Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man: Alternative Models of Reality and the Problematics of Human Reasoning

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-119
Author(s):  
Hilary Bedder
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Human Reasoning ◽  
Olive Schreiner ◽  
Alternative Models ◽  
Rational Mind

This article considers the presence of evolutionary theory in Olive Schreiner’s novel From Man to Man (1926) and the ways in which it  evokes her notion of a horizontal equality between all life forms. Her model extends the materiality inherent in the evolutionary  substructure to incorporate the noumenal. This in turn is validated by direct perception which, in Schreiner’s view, bypasses the distorting  rational mind that she sees as responsible for creating hierarchical dualistic models. Such models for Schreiner reflect a tendency to categorise and label in order to separate and dominate. The article considers how Schreiner’s use of an experimental narrative form allows her to explore and express her egalitarian principles. It further proposes that a re-evaluation of From Man to Man is salutary in ourcurrent environmental crisis, as it reminds us of how an evolutionary, longterm and non-anthropocentric perspective can communicate the importance of the natural world. Keywords: Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man, ecocriticism, evolutionary theory

Political Activism and Other Life Forms in Colonial Buganda

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 373-395
Author(s):  
Jonathon L. Earle
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Trade Unionist ◽  
Concrete World

Abstract:This article uses recently unearthed private papers and ethnographic fieldwork to explore the intersection of political practice and environmental ideation in colonial Buganda. In the early to mid-1900s, colonial administrators sought to draw Ganda interlocutors into abstract conversations about a natural world that was devoid of political power. Through Witchcraft Ordinances, imperial administrators sought to distance spirits, rocks, trees, snakes, and other life forms from the concrete world of social movement and dissent. But in late colonial Uganda, the trade unionist Erieza Bwete and the influential spirit prophet Kibuuka Kigaanira navigated environmental spaces that were imbued with political significance. Uganda’s economic and national histories, informed by methodologies that privileged philosophical materialism, overlooked how interactions with multispecies animated anticolonial politics and larger debates about authority. To challenge these earlier assumptions, this article shows how colonial literati and a late colonial prophet interacted with a natural world that was deeply political to conceptualize independence and challenge colonial power.

Rights of Nature to Protect Human Rights in Times of Environmental Crisis

2020 ◽  
pp. 38-65
Author(s):  
Susana Borràs
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Environmental Laws ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Rights Of Nature ◽  
The Right

The well-being of humans and nature are inextricably linked. Nature is particularly mistreated in light of its characterization as merely “property” to be bought, sold, and ultimately degraded for profit. Reinforcing this misperception is the fact that modern environmental laws themselves implicitly accept this claim of “nature as property.” They legalize nature's destruction by dictating how much of the environment can be exploited and degraded, rather than as an integral ecological partner with its own rights to exist and thrive. Instead, we need laws grounded in the inherent rights of natural world to exist, thrive, and evolve. The article focuses on the transition from the ‘right to the environment' to a biocentric approach constructed around ‘rights of nature.' This transition is evident in various new legal instruments, which serve as models for legal systems that can steer us towards more robust and effective environmental laws.

Mutual Custodianship in the Landscapes of Guðlac A

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney Catherine Barajas
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Stewardship ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Face

Guðlac A details the eponymous saint’s relationships with the holy landscape surrounding his hermitage and its other-than-human inhabitants. The poem suggests that the work of Guðlac’s sainthood is sustained devotion to the Earth community. As an exemplum of Old English ecotheological living, Guðlac’s legend offers a challenge to the concept of environmental “stewardship” of the Earth community in favor of a model of mutual custodianship calls for sustained and deliberate devotion to the created world for its own sake and as a manifestation of the Creator’s love and glory. It also suggests that sustained engagement with the natural world even in the face of environmental crisis or collapse will be rewarded, in this life or the next.

