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Eric Wycoff Rogers

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Oct 31, 2024
What is agency and where does it come from?
Oct 31, 2024
Oct 31, 2024
The Metaverse Must Be a Pluriverse
Dec 24, 2021
The Metaverse Must Be a Pluriverse
Dec 24, 2021
Dec 24, 2021
Screen+Shot+2021-01-09+at+6.00.40+PM.jpg
Jan 9, 2021
In the Aftermath of the Storming of the Capitol
Jan 9, 2021
Jan 9, 2021
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Dec 13, 2020
Why I Don't Post Slogans (reflections on declarative politics)
Dec 13, 2020
Dec 13, 2020
WORK_folder.png
Nov 14, 2020
Prompt for Imagining the Post-Work City
Nov 14, 2020
Nov 14, 2020
emotional ecology-01.jpg
Sep 18, 2020
The Dimensions of Social and Emotional Ecology
Sep 18, 2020
Sep 18, 2020
personal political?-01.jpg
Sep 13, 2020
The Personal is Political . . . Right? (Balancing Personal and Planetary Thrival)
Sep 13, 2020
Sep 13, 2020
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Sep 11, 2020
Why Your Love of Nature May be Destroying Nature
Sep 11, 2020
Sep 11, 2020
Left-realism.png
Sep 9, 2020
Left Criminological "Ultra-Realism" and Defunding the Police
Sep 9, 2020
Sep 9, 2020
lens-systemic-oppression-1024x627.png
Jun 14, 2020
Oppression vs. Discrimination: Why You Can Have Racism Without Racists
Jun 14, 2020
Jun 14, 2020
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Jun 11, 2020
The Meaning of Autonomous Zones
Jun 11, 2020
Jun 11, 2020
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Jun 7, 2020
Why Is Academic Language So Inaccessible?
Jun 7, 2020
Jun 7, 2020
Covidiots and Looters (or, nostalgia for "good citizens")
May 31, 2020
Covidiots and Looters (or, nostalgia for "good citizens")
May 31, 2020
May 31, 2020
Consent-01.jpg
May 13, 2020
Consent and Beyond
May 13, 2020
May 13, 2020
Radical Professionalism-01.jpg
Apr 27, 2020
What Is Radical Professionalism, and Can It Help Us Build Post-capitalism?
Apr 27, 2020
Apr 27, 2020
DISTROID-01.jpg
Mar 19, 2020
The Meaning of DISTROID
Mar 19, 2020
Mar 19, 2020
Feb 13, 2020
Are Shitty Men Really the Problem?
Feb 13, 2020
Feb 13, 2020
Nov 25, 2019
"No Scrubs": Deconstructing the WWI "Slacker," Sexual Manipulation and Gendered Power
Nov 25, 2019
Nov 25, 2019
Sep 4, 2019
Social Media and Post-Authenticity
Sep 4, 2019
Sep 4, 2019
May 7, 2019
Becoming-Feminist: Consciousness-Raising and Social Ecology
May 7, 2019
May 7, 2019
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Mar 20, 2019
Assertive Modesty
Mar 20, 2019
Mar 20, 2019
Jul 3, 2018
Situated Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of End Times
Jul 3, 2018
Jul 3, 2018
Apr 12, 2018
Notes on Oppression
Apr 12, 2018
Apr 12, 2018
post-work city-01.jpg
Feb 9, 2018
Post-Industrious Society: Imagining the cities of a post-work world
Feb 9, 2018
Feb 9, 2018
Feb 1, 2018
The (classed) Political Economy of Data
Feb 1, 2018
Feb 1, 2018
Jan 13, 2018
Business against Capitalism: production that undermines reproduction
Jan 13, 2018
Jan 13, 2018
Jun 22, 2017
Reflections on (uncritical) Aristocratic Hedonism
Jun 22, 2017
Jun 22, 2017
Mar 4, 2017
Queer(ing) Space
Mar 4, 2017
Mar 4, 2017
Dec 21, 2016
Professional Interests: how professionalism came to dominate common sense
Dec 21, 2016
Dec 21, 2016
Dec 6, 2015
Towards a New Sharing Economy
Dec 6, 2015
Dec 6, 2015
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Why Your Love of Nature May be Destroying Nature

September 11, 2020

A few weeks ago, I posted, in a rather cavalier fashion, that I dislike spending time in nature. As the horrifying fires rage all along the west coast of the United States, I’d like to elaborate a bit on the ethics and aesthetics behind that post.

Ethics: If You Love Nature, Don't Live In It

First of all, let me just say that I love the earth, its geological and meteorological systems, its bountiful ecosystems, and all of the nonhuman life that we share our planet with. I think we should look after these systems, not only because they have intrinsic value independent of us, but also because we depend on these for our own survival.

But this love of the earth is not the same thing as an aesthetic love of being *in* natural spaces. Let’s remember: loggers and hunters and frontiersmen have all professed their own love being in nature. Not only is an aesthetic appreciation of being in nature not the same thing as loving the earth and its systems; a strong case can be made that the aesthetic appreciation of nature is actually exacerbating the crises plaguing the earth’s ecosystems, since it inspires humans to abandon cities and take up residence in rural and/or semi-rural settings.

The most pervasive example of this is suburbia. Suburbia is an unequivocally destructive type of conurbation whose appeal is located precisely in its pseudo-pastoral aesthetics (there’s the old joke that suburbia cuts down trees and names streets after them). And this is just as true for rural development. As human settlement sprawls outwards, it not only displaces and disrupts ecosystems; it also increases the carbon footprint attributable to transportation of goods and people over longer distances. Moreover, as the recent fires in California have demonstrated, the blurring of the boundaries between the built and “natural” environments has meant that naturally-occurring processes (such as the small fires that should ordinarily periodically clear out the accumulation of dead vegetation in places with wet winters and arid summers) have been interrupted, leading to greater crises and more serious habitat destruction.

