Environmental consciousness, nature and the philosophy of education: matters arising

Abstract

I make responses to each of the foregoing symposium papers and take the opportunity to clarify and to elaborate some of the key ideas that come up for discussion. In particular, the distinction between science and the kind of scientism that I take to pervade quotidian society at large is amplified, as is the character of the phenomenological approach that I take. I explore the significance of humility as a virtue that is central to environmental consciousness and endorse the transformational potential of mythopoetic participation in developing environmental consciousness as an exciting possibility. Giving consideration to the idea of an environmentalized rationality leads me to clarify the role and kind of conceptualization that is involved in direct experience of the native occurring of things in nature and to exploring some synergies between this latter idea and ideas deriving from Zen culture. I conclude by identifying some shared and closely interrelated themes that emerge from the symposium contributions and that are important in orientating environmental education. These themes include: the character and significance of direct embodied knowledge; the fostering of a genuinely receptive quality of consciousness; the need to focus on the character of our relationship with nature if we are to avoid an impoverished understanding of our environmental situation and misleading ideas of sustainability.

Keywords:

• Ecologizing education
• nature
• phenomenology
• scientism
• sustainability

I wish to begin by expressing my appreciation to the authors of the papers that make up this symposium: for the time they have given and the thoughtfulness of their responses that have resulted in a rich and thought-provoking set of contributions. Many important issues have been raised. In what follows I will briefly respond to each of the papers and then conclude by identifying what I take to be some important shared themes.

Ramsey Affifi’s rich and stimulating paper (Affifi 2023) identifies and explores many highly relevant matters that my position might be taken to raise. In the space available here I cannot do anything like justice to all of these and can only respond to a sample of his points – taking them as welcome opportunities to clarify some central aspects of my position (and even then, inevitably, I will frequently need to refer the reader to the fuller argument given in the book¹).

Let me begin by saying that I believe that there is much about the spirit of his paper that resonates with my view. And his call for an environmental philosophy that is primarily concerned with the quality of relations rather than internal consistency by asserting a vision on the world has to be right. Yet, if I understand him correctly – for his argument is subtle and many-faceted – he detects elements in my account that are, or are potentially, antagonistic to a truly ongoing responsiveness to the world in its self-arising, and also to what he refers to as ‘nature’s naturing within the ecology of ideas’ through which we think about this world. This is a serious charge. He sees it as revealed, for example, by the dualisms and reifications that he detects in some places in my account, and strands of ‘managerialism’ resulting from the imposition of a template of ‘angels’ and ‘villains’. In addition, he expresses serious misgivings about the account of science that pervades my view. As I say, I am not sure of the extent to which he addresses these reservations directly at the account that I give, but insofar as my account might be read this way I would like, amongst other things, to take this opportunity to clarify my position in the light of such a reading.

Taking the issue of science first, Affifi (2023,4) rightly points out that much of my argument refers to a rather impoverished and limited understanding of science. For example, there would appear to be no recognition of its epistemological diversity which on occasion can include a concern for the mysterious, the unique, the spontaneous, and so forth.

