But in the Western world animals have for many centuries been defined as fundamentally different and ontologically separate from humans, and although explicit criteria for establishing human-animal difference have changed over time, all such criteria routinely use humans as the standard for judgement. The concern is, can animals do what humans do? rather than, can humans do what animals do? Thus judged, animals are inferior beings.
We all know that to one person the desert is a harsh landscape; to another it is simple and uncluttered; to yet another it is exceedingly lonely. All these attributes are, in reality, a complex interweaving of the subject and the object, yet they are rarely understood as such.
…[U]rban simulacra such as zoos and wildlife parks have increasingly mediated human experience of animal life. Real live animals can actually come to be seen as less than authentic since the terms of authenticity have been so thoroughly redefined. the distanciation of wild animals has simultaneously stimulated the elaboration of a romanticized wildness used as a means to peddle consumer goods, sell real estate, and sustain the capital accumulation process, reinforcing urban expansion and environmental degradation
Perhaps most importantly, ethical norms not only reflect who we are, but simultaneously condition how we think and act, and thereby who we may become.
In this search for hybridization, we can neither go back to the premodern past nor stay safely in the disgodded present. We are neither completely separate from nor completely merged with the world around us.We need the ‘double perspective’ of both critical distance and of wonder and amazement… to combine intellect and emotion, fact with value, in a new understanding of the wild world…
(Source: socialuprooting)
(Originally from Social Uprooting, Reblogged from Social Uprooting)
The chief difficulty in mobilizing the produced nature concept, Castree (1995) notes, is maintaining a realist ontology with an epistemology that is constructivist. The produced nature concept does not imply that capitalism “determines how trees grow” (Castree 1995:23) but it recognizes that “nature separate from society has no meaning” (Smith 1984:17)
One thing, however, is clear: nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.
The fundamental argument [of social constructivism] is this: given that people in all times and places (including ourselves) have believed many things that later turned out to be false, truth itself cannot be the cause of any belief’s credibility.
(Originally from Geog Thoughts, Reblogged from Andrew Foltz-Morrison)
Knowledge of nature is not the same as the ‘natural world’ it purports to represent. While such nowledge is about the world it is not synonymous with it. This knowledge is, if you like, a necessary filter that intervenes between those things we call ‘natural’ and the way that we, as geographers and citizens, understand and act towards them. This filter allows us to focus on some aspects of those things while casting others into darkness. It also guides our practical interactions with nature, permitting and proscribing certain courses of action.
