Umwelt Transitions: Uexkull and Environmental Change

What role does environmental change play in Jakob von Uexkull's thought? And what role can it play in a up-to-date Uexkullian framework? Admittedly, in hindsight it appears that the Umwelt theory suffers from its reliance on Uexkull's false premise that the environment (including its mixture of species) is generally stable. In this article, the Umwelt theory of Uexkull is reviewed in light of modern findings related to environmental change, especially from macroevolution. Uexkull's thought is interpreted as a distinctive theory of phenomenology-an 'Uexkullian phenomenology'-characterized by an assumption of the (in the realm of life) universal existence of a genuine first person perspective, i.e., of experienced worlds. It is suggested that acknowledging this distinctiveness is critical for ecophenomenology as well as for biosemiotics; the latter of which can only thus thrive as a true 'semiotics of being', rather than a mere 'semiotics of functioning'.