ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the reasons why difficulty is not only present and evident, but also, to a large extent inevitable and irreducible. It focuses on the problematics that arise from recognizing that ecology is a framework of ambiguity, both at the most general level of ecology as a field of knowledge, and at the more particular level of the concept of ecosystem, the central naturalistic underpinning of the ‘ecosystem approach’. The chapter discusses ecology as a framework of ambiguity in relation to its complex genealogy and in relation to its double epistemic role — as a science and as a worldview. It considers a number of the complexities and competing perspectives that traverse ecology — at the intersection of its double epistemic role — complexities that articulate in diverse ways the oscillation between the competing paradigms of order and chaos. The chapter addresses these complex genealogies as they specifically operate in relation to the concept of ecosystem.
