Eco-Trope or Eco-Tripe?

Abstract

Abstract This chapter is a response to Keogh and Collinson’s challenge to music ecology. The author takes issue with their characterization of the “balance of nature” eco-trope in ecological science and music ecology. In distinguishing between ecology as a Western scientific field of inquiry and ecology as a holistic philosophy, the chapter proposes that, like ecological science, ecomusicologies can be holistic without being teleological. It attempts to assuage the concern that music ecology is utopian and risks maintaining the unjust legacy of racism, colonialism, and the neoliberal socioeconomic order. On the contrary, it argues that music ecology’s ecojustice framework embraces a more comprehensive and equitable revisioning of the global political and economic power structure, one that is a multiracial, multiethnic, multigender, and multispecies pluriverse.