Abstract
Human cultures with a high degree of urban and technological development face a connectivity crisis with nature that provides its ecosystem services, threatening its sustainability on different spatial and temporal scales. This notion of nature’s ecosystem services comes from an anthropocentric paradigm that understands humans and their built environment as something artificial, interpreted as unnatural. The civilizing process of these human societies that have separated nature and culture, biology and cognition, ecology and technology, etc., faces complex environmental problems that require reconnecting these realities. Global initiatives from ecological movements such as Fritjof Capra’s Deep Ecology, combined with new research findings in human ecology, can provide a framework to address this crisis. This research presents the habitats of humans and other animals as a network bridging “natural” eco-systems of the environment and “artificial” techno-systems of the built environment. For this purpose, we use systemic thinking to develop a new area of study: techno-systemic studies. In such studies, we show how the habitat is present in both ecological and technological systems by bringing terminology from eco-systemic studies, such as the concept of levels of organization. This knowledge allows actions and practices caring for both biosphere and technosphere. The biosphere, sometimes called ecosphere, is the set of natural ecological systems (i.e., forests). The technosphere is the set of “artificial” technological systems (i.e., cities). Finally, this study allows us to move from an egocentric/anthropocentric to an ecocentric/biocentric paradigm, constituting the foundations of Deep Human Ecology, a knowledge branch reconciling nature and culture.
Presenters
Daniel Felipe Marín VanegasResearcher, School of Construction, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Antioquia, Colombia
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2023 Special Focus—Human/Nature: Toward A Reconciliation
KEYWORDS
Human Ecology, Habitat, Built Environment, Techno-systemic Studies, Systems Thinking
