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Die Welt und wir. Politik im Anthropozän
Die USA sind ein gespaltenes Land: Auf der einen Seite werden Forderungen nach einem Green New Deal, nach einer allgemeinen Krankenversicherung und besserer öffentlicher Bildung immer lauter. Auf der anderen Seite sorgt Präsident Trump mit seinem Versprechen, den »Krieg gegen die Kohle« zu beenden, mit Steuererleichterungen für Reiche und Unternehmen sowie seinem rüpelhaften Benehmen bei seinen Anhängern für Begeisterung.
Jedediah Purdy zeigt, wie es zu dieser desaströsen Polarisierung kommen konnte und welch dramatische Folgen für Natur und Mensch sie hat. Ausgehend von klassischen Autoren wie Henry David Thoreau denkt er darüber nach, wie eine andere, eine nachhaltige und gemeinwohlorientierte Politik aussehen könnte. Wir leben in einer Welt, so Purdy, in der das Schicksal jedes einzelnen Menschen nicht nur mit dem aller anderen verknüpft ist, sondern vor allem mit dem der Erde, die wir zu besitzen meinen, die wir aber doch nur bewohnen.
Jedediah Purdy zeigt, wie es zu dieser desaströsen Polarisierung kommen konnte und welch dramatische Folgen für Natur und Mensch sie hat. Ausgehend von klassischen Autoren wie Henry David Thoreau denkt er darüber nach, wie eine andere, eine nachhaltige und gemeinwohlorientierte Politik aussehen könnte. Wir leben in einer Welt, so Purdy, in der das Schicksal jedes einzelnen Menschen nicht nur mit dem aller anderen verknüpft ist, sondern vor allem mit dem der Erde, die wir zu besitzen meinen, die wir aber doch nur bewohnen.
187 pages, Perfect Paperback
First published September 1, 2015
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March 24, 2016
A tease of book: tantalizing, frustrating, ends with a kiss that could be so much more.
Hugging a relatively conventional environmental history are a series of chapters that lay out and flirt with a potentially interesting series of arguments. But the book doesn't do more than touch on these.
The book opens with a prologue and introduction that take up the first fifty pages of the book--a book that is less than three hundred pages; indeed, the central narrative runs only about 175 pages more before two concluding chapters. It is these four parts, and not the six body chapters that bring the excitement.
The prologue lays out what it means to (possibly) be living in the anthropocene. That is to say, in a geological epoch that is marked most significantly by the actions of humans: by the animals we drive to extinction (and those we subsidize), by the pollen of our crops that coat the earth, and by the climate that we have decidedly altered. If ever there was a division between humans and nature--this is not clear, and Purdy hedges it: it's one of those topics I wish he had explored more--there no longer is.
For Purdy, this revolution in the understanding of nature is one of three important revolutions. The others are the collapse in the belief of a politics that is natural and an economics that follows natural laws. We now must confront that politics, economics, and nature are all our creations, and our responsibility. It's an open question whether humans will bother to pick up their responsibility. Purdy understands that his book is written at a time when there's no indication that humans are ready to do so--that there is no concept of "we." Her hopes his book might nudge the world toward burdening themselves with their responsibility.
I am more pessimistic than him, though, given all the different things humans are responsible for creating-terrorism, inequality, certain forms of disease, etc.,--that we have refused to deal with. We continue to naturalize these problems. Purdy's hope is that we stop using nature as a normative term altogether. From his lips to God's ears.
Our responsibilities begin, as Delmore Schwartz said, in our dreams--or what Purdy calls our imagination. Humans imagine certain ways of interacting with the natural world, and these imaginings our brought to fruition through laws, which create the landscapes in which we live. (There is a circuit, he says, between imagination, law, and landscape.) Consider the Midwest's division in square plots, he says, which came out of certain imagination and a certain legal regime. Not all landscapes, though, are so carefully created, and he admits that the landscape of his own youth--the Appalachia--is mostly ignored, created out of indifference.
Purdy has an admirably clear prose style, and the lawyer's predilection for categories. (He's a legal scholar.) And so he identifies four different imaginings that have shaped America--what he calls the Providential: that God was given to humankind and can be completed and made perfect through labor' the Romantic--in which certain sublime landscapes, particularly montane ones, are natural cathedrals for the spiritual development of the human self; the utilitarian--in which nature is a storehouse of goods for humans to be carefully managed by experts; and the ecological--in which nature is an intricate web that includes humans, the good and the ill both propagating through it.
In many ways, one can see these as close to Foucaltian epistemes, with one following the other--but never completely eradicating the previous, such that in the early 21st century we are the inheritors of all four, our politics about nature drawing on each of these strands. Each also has parts that are cut out--and ways in which the radical implications of the projects are stopped. The providential idea that characterized much of American action from its first discovery by Europeans into the early 19th century obviously ignored the place of Native Americans as well as the role of slaves in the economy and construction of the country.
The utilitarian view, which underwrote the conservation movement of the first half of the twentieth century ignored democracy and ceded political decisions to a cadre of experts, usually distant from the place where the actions were taken place. The Romantic vision ignored the environmental issues of everyday life--choosing to protect those places that became national parks and cites of vacations, but not the places where people lived all the time. The ecological vision, arising since the 1960s, has turned away from politics toward the market--borrowing from the conservation movement--without acknowledging that the act of pricing is political.
Inside each of these political moments were radical possibilities that were snubbed. The providential imagination could have been radical if it opened up democratic citizenship to a wider array of people and if it avoided naturalizing concepts such as property and rights. The Romantic vision turned away from the way their view could have connected humans to nature on the everyday level and instead opted for turning nature into a consumer object--someplace to visit was tourists.
The utilitarian vision promised to show that humans needed to take responsibility for the world that they created, but rather than pursuing that idea, vested the power in a few elites, who were mostly concerned over the loss of white men's privilege. Finally, the ecological vision has turned into making everything a continuous crisis, and has opted for market mechanisms over democratic ones. Indeed, Purdy sees two possible futures, a neoliberal one, that expands the already gaping global inequalities (climate change destroying the poor, while the rich are buffered) and a democratic one, in which a wider and wider array of people--and things?--involve themselves in politics to discuss the outcomes they want without naturalizing any of the answers.
This sets up a potentially interesting exploration of contemporary environmental politics--whether one buys into the anthropocene or not--but rather than follow up with a continuation of the argument, Purdy dips back into history to show the development of each of these ideas and their application via particular legal regimes. Which is ground that has been covered, a lot, over the last forty years by environmental historians. Admittedly,t hey didn't use his categories, but the story is well known by this point. But instead of building on what's come before, it feels as though Purdy is writing this book to bring legal scholars up to speed--even as he barely cites environmental historians (beyond Donald Worster and William Cronon).
I really wanted him to assume the history and move on, but it's not my book. He did tell the story with interesting enough details, but nothing here changes what environmental historians have been saying for twenty, thirty years.
Then we come to the last couple of chapters, where Purdy comes back to his argument. He is very vested in the idea that the only way to deal with the issues is politics. He cites Habermas here, but the argument reminds me more of another Marxist, Steven Vogel, whose Against Nature made many of the same arguments. And while I am uncomfortable with the conclusion, I also have to admit its wisdom.
My discomfort is really a form of narcissism. Politics sucks, I want to be above it, so I want a different way. But there really isn't another way. Politics is all we have.
And we have to be clear about our terms, which is where Purdy starts sketching in some interesting caveats to the democratic future he sees, but never develops them fully. (Oh those wasted 175 pages!) He is careful to stomp out any recourses to one thing or another being "natural" and therefore unchangeable: if nothing else, that's what the anthropocene teaches us, that we cannot use nature normatively. He is also appropriately skeptical of expertise--though he is not quite recursive enough on that, since the "debate" over climate change is also a debate over who counts as expertise.
