<a href="http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/man-and-nature-parts-i-iv-complete/">http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/man-and-nature-parts-i-iv-complete/</a><br><br><p>Taken from a four-part essay by Ross Wolfe:
</p><p><br>
"At some points, nature was viewed as an adversary to be feared,
bringing plague, catastrophe, and famine to ravage mankind. Often these
elemental forces were either animistically, naturalistically, or
totemistically embodied as divine powers in themselves,[1] or
anthropomorphized as gods who commanded these forces as they saw fit.
When cataclysms occurred, it was because the gods or spirits had somehow
been enraged by the misdeeds of men, and thus they unleashed their fury
upon the mass of fear-stricken mortals. In Christian times, this same
logic persisted,[2] with periods of plenty seen as signs of God�s
providence and grace, while periods of blight were viewed as God�s
wrath, brought on by the sinfulness and iniquity of men.
</p><p>Later, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, nature was reenvisioned
as dead matter, abiding by a set of mechanical but unknown laws, which
could be discovered and mastered through careful study and observation
under controlled conditions. As the Baconian dictum went, contra
Aristotle: �the secrets of nature reveal themselves better through
harassments applied by the arts [torture] than when they go on in their
own way.�[3] Thus began the �conquest� of nature, the quest to harness
its forces so that they may serve the ends of mankind. Robbed of their
mysterious properties, natural objects therefore became �disenchanted,�
in the Weberian sense.[4] With the arrival of the Enlightenment, as
Hegel recognized, �the intellect will cognize what is intuited as a mere
thing, reducing the sacred grove to mere timber.�[5]
</p><p>Romanticism responded to this alienation from nature with a sense
of tragic loss, and sought to regain what they saw as the fractured
unity of man and nature. The Romantics exalted the primitive,
celebrating the charming na�vet� of the ancient Greeks or their
modern-day counterparts, who appeared in the form of �noble savages.�
The playwright Friedrich Schiller even dedicated an essay to the
distinction between the �na�ve�[6] and �sentimental� in poetry. For
modern man, he asserted, �nature has disappeared from our humanity, and
we can reencounter it in its genuineness only outside of humanity in the
inanimate world. Not our greater naturalness [Naturm��igkeit], but the
very opposite, the unnaturalness [Naturwidrigkeit] of our relationships,
conditions, and mores forces us to fashion a satisfaction in the
physical world that is not to be hoped for in the moral world.�[7] The
Romantics thus preferred the bucolic simplicity of the small old village
to the sprawling chaos of the modern city. Vitalistic explanations of
nature, like Goethe�s and Schelling�s, were offered as alternatives to
the Democritean-Newtonian vision of the universe as composed of dead
matter and obeying a changeless set of mechanical laws.
</p><p>Despite its nostalgia for a bygone simplicity of life and man�s
unity with nature, the Romantic worldview was gradually overtaken by
that belonging to the modern industrialist. To the industrialist, nature
presented itself as a wealth of raw materials waiting to be exploited.
Through the application of human labor, these natural resources could be
transformed into social products, valuable commodities to be
distributed to the whole of society. �Man when producing wealth acts
upon the things which Nature supplies,� wrote Alfred Marshall, the
famous British economist. �The gifts of Nature to man are firstly
materials such as iron, stone, wood, etc., and secondly, forces such as
the power of the wind, and the heat of the sun, the source whence all
other powers are derived.� Wealth, Marshall claimed, could only be
generated through the action of men on these natural materials, whose
worthiness could only be evaluated according to their potential utility.
He continued:
</p>
<pre> The agents of production are then Nature�s forces, and Man�s force; man�s force being generally most efficient when it is so applied as to control and direct nature�s forces, rather than to counteract them. And the wealth of a country depends upon the manner in which nature�s forces and man�s force work together in the production of wealth.[8]<br>
</pre>
<p>One might note how much the modern industrialist�s perspective on
nature mirrors that of the Enlightenment man of science. For both,
nature is conceived as nothing more than the sum of dead matter and the
mechanical forces that compel it. The difference is that, while a Bacon
or Descartes might be interested in natural products insofar as they
might understand them, a Rockefeller or a Carnegie would be more
interested in the way they might be exploited so as to generate value.
</p><p>Though Romanticism took a �dark� and urbanistic turn toward the
middle of the century (think Baudelaire and the Symbolists) all the way
up to the fin-de-si�cle, many of the sentiments it originally possessed
toward nature survived alongside Europe�s rapid industrialization and
urbanization in the nineteenth century. The American Transcendentalists
are only one of the more notable movements confirming this fact. In the
twentieth century, however, the various currents stemming from early
nineteenth-century Romanticism began to reemerge, tying themselves to a
number of different political tendencies. Preservationists,
environmentalists, vegetarians, and nudists joined in with groups from
all shades of the political spectrum: Teddy Roosevelt-style big-game
conservationism in America, NSDAP fascism in Germany, the pseudo-left
Front Populaire in interwar France. Following the end of the war, these
tendencies joined in with sections of the international New Left and
later the nebulous �post-ideological� Left in the second half of the
century.
</p><p>For most of these groups, the environmentalists tended to view
any exploitation of nature by man as invasive, as a transgression of its
inherent sanctity. Nature for them became something of a Kantian
Ding-an-Sich, something inviolable and essentially unknowable. Its
continued �natural� existence, uncorrupted by the malign influence of
society, came to be considered a kind of virtue in itself. Untouched
wilderness was thought to constitute some sort of pristine, prelapsarian
paradise existing in perfect harmony with itself. It was thus to be set
apart from any considerations of its utility to society. Faced with the
reality of the increased industrial exploitation of natural sites,
however, environmental activists blamed the rapid destruction of the
environment on the expansion of global capitalism and corporate greed
run amok. And so they marched in protest of the further exploitation of
the environment, spouting apocalyptic rhetoric and predicting ecological
catastrophe. All of humanity is doomed, they say, should mankind not
mend its ways. In some sense, this almost marks a return to the
primitive belief that the sinfulness of humanity will be met with wrath,
and it is almost ironic that the rising sea levels resulting from the
melting of the ice caps should recapitulate the biblical Flood. Modern
society for the environmentalists constitutes a sort of capitalist Sodom
and Gomorrah, which will soon be punished by Mother Nature. This is the
sort of environmentalism one often encounters today, the
dispensationalist hysteria almost eclipsing the sound scientific
evidence on which the theory of global warming is based. These are the
times in which we live.
</p>Returning to the original purpose of this outline, however, what
should all these various historical conceptions of nature tell us? First
of all, it should tell us that the conception of nature is in large
part dependent on the society for which it is an object of
contemplation. Nature, though it probably does operate according to an
unchanging set of uniform physical laws, has a significance beyond its
mere existence in itself. The concept of �nature� also carries with it a
great deal of ideological baggage, and reflects the superstructures of
thought in any given age. The problem, going forward, is thus not merely
to find some sort of solution to the prospect of a potential ecological
collapse, but to formulate nature as a social problem. The question of
humanity�s relationship to nature goes far beyond �saving the planet� or
any such platitude; it involves at its core the disalienation of man
from nature, and their reconciliation thereby. No amount of recycling,
collecting of litter, or �going Green� will solve this fundamental
issue. The resolution of the problem of man and nature can only be
reached through radical social transformation, and not by the aggregate
sum of superficial actions that only treat mere symptoms rather than the
underlying problem."
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a>� - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br>
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