What would be much better is for there to be hard boundaries between urban and rural settings, with minimal infrastructural incursions into habitat. This would be the aim of a truly worthwhile preservation movement: clearly delineated cities, energy- and material-efficient lifestyles, and a re-wilding of rural land. Unfortunately, the trends are moving in the opposite direction (and this will probably be exacerbated by the lifestyle choices of the middle class in the wake of Covid)—most recent development in California has been occurring in fire-prone areas, and this trend is projected to continue, due to the pervasive affordability crisis in urban housing markets. But this is yet another reason for why we should be *solving* our urban affordability crisis, and making cities more interesting, beautiful and livable more generally. If you’re in a position to think about ethics (many people aren’t!), and you love nature, you might consider living in a city and leaving it alone.

But let me address another dimension of this issue: the very concept of nature is flawed. The concept of nature creates an artificial distinction between nature and human culture, as if the latter is not part of the former. To escape to nature is to fool oneself into thinking that they are escaping culture, as if the practice of aesthetically elevating and spending time in wilderness is not cultural or ideological (it is!). Perhaps even more perniciously—from an ecological perspective—is the fact that, as Benjamin Bratton has explained, this “nature/culture divide didn’t [even] protect what it called nature, even as it elevated the notion to a transcendental ideal.” Not only has this elevation of nature to a transcendental ideal not protected the sphere of activity we call nature; it has actively harmed it, in the ways I have already mentioned.

Aesthetics: Retreatism vs. ”architects of the future”


In my post, I stated that I specifically find spending time in nature to be boring. The implication was not to say that cities, by contrast, are particularly enjoyable. On the contrary, we've utterly failed, especially over the last 200 years, to build cities as places "fit for human habitation," to appropriate Hannah Arendt’s phrase. My aesthetic boredom with nature, then, is not a favoritism for “really-existing cities,” then,  but for what cities could be. Our capabilities to make dreamy, complex, dynamic, labyrinthine, even sublime urban environments has never been greater. And yet, as a culture, we continue to foster a pervasive pastoralism and nostalgia in our aesthetics.

The love of nature aesthetics, in 2020, has a certain defeatism inherent to it. My worry is that the latest wave of nature-loverism is symptomatic of the abandonment of ambitious and audacious human bids to shape their own environments, because the built environments of late capitalism are so barren, sterile, dangerous, uncomfortable, and highly stratified. As Rem Koolhaas’s brilliant essay on “junkspace” makes deeply palpable, we’ve squandered the resources of the world, yet done so little of value with them. “Junkspace,” he says, “is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than all previous generations together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids.” What we have instead is “a low-grade purgatory,” an “ornamental afterthought on hurriedly erected superblocks,” “flamboyant yet unremarkable,” built of lightweight and impermanent materials, and crisscrossed with traffic-congested highways. In addition to this, our digital cities have also proven themselves to be a dystopia of misinformation, Twitter mobs, scams, targeted advertising, status posturing, and an endless news cycle of horrors. In the face of all of this, many have elected to retreat into a conservative/primitive therapeutic "returning" to the land, rather than engaging in a direct confrontation with society’s problems.

It’s very understandable that people would desire a kind of escapism from the terrifying world of pandemics, high-fructose politics, asinine crowd behaviors, and all the rest of it. But that escape doesn’t necessarily have to be the (colonially-constructed) aesthetic category of nature. Personally, I prefer the realm of utopian projection, fiction, and design. Rather than backing out of our crises, I want to find a way forward—up and over the horrors of contemporary life. To contradict the common sense of a generation of disenchanted members of contemporary society, I would posit that perhaps our problem is not that our lives are too artificial and too disconnected from nature; perhaps, instead, the problem is that they are not artificial enough. Inhering in this idea is a wilderness far vaster than all the Yosemites and Yellowstones and Grand Canyons, with infinite aesthetic experiences to be had, and infinite versions of ourselves and our society to perform. Here, I stand firmly with Buckminster Fuller, who said that “We are called to be the architects of the future, not its victims.”

← The Personal is Political . . . Right? (Balancing Personal and Planetary Thrival)Left Criminological "Ultra-Realism" and Defunding the Police →
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Most Recent

Featured
Oct 31, 2024
What is agency and where does it come from?
Oct 31, 2024
Oct 31, 2024
Dec 24, 2021
The Metaverse Must Be a Pluriverse
Dec 24, 2021
Dec 24, 2021
Jan 9, 2021
In the Aftermath of the Storming of the Capitol
Jan 9, 2021
Jan 9, 2021
Dec 13, 2020
Why I Don't Post Slogans (reflections on declarative politics)
Dec 13, 2020
Dec 13, 2020
Nov 14, 2020
Prompt for Imagining the Post-Work City
Nov 14, 2020
Nov 14, 2020
Sep 18, 2020
The Dimensions of Social and Emotional Ecology
Sep 18, 2020
Sep 18, 2020
Sep 13, 2020
The Personal is Political . . . Right? (Balancing Personal and Planetary Thrival)
Sep 13, 2020
Sep 13, 2020
Sep 11, 2020
Why Your Love of Nature May be Destroying Nature
Sep 11, 2020
Sep 11, 2020
Sep 9, 2020
Left Criminological "Ultra-Realism" and Defunding the Police
Sep 9, 2020
Sep 9, 2020
Jun 14, 2020
Oppression vs. Discrimination: Why You Can Have Racism Without Racists
Jun 14, 2020
Jun 14, 2020