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Val Plumwood - The Concept of Cultural Landscape PDF
Val Plumwood - The Concept of Cultural Landscape PDF
Val Plumwood - The Concept of Cultural Landscape PDF
CULTURAL LANDSCAPE
NATURE, CULTURE AND AGENCY IN THE
LAND
VAL PLUMWOOD
ABSTRACT
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report issued in April 2005
shows how severely our civilisation is degrading and overstressing the
natural systems that support human life and all other lives on earth. An
important critical challenge, especially for the eco-humanities, is to help
us understand the conceptual frameworks and systems that disappear
the crucial support provided by natural systems and prevent us from see-
ing nature as a field of agency. This paper considers the currently
popular concept of a cultural landscape as an example of a concept that
downplays natural agency, and discusses the epistemology of nature
scepticism and nature cynicism that often accompanies its vogue in the
humanities. Can some philosophical disentangling of senses of nature
(often considered the most complex term in the language) allow sceptics
their main points without placing them on such a strong collision course
with the requirements of commonsense and survival?
Which collaborators?
There are many culturally variable ways to cut and identify these
multiple collaborative agencies to fit different cultural narratives. The cast
of actors the model of multiple interactive agencies makes available for
the drama of shaping the land can include disputatious or collaborative
humans, divinities and elements, and what some cultures identify as
ancestral creator beings. And the land itself may be conceived as an active
CONCLUSION
Nature scepticism and idealism are deadends in the quest for a route
to an ecologically-sensitive humanities consciousness. Culture reduction-
ism cannot distinguish between presenting the zone of nature as one of
options and trade-offs, and treating it as foundational enabler whose sur-
vival must constrain our choices. I have tried to suggest ways we might
develop alternative accounts of nature that start from our ecological con-
text, taking account of what is valid in the indigenous, anti-dualist, and
sceptical critique of nature and discarding the idealist and human-cen-
tered elements. Our argument aimed to show that concepts of nature need
not involve the denial of indigenous presence in the land, that we can
reject nature/culture dualism without rejecting difference and limits, and
that an ecological recognition of nature as a zone of limits need not sup-
port a conservative agenda naturalizing social injustice. Perhaps we are
closer to being able to reconcile ecological, indigenous, and radical social
change projects. That has been my aim.