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man and nature unit

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Man nature unit notes

1. Introduction to Unit Four: Man's Relationship with Nature. Are you "in touch" or "out of sorts" with nature? How does your attitude reflect or not reflect your relationship with your surroundings? What do people do knowingly or unknowingly to keep in touch with nature? Does nature, or being outdoors, have restorative properties that can help change our frame of mind? These issues and others along the same lines will be discussed as part of our introduction to our next unit of study.

Man-Nature past and present: Introduction to Mans relationship With nature Unit

The Puritans

Believed that God punished people through nature. Earthquakes, fires, poor crop years etc.

Native Americans

Worshipped Mother Nature as a life giver. They prayed for the sun and rain in the right amounts to help sustain them.

19th Century naturalists and realists

These people were heavily influenced by the teachings of Charles Darwin whose suvival of the fittest and natural selection theories dictated modes of behavior.

19th Century literary works

[Herman Melville, 1885]

American: Herman Melvilles Moby Dick gives us an example of what happens when man tries to control nature. Ahab ceases to exist. Samuel Taylor Coleridges epic poem The Rime of Anchient Mariner likewise gives us an example of what can happen if man is cruel to nature.

Eastern religions/philosophies

Believe that mans fate is directly tied to nature through reincarnation.

The father of the environmental movement in The United States

  George Perkins Marsh published a remarkable book in 1864. Its title was Man and Nature. When he put out a revised edition in 1874, he changed the title to explain his intentions. Now he called it The Earth as Modified by Human Action: Man and Nature.

It was the first modern discussion of our ecological problems. We are not passive inhabitants of Earth, he said. We give Earth its shape and form. We are responsibile for Earth.

Few of us, he once said, could make as good a claim to personality as a respectable oak tree.

We're destined to disturb nature's harmonies. We have to learn to do so as good stewards -- not as vandals.

A modern View

Nature is not dead, but the modern man/nature dualism and the mechanical concept of nature are dead. The new concept of nature is more organismic than mechanistic and includes man as, in Aldo Leopold's words, "a plain member and citizen of the biotic community."

  Contemporary views (Post-Modern)

Vaclav Havel-President of the Czech Republic 1997      Vaclav Havel

" I believe that, for the rest of the world contemporary America is an almost symbolic concentration of all the good and the bad of our civilization - ranging from the fantastic development of science and technology generating more welfare and the profundity of civil liberty and strength of democratic institutions, to the blind cult of perpetual economic growth and never-ending consumption, no matter how detrimental to the environment, the dictates of materialism, consumerism and advertising, the voiding of human uniqueness and its replacement by the uniformity of the round-the-clock noise of TV banality.

Who thinks today about future generations? Who is concerned about what people will eat, drink, breathe in one hundred years, where they will get energy when there are twice as many people living on this planet as today? Only an idealist, a dreamer, a genuinely spiritual person who, they say, is not modern enough.

These dreamers, who are often at the margin of society, will find their way to the place they belong, among the politicians, only if the very spirit of politics changes towards deeper responsibility for the world. "

Ecocentrism vs Anthropocentrism
Patricia A. Michaels

Eco-A combining form of "household" and "environment."

Anthropo-Greek word meaning "human"

Anthropocentrism (A human centered world) vs. Ecocentrism(Nature is dominant)

Anthropocentric philosophers believe that man holds the dominant position in the world and that nature is looked at in use value terms.

Ecocentric philosophers are Earth First! thinkers. They believe that life (the Earth) comes first and they will be willing to fight for the Earths rights.

Weaknesses

Anthropocentrics: By seeing Nature as a utility to the individuals existence it causes man to think of all of our relationships; with people, animals and all of nature as just objects for use value. Man becomes a soulless user and consumer.

Ecocentrics: They see mans relationship with nature in moral terms. Morality is a human concept and to transfer this concept to the natural world does little more than make human the natural world. To assume a moral relationship between man and nature, assumes a type of linguistic compatibility whereby over time each side adapts its moral actions to the activity of the other. Which is a contract that nature cannot sign.

Strengths

Anthropocentrics: Tends to provide better for the basic needs of humanity.

Ecocentrics: By being sensitive to Nature man can perhaps better develop a compassionate and caring human nature.

This is a nature poem studied for this unit
To Autumn
John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
    Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
    With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
    And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
        To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
        For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
    Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
    Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
    Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
        Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
    Steady thy laden head across a brook;
    Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
        Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
    Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
    And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
    Among the river sallows, borne aloft
        Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
    Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
    The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
        And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Here is another poem I studied for this unit. I also studied another Blake poem which is called the tyger and it is about the savageness of the tiger.
The Lamb
William Blake

      Little Lamb, who made thee?
      Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
    Little Lamb, who made thee?
    Dost thou know who made thee?
    Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
    Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb.
We are called by his name.
      Little Lamb, God bless thee!
      Little Lamb, God bless thee!