lo Squaderno (Mar 2017)
Nostalgia for an imagined past. Political ecologies of homelessness in urban public nature
Abstract
A familiar narrative of an objectified relationship with nonhuman nature in Western thought, and especially in nature-society discourses in the United States, adheres closely to a notion of an environmental original sin. In this narrative, humans, by our very existence on the planet, have made nature dirty; we have made the natural world a little less natural. Humans have polluted, despoiled, extracted, extinguished, and unbalanced an otherwise ecologically harmonious system. Our environmental sins, however, are not solely confined to our material disturbances made upon nonhuman nature; our iniquities also include an objectification of nature, whereby through processes of science and superiority, we cast nature into an otherness where it is simultaneously romanticized, embraced, distanced, and harnessed for the powers and processes of capital. The material and discursive effects of humans make nature problematic in numerous ways.
