The Ecosystem Between Nature and Culture. Airplanes, Systems, and Maps

Abstract

Following Donna Haraway’s suggestion to interpret the ecosystem as a dense technoscientific semiotic-material object, this paper will analyze the history of the birth of the concept of “ecosystem” from a philosophical, scientific, political and technological perspective, showing the complex re-articulation of the nature/culture dichotomy that takes place within it. In particular, the ecosystem concept will be problematized from a situated epistemological framework addressing mainly three questions: which kind of events lead to the formulation of the ecosystem concept, how nature is conceptualized through it and what kind of relationship between humans and nature is implied in the constitution of the concept.