The philosophy of ecology and sustainability: new logical and informational dimensions

Ecology or ecological science is an approach to a better understanding of the complex interrelationships between humans and their environment. It is a necessary part of any effort to respond to the resistance and barriers to ecological progress and achieve the goal of a sustainable world. Concomitantly, the necessity of managing the explosive expansion of scientific knowledge and the ‘infosphere’ of communication is apparent. The concept proposed in the 1990s by Capurro and others, of an Informational Ecology as a global ecology of intellectual resources, now would include ‘natural’ ecology and sustainability themselves as domains of knowledge. Further, Zhong and his colleagues in China have recently drawn attention to their version of an Information Ecology that focuses on the ecological characteristics of Information Studies.
In this paper, I propose that what has been missing in these approaches is a rationale for sustainability and ecology in the basic physics of our world. In the mid-20th Century, the Franco-Romanian thinker Stéphane Lupasco proposed a non-propositional logic that can describe the evolution of interactive processes at biological, cognitive, and social levels of human reality. I suggest that the dualism between altruism and selfishness, which is reflected in attitudes toward the environment, can be described by this logic and that this description, as a ‘positivity factor’ may contribute to predominance of the former.
I start in Section 2 with a summary of relevant recent developments in sustainability and philosophy of ecology. Section 3 introduces the topic of the philosophy of ecology and Section 4 discusses the problem of logic in relation to the realities of ecology and sustainability. Because of its unfamiliarity as well as its significant role in this paper, I provide in Section 5 a minimum overview of my Logic in Reality (LIR). In Section 6, I refer briefly to the concepts of natural computation and ‘info computationalism’ as alternative rigorous approaches to digital aspects of sustainability. Section 7 reviews some of the prior work on information and information ecology and relates it to LIR. Section 8 looks more in detail, from the LIR perspective, at current work on the Ecology of Information Studies and Section 9 at Sustainability and the Psychology of Moral Responsibility.
Scientific and philosophical debate about the need to preserve the environment has become a matter of survival. The definition of new relevant forms of philosophy and logic that are relevant to this debate requires a delicate balance between use of established forms and the reasoned introduction of new concepts, structures, and definitions. However, when standard current definitions of logic and philosophy are what are being called into question, as in this paper, they cannot themselves be used as criteria for its evaluation. My answers to the valuable comments, negative as well as positive, of the four reviews of the first version of this paper will all be based on this metaphilosophical position (MPP).
Sustainability and the Digital Environment
This paper was stimulated in part by two recent Summit Conferences on Information organized by the International Society for Studies of Information (IS4SI): Response and Responsibility in the Information Sciences, Vienna, 2015 and Digitalization for a Sustainable Society, Gothenburg, 2017. The latter included a panel discussion specifically entitled “Sustainability in the Digital World”, moderated by Anna Dubois. Here, Sustainability was understood as comprising social, economic/business, and technical sustainability as well as environmental sustainability, domains of course not totally separated or separable. The hopefully rhetorical question asked was whether the final goal of digitalization was an increase in productivity per se or in the net benefits to the society of that productivity. Section 7 of this paper addresses some of the relevant issues.

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https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/3/2/16