The Scales Integral to Ecology: Hierarchies in Laudato Si’ and Christian Ecological Ethics

Laudato si’ and the Postsecularism of the Environmental Humanities

T homas Merton, the American intellectual turned Trappist monk, recounts in The Seven Storey Mountain that his conversion to Catholicism was triggered by reading an account of a sermon in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel that draws from Joyce’s own departure from the faith. Merton fully recognizes the oddness and paradox of such a reading, but there was something, ...

A successful provocation for a pluralistic global society. The encyclical Laudato Si’ – A Magna Carta of integral ecology as a reaction to humanity’s self-destructive course

Paleobiology, Community Ecology, and Scales of Ecological Pattern1

The fossil record provides a wealth of data on the role of regional processes and historical events in shaping biological communities over a variety of time scales. The Quaternary record with its evidence of repeated climatic change shows that both terrestrial and marine species shifted independently rather than as cohesive assemblages over scales of thousands of years. Larger scale patterns al...

Macrosystems ecology: understanding ecological patterns and processes at continental scales

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org I this paper, we present a conceptual framework for investigating ecological patterns and processes at regional to continental scales. Ecological phenomena operate across a range of scales (Figure 1), but the development of ecological theory of regions to continents lags behind that of finer scales. Better understanding of broad sca...

Paleobiology, community ecology, and scales of ecological pattern.

The fossil record provides a wealth of data on the role of regional processes and historical events in shaping biological communities over a variety of time scales. The Quaternary record with its evidence of repeated climatic change shows that both terrestrial and marine species shifted independently rather than as cohesive assemblages over scales of thousands of years. Larger scale patterns al...