Jedediah Purdy. After Nature

Jedediah Purdy joins scholars from many disciplines in declaring the “Anthropocene Age”: a time of massive human impact upon the global biosphere whereby our choices have shaped our world, which “will henceforth be the world we have made” (3) and its fate, along with our own, is determined by us. Rather than celebrating humanity’s power as Baconian/techno-utopian liberation from natural limits, Purdy contends that the Anthropocene imposes on us heavy new duties to choose our common future responsibly and exercise self-restraint. This will require a new sort of “environmental imagination” (6)—new systems of concepts, ideas, and beliefs regarding our relationship to the biosphere, and new ways to describe, express, and practice them. Purdy explains how humans’ relationship to and understanding of nature has always depended upon words and concepts we use to socially and politically construct “nature,” and he traces how this sociopolitically constructed understanding of the North American environment has evolved through various stages from colonial times to the present, including four broad intellectual approaches that still affect our lives, laws, and policies today: providential (colonial period–1800s, Errand into the Wilderness/Manifest Destiny); Romantic (1800s–1900s, transcendentalism/scenic preservation, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir); utilitarian (1900s, Progressive technocratic resource management, Gifford Pinchot, and Theodore Roosevelt); and ecological (postwar environmentalism, Rachel Carson, 1960s–1970s federal environmental laws). Each period and approach constructed “nature” to justify particular human political goals and perceived needs, but also understood nature as something outside the human realm. For Purdy, Anthropocene humans must re-“imagine” nature without that separation and respect the needs of humans and the biosphere together; he calls for blending humanist and post-humanist ideas to forge a new democratic environmental imagination and politics as humanity’s last best hope for shouldering its Anthropocene responsibilities.

Anthropocene · Biology · Biosphere · Colonialism · Environmental ethics · Environmentalism · Humanity · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Realm · Sociology · Wilderness · Ecology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies