ABSTRACT
Marginal concepts such as 'landscape', 'earthworks', 'dreamtime', 'bioregions', and 'the commons' are valuable for opening up the oikos, enlarging the cultural mind and be-wildering human order because they create a middle term between earth and world as they are classically understood. An ecological perspective on domestication challenges social and political theory to understand the 'civilizing process' as frequently weeding out the wild to the detriment both of human society and the trans- or extrahuman world. The cultural fact of domestication, in turn, also offers a challenge to ecological philosophy to think notions of place, home, and community in social and political terms, as well as in the vernacular of the natural or the personal. More recently, a mutualistic theory of domestication has been advanced by some theorists and writers. Whereas domestication generally involves the slow alteration of genetic make-up, biotechnology now threatens with alacrity the image of humanity as well as species integrity.
