By Noel Castree
We hearken to a cacophony of voices teaching us find out how to imagine and believe approximately nature, together with our personal our bodies. the inside track media, flora and fauna documentaries, technological know-how magazines, and environmental NGOs are between these clamouring for our cognizance. yet are we empowered through all this data or is our dependence on numerous groups permitting our recommendations, sentiments and actions to be unduly ruled by way of others?
Making feel of Nature indicates that what we name ‘nature’ is made feel of for us in ways in which make it primary to social order, social switch and social dissent. through employing insights and prolonged examples from anthropology, cultural experiences, human geography, philosophy, politics, sociology, technological know-how reports, this interdisciplinary textual content asks no matter if we will larger make experience of nature for ourselves, and hence take part extra meaningfully in momentous judgements concerning the way forward for lifestyles – human and non-human – on this planet. This e-book exhibits how ‘nature’ will be made experience of with no presuming its naturalness. The problem isn't really loads to rid ourselves of the assumption of nature and its ‘collateral concepts’ (such as genes) yet in its place, we have to be extra alert to how, why and with what results principles approximately ‘nature’ get formed and deployed in particular events. between different issues, the e-book offers with technology and scientists, the mass media and newshounds, ecotourism, literature and cinema, environmentalists, ads and large business.
This cutting edge textual content comprises various case stories and examples from way of life to place thought and material into context, in addition to research projects, a word list and recommended extra studying. The case stories conceal a variety of themes, diversity from forestry in Canada and Guinea, to bestiality in Washington kingdom, to how human genetics is said in Western newspapers, to participatory technological know-how experiments within the united kingdom. Making feel of Nature will empower readers from quite a lot of fields around the social sciences, humanities and actual sciences.
Reviews:
"Noel Castree has written one other bestseller. This booklet without problems synthesises from around the social and usual sciences a major physique of information and mirrored image at the thought of ‘nature’. Castree engages with all of the vital debates and authors and makes them available for his reader, supplying now not closed solutions yet full of life provocations to extra concept. this is often geographical scholarship at its very best." Mike Hulme, Professor of weather and tradition, King’s university London, UK.
"Challenging our assets of information, from the media to activist and medical writing, Making feel of Nature offers us strong instruments to imagine with. I’d placed this e-book within the palms of an individual who desires to jar their very own considering, undermine their very own assumptions, and make up their very own brain approximately humans and the typical world." Professor Paul Robbins, Director, Nelson Institute for Environmental reports, college of Wisconsin - Madison, united states.
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Additional info for Making Sense of Nature
Example text
I am interested in social epistemology, to be specific, because knowledge and belief are not created by sovereign (Cartesian) individuals and nor do they possess absolute foundations located outside the realms of social discourse or social practice. Equally, we might say that Making sense of nature is about ontology, but not in the classic philosophical sense of specifying what’s fundamentally ‘real’ and listing (in typically rarefied language) that ‘mind-independent’ reality’s signature characteristics.
Yet 30 years ago, it was a new term used only by a few biologists and environmental policymakers. It’s said to have been coined by American science administrator Walter G. Rosen in 1985 when deciding on a topical focus for an expert meeting funded by the 20 M AKING S ENS E OF S ENS E M AKING US National Research Council. The word first appeared in a publication in 1988 when Harvard University entomologist E. O. 13 By November of that year, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) convened the Ad Hoc Working Group of Experts on Biological Diversity.
As environmentalists Barbara Ward and René Dubos put it in the title of their germinal 1972 book, there is Only one Earth (Ward and Dubos, 1972). shared assumption. It’s the assumption that because there are, today, more people, more industry, more consumption, more pollution, more travel and more ‘invasive’ technologies than ever before, then there’s therefore less ‘nature’ – it seems to be a zero-sum game in which the natural world is the clear loser. In environmentalist Mark Lynas’s (2011: 12) dramatic words, ‘Nature no longer runs the earth.