SIGNIFICANCE OF ECOLOGICAL EQUILIBRIUM: A PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE FOR NATURE'S SUSTAINABILITY

ecology and philosophy

Ecological harmony and equilibrium is an inevitable topic every sensible person should address for the sustainable co-existence of the present as well as future generations of every living being. This necessitates the urgency of inculcating ecological awareness among all children from a very young age. The love towards nature must be taken into account for the welfare of the planet. It is true that every civilized society teach their young minds about the ecological matters. The grave question, however, is whether they are being taught in the right manner. This paper argues that rather than letting our children being with nature we push them to a world away from nature. This anthropocentric attitude of our pedagogy is detrimental to the well-being of our planet. We need to teach our children that there are ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ ecological approaches. Shallow ecological approaches are usually taken into account by the government or any legislature because it gives an anthropocentric view which ensures the benefit of humankind only. But this a weak ecological approach since it meets human needs at the expense of nonhuman life. This paper analyses how to identify and classify an ecological approach either as ‘shallow’ or ‘deep’, and how to resolve practical ecological issues from the perspective of the theoretical structure of Deep Ecology, an environmental school of thought, formulated by Arne Naess, a Norwegian philosopher in the late 1970s.

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