But there is a reason for this limited focus. My central argument concerns not science in all its manifestations but scientism and the kinds of scientific activity that it normalizes throughout much of quotidian Western culture. Insofar as this – what we might term – ‘scientistic science’ relates to experimental ‘science proper’, it loosely reflects a version of what Thomas Kuhn referred to (before his linguistic turn) as paradigm-determined ‘normal science’ and where – infused, now, by what I have termed the metaphysics of mastery – the Popperian exhortation to seek the negative instance is not always the order of the day.² Conditioned in this way, its overarching purpose is human practical/economic utility such that the material with which it deals essentially is construed as a resource whose value derives exclusively from its perceived capacity to satisfy this demand. In the book I give examples of this stance that seem to me clearly to occlude the individuality of things in nature expressed in their native occurring as characterized in the phenomenological vignettes provided in both my opening paper (Bonnett 2023) and the book. I also refer to the pre-specification and emphasis on what is publicly observable and objectively measurable in contemporary Western education as expressions of this. One needs to consider here the volume of science that is driven by economic, commercial, medical and military interests and that, taking place in laboratories up and down the land, enables advertisements to claim that, say, ingredient X is ‘scientifically proven to diminish the signs of ageing’. This is the kind of science that I take to pervade much everyday Iife in society at large. It is heavily preoccupied with prediction, repeatability under standard conditions, achieving maximum yield for minimum cost and so forth, and that when examining and manipulating its materials, for the most part pays little attention to the individuality of things themselves in their native occurring: their intrinsic value and moral standing, their beauty and their own integrity, and therefore the ways in which such recognition should affect aspirations and procedures. And does even the more openminded ‘frontier’ science, to which Affifi rightly draws attention, typically celebrate the subjectivity of the scientist – their aesthetic and bodied feelings evoked by the encounter with the phenomena that they investigate – as an integral part of their findings? This is not a rhetorical question.

Having said this, I am thankful to Ramsey Affifi for contextualizing my account of the scientism that concerns me within a more generous account of science itself. Perhaps here, and to a limited extent, we have some welcome intimations of what I have termed a ‘poeticized’ science might look like?

Turning now to a related reservation expressed by Affifi. I do, indeed, argue that in some senses, and in particular contexts such as knowing nature, particular kinds of experience are foundational or ‘primordial’ (see, for example, Bonnett 2021, 55–59). This is implicit in my references to ‘things themselves’ (and also occasional positive references to the ‘really real’) throughout the book and in my introductory paper to this symposium. The meaning/function of the term ‘reality’ is that of some founding point of reference that experience is rooted in, or reveals. If I understand them correctly, cognate ideas are present in Farrelly’s (2023) and Misawa’s (2023) papers. An important strand of the argument here is that the reality of nature in its otherness is deeply embedded in our form of sensibility (Bonnett 2021, 42–46). In my view what has become a philosophical orthodoxy of radical post-foundationalism (and, in its excesses, post-structuralism) is something of an aberration – in a way analogous to which logical positivism was in its day. Related to this and to Affifi’s observation that phenomenology of lived experience is neutral with regard to what is foregrounded, while in its everyday usage ‘phenomenological’ might be used to refer to any experience, the school of philosophical phenomenology that I declare myself as working in and that seeks, after Husserl, to get ‘back to things themselves’ is willing to ‘bracket’ features of some everyday experience that it considers to be obstacles to this.³ On the argument that I offer, while even the metaphysics of mastery does indeed reveal things (essentially as objects) this is a very cabined and therefore distorting revelation. For example, clearly it occludes the revelation of nature to be found, say, in the poetry of Wordsworth or Hopkins.

Sometimes I get the impression that, for Affifi, to draw a distinction is to impose a dualism. His discussion of the distinction that I draw between a metaphysics of objects and a metaphysics of things would be one example of this (Affifi 2023, 6). But to draw this distinction does not preclude the possibility that in everyday experience these interpenetrate, that much is hybrid, that they can ‘edge into each other’ – just as would be the case with distinguishing between the colours of, say, blue and green. I think that my discussion of the quiddity of a beech tree (Bonnett 2021, 53) in which I argue that its ‘thisness’ and ‘essence’ interfuse – of itself, the tree is both unique and one of a kind – is an illustration of this. In this respect, all experiences are compound: it is a matter of seeking to (re-)balance constituent elements when the dominance of one has become overweening.

