Democratic Forest Trusts (PDF)in Watson, Alan; Dean, Liese; Sproull, Janet, comps. 2006. Science and stewardship to protect and sustain wilderness values: Eighth World Wilderness Congress Symposium; 2005 September 30-October 6; Anchorage, AK.Democratic trusts with leadership elected by citizen-members promise to solve many of the problems afflicting both traditional government and corporate ownership of forestlands. This article explores these issues in some depth.Complexity and the Dream of Human Control of Eco-Systems (PDF)in Watson, Alan; Dean, Liese; Sproull, Janet, comps. 2006. Science and stewardship to protect and sustain wilderness values: Eighth World Wilderness Congress Symposium; 2005 September 30-October 6; Anchorage, AK.The title captures it. I then explore the kinds of institutions compatible with both nature and the modern world that are implied from this analysis.Rethinking the Obvious: Modernity and Living Respectfully With Nature (PDF)The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, Winter, 1997.Modernity is usually considered a wrong turn in terms of respect for and sustaining the environment. I argue the reality is more complex, for modernity has freed us from personal dependence on agriculture, ended the economic value of children, radically reduced the likelihood of large scale wat, and shifted much production to intellectual rather than material capital. This partially decouples society from nature, which gives us important opportunities as well as problems.Towards an Ecocentric Political Economy (PDF)The Trumpeter, Fall, 1996.This paper begins my effort at showing how liberal modernity can be harmonized with an ecocentric perspective on our relationship with the natural world. It is a corrective to much “free market environmental” literature that sacrifices Nature to money as well as to anti-liberal attacks by well-meaning but economically naïve environmentalists.Unexpected Harmonies: Self-Organization in Liberal Modernity and Ecology (PDF)The Trumpeter, Journal of Ecosophy, 10:1, Winter 1993This is my initial paper exploring how what I term ‘evolutionary liberal’ thought can be an important means by which society and nature can be brought into greater harmony. The other Trumpeter papers build on it.Deep Ecology and Liberalism: The Greener Implications of Evolutionary Liberalism (PDF)Review of Politics, Fall, 1996.Liberal thought and deep ecology are usually regarded as mutually exclusive. But the “evolutionary” tradition offers a way to integrate the two through commonalties in the work of David Hume, Michael Polanyi, Arne Naess, and Aldo Leopold, providing a stronger foundation for liberalism while strengthening the case for an ecocentric ethic.(Related subjects: Ecology)Saving Western Towns: A Jeffersonian Green Proposal (PDF)in Writers on the Range, Karl Hess and John Baden, eds., University Press of Colorado, 1998.Developmental pressures in the rural and small town West involve three groups: long term residents, new arrivals, and environmentalists. Today their interests often conflict. This conflict is in part the outcome of institutions which prevent harmonizing competing interests. The concept of developmental trusts, both for rural regions and for small communities offers a means whereby these interests can be harmonized for the benefit of all concerned.(Related subjects: Politics)Social Ecology, Deep Ecology, and Liberalism (PDF)Critical Review, 6: 2-3, 1992.Murray Bookchin is considered a leading radical environmental theorist. However, his analysis is incapable of leading humankind towards a more respectful and sustainable relationship with the natural world. Criticisms of Bookchin from both the deep ecology and evolutionary liberal perspective complement one another, pointing the way towards a better understanding of how modernity relates to the environment.The paper as a whole offers an early discussion of issues that are more clearly addressed in later papers, particularly Deep Ecology and Liberalism (1996) and the three Trumpeter articles in 1997, 1996, and 1993. However, there are other ideas in the article which have not been developed more thoroughly elsewhere.
While visiting Walla Walla, Washington, where I had taught for some years at Whitman College, I took a side trip over to northeast Oregon, one of the most beautiful and least known parts of our country. There I visited the Zumwalt Prairie, which has been saved by the Nature Conservancy.
The prairies many of us see these days are a weak echo of the ones that had existed for thousands of years in Western North America. Those grasslands were mixes of perennial bunch grasses with herbs and wild flowers growing between the grasses. These prairies provided both great beauty and abundant forage for many birds and animals. The Zumwalt is one of the richest remaining areas in the United States for hawks.
Captivated by the promise of dollars and the belief that they should dominate these ‘savage’ places, land and people alike, they could not be bothered to take the time to get to know either people or land. America’s treatment of the land was no better than its genocide against the Indians. In most places the great grassy gardens are as forgotten as the Indians and animals that once lived there.
But in out of the way corners, the land survived. As did the Indians.
Gary Snyder once wrote that the spirit of place was the sum total of the energy fields of everything that lived there. Seeing a native prairie in its original richness is a wonderful conformation to me of his observation. It has a qualitatively different ‘feel’ from the beautiful but impoverished landscapes of modern ranching.
I worry that our hurried and mostly urban lives, rich as they are in some ways, are deeply impoverished in terms of our awareness of where we live and the relationships within wich we are immersed. We are rich in things, but so poor in relationships we barely miss them.
posted June 15, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I share your concerns, Gus. I often have my own about my own sensitivity to the landscape and actually beings when I talk about spirits. When I call on the spirit of say, raccoon, and I haven’t actually seen a raccoon in years, what does that mean to me? When I honor spirits in a ritual and I’m indoors a lot, sometimes they loose reality and their concrete sensuousness.
Just something I think about, when I talk about being earth-based, when does the earth-based quality simply become a symbol that can be abstracted, but not necessarily sensed?