change happens:
- obviously technology changes
- so do our ideas and values
- in the 1960s and 1970s
public concern about the environment grew dramatically
- led to new regulations but
also new behaviours and values
- are we at the beginning of
another such change, particularly motivated by global warming?
- or are economic problems
going to derail changes to benefit the environment?
this book is about our ideas
about wilderness (tends towards a strict definition of wilderness)
- ideas matter
- important thinkers--people
who come up with new ideas that make a difference
- in the mid/late 19th and
20th centuries ideas grew up around an important book: Walden, Silent Spring
- but also how ideas
spread to large numbers of people--through opinion leaders
- 1. where do new ideas come
from 2. how do new ideas spread and become public opinion 3. public
opinion determines government action
shift in the United
States from
wilderness being hated
and feared to being appreciated and preserved--how did that change
happen?
First we have changes in ideas:
- writers and philosophers
proposed new ways of thinking about wilderness--ideas matter
- trancendentalists
- key people: Marsh,
Thoreau,
Muir, Leopold
- painters and photographers
played a key role in changing American ideas about wilderness
- wilderness was disappearing
(scarcity theory of value)
- as our technology expands,
our relationship with nature changes and therefore our ideas
- do we see civilization and
wildness as things that should be in balance?
Where do we get our ideas?
- books, movies, TV
- news--shapes our perception
of what are the critical issues
- we've been (mostly)
convinced to take global warming seriously--that these issues will
affect us
- community--what our friends
think is important
- moral intuition (what seems
right or wrong to us on a gut level)--we come to think that what we
have learned is somehow human nature and everyone must agree, when in
fact there is a lot of variation
Then those new ideas affect
practice/behavior/government action/business practices
- when people's ideas change
they may change their private and business practices
- politics and government
institutions
- creation of the Forest
Service and Park Service
- key people: Roosevelt,
Pinchot, to some extent Muir
- from early on the
government set aside natural land, at first mostly for future human use
- slowly the idea grew up
of preserving wilderness as wilderness, without providing services for
visitors
- national environmental
protection
laws beginning in 1970s (see next book)
- do we set limits on the
ways we control and manipulate nature?--key example for now is dam
projects and how opposition to them grew
The situation in the United
States is different from other countries
- the US had wilderness left
in the mid 19th century
- wilderness and the frontier
came to be seen as shaping American character
- 2% of lower 48 states is
protected as wild
- but wilderness has
essentially completely disappeared in Europe and
Japan
Possible outcomes--as as a result
of sprawl, factory farming, and
increasing technology to control nature things will be different 50
years from now
- we might end up with a much
poorer natural environment than we have now
- wasteland--the ecosystems
around us collapse
- global
warming may shift climate faster than plants and animals can adapt,
reducing biodiversity
- we throw key
ecosystems seriously out of balance
- garden--total human control
of nature but in a positive way
- island civilization--cities
surrounded by wilderness
themes:
- changing attitudes towards
wilderness of writers
- as wilderness becomes
scarce we value it
- changing public opinion
- politics: how do you put
ideas into government action
- questioning
modernization/progress
- maybe
we don't always like the results of progress
- maybe progress could go
in a different direction
- maybe we want to reject
some innovations (just because we can do something doesn't mean
we should)
- wilderness for human use
vs. wilderness for its own sake
- what counts as
wilderness,
do we want wilderness or parks made convenient for people to use
- letting nature take its
course vs. human intervention
- is the nature world the
opposite of human culture?--no, humans are a part of nature
- the relationship between
human beings and nature is complicated and changing