Similarly, the related distinction that I draw between the ‘ontological’ and the ‘causal’ and my focus on the former should not be taken to deny the ‘validity’ of even mechanical conceptions of causality in particular contexts. And certainly it would be absurd to deny the presence of causality in the everyday sense of the occurrence of regularities in experience – that frequently one thing follows from another. And my account does not do this. As the book illustrates, primordial phenomenology, both immediately and on further reflection, reveals all sorts of patterns, cycles, spirals – maybe even ‘natural laws’ – such as salmon returning to their natal stream to spawn, in the occurring of things in nature. Also, I speak of ‘elemental powers’ such as birth and death, growth and decay, lightening and darkening, revealing and withholding that run through the whole of our experience of nature. These phenomena are all spontaneous in the sense of being self-arising, yet they also present constants in experience. Similarly, to speak of ‘equilibria’ is not attribute a rigid stasis, but rather a dynamic balancing process of powers, forces, populations and so forth that maintain a degree of stability and through which organic evolution occurs. (For example, we might think here of the kinds of feedback processes that inform James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis.)

I might just add here that the metaphysics of mastery, as I characterize it, is less a matter of explicitly held belief and more a matter of a very tacit presumption that is part of a metaphysical climate – a cultural ether – that, as it were, we ‘inhale’ and that surreptitiously conditions our way of being conscious of our surroundings. It’s burgeoning is associated with the idea of the disenchantment of nature discussed by Farrelly (2023).

Affifi goes on to consider the supposition that ‘scientism and mastery of nature are not reifications, but exist’ and that ‘they are primary causes of the eco/spiritual destruction underway’. He asks, rather than villainize them, might it be better to support the resilience of threatened systems, aiming towards ‘a pluralistic reconciliation where even misguided ways have their place within a broader thriving ecology’? He goes on to say that (with regard to invasive species) instead of seeking the short term advantages that might accrue from culling invaders ‘ultimately healing comes when existing species find ways to make use of the newcomer, of finding their gift’ (Affifi 2023, 11). At first blush this sounds an attractive strategy that is much in keeping with the underlying spirit of my position. It appears non-interventionist, less willful and reifying: an advocacy of letting ‘natural’ ecologizing healing processes take their own course. In some particular cases in the biophysical environment this might well be the best strategy to adopt. But when, as Affifi frequently does, we are speaking of ecologies of the mind, it seems to me that a serious problem arises. And indeed, in broad terms, when we are speaking of ecologies in nature today, the strategy is also highly problematic.

Regarding mental ecologies, as I characterize the metaphysics of mastery, because of its willfulness and determination to efface alternative perspectives it is hard to see how it could participate in a truly ‘pluralistic reconciliation’. Yet, perhaps Affifi ‘s account has an important caveat to contribute regarding this rather blunt assessment – one that might be a much-needed source of hope. Perhaps the gift to which he wishes especially to draw attention is that of the way in which self-arising nature reveals itself regardless of – and even through – the despoliation brought about by the metaphysics of mastery. The massive range of unwanted and often unforeseen side effects of human actions are themselves an expression of nature’s occurring and are a gift in the sense of presenting forcefully opportunities for learning, for seeing that mastery is impossible, for feeling humility, gratitude and care provoked by a deepened awareness of nature’s power, responsiveness and autonomy. Also, presumably, a sharpened sense of the worth of what has been lost would play into this new attunement. In this way new possibilities of understanding and relationship are opened up which could be healing and transformative. Undoubtedly, this is an important perspective on the possibility of disrupting the metaphysics of mastery.⁴

