Chapter 5 reflected upon a very significant problem, which is how to determine what is natural. As humans we have been interacting with the environment for thousands of years now; there is little to no land that has no been somehow impacted of affected by this human use. This isn’t even necessarily a bad thing. It only raises the question of when we preserve land, what are we preserving and why.
This relates directly to two separate conversations I’ve had with friends recently. The first was about a paper a friend was writing in which she was exploring essentially what being natural means. Her argument was essentially that even places like cities, which are not traditionally thought of as natural, actually are. For buildings, cement, cars, etc are all derived from materials which exist in the world or are given their existence by humans. Either way, humans are a part of nature, and thus anything we create must be a part of nature as well.
While this particular argument may be a bit of a stretch and not directly related, it still hinges upon that question of what makes something natural? As this chapter and this argument have illustrated, it is almost impossible to define the natural state of an area.
Another related argument I had with a friend this summer was about how to justify protecting the environment. This argument basically called upon this is/ought problem. Just because the world is a certain way, there is no reason to assume that is the way it ought to be. Thus the argument that humans ought to preserve nature and keep it how it is has much less credibility, for there is no valid reason for assuming that just because that is how nature was, that is how it ought to be. This is especially significant given the questions raised in chapter 5. What state of nature are we preserving? Nature has and continues to constantly change in unpredictable ways.
The fascinating questions political ecology raises are: who makes the decisions about what we are preserving? Who benefits from these decisions? Who loses? Why are these decisions made? Etc. The answers to all these questions in many cases will refer back to the discussion above, about what nature is or ought to be and why or how we ought to protect what parts of it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5/5
ReplyDeleteYou've touched upon what I think is an important lesson for those who have considered themselves the 'environmental movement' up until now: do we want to put nature back the way it was? I think not, rather we want to ensure the the biosphere can continue to provide for us. It isn't a matter of is/ought in that case, it's a matter of choosing the best ways to manage what we have now to ensure it's provisioning capabilities in the future. That argument has it's drawbacks too though--for then the decisions on how to save are really about us. Isn't always though?