Environmentalism and ecology

**Environmentalism** is a broad philosophy and ideology relating to concerns for environmental protection and improvement of the health of the environment,
 particularly as the measure for this health seeks to incorporate the
impact of changes to the environment on humans, animals, plants and
non-living matter. Environmentalism advocates the preservation, restoration and/or
improvement of the natural environment, and may be referred to as a
movement to control pollution or protect plant and animal diversity. Environmentalism is heavily tied to the sciences of **ecology** and climate science among others, which can inform its understanding of the effects of certain things on the environment.

Environmentalism is a big theme in megaten, most specifically in strange journey which held it up as one of the primary issues that the plot revolved around, with the different endings revolving around different solutions to the issue of human harm caused to the world. An important facet is that while all the sides have a focus of environmentalism at times, the means by which they approach it will be different, and have a different tone. Environmentalism also comes up as an issue in DDS2, with them talking about how the environment protects the world from god's malignant data, and so with its collapse human society started to collapse as well. With the issues in game and the black sun that regular people can't live in and which is called a harsh environment being a metaphor for environmental issues as a whole.

## General umbrellas

There are three main umbrellas of environmentalist pushes. These are referred to as dark green environmentalism, light green environmentalism, and bright green environmentalism. Note them all having association with the color **green** in keeping with green being a general term for environmentalism as a whole. Note that these are only general umbrellas, and so more specific versions will overlap, do aspects of multiple, etc.

**Light green environmentalism** sees protecting the environment first and foremost as a personal responsibility. Light greens do not tends to emphasize environmentalism as a distinct political ideology, or even seek fundamental political reform. Instead they often focus on environmentalism as a lifestyle choice.

**Dark green environmentalism** believes that environmental problems are an inherent part of our current civilization, and seeks radical political change. Dark greens believe that currently and historically dominant political ideologies (sometimes referred to as industrialism) inevitably lead to consumerism, overconsumption, waste, alienation from nature and resource depletion. Dark greens claim this is caused by the emphasis on economic growth at the expense of the planet that exists within current dominant ideologies, a tendency referred to as growth mania. Dark green solutions range from radical transformation of human society, to even support for a reduction in human numbers and/or a relinquishment of technology to reduce humanity's effect on the biosphere.

**Bright green environmentalism** is a newer trend which believes that radical changes are needed in the economic and
political operation of society in order to make it sustainable, but that
 better designs, new technologies and more widely distributed social
innovations are the means to make those changes. In contrast with dark green environmentalism, this is not about a reduction in human influence, so much as a refinement of it in such a way that it can control and offset its potential for causing environmental problems, potentially using technology to gain some level of control over the environment itself.

In terms of megaten, there is an obvious division here. In strange journey which highlights their views more clearly, while chaos is the most focused on ecology as a direct idea, all the sides are depicted as having elements of it. One of the major differences between law and chaos is that law focuses on the artificial, and chaos on the natural (though law also focuses on cosmic order, which is part of nature. It is more the natural of the chaotic world that is associated with the nature orientation of chaos). This carries over to their views on nature. Strange journey shows an ecological disaster that threatens human civilization. chaos responds to this by saying that humans need to go back to living more naturally, and act less disruptively to nature. Law in contrast says that what is needed is some means to get control over the world system itself. As such, law has a more artificial solution, in which means to control the environment are used to prevent ecological disaster, whereas chaos avoids it by returning to more natural living.

As such, chaos can be associated with dark green environmentalism, and law can be associated with bright green environmentalism. Chaos highlights multiple aspects of dark green, such as getting rid of much of technology, and even living lifestyles that cut down on human numbers, in order to prevent them from having as much of an influence over nature. Not every chaos ending involves getting rid of technology, but the structure of it implies that its warlike nature would often involve reduced humanity, and by extension less technological influence. Note in contrast how much mem aleph complains about law's plan highlights that while it avoids ecological disaster, it does so not by allowing nature to flourish naturally, but to avoid so artificially, and as such would be seen as alien to nature oriented beings.

Neutral is harder to place in strange journey, especially due to its ambiguous nature. One aspect of strange journey is that it is shown that law and chaos both already have readily existing plans to solve the ecological crisis, whereas neutral is more of a hope for creating one. Since neutral often rejects radical social transformations, it has an element of light green environmentalism to it. But again, in relation to how these are ambiguous umbrellas, it does have a bit of bright green as well, and even a little dark green.

