Contextualising the teaching and learning of ecology: Historical and philosophical considerations

Abstract

Ecology has gradually gained salience during the last few decades and ecological issues, including land use changes, global warming, biodiversity loss, food shortage, and so forth, seem to be gaining public attention. Though philosophers of science had given little attention to ecology, there is a lot of interesting work being currently pursued in philosophy of ecology and environmental philosophy. As Colyvan and colleagues put it, “ecology is an important and fascinating branch of biology, with distinctive philosophical issues” (Colyvan et al. 2009, p. 21). Given its conceptual and methodological familiarity with the social sciences, ecology occupies a unique position among other disciplines (Cooper 2003).