Rights of Nature to Protect Human Rights in Times of Environmental Crisis

2017 ◽  
pp. 225-261
Author(s):  
Susana Borràs
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Environmental Laws ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Rights Of Nature ◽  
The Right

The well-being of humans and nature are inextricably linked. Nature is particularly mistreated in light of its characterization as merely “property” to be bought, sold, and ultimately degraded for profit. Reinforcing this misperception is the fact that modern environmental laws themselves implicitly accept this claim of “nature as property.” They legalize nature's destruction by dictating how much of the environment can be exploited and degraded, rather than as an integral ecological partner with its own rights to exist and thrive. Instead, we need laws grounded in the inherent rights of natural world to exist, thrive, and evolve. The article focuses on the transition from the ‘right to the environment' to a biocentric approach constructed around ‘rights of nature.' This transition is evident in various new legal instruments, which serve as models for legal systems that can steer us towards more robust and effective environmental laws.

Nature and Religion in America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett Grainger
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Language ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
North American Continent ◽  
The North ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Complex Words

One of the most complex words in the English language, “nature” (sometimes personified as “Nature” or “Mother Nature”) has been central to developments in American religions. Despite their different origins, the three cosmologies present on the North American continent during the early modern “age of contact”—Native American, African American, and Euro-American—shared a number of similarities, including the belief in an enchanted or animate cosmos, the ambivalence of sacred presences manifested in nature, and the use of myth and ritual to manage these ambivalent presences in ways that secured material and spiritual benefits for individuals or communities. Through encounters on colonial borderlands and through developments in society and culture (in science, economics, politics, etc.), these cosmologies have been adapted, developed, and combined in creative ways to produce new forms of religious life. These developments have been characterized by a series of recurrent tensions, including the notion of divine or spiritual realities as being transcendent or immanent, organicism or mechanism, and of the natural world as including or excluding human beings. Organicist and animist cosmologies, severely challenged by the early modern scientific revolution, were resurgent in the antebellum period, fueling a series of new religious developments, from Transcendentalism and revivalism to Mormonism and the early environmentalist movement. These generative tensions continue to reverberate into the modern day, in part as an outworking of the environmental crisis of the 1960s, which saw a purported “greening” of established religions as well as the rise of new forms of nature spirituality.

The Dialectical Links Between Environmental Ethics and Sciences

1998 ◽  
pp. 49-57
Author(s):  
Ricardo Rozzi
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Reciprocal Relationships ◽  
Misleading Interpretation ◽  
New Vision ◽  
The One ◽  
Radical Transformation

Ecologists formulate their scientific theories influenced by ethical values, and in turn, environmental ethicists value nature based on scientific theories. Darwinian evolutionary theory provides clear examples of these complex links, illustrating how these reciprocal relationships do not constitute a closed system, but are undetermined and open to the influences of two broader worlds: the sociocultural and the natural environment. On the one hand, the Darwinian conception of a common evolutionary origin and ecological connectedness has promoted a respect for all forms of life. On the other hand, the metaphors of struggle for existence and natural selection appear as problematic because they foist onto nature the Hobbesian model of a liberal state, a Malthusian model of the economy, and the productive practice of artificial selection, all of which reaffirm modern individualism and the profit motive that are at the roots of our current environmental crisis. These metaphors were included in the original definitions of ecology and environmental ethics by Haeckel and Leopold respectively, and are still pervasive among both ecologists and ethicists. To suppose that these Darwinian notions, derived from a modern-liberal worldview, are a fact of nature constitutes a misleading interpretation. Such supposition represents a serious impediment to our aim of transforming our relationship with the natural world in order to overcome the environmental crisis. To achieve a radical transformation in environmental ethics, we need a new vision of nature.

