we conventionally designate as self and what we conventionally designate as environment. It attempts,
in other words, to foster the development of an ecological rather than environmental consciousness.” (ibid)
8
9
Writing about the explosion of interest in phenomenological enquiry, Lester Embree points to new ‘problematics’,
13
3.
Entering the Domain of Ecological Phenomenology
The earth, as we know, can be disclosed as an object which is
present at hand. ... Yet, always prior to this, the earth is a region
of the world – that region which in each case supports and nourishes,
and which can do so only by remaining closed in upon itself. It is not
only the “ground” in the literal sense of “soil,” but also that
which in every instance gives rise to what emerges: the earth is
precisely that from which physis arises, into which it continually
withdraws, and which withholds and preserves the possibility of
both. Viewed phenomenologically, it is the solidity of a colored
object which can support a play of color only because of its
very density, and which can present one side of itself only by
withholding another. (Foltz, 1984: 335)
The previous section of this paper provided a short critical history of the encounter between phenomenology
and ecological philosophy, focusing particularly on its intellectual forerunners, initial scope, and some of its
developmental challenges. This section discusses the substance and methods of ecological phenomenology, and then
lays out some elements of an ecological phenomenological enquiry that is central to my doctoral research project: an
assertion that the ecological crisis is fundamentally a crisis of dwelling. The enquiry itself (which is part of a
phenomenological enquiry into the meaning of finitude in contemporary western culture) lies beyond the scope of this
paper, but it is nonetheless useful to offer an introduction to it here, both as an illustration of ecological
phenomenology in research practice and as an invitation for comment on its proposed substance.
(a) What is ‘Ecological Phenomenology’?
So far in this paper, ecological phenomenology has been defined developmentally rather than substantively.
In part this is necessary in a field of enquiry acknowledged to be “still in its infancy” (Brown and Toadvine, 2003:
xiii). In part, it also reflects an idiosyncrasy of phenomenology, a complex philosophical movement focused as much
on asking questions as answering them10. However, to begin to lay out the substance and methods of ecological
phenomenology, it is worth including a long quotation from the introduction to Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine’s
including ecology, observing, “Amazingly, the expression, “ecophenomenology” has been independently coined in
the United States and in Korea.” (2003: 3)
Notwithstanding such quirks, Don Ihde comments, “Without doing phenomenology, it may be practically
impossible to understand phenomenology.” Ihde adds that Heidegger admitted being unable to understand the works
of Edmund Husserl (his teacher and the originator of phenomenology) until he learned to ‘see’ phenomenologically.
(1977: 14-15) In Being and Time, Heidegger says, “what is essential in [phenomenology] does not lie in its actuality as
a philosophical ‘movement’ [“Richtung”]. Higher than actuality stands possibility. We can understand
phenomenology only by seizing upon it as a possibility.” (162: 63)
10
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Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself,
From the beginning, phenomenologists have taken an interest in
th[e] process of abstraction by which the world as we experience
it is gradually transformed into the naturalistic conception of the
world taken for granted by contemporary science. One point of
agreement among phenomenologists is their criticism and rejection
of the tendency of scientific naturalism to forget its own roots in
experience. .... Throughout its development, phenomenology has
seemed to promise a methodological route toward the disclosure
of an “alternative” conception of nature .... For environmental
philosophers, phenomenology ... opens a space for the interdisciplinary
examination of our relation with nature, for a scrutiny of the
historical and institutional construction of the “natural, and
even of the role this concept plays in the formation of our
cultural and self-identities. From its starting point in experience,
phenomenology provides an open horizon for the exploration
of all facets of our relation with nature outside of narrowly
prescribed disciplinary boundaries. By doing so, phenomenology
makes it possible, perhaps for the first time, for philosophical
thinking to express and respond to the full range of our natural
experiences. (2003: xi-xii)
This quotation depicts ecological phenomenology as an interdisciplinary enquiry grounded in our pre-theoretical
experiences of an “alternative conception”11 of nature as explored in the previous section of the paper. It also hints at
ecological phenomenologists’ interest in how the process of reduction or abstraction from experience (to the extent
such abstraction is phenomenologically possible) may function without slipping into naturalistic fallacy (the
confusion of ‘whole’ with the sum of its parts).
