Philosophy of Ecology in the Eastern and Western Civilizations 

The Ecological Society of America (ESA) Annual Meeting 2001

Symposium #15: Philosophy of ecology in the eastern and western civilizations.
Sponsored by ESA Asian Ecology Section
Organized by: Y.D. Choi and J. Carter.
Wednesday, August 8, 2001. 8:00 AM to 11:35 AM. Madison Ballroom B

8:00 AM . Opening remarks

8:05 AM Young Choi¹, Jacoby Carter². Searching for a global consensus of ecological thoughts

Purdue University Calumet, Hammond, Indiana ¹, USGS National Wetlands Research Center, Lafayette, Louisiana ²

ABSTRACT- Judeo-Christian thought has been a dominant form of natural philosophy in western civilization with a supposition that "human is a special creation, apart from nature." Under this thought, cornucopianism (limitless availability of natural resources for human) has been a major philosophical ground for resource exploitations particularly in the North America prior to the 20th Century, whereas the responsibility of stewardship (responsibility of human as a steward for nature) has been a focal point for sustainable use of nature. Rousseau, in his essay of 1745, suggested the idea that "civilization corrupts nature." This idea implies destructive impacts of civilization on nature; nature is best understood and preserved outside the influence of human intervention; and "primitive" or "uncivilized" societies are indicatives of balance with their environment. However, a growing body of evidence suggests otherwise. Darwin's theory of evolution has altered the western natural philosophy with its revolutionary concept of "human as a part of nature" implying neither harms nor benefits of human activities on nature. Meanwhile in the eastern culture, humans are not apart from nature implying profound impacts of human activities on nature regardless the state of civil development. This paper searches for a consensus between the eastern and western natural philosophy for a global connection of ecological thoughts as exemplified by inseparability of human and nature contained in both western Darwinean thought and eastern philosophy.

KEYWORDS- eastern, western, ecology, philosophy

8:30 AM Ye Qi. Integration of man and nature: the yin and yang of sustainability

University of California, Berkeley, California ¹

ABSTRACT- Integration of Man and Nature is a central theme in Chinese Philosophy. It was first stated by Taoist philosophers around 500 BC and later accepted, expanded, illustrated systemically by the philosophers of several other schools from Song and Ming dynasty. When the West celebrated the liberation from the control of the might of nature due to the advances of technology the East worried about the consequences of the industrial revolution, and ultimately the separation of Man from the Nature. Indeed, such a separation has been largely responsible for the many environmental and ecological problems we see today. In order to achieve the sustainability, we might be able to seek useful clues from the ancient wisdom. This paper describes the evolution of the themes in human ecological thoughts in China. These themes are related to the current environmental issues in China and worldwide.

KEYWORDS- yin, yang, Chinese, philosophy

8:55 AM Sun-Kee Hong¹, In-Ju Song¹. Traditional and modern ways of land-use planning and management in South Korea

Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea ¹

ABSTRACT- Feng-Shui ("wind-water" theory in English translation) is a natural philosophy for land-use management and policy in Asia. This philosophy, an integration of ecological and geological elements of landscape from long-term observations and empirical speculations in nature, has been a guiding principle for site selections and procedures of land developments for human uses (e.g., municipality, commerce, industry, and even cemetery). Originated in China, it has differentiated in diverse ways of interpretation depending on the patterns and elements of local landscape. Especially, Korean people have applied this philosophy to nearly all land development and management activities over a few millennia of their civilization history. In recent years, land managers and scientists in South Korea attempt to synthesize the traditional Feng-Shui and the modern land management principles that were imported from the western civilization. This paper will focus on a theoretical comparison of Feng-Shui and western concepts within the framework of the land management and restoration in South Korea.

KEYWORDS- Feng-Shui, land-use, planning, Korea

9:20 AM Dowon Lee¹, Jaeseo Jung².  Ecological philosophy and concepts in old Korean cultural landscapes

Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea ¹, Ewha Women's University, Seoul, South Korea ²

ABSTRACT- Understanding traditional Korean ecological philosophy is complicated as old documents were dominantly written in Chinese characters, and there are delicate difference between Korean and Chinese implications for the same characters. Furthermore, additional misconception appears when Korean philosophical concepts are expressed in English. Hence, we introduce part of traditional Korean ecological knowledge, which may or may not be shared with Chinese counterpart. Then, we illustrate some ecological concepts extracted from old Korean documents and landscape paintings. For example, old maps shows that Korean people hierarchically divided the Korean Peninsula into many watersheds as early as in the 15th century. The concept of landscape configuration is also identified in the typical arrangement of village and surrounding landscape elements. Agricultural landscapes contained vegetative buffer strips which kept village wells and streams from being polluted with surface and subsurface runoff leaching from a cemetery and cultivated areas, respectively. Landscape complementation was also secured in the configuration. As sustainable society is warranted in only a closed system or an open system with balanced input/output of essential elements, the balance was maintained by dominant internal cycles operated at a watershed scale in the past landscapes. In modern society, however, intensive land use activities have disturbed the internal cycles, posing a threat to the sustainability.

