Integrating epistemology, ontology and ethics into ecology education

“Conceptual lenses” are as critical as “technological lenses” to comprehensively understand meaning, interpretation, and communication of data, and their potential to address pressing issues in ecology. “Conceptual lenses” represent, however, an often overlooked dimension of the “data revolution.” Here, we examine prevailing ontologies and epistemologies used in ecological research, formal education, policy. We use hermeneutics as a philosophical methodology to critically analyze texts on philosophical perspectives by contemporary philosophers and activists, policy on rivers in Colombia and Chile. This allows us to scientifically and philosophically examine a central, twenty-first century, environmental-, social-, cultural, economic-, and ethical-issue: water.