Book Reviews: Gordon and Suzuki - It's a Matter of SurvivalAnita Gordon and David Suzuki Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991, 278 pp. US$19.95 cloth. ISBN 0-674-46970-4. Harvard University Press, 79 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

1992 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-286
Author(s):  
Andrea L. Bonnicksen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
University Of British Columbia ◽  
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ◽  
The University

PrécisIn 1989 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a five-part radio series, “It's a Matter of Survival.” Anita Gordon was the originator and executive producer of the series. David Suzuki is Professor of Zoology at the University of British Columbia and the host of “The Nature of Things,” a science television program. This book grew out of the radio series and is described on the jacket cover by Edward O. Wilson as “the best piece of extended environmental journalism I've seen to date.” Cited in the end notes are publications in the popular press (e.g., The New York Times) and CBC interviews with a range of environmental commentators such as Lester Brown and Paul Erlich. The book indicts the environmental irresponsibility of human beings as a species and is intended as a response to the radio listeners who wrote to the CBC following the 1989 broadcasts asking what they could do to forestall environmental catastrophe.Gordon and Suzuki begin with a hypothetical glimpse into the “nightmare world of 2040.” Subsequent chapters question how we reached the stage of environmental crisis, explore myths that have blinded us to the crisis, predict future growth trends, describe the ethic of domination over nature, and review the devastation wrought by prevailing definitions of “progress.” The authors end with an alternative (and positive) look at the year 2040 that can be possible if the resolutions they discuss are sought. They conclude that humans as a species have “lost the ability to hear the warning cries of nature” (p. 234), but they hold the hope that humans can emerge from the crisis with a “new collective image of ourselves as a species integrated into the natural world” (p. 238).

Investors and Exploiters in Ecology and Economics

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Herd Immunity ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Independent Research ◽  
Research Traditions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Widespread Phenomenon ◽  
Cancerous Cells

In the natural world, some agents (investors) employ strategies that provide resources, services, or information while others (exploiters) achieve gain through these efforts. Such behavior coexists and is observable in many species at many levels: from bacteria which depend on the existence of biofilms to synthesize constituent proteins; to cancerous cells which employ angiogenesis in tumors; to parents who forego vaccinating their children yet benefit from herd immunity; to countries’ actions in the handling of greenhouse gases. To analyze such behavior, two independent research traditions have developed in parallel—one couched in evolutionary theory championed by behavioral ecologists, the other in the social sciences advocated by economists. This book looks for commonalities in understanding and approach, in an effort to spur research into this widespread phenomenon.

Myth, metaphor and hypothesis: how anthropomorphism defeats science

1995 ◽  
Vol 349 (1328) ◽  
pp. 215-218 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The State ◽  
Selfish Gene ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Rationalism

Dawkin’s theory of the selfish gene has achieved an hegemony quite out of proportion to its intellectual finesse. Its popularity among not just sociobiologists, but biologists proper, provides yet another illustration of the susceptibility of scientific rationalism to the social and political ideologies of the day, to which scientists, being only too human, are heir. A singular achievement of nineteenth century biology, through such writers as Darwin and Huxley, was the construction of an objectifying language for the description of biological phenomena. Transposed into evolutionary theory, this language carefully deanthropomorphizes the processes of mutation, competition and survival, which were defined as central to the state of being of the natural world. Implications of motivation and intention were excluded from the meaning of these terms, as improper for the species and operations involved.

THE LIMITATIONS OF RELIGIOUS ENVIRONMENTALISM FOR INDIA

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Tomalin
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Use Value ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Nature Religion ◽  
Religious Systems

AbstractMany environmentalists draw upon religious teachings to argue that humanity ought to transform its relationship with the natural world. They maintain that religious systems teach that the earth is sacred and has an intrinsic value beyond its use value to humanity. However, whilst many cultures have religious practices or teachings associated with the natural world, such traditions of nature religion ought to be distinguished from religious environmentalism. This paper suggests that religious environmentalism is limited because it is a product of Western ideas about nature, in particular a 'romantic' vision of nature as a realm of purity and aesthetic value. Although in India, for example, people worship certain trees, this is not evidence of an inherent environmental awareness, if only because such practices are very ancient and pre-date concerns about a global environmental crisis. Moreover, many people in developing countries, such as India, are directly dependent upon the natural world and cannot afford radically to alter their behaviour towards nature to accommodate religious environmentalist goals.

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