Unspeakable Ecology: Eco-Science and Environmental Awareness Through Thick Inquiries, 1910S–1980S

Abstract:In identifying the modern origin of ecological studies, scholarship on "ecological civilization" (shengtai wenming) should have engaged with the fundamental question, that is, What are the modern and contemporary modes of our ethical, political, and economic relationship with coexisting nonhuman species and the planet Earth? Or, more definitely, Can or cannot the possibility of that coexistence be conceived in modern and contemporary terms? This paper draws critical attention to the fact that the cultural and conceptual formation of ecology (shengtai), a distinctly modern historical invention, generates more inquiries than answers. Questioning the possibility of speaking about ecology from within the politics of Green rhetoric, this paper engages the contested ethical and epistemological principles that constituted the foundation of ecological knowledge as well as the conceptual orientations to ecology in China from the 1910s to the 1980s.