## Ecology

**Ecology** is the branch of biology which studies the interactions among organisms and their environment. Topics of interest include the biodiversity, distribution, biomass, and populations of organisms, as well as cooperation and competition within and between species. **Ecosystems** are a primary study of ecology, and are dynamically interacting systems of organisms, the communities they make up, and the non-living components of their environment. Ecology is not synonymous with environmentalism, natural history, or environmental science. It overlaps with the closely related sciences of evolutionary biology, genetics, and ethology. An important focus for ecologists is to improve the understanding of how biodiversity affects ecological function.

Ecology comes in the forms of both individual ecology, which is the ecological apsects of individual biological beings (such as **Ecophysiology** is a biological discipline that studies the adaptation of an organism's physiology to environmental conditions), and population ecology, which studies the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the wider environment. Both of these are important to the concept of environmentalism, since environmentalism revolves around understanding the nature of ecosystems in order to ensure that human action does not destroy or significantly harm them.

**Environmental science** is an interdisciplinary academic field that integrates physical, biological and information sciences (including ecology, biology, physics, chemistry, plant science, zoology, mineralogy, oceanology, limnology, soil science, geology and physical geography (geodesy), and atmospheric science to the study of the environment, and the solution of environmental problems. Ecology is a type of environmental science, but there is also atmospheric science, Environmental chemistry, and geosciences under the umbrella.

**A metapopulation** consists of a group of spatially separated populations of the same species which interact at some level. The term metapopulation was coined by Richard Levins in 1969 to describe a model of population dynamics of insect pests in agricultural fields, but the idea has been most broadly applied to species in naturally or artificially fragmented habitats. In Levins' own words, it consists of "a population of populations". It is an important concept in ecology.

**A keystone species** is a species that is connected to a disproportionately large number of other species in the food-web.
 Keystone species have lower levels of biomass in the trophic pyramid
relative to the importance of their role. The many connections that a
keystone species holds means that it maintains the organization and
structure of entire communities. The loss of a keystone species results
in a range of dramatic cascading effects that alters trophic dynamics,
other food web connections, and can cause the extinction of other
species.

Humans are of course considered a major keystone species, with the world at large heavily affected by their actions. Megaten of course depicts this metaphorically as well, with the various kinds of demons all tending to use humans as a source of biomagnetite, and human action being able to radically change the dynamic of these demons, despite them being in a large way embodiments of nature, showing humanity's affect on nature.

**Holism** remains a critical part of the theoretical foundation in contemporary ecological studies. Holism addresses the biological organization of life that self-organizes
 into layers of emergent whole systems that function according to
non-reducible properties. This means that higher order patterns of a
whole functional system, such as an ecosystem, cannot be predicted or understood by a simple summation of the parts. "New properties emerge because the components interact, not because the basic nature of the components is changed."

**Ecosophy** or **ecophilosophy** (a portmanteau of **ecological philosophy**) is a philosophy of striving for ecological harmony or equilibrium for its own sake. The term was coined by the Norwegian father of deep ecology, Arne Næss. Many demons in strange journey depict this as a good thing, and say that human society is divorced from nature, and heavily disrupting it.

**Deep ecology** is an ecological and environmental philosophy
 promoting the inherent worth of the ecosystem regardless of its instrumental utility to human needs, plus a radical restructuring of
modern human societies in accordance with such ideas. Deep ecology argues that the natural world is a subtle balance of
complex inter-relationships in which the existence of organisms is
dependent on the existence of others within ecosystems.
 Human interference with or destruction of the natural world poses a
threat therefore not only to humans but to all organisms constituting
the natural order. Deep ecology's core principle is the belief that the living
environment as a whole should be respected and regarded as having
certain inalienable legal rights to live and flourish, independent of its utilitarian instrumental benefits for human use.

Deep ecology is sometimes criticized for assuming that living things such as
plants, for example, have their own interests as they are manifested by
the plant's behavior—for instance, self-preservation being considered an
 expression of a will to live. Deep ecologists claim to *identify*
with non-human nature, and in doing so, deny those who claim that
non-human (or non-sentient) lifeforms' needs or interests are
nonexistent or unknowable. The criticism is that the interests that a
deep ecologist attributes to non-human organisms such as survival,
reproduction, growth, and prosperity are really human interests. This is
 sometimes construed as anthropomorphism,
 in which "the earth is endowed with 'wisdom', wilderness equates with
'freedom', and life forms are said to emit 'moral' qualities.

