Stephanie Rutherford
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816674404
- eISBN:
- 9781452946740
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816674404.003.0003
- Subject:
- Environmental Science, Nature
This chapter discusses how ecotourism is not only about environmentalism but also about power. Ecotours can work to structure vision, separate nature, and culture, and proffer discourses of science ...
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This chapter discusses how ecotourism is not only about environmentalism but also about power. Ecotours can work to structure vision, separate nature, and culture, and proffer discourses of science and romanticism that have the effect of “truth”. Ecotours offer a kind of visual grammar for natural beauty, backed up by a long history of romantic encounters with wilderness and narratives of a national nature. The ecotour also offers an opening to think about the relationship between the human and nonhuman in different ways.Less
This chapter discusses how ecotourism is not only about environmentalism but also about power. Ecotours can work to structure vision, separate nature, and culture, and proffer discourses of science and romanticism that have the effect of “truth”. Ecotours offer a kind of visual grammar for natural beauty, backed up by a long history of romantic encounters with wilderness and narratives of a national nature. The ecotour also offers an opening to think about the relationship between the human and nonhuman in different ways.
Stephanie Rutherford
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816674404
- eISBN:
- 9781452946740
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816674404.001.0001
- Subject:
- Environmental Science, Nature
Take four emblematic American scenes: the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park in Orlando; an ecotour of Yellowstone and ...
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Take four emblematic American scenes: the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park in Orlando; an ecotour of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks; the film An Inconvenient Truth. Other than expressing a common interest in the environment, they seem quite dissimilar. And yet, as this book makes clear, these sites are all manifestations of green governmentality, each seeking to define and regulate our understanding, experience, and treatment of nature. This book shows how the museum presents a scientized assessment of global nature under threat; the Animal Kingdom demonstrates that a corporation can successfully organize a biopolitical project; the ecotour, operating as a school for a natural aesthetic sensibility, provides a visual grammar of pristine national nature; and the film offers a toehold on a moral way of encountering nature. But one very powerful force unites the disparate “truths” of nature produced through these sites, and that, the book tells us, is their debt to nature's commodification. This book's analysis reveals how each site integrates nature, power, and profit to make the buying and selling of nature critical to our understanding and rescuing of it. The combination, it argues, renders other ways of encountering nature—particularly more radically environmental ways—unthinkable.Less
Take four emblematic American scenes: the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park in Orlando; an ecotour of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks; the film An Inconvenient Truth. Other than expressing a common interest in the environment, they seem quite dissimilar. And yet, as this book makes clear, these sites are all manifestations of green governmentality, each seeking to define and regulate our understanding, experience, and treatment of nature. This book shows how the museum presents a scientized assessment of global nature under threat; the Animal Kingdom demonstrates that a corporation can successfully organize a biopolitical project; the ecotour, operating as a school for a natural aesthetic sensibility, provides a visual grammar of pristine national nature; and the film offers a toehold on a moral way of encountering nature. But one very powerful force unites the disparate “truths” of nature produced through these sites, and that, the book tells us, is their debt to nature's commodification. This book's analysis reveals how each site integrates nature, power, and profit to make the buying and selling of nature critical to our understanding and rescuing of it. The combination, it argues, renders other ways of encountering nature—particularly more radically environmental ways—unthinkable.
