Muhammad Jalil Arif

This paper critically re-examines the dominant environmental-philosophical imperative to overcome anthropocentrism in light of contemporary posthuman and relational turns. While ecological and posthuman discourses have productively challenged human domination and exceptionalism by emphasizing entanglement, relationality, and more-than-human agency, they often retain a residual abstraction. This abstraction lies in treating “the human” as a unified moral and conceptual problem. This paper argues that this framing risks obscuring the differentiated, situated, and reflexive capacities through which responsibility becomes possible and that the attempts to “decenter human” altogether prove both conceptually paradoxical and practically self undermining. To develop an ethic that genuinely cultivates ecological responsibility, recognition of human-situatedness and human capacities of moral discernment are inescapable, since we cannot think, evaluate, or care except from within human modes of experiencing and understanding. Rather than seeking to transcend anthropocentrism through decentering human, this paper proposes a shift from the logic of centrism to that of participation. Drawing on processrelational philosophy and ecological thought, this paper proposes the concept of ecopoiesis—the relational making of a shared dwelling-place or home. Ecopoiesis reframes ethical life in terms of cultivating responsible participation in the ongoing co-creation of ecological relations. In this view, human-situatedness is not an obstacle to ecological ethics but its very condition of possibility. The task is neither to dissolve the human category into undifferentiated networks nor to reinstate human absolute dominance but to reconceptualize human reflexivity, moral discernment, and cultural capacity as modes of ecological participation. By repositioning responsibility within relational processes rather than abstract moral hierarchies, this shift—from centrism to participation, from collective guilt to differentiated responsiveness, from critique to renewal—offers a constructive contribution to posthuman environmental thought and offers a vision of “ecological civilization” grounded in ecopoietic practice.

This paper briefly presents the historical and philosophical link between Enlightenment philosophy and the emergence of Postmodern philosophy, i.e., the transition from modernity to postmodernity. While identifying and recognizing the “difference” and the sharp contrast, I will concentrate on showing the “continuity” between the two philosophies. This paper shows that postmodernism can be understood as ultra-modernism in at least two dimensions 1) in opting for a particular critical methodology and 2) in the intensification of subjectivity. This enactment of deconstructive criticism, skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism has generated a cultural condition that suspects and distrusts every knowledge and truth claim. As a result, the matters which are related to our shared communal concerns are becoming ambiguous.

This paper aims to identify and relate different ecological approaches (primarily Preservation and Conservation) that played a significant role in developing a global ecological conscience. After presenting a comprehensive historical account of the approaches and movements in ecological thought, at the end of the paper, I will briefly highlight the potential areas of future research that could develop and re-frame ecological thought that ensures collaboration, co-adaptation, and sustainability in the environmental ethos. I fully acknowledge the diverse environmental movements in different parts of the world, and I also recognize the complexity, multi-dimensionality, and dissimilarity of ecological thoughts in different cultures. Nevertheless, the dominant and the most influential standpoint that governed and shaped modern ecological thought comes from western thinkers, scientists, and activists. Therefore, in this paper, I will confine myself to the western environmental tradition.