He also pushes against the humanism inherent in his story--pointing toward recent work (Jane Bennet, e.g.) who want to broaden democracy to involve non-human actors --and wondering what our responsibilities to animals are--but these discussions are abbreviated and suggestive, not definitive. They are pointings toward essays, but not essays themselves.
They are teases.
Although I guess there are worse things to say about a book than that upon finishing you wanted more.
Hugging a relatively conventional environmental history are a series of chapters that lay out and flirt with a potentially interesting series of arguments. But the book doesn't do more than touch on these.
The book opens with a prologue and introduction that take up the first fifty pages of the book--a book that is less than three hundred pages; indeed, the central narrative runs only about 175 pages more before two concluding chapters. It is these four parts, and not the six body chapters that bring the excitement.
The prologue lays out what it means to (possibly) be living in the anthropocene. That is to say, in a geological epoch that is marked most significantly by the actions of humans: by the animals we drive to extinction (and those we subsidize), by the pollen of our crops that coat the earth, and by the climate that we have decidedly altered. If ever there was a division between humans and nature--this is not clear, and Purdy hedges it: it's one of those topics I wish he had explored more--there no longer is.
For Purdy, this revolution in the understanding of nature is one of three important revolutions. The others are the collapse in the belief of a politics that is natural and an economics that follows natural laws. We now must confront that politics, economics, and nature are all our creations, and our responsibility. It's an open question whether humans will bother to pick up their responsibility. Purdy understands that his book is written at a time when there's no indication that humans are ready to do so--that there is no concept of "we." Her hopes his book might nudge the world toward burdening themselves with their responsibility.
I am more pessimistic than him, though, given all the different things humans are responsible for creating-terrorism, inequality, certain forms of disease, etc.,--that we have refused to deal with. We continue to naturalize these problems. Purdy's hope is that we stop using nature as a normative term altogether. From his lips to God's ears.
Our responsibilities begin, as Delmore Schwartz said, in our dreams--or what Purdy calls our imagination. Humans imagine certain ways of interacting with the natural world, and these imaginings our brought to fruition through laws, which create the landscapes in which we live. (There is a circuit, he says, between imagination, law, and landscape.) Consider the Midwest's division in square plots, he says, which came out of certain imagination and a certain legal regime. Not all landscapes, though, are so carefully created, and he admits that the landscape of his own youth--the Appalachia--is mostly ignored, created out of indifference.
Purdy has an admirably clear prose style, and the lawyer's predilection for categories. (He's a legal scholar.) And so he identifies four different imaginings that have shaped America--what he calls the Providential: that God was given to humankind and can be completed and made perfect through labor' the Romantic--in which certain sublime landscapes, particularly montane ones, are natural cathedrals for the spiritual development of the human self; the utilitarian--in which nature is a storehouse of goods for humans to be carefully managed by experts; and the ecological--in which nature is an intricate web that includes humans, the good and the ill both propagating through it.
In many ways, one can see these as close to Foucaltian epistemes, with one following the other--but never completely eradicating the previous, such that in the early 21st century we are the inheritors of all four, our politics about nature drawing on each of these strands. Each also has parts that are cut out--and ways in which the radical implications of the projects are stopped. The providential idea that characterized much of American action from its first discovery by Europeans into the early 19th century obviously ignored the place of Native Americans as well as the role of slaves in the economy and construction of the country.
The utilitarian view, which underwrote the conservation movement of the first half of the twentieth century ignored democracy and ceded political decisions to a cadre of experts, usually distant from the place where the actions were taken place. The Romantic vision ignored the environmental issues of everyday life--choosing to protect those places that became national parks and cites of vacations, but not the places where people lived all the time. The ecological vision, arising since the 1960s, has turned away from politics toward the market--borrowing from the conservation movement--without acknowledging that the act of pricing is political.
Inside each of these political moments were radical possibilities that were snubbed. The providential imagination could have been radical if it opened up democratic citizenship to a wider array of people and if it avoided naturalizing concepts such as property and rights. The Romantic vision turned away from the way their view could have connected humans to nature on the everyday level and instead opted for turning nature into a consumer object--someplace to visit was tourists.
The utilitarian vision promised to show that humans needed to take responsibility for the world that they created, but rather than pursuing that idea, vested the power in a few elites, who were mostly concerned over the loss of white men's privilege. Finally, the ecological vision has turned into making everything a continuous crisis, and has opted for market mechanisms over democratic ones. Indeed, Purdy sees two possible futures, a neoliberal one, that expands the already gaping global inequalities (climate change destroying the poor, while the rich are buffered) and a democratic one, in which a wider and wider array of people--and things?--involve themselves in politics to discuss the outcomes they want without naturalizing any of the answers.
This sets up a potentially interesting exploration of contemporary environmental politics--whether one buys into the anthropocene or not--but rather than follow up with a continuation of the argument, Purdy dips back into history to show the development of each of these ideas and their application via particular legal regimes. Which is ground that has been covered, a lot, over the last forty years by environmental historians. Admittedly,t hey didn't use his categories, but the story is well known by this point. But instead of building on what's come before, it feels as though Purdy is writing this book to bring legal scholars up to speed--even as he barely cites environmental historians (beyond Donald Worster and William Cronon).
I really wanted him to assume the history and move on, but it's not my book. He did tell the story with interesting enough details, but nothing here changes what environmental historians have been saying for twenty, thirty years.
Then we come to the last couple of chapters, where Purdy comes back to his argument. He is very vested in the idea that the only way to deal with the issues is politics. He cites Habermas here, but the argument reminds me more of another Marxist, Steven Vogel, whose Against Nature made many of the same arguments. And while I am uncomfortable with the conclusion, I also have to admit its wisdom.
My discomfort is really a form of narcissism. Politics sucks, I want to be above it, so I want a different way. But there really isn't another way. Politics is all we have.
And we have to be clear about our terms, which is where Purdy starts sketching in some interesting caveats to the democratic future he sees, but never develops them fully. (Oh those wasted 175 pages!) He is careful to stomp out any recourses to one thing or another being "natural" and therefore unchangeable: if nothing else, that's what the anthropocene teaches us, that we cannot use nature normatively. He is also appropriately skeptical of expertise--though he is not quite recursive enough on that, since the "debate" over climate change is also a debate over who counts as expertise.
He also pushes against the humanism inherent in his story--pointing toward recent work (Jane Bennet, e.g.) who want to broaden democracy to involve non-human actors --and wondering what our responsibilities to animals are--but these discussions are abbreviated and suggestive, not definitive. They are pointings toward essays, but not essays themselves.
They are teases.
Although I guess there are worse things to say about a book than that upon finishing you wanted more.
April 3, 2017
after the 2016 U.S. election, this book really provoked a lot of thought for me over the merits of embracing a more democratic politics. a worthy read.
March 30, 2016
A pleasure to read - clear prose, clear ideas, well written.
Purdy describes the sedimentary layers of perspectives and institutions that form our relationship with the natural world (which may not be so natural in the age of the Anthropocene).
I particularly liked the delicate call to an environmental/ethical imagination through the post-human (or, at least, enriched humanism).
"The call to post-humanism is worth taking seriously for at least two reasons. First, it is an effort to understand the ethical complacency that enables humans to remake and destroy the nonhuman world, turning species into industrial food reserves and landscapes into fuel, mostly without more than a blink of hesitation. Post-humanists propose that these things are easy for us to do because of a worldview that puts people and our interests squarely at the centre. Nudging humans away from their special place at the center of the world might be a productive response, a Copernican revolution in ethical imagination" (p.274).
I'm not sure he answered the questions he posed, "What are we doing? What shall we do next?", but he makes a good case for 'the democracy of self-restraint'.
Purdy describes the sedimentary layers of perspectives and institutions that form our relationship with the natural world (which may not be so natural in the age of the Anthropocene).
