ABSTRACT
This concluding part recommends a multidimensional approach to studying events in the domain of human ecology as well as solving problems arising thereof. This necessitates recollecting the aims and the main arguments of Parts II, III and IV to examine how they would contribute to the effort in this part to arrive at a multidimensional approach. In Part IV, we argued that human ecology has a unique domain to address. Moreover, we tried to show there that human ecology represents not just an interdisciplinary area of research but an independent discipline with the emphasis that it is inherently interdisciplinary in its methodology. The topic in Part IV forms an independent idea because the arguments in it can be established independently of and without reference to those in Part II and III. Similarly, Part II argues for the recognition of the irreducibility of the ‘value’ aspect of the domain constituted by human–environment interaction. Perspectives of different schools of ecological philosophies discussed there help us to problematise the events in the ecosphere in ways other than that of the scientific. The validity of the claims of such philosophies largely depend on the principles they recommend for making value judgements of the consequences or motives of human actions in the domain. Instead of concluding which claims are really valid, we confer on it a different significance: they all tell us about the question of value the domain throws up, which will not disappear or be answered once we explain the events in the domain. Part III is not a textual study; it is an arrangement of information contained in the reports on environmental struggles, on the basis of the antagonisms that characterise such struggles. What was internal to the relation between human agency and environment is now externalised in the form of environmental movements, that is, the political dimension of the domain. The arguments in this part also stand independently of other parts of the book from the point of view of the question it tries to raise.
