**2. Environment: a preliminary critique of a guiding concept**

A constitutive and guiding notion in all discussions of "environmental crisis" is that of "environment."

According to Oxford English Dictionary, etymologically "environment" suggests an "action of surrounding something." The German synonyms for "environment"— "*Umwelt*"4 (lit. "the world around") and "*Umgebung*" (lit. that which is around) along with other modern languages—amplify that suggestion. "Environment" means surrounding and even periphery, therefore implying a center. That suggests: Whoever is either talking or thinking about or goes about the environment is compelled to place oneself at the center.5 "Environment" is in other words a centrist notion. Whoever or whatever then stands at the center of any environment faces a choice: to keep one's centrality or to reconsider and displace one-self from the center. This choice is not as radical as it seems, for the centrism of any notion of environment is unavoidable. By necessity, a version of centrism is at the core of any version of environmentalism whatsoever; even if one chooses to step aside from the center, one still always begins from the center.

The notion of environment is thus unavoidably centrist. This remains unchanged, no matter whether one subscribes to Ptolemean views, which are considered by some outdated; or to Copernican views, which are considered by others misleading in their reduction of humans to just objects of science. Do humans on the earth mark the center of the universe (the word "universe" designates no more than an extended version of the "environment") around which the sun and stars are rotating? Alternatively, is the earth only one of the many planets? Is there one privileged center of the world (which is also "ours") or are there many centers and thus no Center with the capital "C"? Either answer must begin from a version of centrism. There simply is no environment without at least one—but potentially also several—centers. Centrism and environmentalism are inseparable one from another.

The notion, of "environment," is thus too geocentric and too anthropocentric to not obfuscate the discussion of the "environmental crisis," which it seemingly purports to be leading. My argument below responds to that obfuscation. Is that possible, and if so, how to avoid such a centrism? In search for an answer, I first turn to the geo-thought of Edmund Husserl.

<sup>4</sup> For a contextually important articulation of the *Umwelt* (immediate surrounding) as a notion of relationship of a living being (human or other animal alike) to surrounding in contradistinction from a relationship to the *Welt* (World, or World-view) at the time and in the context in which Husserl's 1934 notion of mereological earth takes its shape see: Ref. [5]. Famously exemplified in the image of a woodland tick who never has a relationship to an object as such, and thus is "poor in world," Uexküll's notion of the *Umwelt* made its way to Heidegger's distinction between World and Surrounding in his 1927 *Being and Time*. See the establishment and analysis of this connection in Ref. [6]. Husserl's 1934 text [1] can be seen as exploring a way to the earth beyond and before the engagement with objects as objects or a lack thereof becomes a guiding distinction in thinking the "environment" versus "world."

<sup>5</sup> This initial central-placement can consequently be changed. For example, one might consider oneself a part of a surrounding rather than the center thereof. Yet, this is always only a second step; the one *after* placing oneself at the center of the environment.