Beyond the above depiction, ecological phenomenological enquiries flow outward in a variety of directions
from their philosophical roots in the phenomenologies of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Ted
Toadvine characterizes three such directions in his paper, Ecology in the New Millennium: ecological axiology (which
includes questions about ethical and aesthetic valuation, the ‘intrinsic value’ of nature, how valuing arises in
Phenomenology, and ecological phenomenology in particular, are often described as ‘alternative’ or ‘radical’
enquiries which require the adoption of ‘new’ perspectives. Certainly Phenomenology seems a late-comer not only in
the history of philosophy but within the history of the environmental movement itself. In many respects, however, the
modes of enquiry seem much older. Neil Evernden refers not only to nineteenth century environmental advocates like
Thoreau, but to writers in the Romantic period who objected to some of the materialist excesses of the Enlightenment;
he reminds us also that ‘natural philosophy’ predated the rise of scientific naturalism. Writers like David Abram also
link phenomenological enquiries to traditional indigenous perspectives on nature; there have also been efforts to
associate Heidegger’s later thought with Taoism. Ingrid Stefanovic comments that phenomenology is often
oversimplified as an injunction to see the world through the eyes of a child. These illustrations suggest that
(ecological) phenomenology may in fact be reminding us (how) to see in a way we have forgotten. Very similarly does
Heidegger “raise anew the [very old] question of the meaning of being” and suggest, in his later work, that we have
forgotten how to dwell.
11
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experience, and the “ethical treatment of things living and nonliving”); ecophenomenological ontology (which
Toadvine suggests overlaps significantly with concerns associated with deep ecology, including questions about the
constitution and relations of self, other, and world, ideas of holism, questions about nature and culture, and
considerations of “natural teleology”); and finally, ecophenomenological methodology (the implications of such
questions of “human and natural being”for phenomenology itself, particularly with respect to issues of ‘idealism’ in
phenomenology and the question of whether phenomenology is primarily an epistemological or ontological enquiry:
as Toadvine comments, “these questions return to the founding distinctions and conceptions operative in the
phenomenological method, e.g., the relation between the subject of the world, and the subject in the world, between
the transcendental and the mundane or human subject, between essence and fact, spirit and nature.”) (2001: 78-82)
Within and across these classifications lies an even wider (and continually expanding) variety of particular ecological
phenomenological enquiries. A partial list of some enquiries which have influenced the direction of this paper 12
includes Toadvine’s considerations toward a phenomenology of agriculture (based in part on Kohak’s “Varieties of
Ecological Experience”: see Toadvine, 2003:82-93 and Kohak, 1997); Ingrid Leman Stefanovic’s phenomenological
reconsideration of sustainable development (Stefanovic: 2000); David Abram’s exploration of embodied
emplacement in nature, The Spell of the Sensuous (1996); and some elements of Hans Jonas’s work toward a
phenomenology of biology (e.g., “Life, Death, and the Body in the Theory of Being” (1966: 7-37).
The ecological phenomenological enquiries most central to my own research are those grounded in the
phenomenological work of Martin Heidegger and focused on dwelling and environmental crisis. These include (on
phenomenology and environmental crisis) Bruce Foltz’s On Heidegger and the Interpretation of Environmental Crisis
(1984), Michael Zimmerman’s work on Heidegger, deep ecology, and environmental crisis (e.g., 1993, 1996), Ullrich
Melle and K. U. Leuven’s Philosophy and Ecological Crisis (1994), J.M. Howarth’s The Crisis of Ecology: A
Phenomenological Perspective (1995). Work on dwelling (some of which pre-dates the development of ecological
12
The expanding list of ecological phenomenological enquiries is far larger than the focused list I have provided here.
A longer list would incorporate ecological phenomenological explorations of desire (Toadvine), stones (Irene Klaver),
natural disasters (Christian Diehm), and the ‘glance’ (Edward Casey), the foregoing work all found in Brown and
Toadvine, 2003. An even longer list is found in Ted Toadvine’s Bibliography in Eco-Phenomenology, compiled
on-line at www.emporia.edu/socsci/philos/biblio.htm , which includes ecological phenomenological explorations into
feminism/eco-feminism, art, music, human-animal relations, phenomenology of place, technology, etc., not to
mention numerous other broad considerations of the ideas, concerns, scope, and methods of ecological
phenomenology, among others.
16
phenomenology) begins with Heidegger’s Building Dwelling Thinking (given as a lecture in 1951; collected in Krell,
1993: 344-363) and includes David Kelly’s Home as a Philosophical Problem (1975), Kim Kipling’s The Art of
Dwelling (1979), David Platt’s The Seashore as Dwelling in the Fourfold (1985), Raymond Koukal’s work on the
phenomenology of homelessness (1996), Bernard Dauenhauser’s Heidegger: Spokesman for the Dweller (1997), and
Tracy Colony’s paper on dwelling in the biosphere (1999).
