Where Is Ecological Awareness?
For example, you and I can live next door to each other, but if you speak Serbian and I don’t, then you and I do not share much of a cultural “we.” In that instance, you are outside my I; you are also outside my circle of friends (or intimate we’s); and you are even outside my entire circle of spoken communication–in that regard, you are “all Greek” to me, or outside any we-boundary of mutual understanding. What you and I do share, however, is geographical or physical proximity, and therefore we are both parts of, for example, the same local ecosystem–we share an exterior social system, but not all aspects of an interior culture. In other words, it seems pretty obvious that I do not have to share any sort of mutual understanding with my next door neighbor, nor with the insects around me, nor the worms under my house, in order to belong to the same ecosystem.10 But I do have to share a mutual understanding in order to be a member of a given culture. This is why you and I can both be p