Notwithstanding the above, and specifically regarding biophysical ecologies, while undoubtedly some disturbances are part of the natural order and its evolution, it is difficult to see how the anthropogenic despoliation of the natural world that lies at the heart of current sustainability concerns – such as massive deforestation of rainforests, greenhouse gas emissions, and blasting mountaintops for mineral extraction – have a ‘gift’ to be found. While no doubt one way or another the impact of these activities will be accommodated by nature in some form, will it be a form that is biophysically diverse and thriving and in which humankind can flourish? I agree with Affifi that ‘healthy’ ecologies are constantly ‘ecologizing’ and renewing themselves, and that when disrupted can sometimes re-establish themselves over time: but the problem with this is that currently the ecology of the natural world is not ‘healthy’, it is dying, its own processes and norms subverted by anthropogenic impacts.⁵ Furthermore, and as we are now only too aware, time is not unlimited if we are to preserve anything remotely organically continuous with the richness, scale and diversity of the natural world that we inherited from before the industrial revolution.⁶ If to identify the metaphysics of mastery as being a root source of this despoliation is to villainize it, then we do indeed need to identify ‘villains’ (and I suppose in some sense ‘angels’) if we are to engage in the kind of thoughtful purposeful action that is so urgently needed. And, of course, in referring to ideas of ‘gift’ and ‘healthy ecologies’ and how to support them, tacitly Affifi’s own account does the same.

Notwithstanding, the reservations expressed above, there is a great deal in Affifi’s paper with which I agree, and on many points – and as I would like to interpret him – I find his ideas and elaborations enriching in terms both of illuminating descriptions of how things stand environmentally and of possible ways of developing adequate responses. It seems to me that we both seek a way of thinking that does not sacrifice fidelity to the phenomena for the sake of maintaining the internal consistency of a theoretical account of nature – a philosophy that, in the Athenian sense, is autochthonous – directly responsive to the spontaneity of nature’s occurring, including its regularities. This involves a tolerance of tensions within the account. I am less sure about a philosophy (as distinct from perception) that ‘dances on its feet’ (Affifi 2023, 11), for, insofar as eco-phenomenology seeks to reflect on primordial experience and to identify inherent themes, while it would always be responsive, if it were done reasonably well, there would be a degree of steadiness to its findings (as, indeed, there is in nature). Without this, it would be of little help to educational policy-makers.

It seems to me that Jani Pulkki’s illuminating paper (Pulkki 2023) on humility is very much in the spirit of the book and is very helpful in elaborating attitudes – what I term a frame of mind – that are central to the position that I develop. His discussion of humility and hubris are key in this regard. The former is central to the development of environmental consciousness just as the latter lies at the heart of the metaphysics of mastery. Pulkki’s analysis makes it clear that far from humility involving some element of self-abasement, it rather brings enrichment that comes from a fuller receptivity to one’s environment – particularly its self-arising natural elements – which can be received as a gift for which thanks are due and to which respect is owed.⁷ Only when self-absorption, egoism and humanly imposed hierarchies are eschewed can things themselves shine through and are we better in touch with the realities of our situation – so important for identifying and responding to the environmental issues that now confront us. It seems to me that he is absolutely right to say that currently most hopes of sustainability are pinned on technological development rather than on the cultivation of human character. While certainly in society at large, and education in particular, there are encouragements to modify some aspects of behaviour and some beliefs, overall there seems to be limited recognition of the depth of change required to human character and consciousness for it literally to come to its senses and for sustainability to be achieved. In this regard I think that his discussion of the ‘desacralization of nature’ is particularly apposite.

So, too, is his discussion of the influence upon the character of individuals of having to survive in a fiercely competitive society and the distorting external determination of the self by being assigned (and assigning to itself) a ‘market character’ where the depersonalized mechanism of market competition ascribes ones sense of worth. The effects on teachers and pupils of school league tables based on ‘objective’ exam results would be a case in point. In these and other respects, Pulkki’s virtue-ethical account foregrounds the way in which addressing our environmental predicament in this late-modern period is not simply a matter of looking at modifying our environment and making some adjustments to our behaviour in order to continue more or less as we are, rather it requires a re-envisioning of what counts as human flourishing. This is a theme that runs through the whole of the book, indeed, is in many ways its central theme.

Finally, I found Pulkki’s thoughts on educating humility as offering an important contribution to an understanding of what in practical terms might be done to develop environmental consciousness.

