Dialogue

This chapter brings ||Khao-a Dama perspectives from present-day Namibia into dialogue with ancient Confucianism. These two extremely different approaches find common ground in that both refract the sharp distinction often posited between anthropocentric and ecocentric approaches to environmental ethics. In each case, anthropology and history are both key to building a more nuanced perspective, drawing on the many traditions that have conceptualized humans as part of the world rather than apart from and transcendent over it. The commonalities that emerge foreground an ecological conception of human flourishing—in all its relational interconnection with the rest of nature—as the central concern of environmental ethics.