TheDisreputableDog
mute_coyote
SpaceTerminal Destiny
mute_coyote
I want to make every fluffy-bunny nature-worshiper in the world read William Cronon's "The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature". As far as environmental essays go, it is made of much win.
heart heart heart How relevant is to environmental studies?
I should go read it for background material.
ninja Well, I am reading it for a class in the core series for my Environmental Studies major.
wink The main concept is how the modern romantic ideas of nature and wilderness can actually be harmful on a lot of levels. For example, the impossible standard of purity for wilderness ("a place untouched by man") devalues smaller tracts of land, reclaimed areas, and ecosystems woven into human communities. Then there's the cruel irony of setting indigenous people up as idealized "noble savage" figures while removing them from their ancestral lands to create wilderness areas ("places untouched by man" again XP ) and labeling their previous land uses as inappropriate and/or illegal.
It's some pretty good stuff. I'm reading it off of a PDF from my prof. From the scanned images, it looks like this copy of the essay was from a compilation entitled
Uncommon Ground. I highly recommend you check it out.
3nodding Is this the article you're talking about? http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html
At the risk of alienating people...
I find that article to be Humanocentric Dreck liberally spiced with quasi-solipsistic justifications. All placed in an easy to swallow Judeo-Christo-coating. He eventually gets around to a couple points that make me not want to feed his entrails to some of my friends, he eventually does encourage awareness of all the world around us, but in placing the same value on an owned thing as a free thing, he loses me entirely. Keep in mind, I consider humans a part of the world, and the dance of vis therein, however, our potency has long exceeded our sentience.
His little rant has demonstrated an utter lack of respect for any Dei Loci, and rendered them all into things that humans can process without any sort of lessening of their inherent selves.
Now, accusations of fluffdom come as they will, as an animist, his words reek of murder and slavery, narrowly justified with the old stand buy of
Because we can, it is perfectly natural and right that we should.
Now beyond my person views.
He makes points easy enough for people to swallow that it can lead to progress, and there are plenty of tree-hugging dirt-worshippers who don't understand that humans are actually, le gasp, a part of the world. At core, our habits are no less natural than a beaver building a dam, a bird building a nest, or a disease wiping out a species. It is the scope we can apply them to that can be offensive to the locals. Emphasis on can be. There are very harmonious ways to grow, develop and expand. He at least touches on that, which is very important. Loving the natural world does not exclude loving humanity as well. It does not exclude loving our works. We have thumbs, it's sorta natural that we be tool users.
wink A good primer for some people, but don't show it to a person who actually has anything resembling a respect based relationship with any Genus Loci.
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