I was very pleased to hear that my talk on 10 Things Wrong
With Environmental Thinking (10TWWET) provoked some good classroom discussion
at UIC earlier today. I was not, of
course, there to hear it and respond to comments, nor do I know specifically what issues
were raised. A pity! Generally though, I can anticipate the sorts
of questions the arguments I have been reviewing for this project provoke.Before remarking on some of comments I have received on this work a word or two about the overall themes of the work. Central premises of 10TWWET, and pretty incontrovertible ones I think, are that environmental thought has suffered from confusions about definitions of nature, confusion about the dynamics of nature, confusion about our place in nature, some suspicious hankerings after purity, after perfect origins, and it revels in drastic and usually self-defeating predictions about end times. Environmental thought so disdains the conceptual and phenomenological messiness of human interactions with its world that it has become befuddled by its own special sauce of ontological, epistemological and metaphysical confusion. It so disdains the mess of the world, that it mystifyingly has overlooked certain things in the world until fairly recently. Ecologists, for instance, have been tripping over and through, and around some obvious objects in nature in an effort to get into the supposed “real” nature, that they have not noticed the things right in front of them. Cities are just one example. Nor do we have a very substantial ecology of use. We are awfully good at shrinking from the world, as if this was the only response available to us. This is why I claim that environmental solutions tend to make ascetics of all of us. Only the dead have perfect ecological footprints.
