Solving environmental problems requires an ethic for the home landscape, not just remote wilderness

Evidence

But the most troubling cultural baggage that accompanies the celebration of wilderness has less to do with remote rain forests and peoples than with the ways we think about ourselves—we American environmentalists who quite rightly worry about the future of the earth and the threats we pose to the natural world. Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home. Most of our most serious environmental problems start right here, at home, and if we are to solve those problems, we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it. The wilderness dualism tends to cast any use as abuse, and thereby denies us a middle ground in which responsible use and non-use might attain some kind of balanced, sustainable relationship. My own belief is that only by exploring this middle ground will we learn ways of imagining a better world for all of us: humans and nonhumans, rich people and poor, women and men, First Worlders and Third Worlders, white folks and people of color, consumers and producers—a world better for humanity in all of its diversity and for all the rest of nature too. The middle ground is where we actually live. It is where we—all of us, in our different places and ways—make our homes. — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 67

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the constructive alternative — the ‘middle ground’ / home landscape ethic that is the essay’s positive proposal.
• XREF: The ‘middle ground’ concept parallels the polyad’s place-based pedagogy — eco-justice education teaches living well in the home landscape. — connects to: Wilderness recreation is a class privilege that devalues rural land-based labor — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 65; Wilderness is a cultural construction, not an untouched natural sanctuary — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 5; Every landscape, from city to wilderness, is both cultural and natural — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 82 (+11 more)

Related

• Every landscape, from city to wilderness, is both cultural and natural (similarity 0.85)
• Wilderness is a cultural construction, not an untouched natural sanctuary (similarity 0.83)
• Wilderness recreation is a class privilege that devalues rural land-based labor (similarity 0.83)
• Wilderness ethics fails whether it stresses continuity or independence alone (similarity 0.80)
• Wilderness is a cultural construct, not a place that exists apart from humanity (similarity 0.80)
• Wilderness appreciation was an elite urban leisure projection, not a rural ideal. (similarity 0.79)
• Environmentalists’ rural ideal of nature hindered building an urban land-use vision (similarity 0.79)
• Environmental history has privileged rural production over metropolitan land use (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Allowing surroundings to subsist is what turns environment into a lived world #expands (0.78)
• Conservationist ideas carried into environmentalism through an urbanized land ethic #expands (0.75) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 44
• Environmentalism needs a worldview shift to relationality, not just policy fixes. #corroborates (0.75) — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1036
• Local problems motivate environmental action more than abstract global harms #qualifies (0.72) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2949
• Wilderness ethics fails whether it stresses continuity or independence alone #corroborates (0.72) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 604