UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies (E-Journal - York University)
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The Nonhuman in Human Psychological Development
Get PDFThis essay is edited from a larger paper entitled "A Critique of Developmental Psychology in Light of the Ecologicai Crisis.
Toward a Theory of the Body in Critical Social Change: Conceptions of Embodied Knowing and Being in Reform Environmentalism, Ecofeminism and Environmental Thought
Get PDFUnderstanding the significance of the human body as · a locus in which to access and analyze environmental. approaches requires first an understanding of the role of the body in post -modem culture and life. It is notable that the human body should, at this poi_nt in history, come to play a major role in some of the most important social issues of our time. After all, the development of Western civilization was premised on the cultivation of the human capacity towards calculative and analytic thought, ways ofkriowing reached via the suppression and denial of the animated body through its disassociation from, arid therefore relfication by, the human mind
Domination and Preservation: Reflections on Wildlife Cinematography
Get PDFContemporary wildlife documentaries, geared for the television market, exhibit a recurrent pattern: their narratives tend to emphasize the predatory pursuit of wild animals. In large part this problem is a consequence of the masculinist and scientistic legacies which wildlife filmmakers have taken over from the natural sciences, in order to seek legitimacy for this genre.1 Other (even contradictory) forces also come into play in the production of wildlife documentaries, namely those arising from commercial demands. The differences between wildlife programming and entertainment specials are at times only ones of modality. Thus, while the contemporary writings of deep ecology and ecofeminism very clearly reflect alternate ideals of human interconnectedness with the nonhuman environment, wildlife documentaries seem compelled to answer to two rather "environmentally unsympathetic" task-masters: objective science and entertainment
Introduction
Get PDFWelcome to Undercurrents. The papers in this year's volume converge on the theme of the representation and domination of Nature in Western culture. This theme reflects on the problem of how representational thinking, in the form of language, ideology, beliefs, or technology, mediates and filters the experience of the relationships between humans and the rest of Nature. When re-presented, Nature becomes separated, bounded and objectified, and therefore gives itself up as an object for domination
The Better Bathroom: A Spiritual and Political Landscape
Get PDFImagine this scene: luxuriant broadleaf greenery, ferns and verdant mosses. Perhaps a rock or two poking through. A pool, perhaps with clear water, but obviously deep, and a waterfall, flashing and tumbling, soothing to the ear, and lending the air a tangible humidity. Filtered sunlight dapples the waters
Rethinking the Ecological Crisis
Get PDFThe stories we tell about nature reveal a great deal about how we think about ourselves, our society and the world in which we live. Nature is one of those potent cultural spaces within which a society plays out its dreams and fears, its ambitions and anxieties. As John Rodman reminds us, "just as our statements about other people tend also to be concealed statements about ourselves, so statements about nonhuman nature tend also to be concealed statements about the human condition. "1 Constructed through our various discourses, ideas of nature can be read as maps of our historically and culturally-constituted consciousness
