Ecosacral
I coined the word “ecosacral” to conflate ecology with sacrality – meaning to imbue ecology with a sacred character, quality or value. Ecosacral behaviour is that which celebrates ecological phenomena as holy and so requiring reverential human response.
The essence of ecosacrality is in this quote from Liu Yiming, commenting on hexagram 49 of The Taoist I Ching, translated by Thomas Cleary (upon whom blessings be).
We use worldly realities to practice the reality of the Dao and use human affairs to cultivate celestial virtues.
Human culture is both the creature of ecology and, we are increasingly being brought to realise, that on which ecological nature depends. Ecology, in a functional sense, is how everything works. Culture is the specific production of humanity ie what humans produce, what produces humanity.
Take the internet. One reason for using ecosacral to name a website was that the world scored zero hits on google (as of Saturday 18th August 2007). In ecological terms, I have recognised an “empty niche” – one that is not currently occupied by any other organism.
Nothing escapes the demands of reciprocity – the dialectics of niche. The niche of an organism is what it lives on or how it makes a living. It is also defined by what other organisms live on it and on what it outputs. The organism is not dependent on ecology – it is ecology!
The paradox of the idea of the empty niche is that it can never be observed – only inferred retrospectively, or intuited prospectively.