The Nature Pages

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~at Outrider

	Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature by Paul Shepard University of Georgia Press, 2002
	When it was first published in 1967, this book pioneered the modern study of environmental history and the cultural roots of Western society's attitudes toward nature. Publication of this new edition, with a foreword by Dave Foreman, provides an opportunity to rexamine the philosopher's seminal observations and assess what differences 35 years have made.		We are inclined to think of the environment as outside; our structure, heredity, and experiece, inside. But the environment in which the heredity units, the chromosomes, live and act is a flux within the cell. This cellular environment is continually affected by and continuous with the outer world...
	According to Foreman, Paul Shepard's lifelong quest was to find an answer to the question of why humans are destroying the very habitats that gave them birth and are crucial to their survival. He finds the root cause of this behavior in the existentialist division of man and nature expressed first in agriculture and civilization, and more recently and destructively in self-serving humanism and technology.
	If you want to understand environmentalists and mainstream environmentalism, there is no better place to begin than here, in the compost of the movement's seminal philosopher.		Also by Paul Shepard The Only World We'Ve Got: A Paul Shepard Reader Nature and Madness Encounters With Nature: Essays Where We Belong
			The proponents of this fanatic individualism retreat from a hostile and absurd world to an inner life whose only values are personal and subjective. By valuing only the unique and individual they rightly oppose mass man and the treatment of human beings as replacable machines -- at the price of ecological nihilism. It is the act of a screaming and demented oyster.