Notes on Material Ecology - 001

 4.28.26

Notes from "Humane Ecology - Eight Positions"

Robert Weisenberger, essays by Risa Puleo + Alena J. Williams

Ecology - the entire science of the relationship of the organism to its surrounding environment

Greek origin: Oikos (home)

- shares roots with the disciplines of economics, suggesting a related system of exchange among living things

"Ecology presents a web of life that encompasses all of us"

"If nature suggests an idealized, unchanging construct, then ecology acknowledges actual conditions, differentiated by place, and a history of constant transformation"

- Ecology informed to the social sciences and Haeckels endorsed a system of race science and ideas about environment that reemerged in Nazism 

-> Chicago school of sociology; human populations seen as homeostatic systems subject external disturbances by begin "invasive species" often figured as immigrants or people of color 

Humane Ecology - everything is connected but some connections are ineluctable & others elective 

(ecological relations in symbolic form - inert media to make images & objects that trouble common conceptions of nature)