A CRITIQUE OF THE SELF-CENTERED ECOLOGY VIS-A-VIZ THE NATIVE-CENTRIC ECOLOGY

Abstract

One of the main challenges facing humanity today is the search for ecological sustainability and the need to support just and equitable eco-social transformations from the individualistic self to the collective self. The effect of the eco-individualistic self includes threat to humanity, contamination of water supplies, destruction or disablement of energy, and many others. Using the philosophical method of hermeneutics, this study maintains that the ethics of self has been misinterpreted and nature as viewed as personal property, has led to the ecological crisis. to avert the ecological crisis, the self must be viewed as collective. The collective self presents no ontological division in the hierarchy of beings, and it is rooted in the philosophy of the native-centric ecology. "Native-centric ecology" refers to environmental collectivism rooted in communalism, inviolability of nature and environmental contingency. It is a moral principle of realizing environmental potential without destroying self. The paper concludes that a better understanding of the self would help to avoid the destruction of the self in ecological relationships.