Existential ecology: The human/natural world

Abstract

Medicine and ecology share the concern for reconciling human aims and natural processes. That reconciliation is attempted through analogous approaches in the two fields. A dialectical model, described here, provides conceptual organization of those approaches into a coherent progression of paradigms, both existential and theoretical: (1) vulnerability, the immediacy of human exposure to nature's power and the futility of human ascendancy; (2) disengagement, the rational and the romantic objectification of nature; (3) dissection, the scientific and cultural reduction of nature to specimens; (4) holism, the conceptualization of the ecosystem; (5) inherence, the human involvement with nature as home, entailing a local rather than colonial ethic and epistemology. Culmination of the dialectic in ecology, as in medicine, is reconciliation with the otherness of nature, recovering both environment and embodiment as forms of human existence.