I particularly liked the delicate call to an environmental/ethical imagination through the post-human (or, at least, enriched humanism).
"The call to post-humanism is worth taking seriously for at least two reasons. First, it is an effort to understand the ethical complacency that enables humans to remake and destroy the nonhuman world, turning species into industrial food reserves and landscapes into fuel, mostly without more than a blink of hesitation. Post-humanists propose that these things are easy for us to do because of a worldview that puts people and our interests squarely at the centre. Nudging humans away from their special place at the center of the world might be a productive response, a Copernican revolution in ethical imagination" (p.274).
I'm not sure he answered the questions he posed, "What are we doing? What shall we do next?", but he makes a good case for 'the democracy of self-restraint'.
January 24, 2017
This is a great tracing of the discourse about the environment from the beginnings of the United States (even earlier a bit) and how talking about nature, wilderness, and environment shaped what it came to be. The Anthropocene is not a very new concept from Purdy's point of view; his argument is that legal discourse has always been shaping what counts as "nature" over the years of policy, popular press books, and activists pushing together and sometimes against one another to create the "nature" they want. The last two chapters of the book are the best for getting a sense of where we sit now with "wilderness" or "nature" in our collective minds, fueled by legal interpretations as well as the books we love that discuss wilderness scenes and life out in nature. Great read. It is somewhat similar to Carlo Marx's book "The Machine in the Garden" to where I think if you read them together you would really get a lot more out of both. This book is a lot less academic-oriented than Marx's book which is very well researched and detailed. Purdy's is too, but it is written in a popular press style.
November 3, 2015
Worth reading if it's in your field/scope. It traces attitudes towards the environment in an effort to discuss the political implications of the Anthropocene, ultimately arguing for a kind of post-human-friendly form of democracy. It was too American though--more or less a history of dominant American views of nature/environment. The title seemed to promise a bit more of a theoretical and political engagement.
November 16, 2015
A providential, Locke-ian model of nature in which the land must be worked to be claimed. A logic used in the 18th and 19th centuries to legitimize settler colonialism and delegitimize the idea that first nations people had a claim to the land.
A romantic, Sierra Club model of nature which sees it as sublime, something to preserve in national parks and tourist get aways. Radical because it shook consciousness and then the least radical because a relationship with nature that kept it over there, for visits, separate from culture.
A progressive or preservationist model of nature represented by Roosevelt. Experts and technocrats who will manage nature. Less democratic because accorded to a select few. Nature is mixed up with civic spirit and administrative expertise.
The ecological model in which nature becomes something closer to the environment. Now it is all pervasive and the soil in your back yard is related to the spill at Deep Water. Interdependence comes to the fore.
Environmental law and its struggles to accord standing to nature.
Sierra Club v. Morton in which the former opposes the development of California's Mineral King Valley and that justice adopts an "animst-toned dissent", writing about the "river as plaintiff... the voice of the inanimate object..." (210). Another justice in the same case riters of "an imaginative expansion of our traditional concepts of standing" (210).
A post-humanist conclusion:
Is post-humanism not also rightly called "ecocentrism", "new animism" or "politics of nature"?
The post-humanist understanding of self-organizing matter - "autopoesis" - in which all living things reproduce and shape "mere matter" into distinctive forms, whatever they may be. What we become does not make us unique, just distinct, for every living thing has become as well.
1) a post humanist call denies the ethical complacency with which humans remake and destroy the nonhuman world.
2) Deny that those "meanings" in the nonhuman world are just human projections. Instead, acknowledg that there is a great swath of nonhuman experience, perception and relations that form the environmental imagination.
*) a reminder that our human equality - that we are all matter and bacteria - does not imply respect or sympathy for other life. "The bases of that respect lie elsewhere" (278).
Purdy is great at taking both sides.
1) I wonder how much I agree with Purdy's claim that "calls for inter-species egalitarianism can for a politics based in councils of all beings can only be metaphors." I wonder if all we can do is acknowledge what we don't know and ascribe value to the things we don't know.
2) I am moved that he writes of the signal human achievement as artificial. Our politics and laws as artificial, thin and superficial and remote against the powerful resonances of identity and experience. Language: a poor thing to rely on. A call for greater reliance on linguistic interpretations of natural, emotional and bodily experience. (281)
"What kind of democracy, then? At least in part, a democracy open to the strange intuitions of post-humanism: intuitions of ethical affinity with other species, of the moral importance of land-scapes and climats, of the permeable line between humans and the rest of the living world" (282).
A romantic, Sierra Club model of nature which sees it as sublime, something to preserve in national parks and tourist get aways. Radical because it shook consciousness and then the least radical because a relationship with nature that kept it over there, for visits, separate from culture.
A progressive or preservationist model of nature represented by Roosevelt. Experts and technocrats who will manage nature. Less democratic because accorded to a select few. Nature is mixed up with civic spirit and administrative expertise.
The ecological model in which nature becomes something closer to the environment. Now it is all pervasive and the soil in your back yard is related to the spill at Deep Water. Interdependence comes to the fore.
Environmental law and its struggles to accord standing to nature.
Sierra Club v. Morton in which the former opposes the development of California's Mineral King Valley and that justice adopts an "animst-toned dissent", writing about the "river as plaintiff... the voice of the inanimate object..." (210). Another justice in the same case riters of "an imaginative expansion of our traditional concepts of standing" (210).
A post-humanist conclusion:
Is post-humanism not also rightly called "ecocentrism", "new animism" or "politics of nature"?
The post-humanist understanding of self-organizing matter - "autopoesis" - in which all living things reproduce and shape "mere matter" into distinctive forms, whatever they may be. What we become does not make us unique, just distinct, for every living thing has become as well.
1) a post humanist call denies the ethical complacency with which humans remake and destroy the nonhuman world.
2) Deny that those "meanings" in the nonhuman world are just human projections. Instead, acknowledg that there is a great swath of nonhuman experience, perception and relations that form the environmental imagination.
*) a reminder that our human equality - that we are all matter and bacteria - does not imply respect or sympathy for other life. "The bases of that respect lie elsewhere" (278).
Purdy is great at taking both sides.
1) I wonder how much I agree with Purdy's claim that "calls for inter-species egalitarianism can for a politics based in councils of all beings can only be metaphors." I wonder if all we can do is acknowledge what we don't know and ascribe value to the things we don't know.
2) I am moved that he writes of the signal human achievement as artificial. Our politics and laws as artificial, thin and superficial and remote against the powerful resonances of identity and experience. Language: a poor thing to rely on. A call for greater reliance on linguistic interpretations of natural, emotional and bodily experience. (281)
"What kind of democracy, then? At least in part, a democracy open to the strange intuitions of post-humanism: intuitions of ethical affinity with other species, of the moral importance of land-scapes and climats, of the permeable line between humans and the rest of the living world" (282).
Read
January 6, 2024I'm reading through Lithub's 365 Books to Start Your Climate Change Library, a reading list in four sections (Classics, Science, Fiction & Poetry, and Ideas). This book is #11 of Part 4: The Ideas and #39 overall.
I'm not that big a fan of the "history of ideas" book, as I feel that it often suffers from dryness & a lack of narrative that a straightforward history wouldn't. Also working against this book is the fact that much of the history was covered more compellingly in Michelle Nijhuis' Beloved Beasts . Nevertheless, Purdy's categorization of American attitudes towards nature is a helpful way to better understand the warring paradigms that led to our current relationship with the environment, both in our specific laws & in our general beliefs about what the natural world is for and how we should interact with it. He then argues that a new paradigm is necessary, and gives recommendations for how to approach the issue in the new reality of the Anthropocene.
I don't think this book's specifics will stick with me for too long, but it did help clarify some things about the American treatment of the environment, and it got me thinking harder about some issues in environmental law, so it was worth the read.
