Wilderness, Nature and Society: contributions to the history of an environmental attitude

Abstract

The depth of feeling now seen in the struggle over environmental conservation can, with the aid of scholars in other disciplines, be traced to the central importance of Nature in the ideology of Western Society. The late seventeenth century is seen as the period of an ideological transformation in which Nature, at first under the tutelage of God, came to set the terms for social definition and debate. As a flexible metaconcept, Nature became a weapon of social control for a hegemonic centre and, at the same time, a vehicle of protest for the social periphery. Further ambiguity arises from the intersection of this development with the devaluation of Nature as a commodity within the capitalist system, which intensifies the element of protest in the use of Nature as a social category.

Informal Urban Green Space: Residents’ Perception, Use, and Management Preferences across Four Major Japanese Shrinking Cities

“…One such management goal is the creation of new parks using IGS where size and characteristics are suitable. These results are in line with earlier research that found Japanese respondents are overall hesitant to embrace the concept of urban wilderness, a concept that has figured prominently in work on IGS from Europe, North America and Australia [27,28,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50]. Yet this does not imply that residents do not perceive the value of IGS as a different kind of urban green space.…”

Development and the environment: Managing the contradictions?

“…The failure to grasp the global nature of environmental issues lies at the heart of the problem for radical scholarship. To some extent this omission is being made good (McCormick, 1989;King, 1991;Durning, 1992;Leyshon, 1992). However, few writers have attempted to integrate the environment within a political economy framework (Vitale, 1983;Smith, 1984;Blaikie, 1984;Galtung, 1985;Blaikie and Brookneld, 1987).…”

“…However, few writers have attempted to integrate the environment within a political economy framework (Vitale, 1983;Smith, 1984;Blaikie, 1984;Galtung, 1985;Blaikie and Brookneld, 1987). It is interesting that the most effective assaults on neo-classical environmental economics Downloaded by [University of Auckland Library] at 21:01 04 June 2016 have come not from Marxists but from institutionalists (Jacobs, 1991), Green theorists (Ekins, 1992;Ekins and Max-Neef, 1992) and iconoclasts (Martinez-Alier, 1987).…”

The man/land theme in geography: a Sydney University perspective

“…Since 1959, the year he took up a lectureship at Sydney University, he has rigorously pursued historical geography, encouraged the teaching of geography in schools, assisted in establishing historical archaeology as a scholarly discipline in Australia, worked with others in the development of historical conservation and fostered humanistic geography. The product of such scholarship is manifold, ranging from books on historical geography of NSW (Jeans 1972;Jeans and Spearritt, 1980), published lectures on historical conservation (Jeans 1985), to studies of the philosophy of man/land relations (Jeans 1974(Jeans , 1983 and an edited series of books on Australian geography (1978,1986).…”

“…The ambiguous status of nature in the ideology of western society is seen in that sometimes it is used as a weapon of social control for a 'hegemonic centre', and also as a 'vehicle of protest for the social periphery' (Jeans 1983).…”