How Urban Nature Exists in the Context of Nature and Culture?

2022 ◽  
pp. 69-100
Author(s):  
Jürgen Breuste
Keyword(s):  
Urban Nature ◽  
Nature And Culture

scholarly journals Forest re-seen: From the metropolis to the wilderness

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 345-366
Author(s):  
Yan Wang Preston
Keyword(s):  
Physical Space ◽  
Landscape Aesthetics ◽  
Urban Nature ◽  
The West ◽  
International Context ◽  
Landscape Photography ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Nature Restoration ◽  
Practice Based Research ◽  
Politics Of Nature

Rooted in practice-based research, the article uses the author’s artistic work as a springboard to discuss wider issues of ecology restoration, rewilding and environmental aesthetics. The first section of the article critically reviews and contextualizes the author’s eight-year photographic project, Forest, which investigates the politics of nature restoration projects in two new Chinese cities. Hinged upon contemporary environmental awareness and canonical photography aesthetics such as the topographic, the documentary and the storytelling, the Forest project pictorially and dialectically discusses the complexities of urban nature while beginning to accept urbanized China as a possible homeland. Extending the notion of constructed nature to an international context, within the global conversation efforts of re-naturalization and rewilding, the second section of the article analyses the inherent contradictions of rewilding in the post-wild world. The rewilded landscapes, the neo-wilderness, are brought into attention as a physical space to be investigated. The third section of the paper returns to its roots as practice-based research and tries to understand the neo-wilderness from the perspectives of landscape aesthetic traditions of both the West and China. The article finds commonality between three generations of representative western and male environmental photographers in their aesthetic choices and their philosophical grounding towards the sublime, pristine nature, as well as the binary between nature and culture. Finally, after a cautious discussion around the potential mis-use of Chinese traditional landscape aesthetics within contemporary landscape photography, the article points out the need to find alternative landscape aesthetics in order to critically investigate the meaning of nature now, with the constructed, rewilded landscapes as a crux for artists to produce an informed pictorial understanding.

Why Not the City?: Urban Hawk Watching and the End of Nature

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Hunold
Keyword(s):  
Urban Setting ◽  
Urban Nature ◽  
Multispecies Ethnography ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Ecological Features ◽  
Social Ecological ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The City ◽  
As If

This multispecies ethnography of red-tailed hawks and of the humans who observed and cared for them investigates everyday engagement with nature and culture in an urban setting. The proliferation of anthropogenic biomes and their attendant human-animal relations is one of the defining social-ecological features of our day. This transformation has caused many ecological disasters but has also created some opportunities, including for thinking more imaginatively about what it means to protect urban nature. Through their activities, interactions, and travels the hawks questioned where belongings are drawn, prompting humans to debate how the city does, can, and should include other animals. And by monitoring the hawks’ activities, the hawk watchers learned to imagine how things might be different if people acted as if the hawks had chosen to live in the city for reasons that made sense to them, if not necessarily to humans.

SWAZI ORAL LITERATURE, ECO-CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL APOCALYPSE

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Enongene Mirabeau Sone
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Knowledge ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Oral Literature ◽  
Resource Base ◽  
Healthy Environment ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Western Concept ◽  
Critical Resource ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Conservation Of Biodiversity

The main objective of this paper is to show how oral literature is engaged by Swazis with regards to environmental sustainability. It demonstrates the relationship between nature and culture as reflected in Swazi oral literature and how indigenous knowledge embedded in this literature can be used to expand the concepts of eco-literature and eco-criticism. The paper argues that the indigenous environmental expertise among the Swazi people, encapsulated in their oral literature, can serve as a critical resource base for the process of developing a healthy environment. Furthermore, the paper contends that eco-criticism, which is essentially a Western concept, can benefit by drawing inspiration from the indigenous knowledge contained in Swazi culture and expressed in their oral literature. The paper concludes by recommending the need to strengthen traditional and customary knowledge and practices by protecting and recognising the values of such systems in the conservation of biodiversity for sustainable development.

Medianatures

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-106
Author(s):  
Jussi Parikka
Keyword(s):  
Planetary Scale ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Visual Technologies

The article outlines the concept of medianatures. The term is a neologism and in debt to Donna Haraway’s rather eloquent and important coinage naturecultures that already functioned to mark the constant co-becomings of supposedly separated spheres of nature and culture. Medianatures is a further elaboration that elaborates the tie between the earth materialities that are mobilized for technological infrastructures, visual technologies, applications and devices, and the onto- epistemological stance that then feeds back into understanding those planetary scale earth materialities in the first place: the techniques of vision, observation, calculation, and circulation that are part of the governance of the earth and its various localities.

Nature and culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel J. M. M. Alberti
Keyword(s):  
Nature And Culture

Theological Ethics through a Multispecies Lens

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celia E. Deane-Drummond
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Future Orientation ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
Theological Ethics ◽  
Individual Decision ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Radical Approach

There are two driving questions informing this book. The first is where does our moral life come from? The presupposition is that considering morality broadly is inadequate. Instead, different aspects need to be teased apart. It is not sufficient to assume that different virtues are bolted onto a vicious animality, red in tooth and claw. Nature and culture have interlaced histories. By weaving in evolutionary theories and debates on the evolution of compassion, justice, and wisdom, the book shows a richer account of who we are as moral agents. The second driving question concerns our relationships with animals. There is dissatisfaction with animal rights frameworks and an argument instead for a more complex community-based multispecies approach. Hence, rather than extending rights, a more radical approach is a holistic multispecies framework for moral action. This need not weaken individual responsibility. The intention is not to develop a manual of practice, but rather to build towards an alternative philosophically informed approach to theological ethics, including animal ethics. The theological thread weaving through this account is wisdom. Wisdom has many different levels, and in the broadest sense is connected with the flow of life understood in its interconnectedness and sociality. It is profoundly theological and practical. In naming the project the evolution of wisdom a statement is being made about where wisdom may have come from and its future orientation. But justice, compassion, and conscience are not far behind, especially in so far as they are relevant to both individual decision-making and institutions.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document