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Show 240 CHAPTER VI: SACRED ANIMALS: ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS A standard college textbook on ecology announces that an ecologist is a scientist who studies, models, and manipulates the pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. The same text argues in its concluding chapter that the lessons the ecologist learns become a philosophical imperative if Man is to have any future at all. Other ecologists write that ecology is much more than a scientific discipline; it is finally a resistance movement, a subversive science. A recent history of ecology argues that the ecologist is a new prophet of science who proposes to mediate between Man and Nature. But there is also something about the "ecology movement" which suggests a religious awakening. And in that sense, a sociologist asserts that ecological consciousness, as distinguished from the scientific specialty, is "a radical form of consciousness in contemporary, urban-industrial North America." |