This essay takes up one particular iteration of sustainability discourse, rooted in the American environmentalist tradition: seeing “man,” writ large, as an undifferentiated and usually malevolent force affecting “nature.” While this is but one strand of environmental thought, it is important (and, clearly, enduring). Here, I use this “man destroys nature” framework as a foil for this particular strand of environmental thought. That we often talk about environmental decline as a one-way street, from man to nature, reflects larger problems in how sustainability and justice are imagined. The fields of environmental feminism, environmental history, and environmental justice studies give us the tools to destabilize declensionist environmental narratives, thinking more critically about “man,” “nature,” and “destruction.” I outline key themes and contributions in these fields that offer new insights into how we can understand the complex milieu of our human relationships to the non-human world. What these fields suggest to us is that sustainabilities, like feminist epistemology, must be situated in contingent and intersectional environmental knowledge and experience.
Man Destroys Nature?
