The paramount challenge we face in the West is how to change the core assumptions that underlie how we think. This is necessary as the changes we falsely associate with progress have not slowed the rate of decline in the self-renewing capacity of the Earth’s natural system. This is important as the core assumptions underlying the West’s approach to progress are being promoted through the spread of Western technologies and the myth that the American consumer lifestyle should be the model for the rest of the world. One of the reasons that the core assumptions and values in the West are so resistant to change, even in light of the growing awareness that changes in the Earth’s ecosystems are threatening the lifestyle that so many Americans and others now take for granted, is that key words in today’s vocabulary carry forward the misconceptions and silences of earlier thinkers who were responding to the social issues of their era. The misconceptions and silences carried forward the taken for granted patterns of thinking and values of even earlier times, which in turn influenced the analogs settled upon in the writings of philosophers and social theorists who are still considered essential to a liberal education. These analogs framed the meaning of words that are, in many instances, the basis of thinking and values in the West. Even though such important people as Albert Einstein, Gregory Bateson, and Jared Diamond, among others, urged that a change in thinking is the only way of addressing the rate of environmental changes that are threatening life on this planet, our educational systems continue to ignore the critical role that language plays in perpetuating the ideas that were formed before there was an awareness of environmental limits. That is, what the vast majority of Americans, as well as citizens in other western countries, fail to recognize is that words have a history. If the history of words is ignored, the analogs chosen in response to a different set of social circumstances will continue to frame how we understand today’s problems. This history also influences the silences that are clearly present when people claim that they are concerned about changes in the environment, but have few ideas beyond embracing the technological solutions being promoted by experts who share similar silences about the deep cultural changes that must be undertaken.

The word “ecology” has become a prominent part of today’s vocabulary, especially among environmental writers, scientists, and even some educational reformers. One of the purposes of this paper is to examine how the history of this word carries forward the silences and misconceptions of the scientists who borrowed this word from the ancient Greeks. Another purpose is to rectify over a century of reductionist thinking by explaining how the ancient Greek understanding of “ oikos ” can lead to challenging current ways of thinking about the nature of intelligence. Regardless of whether it is a constructivist, cognitive science, or behaviorist explanation of intelligence, none address the language issues and thus the core cultural assumptions that have put Western cultures on the pathway of overshooting environmental limits. As I will argue in this paper, only as we develop the capacity for relying upon ecological intelligence will we be able to understand how we are nested in cultural ecologies, and how cultures are nested in and thus totally dependent upon the self-renewing capacity of natural ecologies.