In the book I call for a curriculum that addresses environmental issues through approaches that, in traditional terms, are not limited to the scientific, the geographical and the technological. For example, I explore ways in which art and literature have a fundamental role to play – particularly in creating opportunities for engagements with nature of the kind that the metaphysics of mastery occludes. In this regard Matthew Farrelly’s paper (Farrelly 2023) makes a much needed contribution to exploring the possibilities of mythopoetic participation in developing environmental consciousness. Many of the ideas that he refers to have strong resonances with my views and can be seen as helpfully providing more substance to them. His discussion of Charles Taylor’s notions of the ‘buffered self’ and the ‘porous self’ are good examples of this. The former is a powerful illustration of the kind of cabined consciousness engendered by the metaphysics of mastery, just as the latter corroborates the genuinely open, receptive-responsive ecstasis, that I argue constitutes environmental consciousness. His discussion of Jean-Luc Marion’s conception of the world and its phenomena as being ‘saturated’ – always spilling over with more than we can absorb – seems to be very much in the spirit of nature as transcendent and inherently mysterious.

Yet Farrelly’s paper does more than provide these (and other) illuminating synergies. It develops a view of mythopoetic participation that opens up a range of exciting, and too seldom explored, possibilities for environmental education. He addresses a question that is of fundamental educational importance: given our current cultural climate, what is it possible to experience in/with the nonhuman world? His phenomenology of reading shows possibilities arising from the reading of mythopoetic artifacts that can be transformational for the reader by opening up new ways of being in the world that encourage the flourishing of both the human and the nonhuman. His thought-provoking analysis shows how ongoing cultivated engagement with such texts might catalyze students’ imagination and create epiphanic experiences that break the hold of ‘disenchanted’ routine language and experience, putting them in touch with something more elemental and releasing them to the fullness of the world.

Koichiro Misawa’s paper (Misawa 2023) highlights the way in which environmental issues require us to address deep philosophical questions such as the nature of our inherence in the world and how we come into the world at all.⁸

I am most grateful to him for identifying and elucidating some key ideas expressed in the book by tracing their genealogy. This approach helps to reveal the underlying spirit of the thinking that my account expresses – the way it is on – and in so-doing is a valuable aid to interpreting it. In the process he deftly navigates some complex and subtle ideas and relationships that are key to the project of environmentalizing thinking – carefully teasing out the contributions that they make and raising a range of salient questions. Very pertinently, he demonstrates how my account involves an environmentalizing of rationality – something about which, I agree, I am not sufficiently explicit, and I am thankful to him for making this clearer and filling out how it might be understood. I would like to say just a little more on this important point here by addressing two interrelated questions. What is to be meant by ‘rationality’ and the operation of concepts, and the sense in which they go ‘all the way down’ or ‘from the bottom up’? And if rationality is pervasive in this way, how can primordial experience remain ‘pre-predictive’ in the way that I (and others) claim?

It seems to me that key to understanding these issues is the recognition that things themselves are meaning-laden. We never experience something as entirely ‘brute’ or as pure sensory input (for example, as sense-data theorists of the early to mid-1900s claimed). As Michael Oakeshott (1972) once put it, we live in a world of intelligibles. These can be apprehended in direct encounters that remain pre-predicative, non-discursive, non-calculative. There is a level of intelligibility that is immediate, that does not wait upon an individual’s conscious judgement. Referring to Misawa’s account of McDowell’ position, I think that the distinction drawn between actualisations of conceptual capacities and exercises of them (that typically involve a judgmental stepping back) is, indeed, helpful in this context. I agree that we can think of rational capacity as actualized in the direct encounter in the sense that significance is apprehended and enacted as in the case of an animal fleeing a predator, and that this differs from a more abstract ‘responding to reasons as such’ (for example, doing something because we account it morally right). Understood in this way, actualisations of conceptual capacities would be pre-predicative and could be a way of characterizing an aspect of responding to the native occurring of things that runs through my account. However, I am less confident about claiming that the ‘logical space of reasons’ involved in responding to reasons as such is sui generis to human beings. As I note in the book, I frequently use the phrase ‘human consciousness or its equivalent’ to allow for the possibility that other creatures such as other Simians, some Cetaceans (and who knows what else?) might be capable of such more abstract rationality. We must remain open to the evidence.

