Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 12

reshaping occurs when nature is destroyed, or ignored, and then recreated
in a 'themed' context. Do not worry about the losses, we might be saying,
we can make it better than the original. When nature is themed, the
outcome is grim: plants and trees are made from plastic, sand is laid down
by the millions of tonnes to create new beaches, and rocks are sprayed with
cement to look more 'natural'. 19 But this should not diminish the value
of nature as an escape, ultimately a mystery, and an 'otherness' from life
in the city. It is an imagined world, as well as a real world full of great
meaning and significance.
This Disconnected Dualism
Is nature part of us, and we a part of a grander scheme? Or are we, as
humans, somehow separate? These are questions that have exercised
philosophers, scientists and theologists through the ages, and particularly
since the Enlightenment, when Newton's mechanics and Descartes' 'nature
as machine' helped to set out a new way of thinking for Europeans. The
result has been the gradual erosion of connections to nature and the
emergence, in many people's minds, of two separate entities - people and
nature.
During recent years, with growing concerns for sustainability, the
environment, and biodiversity, many different typologies have been
developed to categorize shades of deep- to shallow-green thinking. Arne
Naess sees shallow ecology, for example, as an approach centred on
efficiency of resource use, whereas deep ecology transcends conservation
in favour of biocentric values. Other typologies include Donald Worster's
imperial and Arcadian ecology, and the resource and holistic schools of
conservation. For some, there is an even more fundamental schism:
whether nature exists independently of us, or whether it is characterized
as post-modern or as part of a post-modern condition. Nature to
scientific ecologists exists. To post-modernists, though, it is all a cultural
construction. The truth is, surely, that nature does exist, but that we
socially construct its meaning to us. Such meanings and values change over
time, and between different groups of people. 20
There are many dangers in the persistent dualism that separates humans
from nature. It appears to suggest that we can be objective and indep-
endent observers, rather than part of the system and inevitably bound up
in it. Everything we know about the world, we know because we interact
with it, or it with us. Thus, if each of our views is unique, we should listen
to the accounts of others and observe carefully their actions. Another
problem is that nature is seen as having boundaries - the edges of parks