I'm not that big a fan of the "history of ideas" book, as I feel that it often suffers from dryness & a lack of narrative that a straightforward history wouldn't. Also working against this book is the fact that much of the history was covered more compellingly in Michelle Nijhuis' Beloved Beasts . Nevertheless, Purdy's categorization of American attitudes towards nature is a helpful way to better understand the warring paradigms that led to our current relationship with the environment, both in our specific laws & in our general beliefs about what the natural world is for and how we should interact with it. He then argues that a new paradigm is necessary, and gives recommendations for how to approach the issue in the new reality of the Anthropocene.
I don't think this book's specifics will stick with me for too long, but it did help clarify some things about the American treatment of the environment, and it got me thinking harder about some issues in environmental law, so it was worth the read.
January 2, 2025
This was the first book we read during my time at the OE, and while it was an incredibly difficult read, and one that I will not be trying again, I learned more than I thought I did. The “Anthropocene” is still incredibly fascinating to me.
May 23, 2017
As per usual, Jedediah Purdy brings a cohort of historical context and interesting thought to this subject. For those with little grounding in the economic and political history of humanity's relationship to the environment (mostly examined in the US in his summary here) this is a five-star book. However, if you were hoping to get a full appraisal of the current political and economic situation with some specific, concrete ideas as to how to meet the challenges presented by the "Anthropocene," era then you will be somewhat disappointed. The final 60 or so pages contain his actual material on the current challenges of climate change and over-population and have some wonderfully phrased thoughts on the subject:
"So long as the economy treats greenhouse-gas emissions and soil exhaustion as free and the legal system permits the mass feeding operations and slaughterhouses of industrial agriculture, a good deal of changed consciousness will mean no more than shuffling furniture between the first-class and second-class cabins of the Titanic."
However, he admits shortly thereafter that there really won't be much in the way of specifics in this concluding section and that such specifics, at least to him, are impossible to state outright:
"It is important to emphasize that no one really knows what a democracy on the scale of the Anthropocene challenges - global in scope and deep in the reach of its unavoidably shaping relationship to the living world - would look like."
Thus while most readers will agree with several of his earlier premises, those same readers will likely feel somewhat cheated by his concluding remarks. For those with little background in the area, 5 stars, for those already familiar with environmental policy especially in the US, 3 stars.
"So long as the economy treats greenhouse-gas emissions and soil exhaustion as free and the legal system permits the mass feeding operations and slaughterhouses of industrial agriculture, a good deal of changed consciousness will mean no more than shuffling furniture between the first-class and second-class cabins of the Titanic."
However, he admits shortly thereafter that there really won't be much in the way of specifics in this concluding section and that such specifics, at least to him, are impossible to state outright:
"It is important to emphasize that no one really knows what a democracy on the scale of the Anthropocene challenges - global in scope and deep in the reach of its unavoidably shaping relationship to the living world - would look like."
Thus while most readers will agree with several of his earlier premises, those same readers will likely feel somewhat cheated by his concluding remarks. For those with little background in the area, 5 stars, for those already familiar with environmental policy especially in the US, 3 stars.
November 3, 2015
Purdy offers a useful framework for periodizing different phases of the "environmental imaginary" in US history, with specific attention to how this was embodied in law. We see artifacts of these past ways of thinking about the environment in our land grant colleges, in the square counties of states like Iowa, in the national parks, in our laws governing pollution, etc. He traces how these environmental imaginaries emerge and how they inevitably coexist, in tension or in harmony. New ways of conceptualizing nature often subsume or cobble together those of the past.
The book was less strong at the end, in which Purdy reflects on the environmental laws and participatory democracy needed in the "Anthropocene." I found the contrast between this new conceptualization and the fourth one of his periodization--ecological--somewhat unclear. And I would have liked to see the final chapter move away from abstraction and to more deeply engage with the global aspect of the problems we face.
Despite that, it was a highly readable and well-argued book, and I would certainly recommended.
The book was less strong at the end, in which Purdy reflects on the environmental laws and participatory democracy needed in the "Anthropocene." I found the contrast between this new conceptualization and the fourth one of his periodization--ecological--somewhat unclear. And I would have liked to see the final chapter move away from abstraction and to more deeply engage with the global aspect of the problems we face.
Despite that, it was a highly readable and well-argued book, and I would certainly recommended.
August 22, 2019
Many books attempt to understand why we as a society and culture can’t come to grips with acting on what we know about climate change. Polls show that even a majority of Americans believe something is awry with our climate — and that we must do something about it. Trying to comprehend our collective inaction, and further, attempting to devise a way to inspire, motivate and gather momentum for implementing the systemic changes (and sacrifices) it will take to turn back our climate-destroying habit and behaviors has turned into a sub-field of the climate and environmental book genre.
After Nature by law professor Jedediah Purdy tries to outline a new politics for our age, a way of positioning our way of governing and managing ourselves that is conducive not just to the environment but the way we run our society. His optimism and faith in democracy is not necessarily wrong — though in our current moment it sure can seem misplaced — but that is not the issue. The issue is that his reliance on democracy does not do enough to move or change the status quo. While he is persuasive and correct in arguing that collectively we must, as a society, be on board with the a new direction to manage our environmental issues, I don’t see much of a path from his argument that differs from the one we’re already on.
We need directional, substantial, significant change — what Purdy offers is too much of hope. I did not come away from this book with any greater understanding or optimism that we as Americans (and this book focuses exclusively on American attitudes and history) have within us the wherewithal to combat climate change (and the lifestyles that are causing it) in any serious way. Nor do I think the author really offers us a way forward or any concrete suggestions. His emphasis is on politics; other books I’ve read on this matter have looked at behavioral economics and communications theory to try to understand how we can make individual Americans collectively want to take part in addressing the climate disruption all around us.
So while I was disappointed in what the book had to offer for moving forward, I did enjoy the extensive history the author provided on the roots of environmentalism and philosophy towards nature in America, from its founding through the passage of key environmental legislation like the Endangered Species Act.
It’s not always a pretty picture. Purdy is honest about some of the troubling elements in early environmentalism: that in wanting to protect the “natural” order of things, in order to preserve the world as it should be, many early environmental thinkers, some of them with ties to Theodore Roosevelt and even John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, aligned their philosophy about nature with racial purity and white supremacy. As early political leaders and philosophers began to protect some of America’s landscapes, it was clear that they were protecting these spaces either for themselves, and/or for a purpose that was to exclude others, specifically non-whites and most assuredly Native Americans, and at best those of an inferior economic class.
Purdy also does an excellent job at exploring just why Muir, Thoreau and other of our country’s first environmentalists were interested in nature.
What is it for? Why must we keep it — and how are we to “use” it, if we use it at all? Is there a purpose to nature, and if so, who decides what that purpose is? Needless to say, these questions remain contentious even in our society today.
Manifest Destiny calls for American to exploit the land of America — that the concept of wilderness implies wasted land and resources. But we’ve clearcut our way across the country, paved it over, taken out whole species at rates not seen before on our planet. One of our major parties continues to publicly view climate change as a hoax or as a mechanism through which to suppress corporate growth. To many, industry and development is what the land and its resources are for. If we cook the planet, deplete those resources, lose some plants and animals in the process, that’s just the cost of doing business and producing the American way of life. They don’t see it as a problem but a feature.
When the colonists first arrived, there was a vast country to explore and “discover.” As America grew, it felt as if this land was there for the taking, literally and figuratively. And if there was any innate value to the beauty of nature, of preserving the areas that would become our national parks and monuments, it was for the benefit of only those who could go, visit, feel whatever they would feel or experience while there, then return to society with a renewed sense of themselves and their place in the world. As for the Native Americans — and the way they viewed nature and other living things — since they weren’t developing the land themselves, they were essentially foregoing their right to it.
