EcoTypes: Exploring Environmental Difference serves as a companion and in-depth resource to the online EcoTypes initiative.
EcoTypes responds to a preeminent challenge of our time: we live in a world of ideological conflict, threatening genuine environmental progress addressing climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental injustice, and other concerns.
How do we navigate this world of disagreement and debate? It’s understandable to believe that we need to fight the people we disagree with, or that we need to reach agreement to move forward. Yet EcoTypes suggests a third possibility: “many care, just differently,” supporting engagement across environmental difference.
EcoTypes helps clarify the fundamental ideas we are debating, and offers a reframing of these debates as a potential resource toward progress. As the EcoTypes homepage says: “We disagree. That’s good! Our differing EcoTypes can be a source of creative solutions.”
The volume, intended for a general as well as broad academic audience, follows the below organizational structure.
- Prologue: Why EcoTypes? A personal and intellectual background to help the reader appreciate, and best approach, the EcoTypes initiative.
- Approaching Environmental Difference: A systematic overview via four questions about environmental difference: what is it?, why is it?, is it good or bad?, and what can we do?
- I Beg to Differ! Environmental difference as expressed via twelve EcoTypes axes, from Aesthetics to Time.
- Deep Disagreement: Three Themes. Axes statistically organized into Place, Knowledge, and Action themes and related attractors, suggesting our most fundamental disagreements.
- Patterns of Difference: Eight EcoTypes and complementary EcoTypes building on these three themes, with EcoTypes understood as environmental imaginaries.
- Navigating Difference as Paradox. Approaching environmental difference among EcoTypes as complementarity/paradox, with implications for engagement across difference.
- Application: Sustaining Difference. Policy application of EcoTypes to U.N. Sustainable Development Goals; creative tension among differing SDG priorities.
- Appendix. Additional information for readers, including key terminology, methodological details, and bibliographic essays for each chapter.