Stoicism, a Philosophical Basis for Ecology?

Through its ideal of “living in harmony with nature”, the Portico appears to be a philosophy that invites men to take the relationship with the world seriously. In order to achieve wisdom, the essential mark of which is sobriety, it has established principles, some of which seems to have an ecological value. While considering nature as an organic and spiritual entity which parts together form a whole, stoicism posits that it constitutes the destiny whose laws are inescapable and instructs men never to rebel against the already established order but always to seek the best way to collaborate with it so as not to suffer the evils of their action. With the principle of “universal sympathy”, he adds that everything is interwined and interdependent so that one cannot touch other elements of the cosmos without acting on the whole. Through the principle of oikei?sis, i.e. the appropriation of oneself, a familiarity with what is close, extending from the human species to other natural beings, to the whole earth, develops. Apart from all these doctrinal considerations, we discover paradoxically that Seneca’s work conceals several clues relating to the environmental problems. In this sense, it would be difficult to deny that the philosophy of the Portico has nothing to do with the foundation of ecology. Rather, its interest would lie, in terms of effectiveness, in the education of virtue, consisting of a habitus animi, a disposition of the soul in a certain way, which naturally implies ecological behaviour.