Drag Me Outside

Efemmera Gendera is trained as an Environmental Scientist, Behavioral Ecologist, and Ornithologist (i.e., she studied birds). She has studied the behavior and relatedness of bushtits the past five years and published her Master's thesis on bushtit relatedness. Efemmera is experienced in teaching, primarily ecology, and is extremely passionate about the overlap between phenomenology and ecology. I know what you're asking: What the hell does that mean? Well, phenomenology is the philosophical discipline that deals with the investigation of subjective, conscious experience. In philosophy, we typically keep this investigation limited to humans, but we can apply this to non-human organisms too (i.e., What is it Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel). In a nutshell, Efemmera promotes the acknowledgement of the consciousness of non-human organisms. In a world that has promoted capitalism, competition, and exploitation (based on a naïve understanding of how evolution actually works), she believes that recognizing the subjective experience of other organisms is the key to developing a moral-ethical framework for a sustainable society that lives in harmony with functional ecology.