So we can sit here in our present day and tsk-tsk these environmental founders…but before we do we better make sure that we are any better. American are loathe to give up anything. Sacrifice is not part of the national creed. Nor is planning for a future beyond us, which adds up to a laissez-faire attitude about our planet that doesn’t bode well fur future generations.
In this book the author explores the underpinning of our philosophy toward nature, public land and the benefits or expectations of natural resources. I wish there was more of a guide for the future, as our politics seem wholly unable to rise to the occasion. But perhaps understanding how we’ve arrived at this moment in regards to our nation’s environmental history can help better position us for that movement. We don’t have that much time left…and hope is not enough.
After Nature by law professor Jedediah Purdy tries to outline a new politics for our age, a way of positioning our way of governing and managing ourselves that is conducive not just to the environment but the way we run our society. His optimism and faith in democracy is not necessarily wrong — though in our current moment it sure can seem misplaced — but that is not the issue. The issue is that his reliance on democracy does not do enough to move or change the status quo. While he is persuasive and correct in arguing that collectively we must, as a society, be on board with the a new direction to manage our environmental issues, I don’t see much of a path from his argument that differs from the one we’re already on.
We need directional, substantial, significant change — what Purdy offers is too much of hope. I did not come away from this book with any greater understanding or optimism that we as Americans (and this book focuses exclusively on American attitudes and history) have within us the wherewithal to combat climate change (and the lifestyles that are causing it) in any serious way. Nor do I think the author really offers us a way forward or any concrete suggestions. His emphasis is on politics; other books I’ve read on this matter have looked at behavioral economics and communications theory to try to understand how we can make individual Americans collectively want to take part in addressing the climate disruption all around us.
So while I was disappointed in what the book had to offer for moving forward, I did enjoy the extensive history the author provided on the roots of environmentalism and philosophy towards nature in America, from its founding through the passage of key environmental legislation like the Endangered Species Act.
It’s not always a pretty picture. Purdy is honest about some of the troubling elements in early environmentalism: that in wanting to protect the “natural” order of things, in order to preserve the world as it should be, many early environmental thinkers, some of them with ties to Theodore Roosevelt and even John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, aligned their philosophy about nature with racial purity and white supremacy. As early political leaders and philosophers began to protect some of America’s landscapes, it was clear that they were protecting these spaces either for themselves, and/or for a purpose that was to exclude others, specifically non-whites and most assuredly Native Americans, and at best those of an inferior economic class.
Purdy also does an excellent job at exploring just why Muir, Thoreau and other of our country’s first environmentalists were interested in nature.
What is it for? Why must we keep it — and how are we to “use” it, if we use it at all? Is there a purpose to nature, and if so, who decides what that purpose is? Needless to say, these questions remain contentious even in our society today.
Manifest Destiny calls for American to exploit the land of America — that the concept of wilderness implies wasted land and resources. But we’ve clearcut our way across the country, paved it over, taken out whole species at rates not seen before on our planet. One of our major parties continues to publicly view climate change as a hoax or as a mechanism through which to suppress corporate growth. To many, industry and development is what the land and its resources are for. If we cook the planet, deplete those resources, lose some plants and animals in the process, that’s just the cost of doing business and producing the American way of life. They don’t see it as a problem but a feature.
When the colonists first arrived, there was a vast country to explore and “discover.” As America grew, it felt as if this land was there for the taking, literally and figuratively. And if there was any innate value to the beauty of nature, of preserving the areas that would become our national parks and monuments, it was for the benefit of only those who could go, visit, feel whatever they would feel or experience while there, then return to society with a renewed sense of themselves and their place in the world. As for the Native Americans — and the way they viewed nature and other living things — since they weren’t developing the land themselves, they were essentially foregoing their right to it.
So we can sit here in our present day and tsk-tsk these environmental founders…but before we do we better make sure that we are any better. American are loathe to give up anything. Sacrifice is not part of the national creed. Nor is planning for a future beyond us, which adds up to a laissez-faire attitude about our planet that doesn’t bode well fur future generations.
In this book the author explores the underpinning of our philosophy toward nature, public land and the benefits or expectations of natural resources. I wish there was more of a guide for the future, as our politics seem wholly unable to rise to the occasion. But perhaps understanding how we’ve arrived at this moment in regards to our nation’s environmental history can help better position us for that movement. We don’t have that much time left…and hope is not enough.
February 2, 2020
Books I'd Pair This With For Class:
Walden
My First Summer in the Sierra
Silent Spring
Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England
The title and subtitle of the book, "After Nature" and "A Politics for the Anthropocene" are pretty misleading as to the content of the book. These titles truly only refer to the final chapters of the book, which discuss contemporary environmental law, philosophy, and democracy.
Most of the book is actually an intellectual history of environmentalism in the United States: from John Locke's conception of nature through Rachel Carson's denunciation of toxic pollution. These historical chapters are very well written, and Purdy has an incredible chronological framework for understanding how environmental-thinking has expanded over the centuries. Before our contemporary age, Purdy gives us four major trends that influenced Americans' relationship to the natural world:
1) Providential - Whereby God's plan for humanity involves working the land and procuring as many resources as possible. This conception of nature, Purdy tells us, was dominant in the American imagination from the time of Locke until Frederick Jackson Turner recognized that the Western frontier was closed in the late 19th century. This conception of nature only recognized the human necessity to master nature and build civilization.
2) Romantic - Whereby spiritual enlightenment and the enhancement of individual consciousness can arise from certain encounters with the natural world. Today we mainly attribute this understanding of nature to Thoreau or Emerson, but Purdy rightly points out the influence of John Muir and the Sierra Club for turning this attitude into a political program determined to preserve natural sites for the pleasure of the American public. From here we get the National Parks movement, and the determination to preserve unspoiled landscapes.
3) Utilitarian - Whereby the natural resources of the United States are understood to be precious and finite, therefore, technocratic administration is necessary to preserve national resources for the benefit of the country. This conception is related to the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century and the influential Presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. This view of nature is directly inspired by the Romantic ideals of the likes of the Sierra Club, though the spirituality is replaced by efficiency and nationalism. With this understanding of nature came the belief that nature (and humanity) could be sufficiently preserved by expert knowledge administered via government bureaucracies. For the first half of the twentieth century, this was the dominant mood.
4) Ecological - Whereby American civilization as a whole is understood as inseparable from the natural world, so if there is industrial pollution in nature, that pollution will make its way into the human body. This view begins in earnest in America with Rachael Carson's "Silent Spring" and influences environmental policy for the rest of the twentieth century. It led to new legislation that went beyond the mere preservation of land undertaken by the Romantics and Utilitarians. The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Environmental Protection Agency, and so forth all came into being in order to minimize the hazardous effects of industrial production on human populations. The upshot here is that industries became subject to regulations on a scale that they were not previously subject too during the previous eras. This provoked a backlash against regulation (and all forms of environmentalism in general) from corporate interests, who have been working for decades to remove environmental protection laws. This backlash has been taken up by those who have engaged in climate change denialism as a tactic against industrial regulation.
If the book were focused purely on these four movements, it would have been stronger as a whole. The introduction of the Anthropocene in the final two chapters feels a bit out of place with the rest of the analysis, but these two chapters are interesting enough in themselves. Purdy argues that we need to advocate for a "post-humanist" democracy and economic reforms that include the costs of pollution in the price of commodities. These are interesting ideas, but it feels like they need a book of their own. They appear only as sketches here.
For class, this book would be best used in conjunction with some of the books that Purdy discusses: the writings of Muir, Thoreau, Emerson, Carson, Turner, Locke, etc.
Walden
My First Summer in the Sierra
Silent Spring
Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England
The title and subtitle of the book, "After Nature" and "A Politics for the Anthropocene" are pretty misleading as to the content of the book. These titles truly only refer to the final chapters of the book, which discuss contemporary environmental law, philosophy, and democracy.