The question of ecological phenomenological method is a slippery one, arising as it does from a
philosophical movement described even by its originators as perpetually beginning or “on the way” (Stefanovic, 1994:
58;59) and exemplifying what Don Ihde characterizes as an “essential obscurity” (1977: 17) experienced not only by
people newly encountering phenomenology but by phenomenology itself, as its language and constructs are learned
and criticised13. Moreover, given a propensity within phenomenology for what might unflatteringly be described as
naval-gazing, it is sometimes difficult to sort out actual enquiries into experience from the seemingly much larger
body of reconsiderations and rethinkings of phenomenology itself. Even further, the range of phenomenological
enquiries is so great that while any collection of explorations may clearly be ‘phenomenological’, their methods,
approaches, and central questions may resist transferral: broadly considered, there may be as many phenomenologies
as there are phenomenologists. Perhaps in the same way that phenomenological considerations of experience
challenge reductive theorizing, so to does phenomenological method resist generalizing. Notwithstanding these
difficulties/opportunities, it is possible to discern some constitutive and methodological commonalities among
ecological phenomenological enquiries. One such set is grounded in Martin Heidegger’s ontological phenomenology
and rooted in the question of the meaning of Being, and will provide focus for the remainder of this paper.
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic offers the following methodological account of phenomenological enquiry 14:
Ihde (1977:20) also contemplates the possibility that the tenets of phenomenology might reflect a “fundamental
obscurity” (characterized by unresolvable obscurity, confusion, or inconsistency) but points out that this is hardly
unique to phenomenology: critical {and occasionally jaundiced) eyes turn their gaze to upstarts in analytic philosophy
as well. Yet, phenomenology seems to have been singled out for particularly explosive criticism for its admitted
obscurities, which include Heideggerian claims that the world simultaneously reveals and conceals itself and is never
accessible to complete knowledge.
13
See also Stefanovic’s (very similar) three-point summary of how phenomenology may function as an ecological
enquiry, 2000: 81. I have focused on Stefanovic at some length because she provides the most lucid account of
phenomenology as a mode of (ecological) enquiry I have encountered in the ecological phenomenology literature. In
this paper I have chosen to focus on ecological phenomenological method as informed by Heideggerian ontology in
order to offer a sense of its particular questions and approaches, although I anticipate making greater use of the
literature on phenomenological method (more broadly conceived) as I prepare my dissertation work. Good guides to
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Through (a) an empathetic “seeing” and “releasement toward things”;
(b) through as careful, thorough and foundational a description
as possible; and (c) through interpretation of the essential
structures which are revealed through such description –
Phenomenology aims to supplement conventional approaches
to the study of the relation between human understanding and
the lived world, with a more holistic and comprehensive description
of taken-for-granted foundations of such relation. (1994: 71)
She suggests beginning with a commitment to remain true to the notion of phenomenology being in progress (1994:
59) and its program of “shedding light on the taken-for-granted, prepredictive origins upon which explicit theoretical
reflection and scientific understanding are grounded” (2000: 10)15. Heidegger’s path into phenomenological enquiry is
“to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself” (quoted in Stefanovic, 2000:
9-10; from Heidegger, 1962: 58). Stefanovic continues,
One of [phenomenology’s] primary tasks is to articulate essential
meanings as they appear to human understanding[,] ... to discern
underlying patterns of meaning that may not be self-evident but that
permeate our efforts to interpret the world in which we find ourselves
[, and] ... to crystallize some essential truths in their historical and cultural rootedness.” (11)
Subsequently, Stefanovic quotes Thomas Nenon as describing phenomenology as being about “the possibility of
certain kinds of experiences which any reader should be able to recreate imaginatively on his or her own and thereby
see that the possibility for such an experience is universal, even if the reality is not. .... [Phenomenology] exhibits
possibilities as possibilities that any human being could undergo” (11). Stefanovic proposes “originative” thinking
(after Heidegger’s notion of meditative thinking) as a key to “uncover[ing] the taken-for-granted origins and grounds
within which calculative paradigms are rooted.” (51) Originative thinking is creative and open; its call to holism (a
notion that the whole -- a referential whole, not a totalizing paradigm -- is greater than the sum of its parts) is not
intended to be thought of as emotional or “wildly intuitive”, but rather to evoke an awareness of meaningful
connections and interrelationships between and among humans and their environments (51-52; 56).
From the above, (at least) three questions should become evident: What is it that shows itself from itself?;
phenomenological method and its history include Spiegelberg, 1975; Ihde, 1977; and Kersten, 1989.