In strange journey, the demons who embody say that they were not made to serve humans, humans were made to serve them. Since they embody nature, this is in a big way a statement about humanity's role in the world, and how humanity views the world as something to use for its own ends, rather than to uphold. and that humanity's perspective on this is what led to environmental disaster.

**The** **Gaia hypothesis**, also known as the **Gaia theory** or the **Gaia principle**, proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. The hypothesis was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. Lovelock named the idea after Gaia, the primordial goddess who personified the Earth in Greek mythology. It is a major part of the quasi-religious perspective of gaianism, from which the in-game gaians take their name.

Strange journey was heavily based on this idea, and the idea of earth as a cohesive whole, since the schwarzwelt is seen as in a sense it's immune system, arising to purge things that are too dangerous to it. earth is treated in a sense as a cohesive being of its own, though not necessarily an independently sentient one in the sense of being a being, similar to the great will. Similar to yhvh and the great will in the abstract sense of being "god", mem aleph functions as an embodiment of earth.

**Technogaianism** (a portmanteau word combining "techno-" for technology and "gaian" for Gaia philosophy) is a bright green environmentalist stance of active support for the research, development and use of emerging and future technologies to help restore Earth's environment. Technogaians argue that developing safe, clean, alternative technology should be an important goal of environmentalists.

**Ecomodernism** is an environmental
 philosophy which argues that humans can protect nature by using
technology to "decouple" anthropogenic impacts from the natural world. Ecomodernism explicitly embraces substituting natural ecological services with energy, technology, and synthetic solutions. Among other things, ecomodernists embrace agricultural intensification, genetically modified and synthetic foods, desalination and waste recycling, urbanization, and substituting denser energy fuels for less dense fuels (e.g. substituting coal for wood).

**Ecological economics** (also called **eco-economics**, **ecolonomy** or **bioeconomics** of Georgescu-Roegen) is both a transdisciplinary and an interdisciplinary field of academic research addressing the interdependence and coevolution of human economies and natural ecosystems, both intertemporally and spatially.

**Green politics** (also known as **ecopolitics**) is a political ideology while in the wider sense could refer to any political attempt to work for environmentalism, in the more narrow sense it refers to socialistic leaning versions of this. As the socialistic version developed, there also came into existence separate movements that include ecological components such
as green conservatism and eco-capitalism.

**Climate engineering**, commonly referred to as **geoengineering**, also known as **climate intervention**, is the deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system with the aim of affecting adverse global warming. Climate engineering is an umbrella term for measures that mainly fall into two categories: greenhouse gas removal and solar radiation management. Due to law's focus on structure and the artificial and control over long term planning, climate engineering would be a basis of their overall approach. Note in strange journey how they still make use of the schwarzwelt, covering earth's atmosphere.

**Greenwashing** is a form of spin in which green PR or green marketing is deceptively used to promote the perception that an organization's products, aims or policies are environmentally friendly. In SMTIV thereis a point at which the gaians are accused of this after poisoning part of the city for their goals, realizing that this act would have been severely environmentally harmful.

## Ecopsychology

**Ecopsychology** studies the relationship between human beings and the natural world through ecological and psychological principles.
 The field seeks to develop and understand ways of expanding the
emotional connection between individuals and the natural world, thereby
assisting individuals with developing sustainable lifestyles and
remedying alienation from nature. This is of course relevant to megaten as well, since the gods are depicted as embodying nature among other things, and the modern society is depicted as remote from them in part because humanity has alienated itself from nature. Something that it depicts as a problem that leads to environmental decay, and which needs to be fixed.

Certain researchers propose that an individual's connection to nature
can improve their interpersonal relationships and emotional wellbeing. An integral part of this practice is to expand the amount of time humans are in nature, something that past humans would have been more often, in contrast with the modern lifestyle of being indoors in offices and such more often.
 According to the precepts of ecopsychology, a walk in the woods or a
city park is refreshing because it is what humans evolved to do.

Ecopsychology explores how to develop emotional bonds with nature.
 It considers this to be worthwhile because when nature is explored and
viewed without judgement, it gives the sensations of harmony, balance,
timelessness and stability. Ecopsychology largely rejects reductionist views of nature that focus too much upon rudimentary building blocks such as genes,
 and that describe nature as selfish and a struggle to survive.
Ecopsychology considers that there has been insufficient scientific
description and exploration of nature, in terms of wildness, parsimony, spirituality and emotional ties. For example, parsimony is the best way to produce an evolutionary tree of the species (cladistics),
 suggesting that parsimonious adaptations are selected. Yet today, the
brain is often seen as complicated and governed by inherited mind
modules, rather than being a simple organ that looks for parsimony
within the influences of its surroundings, resulting in the compaction
in minds of a great diversity of concepts.

