I recently noticed that whenever I think of nature I tend to think of human nature and its relation to the external world, though I am less sure of what those concepts actually are now than I used to be. That, I think, is the effect that our class has had on my consciousness. And when I think of the themes and ideas that we have used in our discussion of the environment, I tend to see them as applying to our internal environment. So, for example, I see the notion of discourse of domination as being applied to, internalized by, and resisted by, various categories of people, such as women, or slaves, or immigrants, or national or ethnic minorities etc. It is interesting to me what the effects of such actions are on our humanity, on our very being.
Another interesting direction we can take is when we turn the distinction of anthropocentric valuation vs. ecocentric valuation towards ourselves. We can ask for example: in what ways do we anthropomorphize ourselves? And where does this lead exactly? How can we see ourselves from an ecocentric perspective? Is it possible to eliminate all of our anthropomorphizing of ourselves in favor of an ecocentric view? Would this be desirable even?
No comments:
Post a Comment