The possibility of deep naturalism: a philosophy for ecology

This article presents a philosophy of science for ecology – deep naturalism – based on Roy Bhaskar’s transcendental realism. It includes a model of the emergence of ecosystems, analogous to the Transformational Model of Social Activity, that I call the Emergence Model of Ecosystem Resilience. It also proposes the following definition of ecosystem resilience: the process by which the internal complexity of an ecosystem and its coherence as a whole – stemming from the relative ‘richness’ or ‘modularity’ of emergent structures and behaviours/growth/life-history of species – results in the inter-dependencies of its components or their binding as totalities such that the identity of the ecosystem tends to remain intact, despite intrinsic and/or extrinsic entropic forces. This definition is significantly different from mainstream, empiricist definitions.