{"id":1,"date":"2017-01-08T19:08:48","date_gmt":"2017-01-08T19:08:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thegreenfuse.org\/blog\/?p=1"},"modified":"2017-01-09T14:00:58","modified_gmt":"2017-01-09T14:00:58","slug":"hello-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thegreenfuse.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/08\/hello-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Lighting the fuse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Perhaps ‘environmental philosophy’ is too precise a name for what I’m concerned with here. I want to think outside; outside the box, perhaps outside the academy, and certainly immersed in what we rather foolishly call ‘the environment’. But what might that mean?<\/em> In a very fundamental sense everything around us is the environment, but somehow we’ve taken the word to mean ‘the natural world’. That’s not helpful: As Murray Bookchin<\/span>, the founder of Social Ecology, points out, the the languages of many aboriginal peoples lack any equivalent for our word \u201cnature\u201d because they are \u201c[i]mmersed in nature\u201d, and so \u201cit has no special meaning\u201d (1993).<\/span><\/p>\n

Could environmental philosophy be about our relationship to wilderness? I’ve talked elsewhere about the dubious staus of that notion (Where is Wilderness?<\/a>) ‘Wilderness’ has been framed as a romantic myth, a social construction or even a tool of capitalism (various authors in Baird Callicott & Nelson, eds., 1998). It feels inadequate to simply dismiss wilderness as a cultural construction: my experience of being in wilder places is not satisfied by such a reductive argument. But the idea of wilderness remains problematic.
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I’m looking for something wider than ‘environmental philosophy’ but less confused than an appeal to wilderness. I think Felix Guattari may have the rigor and breadth I’m looking for. Guattari takes environmental philosophy out of the box: He expands the concept of ecology, taking it beyond the science of organic interrelationships. Guattari suggest that there are three interconnected<\/span> ecologies of mind, society and the environment (2000).\u00a0<\/span> His emphasis on the connections between psyche, society and environment is just the kind of thinking I want to engage with here. If that appeals to you, read on.<\/p>\n