Man Against Nature :: Environment Pollution

Man Against Nature I perceived, and continue to perceive, a severe problem with our culture. We see the space we inhabit as not wild, as not nature. Nature is in the parks, is in the mountains we drive all over to sun ourselves on the beach, in unreachable and savage depths of countries resembling brazil and continents like Africa. That is nature, we say, not this, not our home, not our workplace. A favorite antecedent of mine calls this an estranged worldview, a term she borrowed herself from Friedrich Engels. She describes it thusly We are strangers to natur, to former(a) human beings, to parts of ourselves. We see the world as made up of separate, isolated, nonliving parts that fork out no inherent value. They are not even dead because death implies life.)i She goes on to say that when nature is forsake of spirit, forests and trees become merely timber, something to be measured in board feet, value only for its profitability, not . . . even for its part in the larg er ecosystem.ii Starhawk, the author, finds the root of an estranged worldview laid deep into our past, two millennia and more. In the Enlightenment, she tells us, the separation of the manufacturer and the mundane (from the Latin word mundus, meaning world) promoted by Christianity became what she calls the simple machine image, a very telling metaphor.iii In such a worldview, when we are told by William McDonough that he wants to build a building like a tree, we find the statement odd ad peradventure even laughable. Trees are alive. Buldings arent. It seems so simple.I will return to that theme of a building like a tree. By now, you readiness be protesting to the invisible author me that you do connect yourself to nature, that you visit guinea pig parks, enjoy camping and hiking, perhaps even teach Environmental recognition classes. McDonough and his chemist cohort, Michael Braungart, wonder if it is all too easy to leave our reverance in the parking lots.iv Bein g designers, they take a look at slight abstract demonstrations of the estranged worldview than does Starhawk (a Wiccan spiritual and ethical author), and they find it in the notable view that every middle management type is looking to have from his corner office after the promotion.