Primary Encounters: Relational Ontology and Ecoflourishing

Western ontologies tend to focus on substance, that is, what makes up the nature of a being or an object. In our attempts to explore the nature of existence, the ideas of the West have encouraged us to think of substance as primary and relationships between substances as derivative. This chapter considers the possibility of the primacy of relations in ontological frameworks, examining human relations with the more-than-human world through the lens of phenomenology and exploring how the resulting relations promote the development of an environmental virtue ethic that leads to ecoflourishing.