Most of the book is actually an intellectual history of environmentalism in the United States: from John Locke's conception of nature through Rachel Carson's denunciation of toxic pollution. These historical chapters are very well written, and Purdy has an incredible chronological framework for understanding how environmental-thinking has expanded over the centuries. Before our contemporary age, Purdy gives us four major trends that influenced Americans' relationship to the natural world:
1) Providential - Whereby God's plan for humanity involves working the land and procuring as many resources as possible. This conception of nature, Purdy tells us, was dominant in the American imagination from the time of Locke until Frederick Jackson Turner recognized that the Western frontier was closed in the late 19th century. This conception of nature only recognized the human necessity to master nature and build civilization.
2) Romantic - Whereby spiritual enlightenment and the enhancement of individual consciousness can arise from certain encounters with the natural world. Today we mainly attribute this understanding of nature to Thoreau or Emerson, but Purdy rightly points out the influence of John Muir and the Sierra Club for turning this attitude into a political program determined to preserve natural sites for the pleasure of the American public. From here we get the National Parks movement, and the determination to preserve unspoiled landscapes.
3) Utilitarian - Whereby the natural resources of the United States are understood to be precious and finite, therefore, technocratic administration is necessary to preserve national resources for the benefit of the country. This conception is related to the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century and the influential Presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. This view of nature is directly inspired by the Romantic ideals of the likes of the Sierra Club, though the spirituality is replaced by efficiency and nationalism. With this understanding of nature came the belief that nature (and humanity) could be sufficiently preserved by expert knowledge administered via government bureaucracies. For the first half of the twentieth century, this was the dominant mood.
4) Ecological - Whereby American civilization as a whole is understood as inseparable from the natural world, so if there is industrial pollution in nature, that pollution will make its way into the human body. This view begins in earnest in America with Rachael Carson's "Silent Spring" and influences environmental policy for the rest of the twentieth century. It led to new legislation that went beyond the mere preservation of land undertaken by the Romantics and Utilitarians. The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Environmental Protection Agency, and so forth all came into being in order to minimize the hazardous effects of industrial production on human populations. The upshot here is that industries became subject to regulations on a scale that they were not previously subject too during the previous eras. This provoked a backlash against regulation (and all forms of environmentalism in general) from corporate interests, who have been working for decades to remove environmental protection laws. This backlash has been taken up by those who have engaged in climate change denialism as a tactic against industrial regulation.
If the book were focused purely on these four movements, it would have been stronger as a whole. The introduction of the Anthropocene in the final two chapters feels a bit out of place with the rest of the analysis, but these two chapters are interesting enough in themselves. Purdy argues that we need to advocate for a "post-humanist" democracy and economic reforms that include the costs of pollution in the price of commodities. These are interesting ideas, but it feels like they need a book of their own. They appear only as sketches here.
For class, this book would be best used in conjunction with some of the books that Purdy discusses: the writings of Muir, Thoreau, Emerson, Carson, Turner, Locke, etc.
August 12, 2017
I enjoyed the book throughout, but if you get snagged in the early chapters after the introduction, you could jump to chapter 7. The intro and the last 2 chapters were the heart of the book.
July 14, 2025
After Nature tracks the relationship between Americans and their views on nature, “how Americans have shaped their landscape, and how ideas and practices have shaped American politics,” and it explains how all of their decisions made toward the environment have helped lead us to our current moment of the Anthropocene. Beginning at the onset of the industrial revolution, this is the era that blurred the distinction between mankind and nature and made clear the two purported divisions were undeniably intertwined and that it was humans who had an outsized influence on their changes.
Early colonial days saw the allegedly uncultivated American landscape as the devil’s domain, a place where Puritans and other pilgrims could stray from the path of God. But it simultaneously saw nature as a place that provided order and a mirror of the social and political hierarchy that allowed both kings and paupers to reaffirm and respect their stations in life.
This transitioned into a longer period throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where American settlers rejected this natural hierarchy by choosing to spread further west rather than remain in the lower orders. They attempted to build a life for themselves on their own terms and eventually use the land they believed God had given them to develop it for their own needs.
Nature also had the ability to teach various lessons to various groups, depending on the inclination of their environmental imagination. Indigenous groups were seen as more spiritual even if that meant they existed on the culturally undeveloped end of a spectrum of civilizational advancement. Henry David Thoreau was able to use nature as a metaphor for thinking differently while John Muir subsequently saw it as a restorative for the individual, at the expense of collective political action.
Perhaps most enlightening is Purdy’s section on the Progressive Era. Views of nature at the time were able to connect political threads–imperialism with nature conservation with technocratic politics–that otherwise didn’t seem to fit together. For leaders of this ideological outlook like Theodore Roosevelt, the resources nature provided were wonderful but needed to be rationed by bureaucrats because most Americans didn’t know how to balance their own self-interests with the greater good. And tamping down nature, as previous settlers had done, was no longer an option. Therefore, expanding into other territories was the natural conclusion of Manifest Destiny.
For all the book’s build up to its final section on the Anthropocene itself, this is, unfortunately, the most disappointing part. Purdy’s writing tends to be a bit long-winded in the first place, and that along with his inability to provide much of a conclusion is particularly frustrating. He offers many solutions of how people can approach a time that is so fraught with anthropogenic drought and disasters, but then he shoots them all down.
Democracy is nice but too sluggish and corrupted. Technology is morally blank and, therefore, has just as many bad uses as good ones. Economic ecology tries and fails to put a price on the unquantifiable aspects of nature. Humanism is too indifferent to nature while posthumanism presumes to know the thoughts of plants and animals in a way no one ever can.
I didn’t expect the definitive answer to the problem of climate change, but I was also hoping that Purdy’s expertise would allow for more than an indefinite deflection.
Early colonial days saw the allegedly uncultivated American landscape as the devil’s domain, a place where Puritans and other pilgrims could stray from the path of God. But it simultaneously saw nature as a place that provided order and a mirror of the social and political hierarchy that allowed both kings and paupers to reaffirm and respect their stations in life.
This transitioned into a longer period throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where American settlers rejected this natural hierarchy by choosing to spread further west rather than remain in the lower orders. They attempted to build a life for themselves on their own terms and eventually use the land they believed God had given them to develop it for their own needs.
Nature also had the ability to teach various lessons to various groups, depending on the inclination of their environmental imagination. Indigenous groups were seen as more spiritual even if that meant they existed on the culturally undeveloped end of a spectrum of civilizational advancement. Henry David Thoreau was able to use nature as a metaphor for thinking differently while John Muir subsequently saw it as a restorative for the individual, at the expense of collective political action.
Perhaps most enlightening is Purdy’s section on the Progressive Era. Views of nature at the time were able to connect political threads–imperialism with nature conservation with technocratic politics–that otherwise didn’t seem to fit together. For leaders of this ideological outlook like Theodore Roosevelt, the resources nature provided were wonderful but needed to be rationed by bureaucrats because most Americans didn’t know how to balance their own self-interests with the greater good. And tamping down nature, as previous settlers had done, was no longer an option. Therefore, expanding into other territories was the natural conclusion of Manifest Destiny.
For all the book’s build up to its final section on the Anthropocene itself, this is, unfortunately, the most disappointing part. Purdy’s writing tends to be a bit long-winded in the first place, and that along with his inability to provide much of a conclusion is particularly frustrating. He offers many solutions of how people can approach a time that is so fraught with anthropogenic drought and disasters, but then he shoots them all down.
Democracy is nice but too sluggish and corrupted. Technology is morally blank and, therefore, has just as many bad uses as good ones. Economic ecology tries and fails to put a price on the unquantifiable aspects of nature. Humanism is too indifferent to nature while posthumanism presumes to know the thoughts of plants and animals in a way no one ever can.