From Being and Time: “The achieving of phenomenological access to the entities which we encounter, consists ... in
thrusting aside our interpretive tendencies, which keep thrusting themselves upon us and running along with us, and
which conceal not only the phenomenon of such ‘concern,’ but even more those entities themselves as encountered of
their own accord in our concern with them.” (Heidegger, 1962: 96)
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What sorts of experiences are open to phenomenological interpretation?; and, How are seeing, describing, and
interpreting accomplished (and presented) in a phenomenological enquiry? In (ecological) phenomenology, the
‘phenomena’ available for enquiry include not only ‘real’/material entities, but also ‘ideal’ phenomena, including
“images, percepts, moods, arithmetical phenomena” (Ihde, 1977: 23), and in particular, the relations among these
types of phenomena within structures of intentionality. Moreover, phenomenologists do not rigidly distinguish
between “real” things and things as they appear, at least not in the initial phenomenological description. Don Ihde
identifies a series of “hermeneutic rules” for ‘doing’ phenomenology. These are:
(a) attend to phenomena as and how they show themselves,
(b) describe (don’t explain) phenomena
(c) horizontalize all phenomena initially [suspend hierarchies of
beliefs about phenomena]
(d) seek out structural or invariant features of the phenomena
(Ihde, 1977: 38-39)
This template for phenomenological reduction (derived from Husserl) supplies a means of tracing phenomena from
experiences as experienced to the level of the transcendental (ibid: 41), primarily through the field of intentionality,
explained as the “correlation apriori” in which “every experiencing has its reference or direction towards what is
experienced [noema], and, contrarily, every experienced phenomenon refers to or reflects a mode of experiencing
[noesis] to which it is present.” (ibid: 42-43). And so, while an appreciation of the transcendental may “elevate” (ibid:
41) phenomenological enquiry to philosophical significance, it must also remain grounded in the concrete experiences
of the self. In ecological phenomenology (particularly, in the case of my doctoral work, as informed by Heidegger’s
ontology) this has extended to the consideration of how concrete or ideal phenomenon (such as the seashore; see Platt,
1985 or a report on sustainability; see Stefanovic, 2000) exemplify or illuminate the experience of being in the world
and the understanding or valuing of nature.
An ecological phenomenological enquiry grounded in its ontological foundations must address the
question of the meaning of Being16. To Stefanovic, this involves an acknowledgement that human Being perceives and
interprets entities “within a web of relations in which they are primordially situated.” (67), in which our surroundings
In Being and Time, Heidegger comments, “The theme of our analytic is to be Being-in-the-world, and accordingly
the very world itself; and these are to be considered within the horizon of average everydayness – the kind of Being
which is closest to Dasein. .... The world of everyday Dasein which is closest to it, is the environment [umwelt]. ... We
shall seek the worldhood of the environment (environmentality) by going through an ontological Interpretation of
those entities within-the-environment which we encounter as closest to us.” (1962: 94)
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are intelligible as environs (68). It is possible to discern meanings and relations among entities as elements within a
whole that are not generally fully revealed but are nonetheless always already present and understood (69). It is as
though a lens might be focused and refocused on objects in a room, exposing to light not only various aspects of their
existence and their relatedness to one another, but illuminating our own primordial Being amid them. This
“‘ready-to-hand’ immersion in the world is such that perception is accompanied by memory, imagination, emotion,
and understanding” (69), which collectively constitute the basis of meaning. Thus, our direct experiences of the world
are shown to emerge “within a horizon of interpretation” (70), in which we are always already present in the world
(hence, in part, Heidegger’s conception of Dasein, “Being-there”) and oriented within a temporal horizon (71-72).
Like phenomenology itself, as Beings we too are “on the way”.
Turning to ecological questions in particular, phenomenology offers both theoretical and practical
possibilities. Phenomenology, for example, is useful in exposing and contributing to the “rethinking of hidden
assumptions” and the foundations of human attitudes themselves (Stefanovic, 2000: 13; 15). By doing so,
phenomenological insights may contribute to better decisions on environmental matters, ranging from policies and
laws to the design of the environments we dwell and work in. Stefanovic suggests also that phenomenological
perspectives may provide a middle way between anthropocentric and ecocentric viewpoints, in which the world is
perceived as something to be neither controlled nor revered (43). Beyond this still, phenomenology may help us regain
a sense of the “grace of nature”, in which we emerge from and return to a “self-emerging” natural world (76).
