Confronted with the current environmental crisis, the academic community faces a conceptual and practical problem of dissociation: Ecologists approach nature with the aim of understanding it, whereas environmental ethicists approach nature asking how we should relate to it, or inhabit it. Ecology looks for the "is" of nature, and environmental ethics seeks an "ought" with respect to nature. How can these still largely disconnected and yet parallel courses be bridged? How can the is of ecologists and the ought of eco-philosophers be interrelated? More basically, how can the links between the cognitive - scientific and the practical - ethical spheres be recovered?

To describe my approach to these questions, I begin with an illustration. Figure 1 a depicts at its center my thesis: that the ways in which humans dwell in the natural world inspire the ways in which we understand, explain, and look at the natural world. Conversely, the ways in which we represent nature (e.g., through scientific theories) constitute a kind of text or scenario that inspires our attitudes, behaviors, and ways of inhabiting nature. Therefore, changes in the scientific sphere suggest changes in the ethical sphere, and vice versa. If the way of dwelling in the natural world is viewed as an environmental ethos, we can in a broad sense refer to this ethos as an environmental ethic. If the way of understanding the natural world is called a science, we can broadly refer to this understanding as evolutionary - ecological sciences. With these definitions, the initial thesis illustrated in Figure 1a can be reformulated by affirming that environmental ethics and environmental sciences influence each other in a reciprocal and dynamic way. Ethics and science establish a dialectic interrelationship that evolves historically through mutual and successive modifications.

The continuous and reciprocal influences between ecological theories and ethical norms respecting nature take place within two broader environments: the cultural world and the natural world (Figure 1a). The reciprocal and dynamic influences between environmental ethics and sciences are, therefore, open to the influences of broader contexts. Both sociological and natural phenomena exert significant influence on the genesis of scientific conceptions of and ethical attitudes toward nature. Even more, as Figure 1a shows, the natural world constitutes a broader environment in which culture occurs.

In this article, I illustrate the reciprocal relationships between sciences and environmental ethics by examining the Darwinian theory of evolution and discussing its implications for ecologists and ethicists. Darwinian theory represents only an illustrative case; similar analyses could be done for other ecological theories, such as ecosystem theory or vegetation succession. However, the Darwinian theory of evolution is ideal for discussion of the interrelationships between ecological sciences and ethics, for three reasons. First, the social influences and historical circumstances that led Darwin to formulate his theory of natural selection have been examined and debated more than those leading to any other theory in the history of biology. Second, Darwinian theory constitutes a foundational basis for major strains of both ecology and environmental ethics. Third, Darwinian theory...