The spiritual element is also seen as being tied to humanity removing itself from nature. The earliest humans' religions were deifications of nature itself, which evolved into beings that embody, represent, or control it. So the idea of religion and spirituality is heavily tied to one's connection with nature and the larger world. The decrease in a focus on spirituality then goes hand in hand with the development of a post-industrial society in which humans are removed from nature, and so this connection and view and understanding of being connected to and a part of something larger is lost. This connection is explored further below in the religious section.

## Religion of environmentalism

**Gaianism** as a term describes a philosophy and ethical worldview which, though not necessarily religious, implies a transpersonal devotion to earth as a superorganism. Practitioners of Gaianism are called Gaians. Gaianism is inspired by pantheistic theology, and has been associated with the New Age movement
 due to sharing similar viewpoints, but is not typically identified as
strictly part of the New Age movement as a whole. Scientific support of belief comes from Gaia hypothesis and Living systems theory. Supporting Gaia's homeostasis, ecological activism, with spiritual belief is often tied to the idea of Deep ecology.

Followers of Gaianism state that the term is based both in the felt
connection and scientific understanding of the biosphere, which is given
 the name Gaia. The namesake primordial deity from Greek mythology
 is the mother of all beings, both god and animal, born from her union
with the sky (Uranus) and the sea (Pontus). (More information on the greek mythology page) Gaians believe that naming
the biosphere
 Gaia helps encourage practitioners and others to see the living planet
as an organism with an intrinsic personality that expresses itself
through evolution. Gaianism's philosophy stems from James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis,
 which proposes that organisms interact with their surroundings on earth
 to form a more complex and self-regulating system that contributes to
maintaining the conditions for life on the planet.
 Gaia can be understood as a super-organism made of organisms, as
multi-cellular life can be understood as a super-organism at a smaller
level of scale.

Practitioners of Gaianism are termed "Gaians", or sometimes *Gaianists*. Followers typically approach the philosophy with the perspective that you should honor the earth, reduce or soften the human impact on the earth,
 and to be respectful of all life on earth. The latter perspective is
extended to all forms of life such as plant, animal, or human, and
followers will often try to maintain a close relationship with the
planet in order to strive toward world peace, maintain global homeostasis
 and find inner fulfillment. Gaians will occasionally follow Gaianism
along with other religions, but for many Gaianism is not necessarily
religious.

As far as megaten goes, gaianism is of course a major aspect of the games, since one of the main sides is itself called the cult of gaia or ring of gaia, often shortened to gaianism. Gaians consider "nature" or the earth in particular to be their ultimate and focus in a somewhat pantheistic light, and consider demons to be embodiments of nature. They consider human society to have divorced itself too strongly from nature as a whole, and more natural ways of acting, and this being a problem associated with its modern functioning. The "gaia" itself of their religion is itself manifested as the being mem aleph, who represents the earth, though is not quite identical with it, similar to how yhvh is treated as a face of god, and conflated with but not quite it as a whole. Restoring nature of course happens in games other than strange journey as well. In both II and IV, restoring ishtar is depicted as tied to her being able to help nature restore itself, and bring back growth.

In a larger sense, the focus on seeing groups, and ecosystems, and the world itself as larger beings is a staple of the series as a whole, not just tied to any one side. Demons actually function in this way, and so the ecological element runs deep in the sense of how it is tied to spirituality. Demons are depicted both as embodiments of nature, of things that already exist, as well as being shaped by human thoughts and living within humanity. Showing an interconnected process. For more information about this in a literal sense, see the carl jung and philosophy of mind pages.

**Spiritual ecology** is an emerging field in religion, conservation, and academia recognizing that there is a spiritual facet to all issues related to conservation, environmentalism, and earth stewardship.
 Proponents of Spiritual Ecology assert a need for contemporary
conservation work to include spiritual elements and for contemporary
religion and spirituality to include awareness of and engagement in
ecological issues.

