EDITORIAL: RECOGNIZING THE HORIZON OF ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION
The world today is caught in a set of difficult and often unresolved contradictions. These contradictions show how closely natural, social, and mental ecologies are connected, and they ask us to think in more integrated ways about both analysis and action. Environmental and social crises cannot be understood only at the level of their visible effects; their systemic roots also need to be examined if ecological balance, social justice, and mental well-being are to be restored. By moving beyond inherited dichotomies, including the opposition often assumed between humanity and the environment, an eco-human approach calls for collective efforts to sustain life on our planet.
Against this background, the possibility of a systemic transformation of the world order through the construction of an ecological civilization is becoming increasingly visible. It appears not as a distant abstraction, but as one possible horizon for future human development. The contours and meaning of this horizon have been explored many times in our journal, and they form the central theme of the current issue.
The idea of ecological civilization has gained increasing force in recent years and has now been developed into a more coherent programme capable of shaping how the future relationship between humanity and nature is imagined. An important contribution to this work is the recently published collective volume Handbook of Ecological Civilization: Concept, Philosophy, and Pedagogy (edited by Michael A. Peters, Benjamin J. Green, Greg William Misiaszek, and Xudong Zhu; Springer Singapore, 2026). The Handbook is both a scholarly contribution and a call to action. It emerges from a growing planetary awareness of the need to move beyond the industrial civilization of modernity and toward a more sustainable civilizational model: ecological civilization. Drawing on cultural, spiritual, and scientific traditions, the volume brings together scientists, educators, Indigenous leaders, and technologists to examine the concept, philosophy, methods, and moral imperatives involved in building a new type of global civilization. It also recognizes China’s role in articulating ecological civilization as a state-level priority, with wider implications for debates on modernization.
A presentation of this book, written by one of its initiators and editors, Michael A. Peters, is included in this issue of the journal. We are also pleased to announce that he has accepted our invitation to become the journal’s third Co-Editor-in-Chief, together with Stephen K. Levine and Alexander Kopytin.
Michael A. Peters is a philosopher of education and public intellectual whose work has made a major contribution to contemporary debates in philosophy, education, and political economy. He is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in China, Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the United States, and Research Associate in the Philosophy Program at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. From 2018 to 2024, he served as Distinguished Professor of Education at Beijing Normal University.
Michael A. Peters has authored more than 120 books and 500 scholarly articles. His research is marked by interdisciplinary breadth and sustained engagement with some of the central questions of our time, including knowledge socialism, the politics of the university, digital epistemologies, ecological civilization, and post-apocalyptic thought. His recent works include Civilisational Collapse and the Philosophy of Post-Apocalyptic Survival (Peter Lang, 2025) and the Handbook of Ecological Civilization (Springer Singapore, 2026). He has received several honours, including honorary doctorates from the State University of New York in 2012 and the University of Aalborg in 2015, in recognition of his international contribution to the philosophy of education and critical social thought.
With permission from Springer Nature, we have included in the current issue a chapter from the Handbook of Ecological Civilization: “Chinese Ecological Civilization: A New Model for Green Modernization and Global Leadership” by Michael A. Peters, Benjamin J. Green, and Greg William Misiaszek. The chapter offers a comprehensive analysis of the philosophical origins and development of the Chinese concept of ecological civilization. It traces the concept from its early theoretical foundations to its formal adoption as a national strategy, situating this development within a broader historical movement from philosophical reflection to academic formulation, official endorsement, and political implementation.
Another article in this issue devoted to ecological civilization is “Ecological Civilization as a Compassionate Civilization” by Zhihe Wang and Junfeng Wang. The authors argue that the creation of an ecological civilization is necessary if humanity is to avoid a destructive trajectory. For them, ecological civilization is a compassionate civilization because it respects nature and affirms life. It is grounded in organic process philosophy and in the idea of a Second Enlightenment. The compassion of ecological civilization is expressed through six core principles: reverence for nature; cherishing tradition; respect for farmers; appreciation of heterogeneous cultures; respect for non-science; and treating others kindly. The authors present these principles as urgently needed responses to the existential challenges of the present.
This issue also includes a critical review by Lidi Yang and Zhihe Wang of Dr. Goran Carstedt’s lecture, What Kind of Leadership Does an Ecological Civilization Truly Require? Carstedt’s lecture was recently delivered at the John Cobb Eco-Academy. Drawing on his experience in senior leadership roles, as well as his academic and social work as a visiting professor, Carstedt reflects on the need to rethink leadership. He critiques models based on “authoritative control” and the “mechanical separation” worldview of modern enterprises and instead argues for leadership grounded in “co-creation and symbiosis.” His lecture emphasizes more mutually sustaining relations among individuals, organizations, and nature, while also giving particular attention to China’s practice of ecological civilization construction and its possible relevance for global ecological governance and leadership reform.
In addition to the central theme of ecological civilization, the current issue addresses several topics related to the eco-human perspective in research. In “The Third Human Nature as a Subject of Posthuman Studies and Contemporary Art,” Alexander Kopytin examines the changing qualities of the human being under the influence of bio-, cogno-, socio-, and informational technologies. These changes are considered through recent approaches in human studies, including posthumanism, technohumanism, transhumanism, and ecohumanism. The article discusses the so-called “third nature” of humans as a key factor in further transformations of human qualities. These transformations, taking place both in the human environment and within humans themselves under the impact of digital and other high technologies, are illustrated through works by contemporary artists.
The post-digital era is not simply a period in which digital tools are everywhere. It points to a situation in which technologies become so closely embedded in everyday existence that they begin to transform the nature of humans themselves. From this perspective, humanity and environment can be understood as part of a relational system rather than as separate domains. In this new third-nature reality, as suggested, for example, by the projects of Newton Harrison and Refik Anadol, human intelligence, artificial intelligence, and ecosystems may enter into new forms of collaboration directed toward sustaining and improving life on Earth.
The “In Resonance with the Earth” section of this issue includes an essay by Merve Kurt, who reflects on her experience of creating felt artwork and on the creative process as a bodily and material way of working with memory. This section also features selected songs from Alexander Kopytin’s musical and poetic cycle, “Thus Spoke Taliesin.”
The “Events. Reviews. Interviews” section includes, in addition to the book presentation of the Handbook of Ecological Civilization and the review of Goran Carstedt’s lecture, the two book reviews, those by Merve Kurt and Kaige Wang. Merve Kurt presents her critical review of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World as a methodological and ethical resource for ecopoiesis. Kurt argues that Tsing makes visible the sensory, infrastructural, and political-economic conditions through which relations are composed under capitalism. Read in this way, ecopoiesis does not offer a promise of harmonious relations with nature. Rather, it becomes a disciplined practice of attending to interdependence and common life without guaranteed outcomes. The essay further suggests that ecological care requires attention not only to affective or restorative encounters, but also to the material apparatuses of property, logistics, and standardization through which relations are organized, commodified, or erased.
The review by Kaige Wang examines the key tenets of Aesthetics of Ecological Civilization, written by Professor Chen Wangheng of Wuhan University. The book is the first theoretical work in international academia to systematically explore the aesthetics of ecological civilization.
Alexander Kopytin, Co-Editor-in-Chief