Walking, Working, and Tinkering: Perception and Practice in Environmentalism
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Date
2013-10-18
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
This dissertation examines the venerated status of certain practices in the history of American environmentalism, particularly wilderness walking, traditional farming, and the scientific field work of naturalists. These practices, which, following Foucault, I call “environmental techniques of the self,” are held up as ways of enacting, restoring, or cultivating a rightful relationship to the natural world. Specifically, I examine Henry David Thoreau on walking, Wendell Berry on work, Martin Heidegger on “dwelling,” and Aldo Leopold on ecological field work. Through critical engagements with these authors I show how environmental techniques of the self enact ecological subjectivities with reference to various figurations of perceptual truth, and how in this way they perform “nature” as a normative and critical concept. However, I suggest that these traditional ecological practices are ill suited to a world that no longer seems holistically natural. Seeking an alternative modality of ecological practice I explore an under-acknowledged affinity between environmental philosophy and the practice of tinkering.
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Ecology, Political Philosophy