Citizen-led environment management : learning from the ’bush restorers’

Environmental theorists, seeking the origin of Western exploitative attitudes toward nature, have directed their attacks against ‘humanism’. This essay argues that such criticisms are misplaced. Humanism has much closer affinities to environmentalism than the latter’s advocates believe. As early as the Renaissance, and certainly by the late eighteenth century, humanists were developing historically-conscious, hermeneutically-grounded modes of understanding, rather than the abstract, mathematical models of nature often associated with them. In its twentieth-century versions humanism also shares much of the mistrust of consumerism, instrumental reason, and ‘worldlessness’ that marks environmentalist literature. Nevertheless, humanism is indeed committed to the principle that human beings are and ought to be free, and opposes theoretical approaches that suppress freedom. Reconciling humanism and environmentalism thus involves two steps: resisting the former’s tendency to treat nature and freedom as metaphysical polarities, and drawing environmental theory away from flirtation with deterministic, biologistic worldviews. The essay concludes by suggesting Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac as the paradigm case of environmental thought with roots in humanist approaches.

Is Environmentalism a Humanism

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The Animal: Other Civility and Animality in and Beyond Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida

x, 255 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.

Second nature: literature, capital and the built environment, 1848--1938.

Ecological Humanist Mosaics: Dislocations and Relocations of the Autobiographical Self in Terry Tempest Williams’s Finding Beauty in a Broken World Sharman Tullis Gill Department of English, BYU Master of Arts Scientists and theorists are defining the contemporary era as the Anthropocene, an epoch of unprecedented human dominance. Terry Tempest Williams, in Finding Beauty in a Broken World, asserts an ethical place for the human being in the 21 century. In light of ecological humanism, as an eco-critical lens that ethically centers the human in relational systems, she presents the metaphor of mosaic as a human-directed response to relational fragmentation, putting her in conversation with theorists of the Anthropocene. Her narratives of the self in various communities evoke mosaic as relational harmony, harking back to Romantic notions of wholeness and subject-centrism while adding the contemporary aspect of an interconnected and changeable self who, in the Anthropocene, recognizes a stewardship in the construction and maintenance of mosaic. Williams employs literary techniques that suggest dislocations and relocations of the human subject in ethical modes of being. Through narrative modes, multidisciplinary language, and themes of conversation, gift-exchange, listening and response, Williams reflects ecological humanist mosaics, suggesting cooperative regeneration—an intersection of material beings facilitated by an ethical human imagination that listens, receives, and gives toward patterns of beauty, including, but not limited to, being human in a collective world. This eco-critical analysis of Williams’s work affirms the human being in post-humanist philosophy and repositions relational Romanticism for the 21 century.

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Ecological Humanist Mosaics: Dislocations and Relocations of the Autobiographical Self in Terry Tempest Williams’s Finding Beauty in a Broken World

adherents of "deep ecology" and proponents of "social ecology." While the debate is many-faceted, perhaps the most central issue of contention focuses on the appropriate role of humanity in its relationship to nature. Deep ecologists argue for a "species egali tarianism" or "biocentric equality" that denies any special value or rights for human beings within the whole of nature: "all organ isms and entities in the ecosphere, as parts of the interrelated whole, are equal in intrinsic worth," as Bill Devall and George Sessions say. Or as the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess wrote in the 1973 essay where he coined the term "deep ecology," "there is a core democracy in the biosphere," such that "all things in the biosphere have an equal right to live and blossom and to reach their own individual forms of... self-realization."2 Social ecology, on the other hand, stresses the unique character of humanity within nature: human beings are not a "simple zoological phenomenon,... interchangeable with rodents or ants, ... merely one life-form among many," as Murray Bookchin, the anarchist ecologist who was most responsible for the development of "social ecology" in the early 1960s, puts it.3 In humanity, "blind nature" turns into "free nature," because only humanity is capable of creatively and self-consciously evolving, while nature can only adapt. Human beings are thus the highest expression of natural evolution, its coming into self-conscious direction of its own destiny.4

Daniel Berthold-Bond

Papers

Can There Be a “Humanistic” Ecology?: A Debate Between Hegel and Heidegger on the Meaning of Ecological Thinking