Wilderness ethics cannot transfer to subsistence peasant communities whose land is under assault.

Evidence

Most deep ecologists evinced a shallow grasp of the consequences of transferring wholesale an environmental ideology from a supremely rich, lightly populated, overconsuming, overmilitarized society like the United States to densely populated countries (India, Nigeria, Indonesia) where significant peasant communities subsisted off the land. For such communities, the idea of the wild could never be primarily a recreational counterpoint to an urban industrialized lifestyle, but was profoundly entangled with the kinds of threats I have outlined in this book: assaults from slow and direct violence on increasingly marginal ecosystems on which their livelihoods depended, ecosystems vulnerable to resource capture by transnational corporations; by third-world military, civilian, and corporate elites; and by international conservation organizations. In such peasant communities environmental sensibilities and practices existed, but they were often directly entangled with ongoing, quotidian struggles for survival. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 781

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the book’s ch4 vernacular-maps idea and ties to the polyad’s ‘environmentalism of the poor’ through-line. — connects to: Wilderness ethics fails whether it stresses continuity or independence alone — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 604; Engels held dispersed peasantries cannot revolt independently but need the towns’ impulse.; A peasant class that self-produces its consumption cannot form collective political action (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: Gives the Eco-Justice course a crisp contrast between recreational-wilderness and livelihood-based environmental worldviews.

Broader Connections

• Wilderness ethics fails whether it stresses continuity or independence alone #expands (0.85) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 604
• A peasant class that self-produces its consumption cannot form collective political action #corroborates (0.82)
• Indigenous culture cannot be a unified site of anti-imperialist resistance #expands (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 18
• Engels held dispersed peasantries cannot revolt independently but need the towns’ impulse. #complicates (0.75)