Environmental Ethics

Volume 12, Issue 3, Fall 1990

Metaphysical Implications from Physics and Ecology

I contrast metaphysical implications from physics and ecology and compare them through two concepts, the field, primary in physics and borrowed by ecology, and wholeness, postulated in ecology and borrowed by physics. I argue that several implications from physics are unacceptably reductive or erroneous and identify an old and a new ecology. Metaphysical implications from the old ecology are quite different from the new ecology, as weIl as from quantum or Newtonian physics.