Today, I will be teaching the first class in the Big
Questions in Science course at Amsterdam University College. In this course, we
deal with all the major areas of biology, and we try to focus on the ‘big
questions’, which are often in those areas where science and society meet. The
first class about ecology is a wonderful opportunity to talk about the
importance of taking care of our environment.
In this class, I usually talk about the Lake Victoria
disaster, which is a disaster story with a twist. We first focus on the
disaster story as it is usually told, then go into the science, which shows the
story is more complicated than it seems, and finally move to the management of
the ecosystem, which shows that not only the biology is complicated, but the
social side of it is as well. In the end, I hope to paint a more complete
picture of all the things that go into taking good care of our environment.
Personally, I am very happy to be able to teach about this
subject, because I think it is very important that we take good care of our
environment, as well as of the people that interact with it. As a Catholic Christian,
I think that God has created our planet for us to be our home, but has given us
the task to take good care of it, and the task to take good care of each other.
Both of these dimensions are intimately related to each other: we cannot take
good care of people without taking good care of their environment, while we
also cannot take good care of the environment and leave the people that live in
it out of the equation, or even try to get rid of them. Only by paying full
attention to both people and environment can we establish the wonderful harmony
between the human being and creation that God has intended.
Interestingly, the Vatican has over the last years shown
with deeds that the Church values the environment. They have for instance
installed many solar panels, which have resulted in its being called “the
greenest place on earth”. Pope Benedict has also been called “the Green Pope”
for this reason, while Pope Francis is seemingly preparing a pastoral letter (encyclical)
about the environment issue. So the environment and its inhabitants are
important for the Church. All the more reason for me to be happy to be able to
teach about it!
Recently, I published an review of Leonardo Polo's 'Introduction to Philosophy' in the Journal of Polian Studies. In it, I highlight the challenge Polo's thinking poses to biologists, even in this introductory work. Polo is a 'systemic thinker' who has thought through very fundamental concepts that will prove very useful now that the study of the Human Genome and other 'omes' is proving just how interrelated everything is in an organism.
Paul Shrimpton has recently written a book about John Henry Newman, entitled, "The making of men: the Idea and reality of Newman’s university in Oxford and Dublin" (Gracewing, 2014).
Recently I wrote an article on Mercatornet, about the philosopher Leonardo Polo. In it, I focused on his methodological proposition of "detecting the mental boundary so that we can go beyond it".