In addition, the above issues relate to the idea of ‘embodiment’ that pervades my – and many other – accounts of environmental education. For it seems to me that while there are times when it can be helpful to draw a distinction between mind and body, we should not allow this to become a dualism of the Cartesian kind. ‘Bodied’ does not mean ‘brute’, consciousness is frequently overtly bodied (when it is not lost in purely intellectual pursuit) and is always implicitly so, through being emplaced. Feeling and emotion (frequently associated with the body) involve the sensing of significances, intelligibles. For such reasons I use terms such as ‘mind-body’ and ‘mind-body-heart’ in the book.

It seems to me that Heesoon Bai’s paper (Bai 2023) is a very helpful contribution to the symposium, drawing attention to the issue of environmental activism and providing, as it does, a developmental psychological perspective that offers observations on how the metaphysics of mastery comes to hold sway in the life of individuals and a culture. Her discussion of the psychology of its addictiveness is particularly pertinent, as is her exploration of the means by which it might be curtailed and the frame of mind – kind of consciousness – that needs to replace it. In this regard, many synergies between her view and mine become foregrounded. For example, the idea of ‘interbeing’ resonates strongly with the kind of participation in the native occurring of things in emplaced nature that I describe as lying at the heart of environmental consciousness. So, too, does her Zen-inspired account of the nature of this consciousness.⁹ Indeed, there seems to be considerable amount of underlying agreement on this across a number of the papers that compose this symposium (particularly Pulkki’s and Farrelly’s papers).

Having said this, I think that it is worth commenting upon what, at first blush at least, might be taken as some tensions between our views. Throughout my account I lay stress on the ‘otherness’ of nature whereas Bai speaks of the desirability of seeing nature as a friend. Furthermore, she observes that:

Historically in certain cultural contexts, nature has been often seen as an Other, and therefore treated as if it is an enemy. [My emphasis]

I would like to make it clear that the term ‘otherness’ in the sense in which I employ it does not provoke enmity, rather it is a precondition of respect. We have to learn to accept – indeed celebrate – the otherness of things in nature, natural beings, in order to let them be (reveal) themselves. Empathy with the natural world must not be allowed to degenerate into anthropomorphism if we are to remain in touch with the really real (see my discussion of this in the book pp. 27-30). I suspect that Bai would readily agree with this as an essential aspect of the kind of love towards the earth that she extolls, the tension being more apparent than real and resulting from what we are choosing to focus upon in a particular context. Iris Murdoch (1959), too, suggests that letting the other be, in its otherness, is a form of love. Nonetheless, I argue that our relationship with nature is tensioned both in the sense that, as Max Scheler once observed, we are the animals that can say ‘No’ to nature, and that our awareness of its intrinsic value and ideas of ‘friendship’ are tempered by an awareness of such things as Ebola and the possibility of planet-destroying asteroids.