(b) The Environmental Crisis as a Crisis of Dwelling
The remainder of this paper consists of an exploration of the ecological crisis as a crisis of dwelling. Earlier in
this paper I indicated that a substantial literature exists on both subjects. In this section I identify some commonalities
emerging from these literatures, beginning with the observation (from Heidegger) that our Being is disclosed in our
dwelling, and that failure to dwell harms us both physically and metaphysically. This exploration furthers my doctoral
project in a number of ways, primarily through its consideration of the interplay between dwelling and crisis. In Being
and Time, Heidegger commented that we have forgotten how to ask the question of the meaning of Being. In my
comprehensive paper on Heidegger and Death I examine and extend Heidegger’s viewpoint that we have also
forgotten how to ask the question of the meaning of death. In this section, I seek to demonstrate that, under the
influence of a modern metaphysics of technology, we have also forgotten how to dwell. In the introduction to this
20
paper, I commented that ecological phenomenologists consider the ecological crisis to be both physical and
metaphysical in character. In the second section I offered a critical history of ecological phenomenology conceived as
an ‘alternative’ response to the environmental crisis. I turn now to an examination of the ecological crisis itself,
beginning with a consideration of how the ecological crisis is grounded in a metaphysics of technology which reduces
nature to an entity to be dominated and exploited, and conclude with a discussion of how a similar crisis of dwelling is
both a symptom of and a possible response to the ecological crisis.
The existence of an ecological crisis seems now to be beyond question: Rachel Carson’s “Fable for
Tomorrow” has been made manifest not only in towns but in the increasingly silent woods and countryside as well; the
Brundtland Commission’s principles of sustainability have taken on a sepia tint and are showing their age; the Kyoto
Protocol languishes, promoted by the Canadian government in principled isolation; and we no longer trust the
weather, the atmosphere, the soil, or the polar bears wandering inland from Hudson Bay because the sea ice has
melted. The term ‘crisis’ seems apt, then, not only to describe the planet’s ecological health, but also to describe the
state of the responses to it. According to Neil Evernden and others mentioned in the second section of this paper, the
ecological movement has failed because the version of utilitarianism it proposes is so similar to the one promulgated
by the mining and logging companies. Even the “environmental revolution” proposed by Lester Brown (Melle, 1994:
174) has failed to materialize outside of well armoured think tanks.
Bruce Foltz17 suggests that our “fundamental relation to nature, rather than nature alone” (1984: 324) should
be taken as the subject of this crisis, and further, that we should speak not of a crisis but a “genuine krisis: a deciding,
a judgement, a sentence in which not only our future survival, but our comportment toward nature in general is called
into question.” (ibid: 324). According to Foltz, a consideration of technology can illuminate aspects of this krisis. The
metaphysics of technology (as advanced by Heidegger in “The Question Concerning Technology”) is at the heart of
this relationship, and has particular metaphysical connotations. After the Greek techne, technology is a way of
“bringing forth”; yet in the modern period it does so not through an “attuned responsiveness” but by “challenging
forth, provoking, or forcing out” (328). Foltz argues that
Foltz’s commentary anticipates arguments subsequently advanced by Ullrich Melle and K.U. Leuven (1994), in
which the “exterminist logic” of modern industrial capitalism underpin the ecological crisis; the authors suggest deep
ecology as a promising “proposal for ... a far-reaching perspective.” (186) See also J.M. Howarth, who probes the
limits of “scientific ecology”, and proposes Heidegger’s notion of dwelling and Merleau-Ponty’s body subject as
phenomenological responses to the crisis of ecology.
17
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What is brought forth by technology is not evoked, shaped, or even
forged, but rather “extracted”. Technology, as a manner of revealing,
“sets upon” its resources so as to “set in order” the yield it has
demanded; and demanded above all else, as Heidegger noted
some [fifty] years ago, is a supply of storable energy. ... the revealing
carried out by technology finds its denouement not just in the
“delivery” of what is challenged forth, nor even in its being
“set in order” and “on call”, but in the final mastery and securing
of its yield. Along with what it challenges forth, technology also
discloses an imperative of total control and domination. (328)
According to Foltz, technology not only discloses entities; it “delimits the manner in which they can be present. ... For
a technological age, the very being of an entity is to be on call as a resource or standing reserve, to be “in stock” for
further disposal.” (329).
