Socioecological Transformations - Linking Ontologies with Structures, Personal with Collective Change

Summary

A substantial, open-access collection of essays that challenges the habit of reducing transformation to policy tweaks or social movements, both of which bypass what lies beneath: ontologies, our assumptions about reality, which run “deeper and more foundational than worldviews”. Modern socio-political and economic structures are root causes, but “also a symptom of certain ways of being (ontologies), knowing (epistemologies), and doing (ethics)”; ideas and structures are “two sides of the same coin that reflect and reproduce one another”. Which widens the response beyond activism alone, to work that unsettles “the human exceptionalism and the illusion of separation” through “contemplation, self-study, the practice of deep interconnectedness, inner transformations, radical kindness, and openness”. Fifteen chapters range from deep relational ontology to a Mumbai fishing community and tourism degrowth in Barcelona, in pursuit of transformation “where being, knowing, and doing are reimagined in relational, life-affirming terms.”

Rationale

We appreciated the academic rigour of this book. It resonated with our wider findings that change has to reach beneath structures to the various ways of being that hold them in place and, as we’ve seen elsewhere, the authors trace much of the damage back to the illusion of separation.