I didn’t expect the definitive answer to the problem of climate change, but I was also hoping that Purdy’s expertise would allow for more than an indefinite deflection.
August 24, 2020
Jed Purdy reviews American perceptions of their country, their relationship to the land, and how modern environmental laws conflict with earlier laws based on the settlement mentality and the use of public lands at a time when changes to the biosphere are changing more rapidly than they have ever. And from our perspective, they are changing for the worst.
One of the most striking observations of American polity in the book comes from the French traveller and writer Alexis de Tocqueville.
Tocqueville arrived at 3pm of a hot summer afternoon in the largely French village of Detroit in 1831.
He didn’t find the locals very welcoming or at all in awe of the wilderness beyond their village. Not surprising given how difficult and dangerous frontier life was in those days.
“Tocqueville’s intuition was that Americans’ isolation from one another, their evasion from their own warm and passionate energies, and their relentless, muscular, but cold-blooded struggle with nature were parts of a coherent outlook, which would foster both wealth and devastation.”
The author disagrees with Tocqueville’s observation. He didn’t think the outlook was necessarily coherent.
Based on my own observation of how Michigan residents reacted to COVID regulations I would have to agree with the author on this one.
Any American initiatives to deal effectively with climate change will come up against the accretion of laws and precedents to protect the sanctity of private property. Laws made at different times and law cases adjudicated by judges with different biases reflect different currents of thought in the community.
The current crisis of ecology is as political as the crisis in economics and government.
It’s what I have called the problem of inertia in government and I believe it could prevent Americans from ever ratifying a supra-national authority on any environmental matters to an international agreement or adjudicating body.
If there is any serious flaw in this timely book it is the sense of a parochial examination of the environmental catastrophe enveloping us. Climate change will not be an American issue, nor a Canadian, or Chinese. The laws this book examines arise out of intra-American conflict. He isn't necessarily wrong, but the argument feels a little cramped.
The author justly points out that climate change is not something to manage: it's something to get used to and to plan for. Humankind adjusted the global environment. And as we know from other scholarship, changes to the landscape began right at the dawn of homo sapiens, if not earlier. Now the changes are accelerating whether we like it or not. Nature doesn't approve or disapprove. Species are dying quietly. Coral is dying quietly. Humans stand to lose so much. So quickly.
One of the most striking observations of American polity in the book comes from the French traveller and writer Alexis de Tocqueville.
Tocqueville arrived at 3pm of a hot summer afternoon in the largely French village of Detroit in 1831.
He didn’t find the locals very welcoming or at all in awe of the wilderness beyond their village. Not surprising given how difficult and dangerous frontier life was in those days.
“Tocqueville’s intuition was that Americans’ isolation from one another, their evasion from their own warm and passionate energies, and their relentless, muscular, but cold-blooded struggle with nature were parts of a coherent outlook, which would foster both wealth and devastation.”
The author disagrees with Tocqueville’s observation. He didn’t think the outlook was necessarily coherent.
Based on my own observation of how Michigan residents reacted to COVID regulations I would have to agree with the author on this one.
Any American initiatives to deal effectively with climate change will come up against the accretion of laws and precedents to protect the sanctity of private property. Laws made at different times and law cases adjudicated by judges with different biases reflect different currents of thought in the community.
The current crisis of ecology is as political as the crisis in economics and government.
It’s what I have called the problem of inertia in government and I believe it could prevent Americans from ever ratifying a supra-national authority on any environmental matters to an international agreement or adjudicating body.
If there is any serious flaw in this timely book it is the sense of a parochial examination of the environmental catastrophe enveloping us. Climate change will not be an American issue, nor a Canadian, or Chinese. The laws this book examines arise out of intra-American conflict. He isn't necessarily wrong, but the argument feels a little cramped.
The author justly points out that climate change is not something to manage: it's something to get used to and to plan for. Humankind adjusted the global environment. And as we know from other scholarship, changes to the landscape began right at the dawn of homo sapiens, if not earlier. Now the changes are accelerating whether we like it or not. Nature doesn't approve or disapprove. Species are dying quietly. Coral is dying quietly. Humans stand to lose so much. So quickly.
November 25, 2017
An interesting, complex history of environmental science and policy in the U.S. Purdy traces the evolution of the public's perception of nature from frightening unknown wilderness to plunderable resource cache (including the incredibly shameful way white male landowners treated American Indians and African slaves to maximize it) to aesthetically vital getaway. The public policy that arose around it reflects influence from writers like Thoreau and changes in cultural perception thanks in large part to, for example, Teddy Roosevelt, and John Muir and the Sierra Club.
I found the history enlightening but felt the book was less effective as any kind of guide for what to do now. Purdy contends that we have arrived at a point in our natural history where the human effect overwhelms everything else, hence labeling this period the "Anthropocene." I don't think anyone who would read a book like this would deny it. Human-influenced climate change is an overwhelming scientific consensus. He further argues that politics are the only solution--we can't count on either technology or intrinsic human nature. We don't have to look too deeply into history to see them working either. The same postwar era that created the worst environmental problems tried to address them, too. Both parties agreed something should be done about it, and as a result the 1960s and '70s saw extremely ambitious environmental policy, like the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act.
They weren't perfect, so it'd be great to continue building on them, but today's political climate is profoundly broken. Entrenched industries own both major U.S. parties, one of which won't even acknowledge that human-influenced climate change exists, much less that it's a problem. But the book doesn't offer any novel solutions. It's more of an academic book than popular treatise or position statement, so perhaps that's not unexpected. But disappointing in the end.
I found the history enlightening but felt the book was less effective as any kind of guide for what to do now. Purdy contends that we have arrived at a point in our natural history where the human effect overwhelms everything else, hence labeling this period the "Anthropocene." I don't think anyone who would read a book like this would deny it. Human-influenced climate change is an overwhelming scientific consensus. He further argues that politics are the only solution--we can't count on either technology or intrinsic human nature. We don't have to look too deeply into history to see them working either. The same postwar era that created the worst environmental problems tried to address them, too. Both parties agreed something should be done about it, and as a result the 1960s and '70s saw extremely ambitious environmental policy, like the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act.
They weren't perfect, so it'd be great to continue building on them, but today's political climate is profoundly broken. Entrenched industries own both major U.S. parties, one of which won't even acknowledge that human-influenced climate change exists, much less that it's a problem. But the book doesn't offer any novel solutions. It's more of an academic book than popular treatise or position statement, so perhaps that's not unexpected. But disappointing in the end.
March 1, 2022
Have we come to a point in history where there are no clear boundaries between culture and nature? Can human activity now be considered such a force on the rest of the natural world, that cultural decisions are simultaneously decisions about nature? If so, what does this mean for human responsibility?
These are questions Jedediah Purdy wrestles with in After Nature. I will highly recommend the book for anyone interested in the future of democracy, economy, and ecology, in a world where human actions can not be understood in isolated domains, but need to be considered as affecting the whole complexity of life on earth.
Purdy starts by introducing his agenda of the book: To investigate what it might mean for our ethics, politics and, economy to live in the Anthropocene - "the age of humans". What concrete actions can we take to confront the complex problems of our time? These questions are however not processed until the book's last two chapters.
Before then, he demonstrates one of his key points in the book: Nature is not something "given"; nature is something co-created. By looking into American history, Purdy shows how our relationship to nature is constructive - it depends on which attitudes and concepts we carry with us when we approach it. Purdy shows several key approaches to nature, which I would summarize as divine, romantic, utilitarian, and ecological. I would however recommend skipping the parts of these chapters that don't interest you, as long as you get the gist of his points for each era (which can mostly be found in the last parts of each chapter ...)
Happy reading to anyone interested in approaching the age of humanity - which at the same time might be "an age post-humanity" ...
