Abstract

HAY, Emma. An ecology of bad ideas: approaching human relations with wider nature from an ecological-complexity perspective. Acta acad. (Bloemfontein, Online) [online]. 2024, vol.56, n.2, pp.96-115. ISSN 2415-0479.  https://doi.org/10.38140/aa.v56i2.8974.

In this article, human relations with wider nature are approached from an ecological-complexity perspective. From this viewpoint, environmental issues such as ongoing biodiversity loss and mass extinction are co-implicated with economic and social problems and regarded as symptomatic of a deeper 'crisis of thinking'. Borrowing from Félix Guattari's (1989) The Three Ecologies, which foregrounds the overlapping interrelationality of different mental, social, and environmental 'registers', ecological economics and ecopsychology are brought into interdisciplinary dialogue. Here critical attention is drawn to the "ecologics of growthmanship" (bigger, faster, more is better), as explored through the concept of "economism", which illustrates the interplay between the individual (psyche) and its surrounding social milieu. Revealed by this networking is an "ecology of bad ideas" that materially, symbolically, and psychologically detaches humans from wider nature. An ecological-complexity lens provides fresh theoretical insight into urgent collective problems and opens the dialogue for different theoretical, ethical, and practical responses.

Keywords : ecological-complexity; ecologics; growthmanship; economism; negative capability.

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