Spiritual ecology identifies the Scientific Revolution—beginning the 16th century, and continuing through the Age of Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution—as
 contributing to a critical shift in human understanding with
reverberating effects on the environment. The radical expansion of
collective consciousness into the era of rational science included a
collective change from experiencing nature as a living, spiritual
presence to a pool of resources to be used as a means to an end. It is argued that the growing
predominance of a global, mechanized worldview, a collective sense of
the sacred was severed and replaced with an insatiable drive for scientific progress and material prosperity without any sense of limits or responsibility. Spiritual ecology is a response to the values and socio-political
structures of recent centuries with their trajectory away from intimacy
with the earth and its sacred essence

Some in Spiritual Ecology argue that a monotheistic
 religious orientation towards a transcendent divinity, is largely
responsible for destructive attitudes about the earth, and sacred nature of creation. Thus, many identify the wisdom of indigenous cultures, for whom the physical world is still regarded as sacred, as holding a key to our current ecological predicament. And focus on the idea of immanent divinity.

Spiritual ecology includes a vast array of people and practices that
intertwine spiritual and environmental experience and understanding. Influenced heavily by pantheistic and animistic religious views, it views the ritualism and focus of earlier religions as tied to human psychological relation to nature, and as such a necessary part of properly contextualizing it. And so this focus of a modern spirituality is not just for the sake of a modern spiritual vision, but thinks that such oriented properly is how to properly establish the human interrelation between humans and nature itself, as part of something bigger.

Visionaries carrying this thread include Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) who founded the spiritual movement of anthroposophy, and described a "co-evolution of spirituality and nature" and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
 a French Jesuit and paleontologist (1881-1955) who spoke of a
transition in collective awareness toward a consciousness of the divinity
 within every particle of life, even the most dense mineral. This shift
includes the necessary dissolution of divisions between fields of study
as mentioned above. "Science, philosophy and religion are bound to
converge as they draw nearer to the whole."

Note that while explicitly environmentalist spirituality may be mostly tied to chaos, neutral and law have aspects of it too. The neutral god Taishang LaoJun in SMTI is himself referred to as an embodiment of nature and its desire for equilibrium. Implying an ecological aspect of these ideas as well. And law relates order to the idea of cosmic order, and wants to create a sustainable world, albeit in a way that involves artificial structures within the world.

**Pantheism**. Many spiritual views that focus on ecology tend to take on pantheistic aspects, due to the idea of immanent divinity, and the literal reality of humans as part of something bigger. While classical pantheism was formed before the modern idea of environmentalism was a thing, many religious traditions that have more of a pantheistic slant have been considered a good basis for contextualizing it.

For instance, Taoism has a semi pantheistic slant in its depiction of the tao, and offers many ideas that are in line with environmentalism, such as wu wei, moderation, and Taoist animism. Parallels were found between Taoism and deep ecology. This is because wu wei focuses on acting in tune with the flow of nature rather than trying to go against it, and so this is easy to tie to environmental concerns.

There are other ideas that can tie pantheism and ecology together. For instance, panpsychist views which view consciousness as information processing, and so inherent to all physical systems can tie these together in a way that gives it a more tangible physicality. This calls back to ancient animist views of nature having an inherently spiritual aspect. More information on the philosophy of mind page.

**Neopaganism** in many forms is heavily tied to nature worship, and often has an ecological focus. In archetypical forms, it often sees gods as embodiments of nature, similar to how megaten shows them as arising, or on some forms might view nature as independently divine. More information on the neopaganism page.

**Buddhism** in many forms is not pantheistic per say. But has similar aspects that are ecologically relevant. More recently, leaders in the Engaged Buddhism movement, including Thich Nhat Hanh, also identify a need to return to a sense of self which includes the Earth. Joanna Macy describes a collective shift – referred to as the "Great Turning" – taking us into a new consciousness in which the earth is not experienced as separate.

**Ecotheology** is a form of constructive theology that focuses on the interrelationships of religion and nature, particularly in the light of environmental concerns. Ecotheology generally starts from the premise that a relationship exists between human religious/spiritual worldviews and the degradation of nature. It explores the interaction between ecological values, such as sustainability, and the human domination of nature. The movement has produced numerous religious-environmental projects around the world.

Some scholars argue that Christians actually helped bring about the
current global environmental crisis by instructing followers that God,
and by extension mankind, transcends nature, and that nature exists under mankind's dominion, thus changing the view of nature from sacred to profane. Ecotheology exists as a response to this, and to diminish these types of focus within christian thinking. Christian ecotheology draws on the writings of such authors as Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and Passionist priest and historian Thomas Berry, but has a basis in earlier writings as well, such as the writings of francis of assisi.

**Stewardship** is a theological belief that humans are responsible for the world,
 and should take care of it. Stewardship is people who believe in one
God who created the universe and all that is within it, also believing
that they must take care of creation and look after it. Creation
includes animals and the environment. Many religions and denominations
have various degrees of support for environmental stewardship