These are questions Jedediah Purdy wrestles with in After Nature. I will highly recommend the book for anyone interested in the future of democracy, economy, and ecology, in a world where human actions can not be understood in isolated domains, but need to be considered as affecting the whole complexity of life on earth.
Purdy starts by introducing his agenda of the book: To investigate what it might mean for our ethics, politics and, economy to live in the Anthropocene - "the age of humans". What concrete actions can we take to confront the complex problems of our time? These questions are however not processed until the book's last two chapters.
Before then, he demonstrates one of his key points in the book: Nature is not something "given"; nature is something co-created. By looking into American history, Purdy shows how our relationship to nature is constructive - it depends on which attitudes and concepts we carry with us when we approach it. Purdy shows several key approaches to nature, which I would summarize as divine, romantic, utilitarian, and ecological. I would however recommend skipping the parts of these chapters that don't interest you, as long as you get the gist of his points for each era (which can mostly be found in the last parts of each chapter ...)
Happy reading to anyone interested in approaching the age of humanity - which at the same time might be "an age post-humanity" ...
November 13, 2020
Kind of a slog (I haven't ready anything nearly this academic in a WHILE) but this is an interesting approach to addressing the Anthropocene and how humans can and should act within it. At first I was frustrated - why does there have to be so much focus on the narrative of white settlers, white men, etc they ruined everything etc - but of course, their worldview is what brought American society to where we are today and their worldviews absolutely still linger (undeveloped land as "waste", as something to be tamed, ordered, utilized; nature/wilderness as place of respite but for who; humans as central actors, the ones who control the natural world). These examples are solidified in environmental law practice, in which individual property rights still rule, and trees and rivers cannot exactly get representation.
It was helpful to take a step back from the distress of today's environmental justice movement and think about its origins. "The environment, the wholeness of the world, had to be named, and in some measure invented, before people could think of it as endangered and aim to save it." The term post-humanism was new to me but echos other ideas of interconnectivity and care that can be found in more recent visions of our future here if we can shift politically, economically, legally, to support an environmentally-oriented society.
It was helpful to take a step back from the distress of today's environmental justice movement and think about its origins. "The environment, the wholeness of the world, had to be named, and in some measure invented, before people could think of it as endangered and aim to save it." The term post-humanism was new to me but echos other ideas of interconnectivity and care that can be found in more recent visions of our future here if we can shift politically, economically, legally, to support an environmentally-oriented society.
March 21, 2019
Five stars for nuance and quality of thought, four stars for ending up more as a deeply complex starting point than the blueprint for renewed engagement I had hoped for based on the introduction and a really fine interview with him I read in the Atlantic.
Rounding up because it was such a pleasure to read a book with such incredible subtlety of thought and depth about approaches to nature and how the hell to wrap our heads around the bewildering moment of environmental crisis in which we find ourselves. If you are a reader tantalized by the new methodology he points towards but doesn't actually really discuss, I *strongly* suggest you get your hands on adrienne maree brown's visionary Emergent Strategy, which is to me the workbook for creating the kind of politics he so persuasively argues for. It makes a perfect follow-up.
Rounding up because it was such a pleasure to read a book with such incredible subtlety of thought and depth about approaches to nature and how the hell to wrap our heads around the bewildering moment of environmental crisis in which we find ourselves. If you are a reader tantalized by the new methodology he points towards but doesn't actually really discuss, I *strongly* suggest you get your hands on adrienne maree brown's visionary Emergent Strategy, which is to me the workbook for creating the kind of politics he so persuasively argues for. It makes a perfect follow-up.
June 21, 2020
I had Jedediah Purdy for Constitutional Law II as a visiting professor Georgetown. Although I probably didn't make much of an impression on him (I got a B), he struck me as one of those people processing things a notch or two higher than what I am able to muster. After Nature reinforced that. Aside being an essential read for those interested in the intellectual history of environmental exploitation and and environmental movement, it is also vivid display of intellectual prowess. Meticulously researched and powerfully written, it was constantly fascinating to read.
I like to read and walk, and I read much of it on hikes with the scouts, so my memories of the book are interwove with the trail, stepping across streams and walking in and out of dapples of light. That last bit doesn't have much to do with the book, but it's worth trying.
I like to read and walk, and I read much of it on hikes with the scouts, so my memories of the book are interwove with the trail, stepping across streams and walking in and out of dapples of light. That last bit doesn't have much to do with the book, but it's worth trying.
February 8, 2021
Although Purdy is a professor of law and many themes in After Nature are about politics, the book is largely about the interconnectedness of humanity and our environment. It’s a dense read but the payoff in the final few chapters (which I found to be the most interesting) made it worth it. It’s definitely a book I’d like to read again, or maybe in a classroom setting where I’d be able to unpack more of Purdy’s ideas.
“Losing nature need not mean losing the value of the living world, but it will mean engaging it differently. It may mean learning to find beauty in ordinary places, not just wonder in wild ones. It may mean treasuring places that are irremediably damaged, learning to prize what is neither pure nor natural, but just is—the always imperfect joint product of human powers and the natural world.”
“Losing nature need not mean losing the value of the living world, but it will mean engaging it differently. It may mean learning to find beauty in ordinary places, not just wonder in wild ones. It may mean treasuring places that are irremediably damaged, learning to prize what is neither pure nor natural, but just is—the always imperfect joint product of human powers and the natural world.”
January 21, 2019
Essential reading
Essential reading for anyone trying to understand the peculiar love-hate relationship that American citizens and governments have had with land conservation and environmental regulation. The author’s deep knowledge of the history of American attitudes and politics of natural resources is a good starting point to chart a way forward into a dimly seen future of increasing environmental uncertainty and urgency for action. While the answers offered are not always well-defined or convincing, the questions raised are the diggings needed to build a foundation for a livable future.
Essential reading for anyone trying to understand the peculiar love-hate relationship that American citizens and governments have had with land conservation and environmental regulation. The author’s deep knowledge of the history of American attitudes and politics of natural resources is a good starting point to chart a way forward into a dimly seen future of increasing environmental uncertainty and urgency for action. While the answers offered are not always well-defined or convincing, the questions raised are the diggings needed to build a foundation for a livable future.
September 29, 2019
Purdy does a good job walking us through the evolution of the American environmental imagination. The beginning of the book takes us through the Romantic period, moving into the development of conservation and its fraught relationship with eugenics. Most helpful and compelling in this book is the idea that as our relationship to the natural world shifts, so too must our grasp of our political imagination. In the face of such monumental crises, it's easy to rest on a live and let live feeling. But the reality is this moment is inherently political, and only the institutions created by a political revolution can respond to such a monumental crisis.
November 11, 2019
Instead of reading the book, I rather recommend to read the interview with the author in The Atlantic. It grasps well the essence and somehow summarize well the main findings human relationships with natural world and need to redefine our relationship with nature to solve biodiversity extinction or climate change challenges https://www.theatlantic.com/science/a...
May 6, 2018
The last two chapters of the book are the most interesting and I wish the first six had been condensed a bit more so more pages could be devoted to current questions surrounding the anthropocene, environmentalism and politics.
April 25, 2019
definitely more of a historical perspective on environmentalism in America, rather than an analysis of a post-natural world. So it wasn't what I was expecting or really looking for, but the historical background was nice.
September 11, 2021
this book was so fuckin boring oh my god,,, but if you are a political science major i bet you would think it was interesting. brings up some super cool ideas and fostered really interesting discussion! i was just,,, bored. read for school.
September 8, 2023
Totally thought provoking for me. I appreciated the thorough history presented, and conclusions drawn. Sometimes the writing get overly flowery, but it also caused me to learn new words, so I’m overall grateful!
July 27, 2018
Can't agree with his assessment of feminist posthumanism as a political dead end. Some good work here nevertheless.
January 3, 2020
as finished as this book will ever be ( for me at least)
so dense & boring
so dense & boring
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