Nature Tidbits

VI – Nature As Landscape

• “The word landscape denotes places that are the combined product of human and geological forces as suggested by its frequent use as a synonym for nature, land, scenery and physical environment and even ecosystems.”
• The latest generation of human geographers and the “new garden historians seek to reveal the victors and victims in the competition for control over the definition and use of nature.
• Landscapes of leisure were no more innocent and no less enclosed than the landscapes of agricultural progress.
• Eighteenth century English landowners did more to recreate the amsiecence of Virgilian pastoralism than erect the temples of flora.
• “Agriculture was revered for its proximity to nature.”

VII – Reassessments of Nature: Romantic and Ecological

• Ecological awareness in its present form, however, was shaped by a new order of pollutants, notably nuclear fallout insecticides, inorganic fertilizers, plastics and chemical detergents.
• Theologians, jurists, economists and politicians have also appealed to nature as an antidote to the flux and imperfections of past and present.
• Belief in nature a a blueprint for social rejuvenation reaches its zenith in the french and American physiocratic ideology of agrarian virtue.
• The romantic ideology of nature is more ambiguous than is usually appreciated by today’s environmentalists.
• Darwin: “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity.”

VIII – The Disunited Colours of Nature

• Every culture projects its values onto nature and then holds them up as natures own authority.
• Whatever else it rejected in capitalism, socialism shared its essential orientation towards nature.
• Eco-socialists and green-anarchists contend that it is sociologically and historically facile to present vast and vague impersonal forces like industrialization , technology and human greed as the source of the problem without distinguishing between privileged and underprivileged people.
• As slums, community health and hazardous working conditions are transformed into environmental issues, underprivileged people, rather than the natural world itself are being designated the primary victims of environmental abuse.
• Nazi Germany led Europe in the creation of nature preserves and implementations of progressive forestry techniques.

IX The Future of Nature

• As a thoughtful green what the greatest threat to nature is today and the answer might be ‘postmodernism’ rather than capitalism, human greed or ignorance.
• For the postmodernist, the identification of an externally and reverence for nature as an unambiguous source of guidance are simply more universalizing metonaturatuves more out moded modernistic certainties, depending on a strict and fituous separation of culture and nature.
• The new ecology ahas also generalized ideas of antidote to prophecies of doom.
• “Natures power is too immense for total conquest”
• All Classification he explained process by pairs of contrasts.

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