KEYWORDS- ecology, philosophy, Korea, landscape

9:45 AM Akira Miyawaki1. Philosophy and practice of ecology in Japan in special regards to forest restoration

Japanese Center for International Studies in Ecology, Yokohama, Japan ¹

ABSTRACT- Japanese culture has co-existed with nature under an indigenous polytheism "Shinto," whereas the western civilizations have developed under monotheism. All living and nonliving objects are respected as parts of gods under the Shinto. Artificial establishment of native forests, as an example of such respect, is a common traditional practice to compensate the loss of natural areas due to land development for agriculture and housing in Japan. Remnants of such forests (called "Chin-ju-no-mori" in Japanese language) still exist near rural villages. In the past decades, the concepts of both Japanese Chin-ju-no-mori and western ecology have been synthesized to restore native forests in more than 600 sites of various vegetation zones along the 3,000-km long Japanese Archipelago. This approach of reforestation, called "Miyawaki method," has extended to Borneo of Malaysia, Brazilian Amazon, Chile, China and other parts of the world since 1992, and expects to expand further. This merge of eastern (Japan in this case) and western natural philosophy provides and exemplary model for the conservation and management of global natural resources in the 21st Century.

KEYWORDS- ecology, philosophy, Japan, chin-ju-mori

10:10 AM . Break

10:20 AM Curtis Meine¹, Baird Callicot², Richard Beilfuss¹. Toward an international conservation ethic: lessons from the cranes of Asia

International Crane Foundation, Baraboo, Wisconsin ¹, University of Northern Texas, Denton, Texas ²

ABSTRACT- Conservation efforts must be responsive to, and reflective of, local cultural attitudes and values as well as best available science. Especially, in the case of extensive biomes (e.g., Amazon rainforest or the Himalayan highlands) or long-distance migratory species (e.g., whales or cranes) conservation efforts must be undertaken in the context of several cultural codes at once, codes that may not easily translate into one another. We suggest that Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic, as a kind of cross-cultural lingua franca or Rosetta Stone, allows for coordination and integration of culturally embedded conservation efforts for the following reasons. (1) Land Ethic is based on evolutionary biology and ecology, sciences that are pursued across cultural boundaries in diverse local contexts. (2) Leopold was acutely aware of the human response to natural beauty ("the esthetic harvest," as he put it, that land "is capable, under science, of contributing to culture") and of the potential of the natural world to serve as a common source of spiritual inspiration ("a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise"). (3) Land Ethic, an essential part of ecology and evolutionary biology, may integrate and crosscut "disciplines" inviting conversations the fields beyond the reductive "hard" sciences. We examine these premises with case studies of local crane and wetland conservation efforts in Central and East Asia.

KEYWORDS- international, conservation, ethic, Leopold

10:45 AM Robert Burgess¹. Role of Ecological Society of America for global connections of ecological thoughts

Robert Burgess¹.

SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, New York ¹

ABSTRACT- Since its birth around the advent of the 20th Century, American ecology has built an enviable record of education, research and application. Colleges and universities have trained thousands of professional ecologists. Research output has burgeoned, evidenced by the growth of the major journals, ECOLOGY and ECOLOGICAL MONOGRAPHS, both in numbers of pages and in issues per volume. Funding for ecological research started slowly, but after World War II, has increased steadily. The main impetus began with the Atomic Energy Commission and the Office of Naval Research. Since its establishment in 1950, National Science Foundation has been a world leader in sponsorship of environmental research. Development of mathematical, theoretical, and ecosystem-level ecology stemmed from Odum's immensely successful textbook, "Fundamentals of Ecology," building on Lindeman's "trophic-dynamics" ecology, and incorporating energy flow and nutrient cycling into the mainstream of ecological thinking, teaching, and research. The Ecological Society of America has grown to a position of world leadership in the community of scientific societies, and played a dominant role in the IVth International Congress of Ecology, held in Syracuse, New York in 1986. Support for natural area preservation and the formulation of ecologically based natural resource legislation have become major roles for American ecologists. As we begin the 21st Century, all indicators point to increasing development of ecological science and application to the myriad problems of human society.

KEYWORDS- ESA, global, ecology, leadership

11:10 AM Robert McIntosh¹. Toward a global synthesis of ecological thoughts

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana ¹

ABSTRACT- The charge of providing a "final summation" to diverse traditions of natural history and natural philosophy of the diverse cultures considered in this symposium is daunting. I prefer to hark back to G. E. Hutchinson's famous "concluding remarks". The concept of nature and the relation of humans to, or in, it permeates all cultures and members of all societies have extensive knowledge of the organisms and environments in which they live. Clarence Glacken wrote of western ideas of nature that from the 5th Century B.C. to the 18th Century A.D. every great thinker had something to say about them and this is true of other cultures as indicated by Professor Qi. The differences among these cultures in the traditions of natural philosophy and natural history are evident. Scientific ecology and its concepts are very recent products largely of western cultural and religious traditions. Ernst Haeckel described ecology as the essence of Darwinian thought and Drs. Carter and Choi see Darwinian theory as leading to a consensus of eastern and western natural philosophy. There is some hazard that the word ecology, but not always the science, has been drawn into discourse on economics, political science and just plain politics, as well as philosophy and theology in recent years.

KEYWORDS- global, synthesis, ecology, summation