Regional Environmental Policies, Environmental Conservation & Protection - General & Miscellaneous, Environmental Conservation & Protection Policy
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Overview
Nature: the wilderness that environmentalists try to protect from industrial despoliation; the spectacular national parks where people seek refuge from their everyday urban lives; the endangered plants and animals that now need the shelter of science and law to survive; the rain forests, mountains, deserts, oceans, rivers, and lakes we would like to see as unspoiled, unchanging. These conceptions of nature, so familiar and powerful that we take them for granted, are deeply flawed because they too often leave people out of the picture. The original essays in this volume, by leading scholars from many disciplines, examine the problems that flow from a viewpoint that severs human beings and human activities from their place in nature. The essays draw on evidence from many corners of our cultural landscape, from the parks of Frederick Law Olmsted to the cool confines of The Nature Company's stores, from the Amazon rain forest and the Garden of Eden to the virtual world of cyberspace. Together, they point toward new environmental values that affirm a responsible human place in nature. On such a foundation we can meet the challenges of the present and build an environmentalism for the twenty-first century.Editorials
Library Journal
In this thought-provoking collection of essays edited by environmental historian Cronon, scholars such as Carolyn Merchant, Richard White, Kenneth Olwig, Donna Haraway, and others "contribute to an ongoing dialog about the environment." The book has its roots in an interdisciplinary seminar on "Reinventing Nature," held at the University of California, Irvine's Humanities Research Institute in 1994, and is similar in scope to another Reinventing Nature project entitled Reinventing Nature?: Responses to Postmodern Deconstructionism (Island Pr., 1995). This work explores our ideas of nature in a cultural context, for "if we hope for an environmentalism capable of explaining why people abuse the earth as they do, then the nature we study most become less natural and more cultural." By using materials such as photographs, advertisements, and paintings (termed "found objects" by Haraway) to stimulate fresh ways of viewing and responding to nature, the group has produced an enlightening work that challenges our very ideas of the natural world. Highly recommended.-S. Maret, Univ. of Colorado, DenverBook Details
Published
November 28, 1995
Publisher
Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Pages
561
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780641003844