Environmentalists Exist – How Is it Possible?

The concept of ‘ecological communication’ for Niklas Luhmann was something that characterizes the system/environment relations in general, and it has very little to do with the way ecology movements communicate their messages to the audience in general. Bulcsu Bognár, in his article adopts Luhmann’s description of the ignorant green activists moralizing their case and being uncapable to consider the characteristics of the rational communication that takes place in the social subsystems of modernity. I argue that Bognár failed to reconstruct the original context of Luhmann’s sharp criticism, namely his dispute with Jurgen Habermas about the social consequences of rationalized communication, where environmentalists took position on the ‘wrong’ side, at least for Luhmann. On the grounds of his paper about the issue, Luhmann himself did not actually seem to be either informed about or even interested in the green movements and their ideology. If he did, he would have recognized the common roots of his systems theory and ecophilosophy in Umberto Maturana’s views about the communicative nature of living systems.