Finally, such discussion raises a further set of issues concerning the character of our place in nature in a more general sense and that occurs in several of the papers. It is implicit in the use of terms such as ‘nonhuman’, ‘more-than-human’, ‘other-than-human’ and is relevant to our understanding of exhortations to remember that we are (sometimes ‘are simply’) part of nature. It seems to me that human consciousness or its equivalent is not part of nature in the same way that, say, an earthworm (or, as far as we know at present, a lion) is. The degree of self-awareness, choice and responsibility of which mature human consciousness is typically capable puts it in a different league to much of the rest of nature. This is not to say that it is superior in terms of its contribution to the functioning of the biosphere – indeed, in many respects its contribution in this context is to be regretted – but it is the place where things show up not simply in the present alone, but in the context of a future and a past, and where an all-inclusive imagination operates that can conceive a sustainable and viable world that includes the life of future generations and a global context (Kemp 2017). This places humankind in a special position of responsibility for its actions and their impacts on the natural world, and introduces an asymmetry into our relationship with its other beings that can be obscured by insufficiently qualified talk of the equality of all species. In this respect, Bai’s claim that ‘concepts, beliefs, arguments, reasoning, and so on, are limited in their ability to take us to experiencing consanguinity with all earthly beings’ is most apposite providing it is not interpreted as implying a dualism between mind and body, sense and sensibility. As previously discussed, intelligibility comes all the way up from embodied (i.e. mind-body) experiences that are the foundation of more abstract reason, or are the ground in which such reason must be reintegrated. It needs to be said that none of the above discussion is intended as criticism of Bai’s account – only as cautions regarding possible problematic readings. And her call for activism that is determined, but also carried out with kindness and compassion, is surely in keeping with the essence of environmental consciousness.

Conclusion

The papers that compose this symposium display a wide range of ideas, often in much rich detail. By way of drawing things to a close, it might be helpful to identify briefly some main themes that have emerged from them for the orientation of environmental education.

1. While the conventional fodder of education – factual knowledge and skills – remain important, the symposium papers foreground a different kind of knowledge as being equally, if not more, important: a more receptive direct embodied knowledge by acquaintance, rather than by calculation. This emplaced knowledge can act as a grounding for more abstract knowledge and as a corrective to immoderate anthropocentric instrumentalism.

2. It is our underlying attitude, frame of mind, kind of rationality, quality of consciousness, that are absolutely central to environmental education. Focusing on technological solutions and limited behavioural adaptions is not enough.

3. Embedded in the above, is the central importance of the character of our relationship with nature: our sense of it, our ways of knowing it, our ways of being ‘in’ it, and of standing ‘outside’ it.

4. How, in our late-modern time, do we truly achieve environmental consciousness and what part can education play? Throughout the symposium, a number of interesting and important possibilities are identified that are relevant to cultivating those qualities of embodied consciousness that facilitate an authentic awareness of nature and our emplacement within it. Without such cultivation, our understanding of our environmental situation will be impoverished and there is a danger of environmental education being mired in misleading ideas of sustainability.

Michael Bonnett
Independent Scholar, Formerly University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
[email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Throughout this paper, “the book” refers to Bonnett (2021).

2 See, also, my discussion of the reality of much science practice and its way of structuring thinking in Bonnett (1983) and (1995).

3 See Magrini (2019, Ch. 1) for an excellent account of the eco-phenomenological approach.

4 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for alerting me to this dimension of Affifi’s view.

5 In this respect, it is humankind that is the most worrisome invasive species.

6 In the book I am explicit about taking this conception of nature, or something close to it, as being at the root of ideas of sustainability.

7 One is prompted here (and, indeed, throughout) to allude to a truth nascent in the idea that the meek will inherit the earth. They will, they do, because only they can.

8 On the question of how we come to be in the world in the first place, in other work (Bonnett 1978) I have addressed the question by arguing that consciousness possesses an innate ‘vectorial structure’ of intentions that enables and conditions its first engagements with a world of intelligibles. This idea is implicit in my discussion of the role of emplaced anticipations (Bonnett 2021, 69–75): that these are not only the way in which we inhere in the world (avoid ‘ontological freefall’), but also are the means by which we first come into the world. No doubt these innate anticipations have been honed by evolution to mesh with the world in ways analogous to the ways that physical attributes have been.

9 Being lamentably ignorant of Zen culture, and conceiving myself as working from within the ‘Western tradition’, I was delighted to discover this degree of synergy. Both because it seems to corroborate the position that I put forward and also for what might be a more important reason: might it corroborate the idea of some underlying transcultural bedrock, touchstone, of human experience?