Traci Brynne Voyles (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479894567
- eISBN:
- 9781479822447
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479894567.003.0009
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This essay takes up one particular iteration of sustainability discourse, rooted in the American environmentalist tradition: seeing “man,” writ large, as an undifferentiated and usually malevolent ...
More
This essay takes up one particular iteration of sustainability discourse, rooted in the American environmentalist tradition: seeing “man,” writ large, as an undifferentiated and usually malevolent force affecting “nature.” While this is but one strand of environmental thought, it is important (and, clearly, enduring). Here, I use this “man destroys nature” framework as a foil for this particular strand of environmental thought. That we often talk about environmental decline as a one-way street, from man to nature, reflects larger problems in how sustainability and justice are imagined. The fields of environmental feminism, environmental history, and environmental justice studies give us the tools to destabilize declensionist environmental narratives, thinking more critically about “man,” “nature,” and “destruction.” I outline key themes and contributions in these fields that offer new insights into how we can understand the complex milieu of our human relationships to the non-human world. What these fields suggest to us is that sustainabilities, like feminist epistemology, must be situated in contingent and intersectional environmental knowledge and experience.Less
This essay takes up one particular iteration of sustainability discourse, rooted in the American environmentalist tradition: seeing “man,” writ large, as an undifferentiated and usually malevolent force affecting “nature.” While this is but one strand of environmental thought, it is important (and, clearly, enduring). Here, I use this “man destroys nature” framework as a foil for this particular strand of environmental thought. That we often talk about environmental decline as a one-way street, from man to nature, reflects larger problems in how sustainability and justice are imagined. The fields of environmental feminism, environmental history, and environmental justice studies give us the tools to destabilize declensionist environmental narratives, thinking more critically about “man,” “nature,” and “destruction.” I outline key themes and contributions in these fields that offer new insights into how we can understand the complex milieu of our human relationships to the non-human world. What these fields suggest to us is that sustainabilities, like feminist epistemology, must be situated in contingent and intersectional environmental knowledge and experience.
Catherine A. Corson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780300212273
- eISBN:
- 9780300225068
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300212273.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet its habitats are still in decline. Studying forty ...
More
Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet its habitats are still in decline. Studying forty years of policy making in multiple sites, this book reveals how blaming impoverished Malagasy farmers for Madagascar's environmental decline has avoided challenging other drivers of deforestation, such as the logging and mining industries. This ethnographic study reveals how Madagascar's environmental program reflects the transformation of global environmental governance under neoliberalism.Less
Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet its habitats are still in decline. Studying forty years of policy making in multiple sites, this book reveals how blaming impoverished Malagasy farmers for Madagascar's environmental decline has avoided challenging other drivers of deforestation, such as the logging and mining industries. This ethnographic study reveals how Madagascar's environmental program reflects the transformation of global environmental governance under neoliberalism.
Tore C. Olsson
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691165202
- eISBN:
- 9781400888054
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691165202.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
In the 1930s and 1940s, rural reformers in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and agricultural productivity. This ...
More
In the 1930s and 1940s, rural reformers in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and agricultural productivity. This book tells the story of how these campaigns were conducted in dialogue with one another as reformers in each nation came to exchange models, plans, and strategies with their equivalents across the border. Dismantling the artificial boundaries that can divide American and Latin American history, the book shows how the agrarian histories of both regions share far more than we realize. It traces the connections between the US South and the plantation zones of Mexico, places that suffered parallel problems of environmental decline, rural poverty, and gross inequities in land tenure. Bringing this tumultuous era vividly to life, the book describes how Roosevelt's New Deal drew on Mexican revolutionary agrarianism to shape its program for the rural South. The book also looks at how the US South served as the domestic laboratory for the Rockefeller Foundation's “green revolution” in Mexico—which would become the most important Third World development campaign of the twentieth century—and how the Mexican government attempted to replicate the hydraulic development of the Tennessee Valley Authority after World War II. This book is an innovative history of comparisons and the ways they affected policy, moved people, and reshaped the landscape.Less
In the 1930s and 1940s, rural reformers in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and agricultural productivity. This book tells the story of how these campaigns were conducted in dialogue with one another as reformers in each nation came to exchange models, plans, and strategies with their equivalents across the border. Dismantling the artificial boundaries that can divide American and Latin American history, the book shows how the agrarian histories of both regions share far more than we realize. It traces the connections between the US South and the plantation zones of Mexico, places that suffered parallel problems of environmental decline, rural poverty, and gross inequities in land tenure. Bringing this tumultuous era vividly to life, the book describes how Roosevelt's New Deal drew on Mexican revolutionary agrarianism to shape its program for the rural South. The book also looks at how the US South served as the domestic laboratory for the Rockefeller Foundation's “green revolution” in Mexico—which would become the most important Third World development campaign of the twentieth century—and how the Mexican government attempted to replicate the hydraulic development of the Tennessee Valley Authority after World War II. This book is an innovative history of comparisons and the ways they affected policy, moved people, and reshaped the landscape.
Eileen Crist
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226925332
- eISBN:
- 9780226925363
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226925363.003.0003
- Subject:
- Biology, Biodiversity / Conservation Biology
In recent years humanity has come to two momentous realizations. The first is that we are in the midst of an anthropogenic crisis of life—an extinction spasm and ecological unraveling that is moving ...
More
In recent years humanity has come to two momentous realizations. The first is that we are in the midst of an anthropogenic crisis of life—an extinction spasm and ecological unraveling that is moving the biosphere towards an impoverished biogeological era. The second is that, in the course of history, especially the history of domination-driven Western culture, humanity has tended to deny or underestimate the mental life of animals. This chapter explores the conceptual and historical links between the unraveling of life and the denigration of animal minds. It argues that the long-standing denial or disparagement of animal minds has contributed to the devastation of the biosphere. The portrayal of animals as inferior beings, and eventually even as mechanical entities, facilitated the objectification of the natural world and its transformation into a domain of resources.Less
In recent years humanity has come to two momentous realizations. The first is that we are in the midst of an anthropogenic crisis of life—an extinction spasm and ecological unraveling that is moving the biosphere towards an impoverished biogeological era. The second is that, in the course of history, especially the history of domination-driven Western culture, humanity has tended to deny or underestimate the mental life of animals. This chapter explores the conceptual and historical links between the unraveling of life and the denigration of animal minds. It argues that the long-standing denial or disparagement of animal minds has contributed to the devastation of the biosphere. The portrayal of animals as inferior beings, and eventually even as mechanical entities, facilitated the objectification of the natural world and its transformation into a domain of resources.
