Man Against Nature :: Environment Pollution

Man Against Nature I perceived, and continue to perceive, a severe difficulty 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 over to sun ourselves on the beach, in unreachable and savage depths of countries like Brazil and continents like Africa. That is nature, we say, not this, not our home, not our workplace. A favorite designer of mine calls this an estranged worldview, a experimental condition she borrowed herself from Friedrich Engels. She describes it thusly We be strangers to natur, to other human beings, to parts of ourselves. We see the world as made up of separate, isolated, nonliving parts that have no constituent(a) value. They are not even dead because death implies life.)i She goes on to say that when nature is empty of spirit, forests and trees become merely timber, something to be measured in mount feet, valued only for its profitability, not . . . even for its part in the larger ecosystem.ii Starhawk, the author, run a risks the roots of an estranged worldview laid deep into our past, two millennia and more. In the Enlightenment, she tells us, the separation of the worshipful and the mundane (from the Latin word mundus, meaning world) promoted by Christianity became what she calls the 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 perhaps even laughable. Trees are alive. Buldings arent. It seems so simple.I will return to that idea of a building like a tree. By now, you might be protesting to the invisible author me that you do connect yourself to nature, that you visit national parks, enjoy camping and hiking, perhaps even teach Environmental Science classes. McDonough and his chemist cohort, Michael Braungart, wonder if it is all in like manner easy to leave our reverance in the parking lots.iv Being desi gners, they take a look at less abstract demonstrations of the estranged worldview than does Starhawk (a Wiccan spiritual and ethical author), and they find it in the famed view that every middle management type is looking to have from his corner office after the promotion.