A Nature Language: An Agenda to Catalog, Save, and Recover Patterns of Human–Nature Interaction (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Social Sustainability in Economics, Social and Cultural Context, 2016
Western admiration of nature in human-inhabited environments is historically different from admiration of nature in wilderness environments. This paper looks at the history of admiration and argues that the split is now a hindrance rather than help in moving forward into a unified conception of nature’s relationship to humanity. In its place I argue for human-impacted environments as ethical stakeholders using models of communication that suggest nature might have a systemic and active abilities to elicit human admiration
Transformation of Experience: Toward a New Relationship with Nature
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Despite decades of awareness about the biodiversity crisis, it remains a wicked problem. Besides preservation and restoration strategies, one approach has focused on increasing public concern about biodiversity issues by emphasizing opportunities for people to experience natural environments. In this article, we endeavor to complicate the understanding of these experiences of nature (EoN). Because EoN are embedded in social and cultural contexts, transformative or new EoN are emerging in combination with societal changes in work, home, and technology. Policies that acknowledge and accept a diversity of culturally situated EoN, including negative EoN, could help people reconnect with the complexity and dynamics of biodiversity. A new conceptualization of EoN that encompasses diverse experiences and reflects the sociocultural context could help to stimulate a broader transformation in the relationship between society and nature, one that better integrates the two spheres. Such a transformation is necessary to more effectively address the biodiversity crisis.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022
This paper examines how (auditory) knowledge about, experience of, and interaction with the natural environment affects the social, relational, and performative practices that people have in and with the (natural) world around them. As a point of departure, we take the increasing pursuit of personal growth and well-being through connection to and immersion in nature, and its sonic dimension. Drawing on field research, interviews, observations, and a nascent body of literature, we consider practices such as meditation and mindful listening in nature and interspecies music-making. Practitioners of the newly trendy shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) and other forms of mindfulness-particularly through birding-deepen their sense of presence by listening and hearing. Likewise, interspecies musicians, many of whom play with birds, not only open up an understanding of music that transcends species boundaries, but also show how listening can function as another way of "being-with" the world in a Heideggerian sense. These examples are considered in light of Pauline Oliveros' concept of Deep Listening and within the framework of the Biophilia Hypothesis, which assumes that human beings have an innately emotional affiliation to other living organisms, which may even be essential for bodily and especially mental health and well-being. In both mindfulness practice and interspecies musicmaking, the sonic and auditory provide an alternative means of knowing and engaging with the natural world, enabling the forging of meaningful connections to the lived environment through listening, sound, and performance. With this paper, we ask how humans' relationship with nature could be revalorized and reimagined in a non-hierarchical way, rooted in an idea of coexistence rather than human dominance. We hope to begin a conversation about how communion-and perceived communion-with the natural world might create the impetus for engagement and change in times of ecological crisis.
Environmental Values, 2015
As our interactions with nature occur increasingly within urban landscapes, there is a need to consider how 'mundane nature' can be valued as a route for people to connect to nature. The content of a three good things in nature intervention, written by 65 participants each day for five days is analysed. Content analysis produced themes related to sensations, temporal change, active wildlife, beauty, weather, colour, good feelings and specific aspects of nature. The themes describe the everyday good things in nature, providing direction for those seeking to frame engaging conservation messages, plan urban spaces and connect people with nearby nature.
Journal of Political Ecology, 1999
The writings of Paul Shepard are, if nothing else, provocative-in the best sense of that word. His work provokes us, shakes us out of our complacency, and forces us to reexamine and rethink our ideas about the relationship between humanity and nature. In a career that spanned forty years he produced several masterpieces of what we now would call "environmental thought"-Man in the Landscape: An Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature (1967), The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (1973), Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence (1978), and Nature and Madness (1982)-as well as many others books and essays. In this volume, published posthumously, we are presented with twenty-two previously uncollected essays, both published and unpublished in Shepard's life time. The essays have been collected and edited by Florence Shepard, Paul's wife and partner during the last decade of his life. According to the editor's preface, the essays were selected to illuminate two themes: animals and place (p. xiv), and the essays are grouped into two parts to reflect this editorial organization. But a close reading of the essays reveals four basic themes: (1) the role of animals in the development of human mental and cultural life; (2) the justification of hunting as a basic component of human culture; (3) the need to connect to the earth in specific places, to understand specific natural histories, and to move beyond the simplistic human-centered categories of nature appreciation, such as the beautiful or the pastoral; and finally (4) the need to understand the radical difference between what is truly natural and what is thought to be natural by human society. It is in this last theme that we see the full force of Shepard's critique of current ecological thought and environmental practice. It is here that Shepard attacks the relativism of current science-including ecology-and calls for the objectivity, the trans-cultural reality, of ecosystems and biomes (p. 163). All four themes are dominated by a deep understanding and respect for the process of evolution. For me, this is the chief insight that Shepard seeks to impale into our consciousness: humans are biological creatures who have a long evolutionary history that preceded by millions of years the establishment of this remarkable civilization in which we are embedded. "Our minds, like our bodies, still live in the Pleistocene" (p. 14). Culture and civilization attempt to separate humans from this biological and natural past, but in the long run this attempt at separation and dualism is doomed to failure: it leads to ecological destruction, the collapse of civilizations, and individual alienation and unhappiness. The essays in this collection begin on the individual level with the importance of animals in the development of human thought. In "The Origin of the Metaphor: The Animal Connection" Shepard suggests that that the interaction with animal Others by our prehistoric human ancestors laid the basis for abstract thinking through the use of metaphor, imagery, and categorical thinking: "The animal species system in nature is the least ambiguous categorical model in the world. It is the doorway to cognition" (pp. 10-11). Animals are crucial to human development because they reside in that middle ground between the wholly different physical environment and the wholly similar human species they are both different and similar to us, and thus serve as a bridge to our understanding of the world around us and to our understanding of ourselves Reviews
Of the Earth: A Study of the Human Relationship with the Natural World
The human species has danced with the earth – its many species and systems – since our inception on the planet. How we view this relationship is as complicated as the interwoven network of synapses in our minds. It is through the unique expression of language that we give life and voice to this relationship. This paper delves into the meaning behind the language we use as a means of either connecting or separating our species to the planet we call home.