nature-culture

Before he was known to the world mainly as a passionate advocate of "real" (local, human-scale) food, Michael Pollan was thinking hard about what Daniel Wildcat calls the "nature-culture nexus" and recognizing the complex co-evolutionary relationship between them. It's a hopeful view, suggesting we have an important   continuing role to play in Mother Earth's preservation and flourishing.

Nature does tend toward dissolution and entropy, yes, yes, but I can't help thinking she contains some countervailing tendency, too, some bent toward forms of ever-increasing complexity. Toward us and our creations, I mean. Second Nature

In A Place of My Own he builds a little house in which to think and dream. Like most of our human enterprises it "stands a little apart" from its natural surroundings.

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Red Alert! ch7-conclusion

1. How much did the American bison population decline between the 17th & 19th centuries?

2. What does it mean concretely to "allow places to give us homes" and to live in a "coextensive present with the past and future"?

3. Have you lived in an "unimaginative house"? Has your conceptual/spiritual life been "boxed" by the experience? Does this attitude place too much confidence in architecture? Do we place too little?

4. Is there any way to live "green" in suburbia? Are "buffalo commons" and "earth lodges" realistic?

5. Are you personally fatalistic about "500 year floods"? Would you ever deliberately make your home in a flood plain? Do you expect the Army Corps of Engineers to consult indigenous peoples in the future?

6. Is childhood obesity a public policy issue? Or is it just a matter of "personal virtue"?

7. Are you making different food choices since becoming aware of the nutritional problems associated with fast food? Do you consciously choose local products? Do you see your food choices as ethical? Are you willing to pay more for more responsibly grown & distributed food?

8. What is T3C? Is it helpful or relevant? Is it possible to make a reliable present judgment about the ultimate impact of technologies? How does the will to bequeath "good stories" help us make wise choices?

9. Is it not possible to see the world as full of relatives and resources?