Entry #2

Hi all, here's another blog post for those of you lucky enough to be following my *fantastic* blog. In the past week of my SRP I've begun setting up an Evernote database of sources pertaining to both my advisor's (Sarah's) project and my own, replete with write-ups communicating the texts' main points. Among these are three sources Sarah and I worked on cooperatively; they are, in chronological order: an excerpt of David Harvey's Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference; select chapters of Paul Robbin's Political Ecology; and the first section of Mark Carey's In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers. All of these books deal in some form with the ways in which we perceive nature, and what inherent biases are encoded in those interactions. For each of these, I'll do a breakdown of what I feel to be the most important/relevant points for my project, so those of you reading this can get a better feel for the ideas I'm currently toying with.

David Harvey (whom many of the seniors got to hear lecture, on a field trip earlier this school year) is known firstly as a Marxist scholar, but in Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, he concerns himself with other discourses as well. In the excerpt I read, Harvey looks at different philosophical schools of thought (Marxian, Enlightenment, and the Frankfurt School) and their references of the idea of nature in their writing, analyzing the assumptions encapsulated by those different discourses' language regarding the environment. He concludes that Marxian and Enlightenment theory act as primarily dominative, anti-ecological forces in their language used, while the Frankfurt School was simply too abstract in this regard to be considered further. Of interest to me is his elaboration on Enlightenment thought's subjection of nature to the same internal (human) / external (environment)* "power asymmetry" as it does class, with its 18th-century political economy (more on this later) "making sense" of nature by viewing it in terms of capital, effecting a subjection of it to the "philosophies of mechanical systems." These theses, laden in the Enlightenment tenets of human emancipation and self-realization, in effect confine the environment as a whole to a managerial/institutional order; in other words: end-game for the Enlightenment = complete domination of nature. He goes on, asking the lofty question of whether "values inhere in nature," that is to say: are the "feelings" we derive from nature actually coming to us from the environment, are or they merely socially constructed phenomena - modern culture telling us to "feel" a certain way when we look out upon a landscape, or go on a walk through the woods? He fails to provide a concrete answer for this (most likely because there is none). But even further, he qualifies all scientific findings (far out) as "tainted" by these more or less constructed (also more on this later) social biases, which serve to color our perception of ecological data. He states: "If values reside in nature we have no scientific way of knowing what they are independently of the values implicit in the metaphors deployed in mounting specific forms of scientific enquiry," implying that a neutral, objective understanding of nature's "foundational moral principles" is basically impossible in the face of these discursively imbedded assumptions. Terribly abstract, but interesting nonetheless - and one of the major foci of my project.

* Harvey does something interesting in this text; when interrogating the different discourses' relationships with the idea of nature, he moves fluidly between the concepts of "internal" and "external" nature, presumably to counteract the notion that these two things are somehow separate or distinct categories. Critical discourse analysis is all about taking apart assumptions, and Harvey evidently alludes to this facet by structurally blurring the two "natures", and very possibly as intra-textual reference to his later point that the heterogeneity of discourses is very much welcomed in the field ecology, much as we as humans welcome the heterogeneity of flora and fauna in our interactions with "wilderness" (constructed or no).

This became quite long (I tend to do that!) so expect a follow-up on the Robbins and Carey pieces probably tomorrow. A heads-up (and possibly a relief to some), Robbins-wise, is that Political Ecology grounds itself more in material implications and empirical research; that is to say, it's not the head-in-the-clouds conceptual thinking that Harvey tends to gravitate toward. In any event, the themes addressed by the Harvey piece, obviously not all of which were covered in this blog post, will be useful in providing inspiration for my final product, a fictional short story relating discourse analysis to the field of geography. Also, some of my terminology might be unclear, which tends to happen when working for long hours with academic reading - that being said, if anyone needs clarification for anything I write, hit up the comments section! I'd be glad to help (to the best of my ability).