On Saturday, February 28, 2004, at 03:01 PM, Jim Tantillo wrote:

> Gus wrote:
>
> Jim - you are picking out one part of Crichton's piece - that the 
> environmental and conservation movements have been urban based 
> historically - and ignoring all the rest.  As a matter of fact, I have 
> published on exactly that issue, and have no disagreement with the 
> facts, though my interpretation of their meaning differs from 
> Cronon's, and from Crichton's.
>
>
>
> But Crichton also says in the passage you take me to task over  - and 
> Cronon does not - that the "romantic" view is held by people with "no 
> actual experience" of nature - this view Crichton equates with 
> environmentalism - and implies (I see no other way of reading the 
> passage) that romantics/environmentalists are against killing animals 
> or uprooting plants.  Where does Cronon say this?  Please point it 
> out.  If you can't then your example falls flat.  Utterly.
>
>
> Well, for one thing:  I interpret Cronon's book, Nature's Metropolis 
> to be very nearly a *book-length* argument to this effect.  In many 
> ways, the Prologue ("Cloud Over Chicago") and the Epilogue ("Where We 
> Were Driving") state and restate the point you make here about the 
> "romantic" views that people hold--and I take Cronon's book-length 
> treatment of nature as commodity to be a sermon about how divorced 
> most (naive) city people/readers/environmentalists/deep ecologists are 
> from "actual experience" with nature--meaning nature as the raw stuff 
> of value.  It is where value comes from.
>
OK - you've got a book I've bought but haven't yet read.  I'll take 
your word on what follows.

> Cronon writes for example that the radical rural-urban split in modern 
> society embodies "one underlying assumption which is itself deeply 
> problematic."  This he identifies as the assumption "that city and 
> country are separate and opposing worlds."  In other words, naive city 
> folk (as he even describes himself at an earlier age) find it easy to 
> romanticize nature as playground, while they have difficulty 
> understanding and comprending nature more fully as the raw stuff of 
> value--economic or otherwise.
>
I agree with the play/work distinction.  Even when I had a garden I 
could survive its failure in a way that a farmer could not survive the 
failure of his crops.  Nor did I have a family dependent on a good 
harvest for survival or - in later years - solvency.  I think this is a 
weakness of some forms of environmental thought.  I have thought so for 
a long time.

> He writes:
>        "Such beliefs are deeply embedded in Western thought.  We 
> learned our city-country dichotomy from the nineteenth century 
> Romantics, who learned it in turn from pastoral poets stretching back 
> to Virgil" (17).
>
> ". . . [D]ecrying the 'unnaturalness' of city life in a place like 
> Chicago was merely one more way of doing what my own environmental 
> ethic told me to oppose: isolating human life from the ecosystems that 
> sustain it.  Putting the city outside nature meant sending humanity 
> into the same exile.  And yet this is what I and many other modern 
> environmentalists have unconsciously often done, following the lessons 
> we learned from nineteenth-century romantic writers like Wordsworth, 
> Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir.  .  .  " (8).

Both Cronon and those who see the city as unnatural are correct (or can 
be, depending on what they mean, anyway).  They are focused on 
different dimensions of what it means to be natural.

Cronon says, if I get his point, that we are necessarily completely 
embedded within the natural world, whether we are in the city or out of 
it.  Humanity is not exiled from nature and it is harmful to cultivate 
the sense that it is.  I agree.

Also - natural processes adapt almost entirely on the basis of genetic 
change across generations.  Human ones almost entirely on the basis of 
changes in ideas and understanding within generations.  Therefore the 
rate of human change is far more rapid than the rate of natural 
adaptation except for life forms that tend to be opportunistic, 
extremely fecund, and reproduce very rapidly.  think bacteria, viruses, 
rats, dandelions, and so on.  they do just fine with us.  This is a 
very real, very important, and very legitimate, distinction between 
human society and nature.

Third, there seems to be a very real difference in our psychological 
states depending on our exposure to nature.  the latest edition of 
Orion mentions scientific research indicating much more rapid rates of 
recovery in hospitals where patients had a window view of greenery 
compared to having a window view of a wall, or no window at all.  there 
seems to be a widely acknowledged psychological benefit from leaving a 
place of many buildings and people and entering into a place where 
nature is less obviously or strongly shaped and molded by human impact. 
  Not 100% untouched, of course, but largely left to its own devices,  
It would make lots of sense that the psychological strains of urban 
life and the benefits of going into nature from it would be noticed by 
urbanites, not country dwellers.

There is also the difference between being in a place that is dominated 
overwhelmingly by human creations, and a place that is not.  This leads 
to all manner of different things, from the spiritual to the 
psychological to the aesthetic to the shamanic.  So I'll llet it stop 
there.

