The Earth in Our Hands: Hermeneutics and the Practice of Ecology

There is no possibility for an ecological crisis without someone to be in crisis. The environment is not in danger as such, humanity’s ability to persist in it with well-being is. Thus, the ecological crisis is a human crisis, a crisis of meaning. Although ecology is required to understand and address these problems, we must understand the human condition if we wish to address them with any amount of seriousness or hope for success. We will be concerned with the relevance of hermeneutic practices in the study and practice of ecology. By hermeneutic practices, I mean the practices central to the human condition of world-building through perpetual interpretation and re-interpretation informed by one’s facticity. By the study and practice of ecology, I mean the education of ecology’s concepts within a scholastic, primarily university, setting and the usage of said concepts for the purpose of research or societal development respectively. I will argue that the study and practice of ecology would benefit from an inclusion of hermeneutics into its study in the scholastic system by way of developing nuanced understandings of oneself and their relation to the environment, thereby revealing new horizons of possibility in decision-making in society regarding the environment and oneself. To do this, I begin by using hermeneutic strategies in a reading of Gilgamesh to draw comparisons between Gilgamesh’s journey and the development of human society’s relationship to progress. Juxtaposing the concerns posited by the hermeneutic reading of Gilgamesh with Neil Postman’s claim that our contemporary understanding of the world is helpfully understood as what he calls a “Technopoly,” I argue technology has altered our orientation towards the environment in a way that falsely suggests hermeneutics has no place in ecology or any science. Exploring passages from Martin Heidegger, I then argue how humans’ fundamental relationship to interpretation makes hermeneutics the ground from which ecology is able to rise from. Further exploring passages from Heidegger’s work and exploring the etymology of the words “preserve” and “beforehand,” I argue that not only does hermeneutics allow for the study of ecology, but by studying ecology without it we are left in a state prime for mis-handling the Earth, thus making hermeneutics a crucial part of an education in ecology. I close by providing an example of using hermeneutic practices on two essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson to display how these hermeneutic practices could be used in conjunction with an education in ecology and illustrate the benefits therein.