Summary
Man's relationship with nature - The Human Challenge of Ecological Restoration
Man's relationship with the environment is as part of a community, not as an individual against nature. Man's rituals and practices should work within his ecosystem to restore damaged biological communities. Preservationists pit man against nature, which is wrong.See the full content of this document
Extract
Rituals of restoration.
When considering the status of the relationship between nature and a particular culture, one of the most basic and straightforward questions we can ask is: who, exactly, negotiates the relationship? Or, to be more precise, what kinds of relationships with nature can be negotiated by individuals, on the one hand, and people acting as a group-the human community, if you will-on the other?
This question appears to be so obvious that it hardly seems worth asking. Yet it is a question that raises some very real and fundamental issues about our own society and its history-issues which, I suspect, have a great deal to do, in turn, with our many and varied environmental problems. A distinctive feature of American society is its strong emphasis on individualism, as well as its explicit rejection of the rituals that have traditionally served to both define and affirm community. This is, to some extent, the le...See the full content of this document
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