This is just off the top of my head, and the examples are not trivial.  
I think the point is clear.  Whether we are or are not in nature is 
pretty much dependent on the context we focus on.

I get my knickers in a knot when context A is used to dispute the 
legitimacy of context B, or vice versa.

>
> Jim again: Now, it would be difficult to summarize Cronon's entire 
> book, proving to your satisfaction that it is indeed a book-length 
> elaboration of the thesis that "the 'romantic' view is held by people 
> with 'no actual experience of nature," but this thesis is in fact what 
> I believe the book to be saying (among other things).  Intelligent 
> people of goodwill on this list--and they are ALL intelligent people 
> of goodwill in my humble opinion--can read Nature's Metropolis and 
> determine this for themselves.  But Cronon provides additional clues 
> in his Prologue.
>
It's a damn BIG book, which is why I haven't yet.  But you have 
succeeded in moving it much higher up on my list.  So many books, so 
little time... SIGH.

> He writes:
>        "The urban-rural, human-natural dichotomy blinds us to the 
> deeper unity beneath our own divided perceptions.  If we concentrate 
> our attention solely upon the city, seeing in it the ultimate symbol 
> of 'man's' conquest of 'nature,' we miss the extent to which the 
> city's inhabitants continue to rely as much on the nonhuman world as 
> they do on each other.  We lose sight of the men and women whose many 
> lives and relationships--in city or country, in factory or field, in 
> workshop or countinghouse--cannot express themselves in so simple an 
> image as singular man conquering singular nature.  By forgetting these 
> people and their history, we also wall ourselves off from the broader 
> ecosystems which contain our urban homes.  Deep ecology to the 
> contrary, we cannot solve this dilemma by seeking permanent escape 
> from the city in a 'wild' nature untouched by human hands, for such an 
> escape requires us to build the same artificial mental wall between 
> nature and un-nature" (18).
>
Interesting passage - in part because of the kinds of unity he does not 
seem to be aware of.  Partly he seems to be complaining that 
environmentally concerned people don't pay enough attention to the 
powerless in our own society.  Sometimes true, sometimes not.  The 
anti-WTO demonstrations, whether you liked them or didn't like them, 
certainly focused on both.  And no - I don't want to get into that 
issue other than the point that the myopia Cronon describes did not 
seem evident there.  Whether it was well informed is another matter 
that is very complex.

I also sure don't read Arne Naess as advocating we depart from cities 
and live in the country as hunter gatherers or what have you.  A man 
who endorses the usefulness of snowmobiles for Inuit people does not 
easily fit Cronon's caricature.

So I give this passage maybe a "B" maybe a "B-"

Again - the stumbling point about
> "the 'romantic' view is held by people with 'no actual experience of 
> nature,"
Jim that is simply false.  How do you define experience?  Is the only 
experience of nature that you regard as real plowing a field?  Did Aldo 
Leopold have experience of nature?  Was he a romantic?  Was he an 
environmentalist?  It may also be as one of my points above suggested , 
that like vitamins, we realize our need when we are deprived of them.  
Otherwise we take them for granted.

So - if you want to continue this thread, answer please my question - 
"Did Aldo Leopold have experience of nature?"

> So I disagree with your assessment that Crichton and Cronon are 
> necessarily "apples and oranges"--again, and to make the point more 
> explicitly this time: I believe Crichton exhibits the influence of 
> Cronon's ideas.  It would be an interesting thing to ask Crichton 
> about this.
>
It would.  It would be even more interesting to discover whether 
Crichton understood Cronon, if he did.  I see no evidence of it.  There 
is next to nothing in his talk he couldn't have cribbed trom a 
Techcentral site and a Ron Bailey book.

> Now, to be sure, they differ a great deal as well, but I think that is 
> more in the respective *tone* each author adopts: Crichton, delivering 
> a 45 minute speech designed to be heard, intended to be provocative, 
> and crafted with the hope of keeping people in the audience awake 
> <smile>.   Cronon, on the other hand, the sober historian making an 
> extended 450 page book-length argument, with all the bells, whistles, 
> and scholarly apparatus that the written academic genre implies.
>
> So yes, Gus, Crichton and Cronon are in one sense, "apples and 
> oranges."  But I do not believe that the *argument* each individual is 
> making is necessarily that far apart from the other's.
>
And I obviously do.

> Enjoying the conversation,
> Jim
>
Also enjoying it - but remember my question about Leopold.

Gus

>
> Cronon, William. 1991. _Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great 
> West_. New York: W.W. Norton.