As this paper has already shown, the consequences of such a metaphysics of technology (operating in a
reciprocal relationship with scientific naturalism) have been far-ranging. The material environmental impacts are well
known and recounted in every environmental/ecological treatise. Even the environmental movement has struggled for
alternatives to this paradigm in constructing its own philosophical and political responses. In this sense, the ecological
crisis is multi-dimensional. Accordingly, there is a particular value in efforts to articulate a world-view outside of the
metaphysics of technology, which does not have as its automatic consequence further ecological harm, and which
might lead to a greater valuing of the earth as a valuable entity in itself. One such avenue ecological phenomenologists
have focused on is the concept of dwelling, whose disclosure may be explored both as a symptom of ecological crisis
and a response to it. Bernard Dauenhauer reformulates Heidegger’s (after Nietzsche) “decisive question” of our age as
“can man avoid destroying himself and the habitable world?” (1997: 189), and cites Heidegger’s claim that in order to
effectively confront this question, one must be a “spokesman”, in Heidegger’s case, for the dweller. A “spokesman”
speaks for something, and by doing so can be a bridge. Yet,
It is important to notice that he who announces the bridge or himself
bridges, namely the spokesman, goes where no bridge can have been.
Since there is no bridge, he must leap. And the leap cannot but be
fraught with danger. (190)
Dauenhauer cites in particular Heidegger’s naming of the “chasm” between science and thought (190):
The spokesman, he who makes the leap, bridges the chasm while
revealing the chasm as chasm. The leap bridges between which
no bridge has yet been. The spokesman is he who, in pointing
to the far side, brings together the two sides in such a way that
the gap between them is preserved and each side retains its own
Being as a side. (190-191)
22
According to Heidegger, the spokesman [spokesperson, speaker, giver of voice] must, as a mortal Being, be capable of
“yielding back” to that for which he [she] has spoken. The spokesman “is never self-appointed ... the spokesman’s
speech, the leap, is not a moment of conquest. Rather it is a moment of devotion. ... To be a spokesman only for oneself
is ludicrous. It is not to be a spokesman at all.” (191). And so, perhaps as mortals, as dwellers, we might become
speakers for the earth.
Heidegger’s concept of dwelling is an intentional “contrast to the technological project of dominating the
earth” which offers instead the possibility of “saving the earth and dwelling upon it.” (Foltz, 1984: 336). In Building
Dwelling Thinking (given as a lecture in 1951; reprinted in Basic Writings, 1993: 347-363) Heidegger uncovers how
dwelling and building are related as ends and means. Through an etymological excavation, he shows that to build also
means to dwell, to stay in a place in a particular manner of dwelling: “The way in which you are and I am, the manner
in which we humans are on the earth, is bauen, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It
means to dwell. ... this word bauen, however, also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care
for” (349). Through an interpretation of the Gothic Wunian (which also means to remain, to stay in a place) Heidegger
extends the meaning of dwelling to incorporate peace, freeing, and sparing:
to dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the
free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its
essence. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing. It
pervades dwelling in its whole range. That range reveals itself to us
as soon as we recall that human being consists in dwelling and,
indeed, dwelling in the sense of the stay of mortals on the earth. (351)
Mortals (one part of a fourfold consisting also of earth, sky, and divinities) dwell in safeguarding the fourfold, and in
particular, the earth:
Mortals dwell in that they save the earth .... Saving does not only
snatch something from danger. To save properly means to set something
free into its own essence. To save the earth is more than to exploit
it or even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth
and does not subjugate it ... (352)18
18
The distinction between these types of saving finds voice in odd places, including a satirical column in the Toronto
Star: “The theme of his pre-election campaign — it's plastered all over his riding — is "Save Our Waterfront!" But
Dennis [Mills, M.P.] is no slouch when it comes to befuddling himself, too, and between you and me, this isn't what he
wants to do at all. He doesn't want to "save" it the way people mean when they talk about saving, for example, the
whales. “Saving" it would mean leaving the wretched place the way it is, or at least protecting it from any more crazy
ideas Dennis has. (He's responsible for burdening us with the port authority that made everything, if possible, worse.)”
(column by Slinger titled “His brain cramps are a national treasure”, Toronto Star, April 17, 2004)
23
Yet, Heidegger also asks, “What is the state of dwelling in our precarious age?” and asks, “What if man’s
homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the proper plight of dwelling as the plight?” These
are the questions an ecological phenomenological enquiry into dwelling must take up in considering how questions
about the plight of dwelling may illuminate the ecological crisis. With regard to the ecological crisis in particular, it
seems that such enquiries must take up the question of how our culture understands dwelling as saving.
