Science, Ecology and Wellbeing

The planet, human societies and the natural environment face some daunting challenges in our current neoliberal age. How we respond to such challenges at global, local and personal levels is mediated through our epistemological positions and the knowledges we have to draw upon in order to construct critical understand- ings of interrelationships between people, communities, environments (natural and built) and nations. Within and between these con- texts, particular, dominant ways of knowing and being are privileged and enacted. White, Western knowledge systems, such as science, have provided a guiding framework for societal evaluation of worth. Science has provided a (purportedly) universal, objective way of describing and understanding the natural world and those who dwell within it. This has led to great advances in human achievement and wellbeing on one hand, but also allowed environmental destruction, systematic racism and many other forms of marginalisation