Interconnections, Relationships, and Environmental Wholes: A Phenomenological Ecology of Natural and Built Worlds

www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon cology, both as a science and as a world view, emphasizes the study of relationships, interconnections, and environmental wholes that are different from the sum of their environmental parts. “Special qualities emerge out of interactions and collectivities, ” writes intellectual historian Donald Worster (1994, p. 22), in his Nature’s Economy, a history of ecological ideas in the Western world.1 E The central question I address here is this: What do the relationships, interconnections, and environmental wholes of ecology become in a phenomenological perspective?2 To examine this question, I consider one phenomenon from the natural world—color—and one phenomenon from the human-made world—lively urban places. I think it important to offer an example from both natural and human worlds because a “phenomenological ecology, ” as it might be called, must be responsive to all lived relationships and interconnections, examining and describing the ways that things, living forms, people, events, situations and worlds come together to make environmental and human wholes (Riegner 1993, p. 211-12; Seamon 1993, p. 16).