If we have forgotten how to dwell, what are the consequences? How might we re-learn, and what resolution
might this offer to the environmental crisis? How might we ‘save’ the earth in a way that preserves the fourfold to its
essential unfolding? J.M. Howarth contrasts dwelling with “merely ‘passing through’” and distinguishes between
houses which feel like “homes” and those which feel cold or empty. She offers, “we presumably want to preserve
dwelling”. The idea of home is a recurring phenomenological subject. As Richard Lang observes in The Dwelling
Door, “the notion of dwelling is the most taken-for-granted aspect of human existence” and is therefore “the most
obscure problem upon which we may reflect.” (201). Home is typically discussed in the language of familiarity and
“rootedness” (e.g., Terkenli, 1996: 329). Yet, an analysis of home and dwelling (and place and environment) must
move beyond the physical and into (in this case) the ontological if it is to have any enduring phenomenological
significance. To be sure, home may be described as a place which is familiar to us and where we find our roots, but it
signifies far beyond the material. Stefanovic reminds us that building (which describes an activity as well as a place) is
the central activity of dwelling (2000: 105), bringing us back to Heidegger’s observation that “we attain to dwelling ...
only by means of building.” (Basic Writings, 1993: 347). According to Heidegger, the things we build – homes,
bridges – create locales and allow a space for the fourfold. For Heidegger, “space is essence that for which room has
been made, that which is let into its bounds.” (356).
In a technological age, however, there may be a slippage in our building to the extent that it actively resists
the fourfold by rupturing locale. Heidegger’s concept of locale is relational: a bridge relates to the space it crosses, for
example a river. But what if the bridge ruptures the river by also being (to use an example in the phenomenological
literature) a hydroelectric dam? In this case the river is more than changed by becoming a locale: at some point it may
cease being a river at all. Quite literally this describes any stream reduced to a culverted ditch as it passes through
subdivisions whose planners have decided must be protected from seasonal flooding or the natural meandering of
streams. In such cases, locale is a thin concept because the fourfold is not preserved: room is not allowed for the river
24
to be in its essence. In such cases building cannot be said to attain to dwelling, and though the activity may provide a
space for ‘living’, in a thin sense. And to the extent that we fail to notice the slippage, we have forgotten how to dwell.
From this we need not necessarily conclude that all subdivisions should be torn out (although we might conclude that
most culverted streams should be restored so their originary essence as streams may be preserved in a keeping sense).
But we might heed Heidegger’s injunction at the close of Building Dwelling Thinking to consider the plight of
dwelling: “as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness19, it is a misery no longer. Rightly considered and kept
well in mind, it is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling.” (363) In this way, ruptures in dwelling may
be exposed as symptoms of ecological crisis, and a renewed commitment to authentic dwelling may represent one
possible solution, at least philosophically conceived.
By way of concluding this paper, the second question I would like to take up from Howarth’s analysis is the
idea of preservation. For Heidegger, preservation means preserving the fourfold, caring for it and letting it be.
Environmentalists also speak of the need to ‘preserve’ the earth, but there is a need to reflect on the ways the
environmental movement has tended to preserve nature. In the introduction to Rogue Primate, John Livingston takes
up a question he had previously tackled in The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation: “since resource conservation does
not allow worth (to itself) to inhere in Nature, it can protect Nature only as the human estate, in which case it is no
longer Nature but rather an extension of the human apparatus.” (V). This echoes Neil Evernden’s assertions about the
failure of the environmental movement, and the calls made by Joseph Grange, Evernden, Erazim Kohak, and the other
explorers of ecological phenomenological perspectives, to consider anew our ways of relating to the natural world, not
only ontically but ontologically, to conceive how we might resolve our ecological difficulties by preserving the natural
world, not in the pickling sense (in which nature is preserved only to facilitate future consumption), but in a way that
preserves it in its essence, and that preserves the fourfold as well.
4.
Conclusion
19
In Discrete Environments: Those Which Do Not Dwell, Raymond Koukal takes up the question of homelessness,
asking “can the fourfold ever be secured if we allow the homeless to exist among mortals?” Koukal suggests that we
degrade the fourfold by excluding the homeless from dwelling and from our solicitude. While there is reason to
challenge the notion that the homeless do not dwell ‘simply’ because they do not have a ‘home’, Koukal’s paper may
be read as challenging our use/understanding of all of these concepts. Certainly, there are many ways of being
homeless: displacement describes the condition not only of people who sleep on sewer grates or of those seeking
refuge in other ways, but may also describe the mere occupancy of houses where fake lemons fill bowls in sterile urban
or suburban kitchens.
