Monday

Health And Wellness Discussion

8-Day Social Ecology Intensive

January 9th – 16th, 2010 — New York City — $300 (scholarships available)

The Institute for Social Ecology presents an 8-day intensive introduction to the philosophy and politics of Social Ecology. This 8-day intensive will offer students an introduction to the dialectical philosophy and politics of Social Ecology. Using the lens of Social Ecology, students will participate in four topical seminars focused the climate justice; alternatives capitalism; race; and the history of Social Ecology and radical movements. Students will also participate in a practicum applying the principles of Social Ecology to their own actual (or imagined) activist campaigns.


*The philosophy class will be held in the evening to allow for NYC students with day jobs to attend.

Some thoughts about the situation in Australia

The debate about social ecology versus deep ecology should lead to a better understanding of these two influential currents in “the ecology movement”, also in Australia. It's a shame for example that ecofeminists aren't better at this than the way they talk about it all now.

What should we think of the ideas of materialist ecofeminist Ariel Salleh, who has spent some time as Associate Professor in Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney, and who “now writes full time and is an Honorary Associate with Political Economy in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney”? Some of these ideas, you can find here.

Let's take another example, the ideas of Barbara Noske, who considers herself “a member of both the animal movement and deep ecology”. I don't know if she calls herself an ecofeminist but she really seems so much positive about ecofeminism.
“Dr Barbara Noske holds a Master's degree in Sociocultural Anthropology and a Ph.D in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam.
In the nineties she taught and undertook research in the areas of environmental thought, environmental ethics, deep ecology, social ecology and ecofeminism at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University in Toronto, Canada.
Presently she is a research fellow at the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney in Australia.”
Source : here

I have been inspired by some of the ideas of Barbara Noske but I really disagree with several things she says in this interview (see the link) about deep ecology and animals. It's good to not be mechanistic in the approach to animals. But the human body is not “just an animal body amongst other animal bodies”. And this does not mean that social ecologists are “anthropocentric”, like deep ecologists tend to accuse us of being.