Chris Doss wrote:
> I was thinking about this, and I'm not sure what "honorable and
> harmonious" means in this context. ("Sustainable"?) The earth (which I
> suppose means "nonhuman stuff as a whole") doesn't have a notion of
> harmony (since it doesn't have notions). Seen sub specie aetertnatis
> (sp?), everything that happens is harmonious, since everything follows
> natural laws (or lawlike regularities, if you prefer). From the POV of
> individual bits of nonhuman stuff capable of this sort of thing (like the
> boar you are harmoniously skewering), anything that hurts them is
> nonharmonious.
while foster still falls into the trap Dwayne is complaining about -- writing as if humans are distinct from nature -- I thought this was interesting. It's from an interview with John Bellamy Foster, about his book _Marx's Ecology_:
<quote> According to this view we should solve the problems of the earth by recycling and reducing our consumption. In terms of the structures of the system, this doesn’t make very much sense at all. Having a new spiritual relationship to the earth is OK and acting as individuals to defend the earth is commendable, but if we can’t change our material practices and social relations, then such spirituality and individual action is meaningless. </quote>
crap I lost the URL
I will write more later about Pollan's rhetoric which devolves not so much on nature, but on the happiness of pigs, cows, sheep, etc. Nature in Pollan's world is Aristotelean in its causality.
shag