25
In this paper I have sought to offer some sense of the scope and character of ecological phenomenology,
particularly as it informs and is illuminated by certain aspects of Heidegger’s ontological phenomenology. In doing so,
one task of this paper has been the construction of a history of ecological phenomenology, at least as a Heideggerian
enquiry (something I have encountered nowhere in the literature; even the account provided in this paper remains
partial as it does not delve into the large literature on ‘phenomenology of place’, nor does it address in depth the
relationship between ecological phenomenology and deep ecology). Another task has been the identification of
developmental questions ecological phenomenology must confront if it is to offer philosophical and pragmatic
answers to (or explanations of) problems associated with the environmental crisis. In this paper I have focused
primarily on Heidegger’s concept of Dwelling as articulated in “Building Dwelling Thinking” and have dealt only
peripherally with Heidegger’s views on Being-in-the-world and his general ontological program as advanced in Being
and Time. My purpose here has been to focus attention on phenomenological responses to the environmental crisis
itself; I deal more closely with Heidegger’s ontology in my final comprehensive paper.
My doctoral work begins with the claim that there is a crisis of death in contemporary western culture, and
that this crisis is dialectically related to two other crises: the ecological crisis and a crisis of dwelling. Heidegger avers
that we dwell on the earth as mortals, and subsequently suggests that we have forgotten how to dwell. While much
work has linked homelessness, the contemporary “plight of dwelling”, to the modern metaphysics of technology, and
while connections have been made between the ecological crisis and the plight of dwelling, in my doctoral work I seek
to close the circle by turning attention to finitude itself. In his book Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, the philosopher
Julian Young describes Heidegger as “the ‘physician’ of modern Western culture” (2002: 3), and explores
Heidegger’s argument that one aspect of our ‘sickness’, forgetting how to dwell, is rooted in modernity’s evasion of
finitude (65-66)20: “gripped by metaphysics, in other words, we take it that there is no other ‘side’ to our world of
beings, that its inhabitants are ‘suspended’ in ‘a complete emptiness .... Given such a taking, death presents itself, of
The history of modernity’s evasion of finitude is fascinating, and an exploration of modernity’s strategies of evasion
reveals interesting contradictions. For example, Hans Jonas points out that an analysis of scientific naturalism shows
that part of the program of modernity has been to replace a living cosmos with a dead one: “the lifeless has become the
knowable par exelence and is for that reason also considered the true and only foundation of reality. It is the “natural”
as well as the original state of things. Not only in terms of relative quantity but also in terms of ontological
genuineness, nonlife is the rule, life the puzzling exception in physical existence.” (1966: 10) In a cosmos in which life
is a fragile exception, our culture’s terror (and evasion) of death is hardly surprising. Jose Ferrater Mora echoes this
interpretation in his examination of different types of mortality (1965)
20
26
course, as absolute annihilation.” (68) Heidegger claimed that overcoming metaphysics, grasping the Other of beings,
is the route to facing death with equanimity (in Young: 69). Young makes one observation which very closely informs
my doctoral research:
[T]he Other of beings must be exempt from the dissolution of beings,
in particular from that dissolution which is the death of the being I
call myself. But why should the knowledge that it survives my death
be any more comforting than the knowledge that, for example, the
Matter in my body does? (69)
To dwell, according to Young, is to be “secure even in the face of death.” (65) This comment is based on Heidegger’s
claim in Building Dwelling Thinking, that
Mortals dwell in that they initiate their own essential being –
their being capable of death as death – into the use and practice
of this capacity, so that there may be a good death. To initiate
mortals into the essence of death in no way means to make death,
as the empty nothing, the goal. Nor does it mean to darken dwelling
by blindly staring toward the end.
...
Dwelling preserves the fourfold by bringing the essence of the
fourfold into things. But things themselves secure the fourfold
only when they themselves as things are let be in their essence.
How does this happen? In this way, that mortals nurse and
nurture the things that grow, and specially construct things
that do not grow. Cultivating and construction are building
in the narrower sense. Dwelling inasmuch as it keeps the fourfold
in things, is, as this keeping, a building.
And so, as mortals we dwell in the sense that we preserve the fourfold in its unfolding, in its essence. We build, and
nurture, and cultivate. These acts of building, this dwelling, is the comfort to being mortal, to our mortal being. The
phenomenologist Werner Marx describes this orientation as a “gift”, a “magnanimity” toward the world (1992: 134).
In casual language, it signifies the reversal of the cliche, “you can’t take it with you” with a claim that “the cosmos
takes us with it.”
The failure of our culture to do so has produced three interwoven crises / krises: the ecological crisis, the
crisis of dwelling, and the crisis of death. We cannot resolve the ecological crisis, physically or intellectually, until we
relearn how to dwell, and how to preserve the earth in a way that preserves it in its own essence. And we cannot learn
to dwell unless we confront the realities of our own mortality. Doing so will require reconceiving the self-not as an
island of being, but as an entity which dwells in the world, and must preserve it. This is the scope of my doctoral work.
27
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