Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature

by Cronon, William

• ISBN13: 9780393315110
• ISBN10: 0393315118
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-10-17
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

In a lead essay that powerfully states the broad argument of the book, William Cronon writes that the environmentalist goal of wilderness preservation is conceptually and politically wrongheaded. Among the ironies and entanglements resulting from this goal are the sale of nature in our malls through the Nature Company, and the disputes between working people and environmentalists over spotted owls and other objects of species preservation. The problem is that we haven't learned to live responsibly in nature. The environmentalist aim of legislating humans out of the wilderness is no solution. People, Cronon argues, are inextricably tied to nature, whether they live in cities or countryside. Rather than attempt to exclude humans, environmental advocates should help us learn to live in some sustainable relationship with nature. It is our home.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	9	(2)
The Albums	11	(2)
Acknowledgments	13	(2)
Contributors	15	(4)
Foreword to the Paperback Edition	19	(4)
BEGINNINGS Introduction: In Search of Nature	23	(46)
William Cronon
PARADISE LOST AND FOUND	69	(102)
The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature	69	(22)
William Cronon
Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted	91	(23)
Anne Whiston Spirn
Amazonia as Edenic Narrative	114	(18)
Candace Slater
Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative	132	(39)
Carolyn Merchant
AT WORK AND PLAY	171	(62)
"Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?": Work and Nature	171	(15)
Richard White
Looking for Nature at the Mall: A Field Guide to the Nature Company	186	(18)
Jennifer Price
"Touch the Magic"	204	(29)
Susan G. Davis
CONTESTED TERRAINS	233	(146)
Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties	233	(23)
Michael G. Barbour
On the Search for a Root Cause: Essentialist Tendencies in Environmental Discourse	256	(13)
Jeffrey C. Ellis
Whose Nature? The Contested Moral Terrain of Ancient Forests	269	(29)
James D. Proctor
Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice	298	(23)
Giovanna Di Chiro
Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture: It's All in the Family: Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-Century United States	321	(58)
Donna J. Haraway
COMMON PLACES	379	(68)
Reinventing Common Nature: Yosemite and Mount Rushmore--A Meandering Tale of a Double Nature	379	(30)
Kenneth R. Olwig
Simulated Nature and Natural Simulations: Rethinking the Relation between the Beholder and the World	409	(17)
N. Katherine Hayles
Toward a Philosophy of Nature	426	(21)
Robert P. Harrison
PARTINGS Toward a Conclusion	447	(14)
On the Nature of Nature: An Eclectic Reading List	461	(16)
Notes	477	(70)
Index	547