From my dissertation:
Keeping, tending, or managing the wild is a paradox. Nature loses something of its wildness once brought under the wing of human concern. Although human impacts on nature are often thought to also curb nature’s wildness, not all impacts are the same. Some, like climate change, biodiversity loss, invasive species, and certain forms of pollution are globally pervasive and have been, up until now, inadvertent. For climate change in particular, the present challenge is to shift from inadvertent impact to deliberate design of the global climate. This is no small feat, requiring complex, international negotiations that involve every sector of the economy with millions of human lives and the existence of nations at stake. Nor is it a small change in our relationship with the planet. Humanity has inadvertently become a global, geological force. Now we must become deliberate designers of the climate. As our technological power increases, so do our impacts, as does the necessity and possibility of design. As we liberate the planet from environmental degradation and pollutants, however, a new risk emerges—that the global climate and other aspects of our world become technological artifacts. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, science, while integral to shaping a sustainable, livable future, is also implicated in technocratic management—as is modern ethics. Without something akin to the impulse in John Muir or the cultural traditions of the Tlingit—if we slip into conceiving and treating the earth as merely an engineering problem or purveyor of services—we risk living on a sanitized earth—a dystopia of total technical design. #technocracy #technocratic
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Chris Dunn, PhD
Researcher, writer, explorer*, photographer, thinker. Wrestling with nature, culture, technology. Archives
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*When I use the term "exploration", I mean it in a personal sense (discovery for myself, or at a unique moment in time [everywhere after all--even crowded cities--endlessly await rediscovery--by new eyes and in new moments]), not in an absolute sense. With few exceptions (notably Antarctica), almost everywhere on earth has had other people around for a long time (though to varying degrees - high mountain tops or places like the interior of the Greenland Ice Sheet for instance were far less visited and populated, and undoubtedly at least some pockets of the earth were never visited or populated). It is an enlightening experience though when on an isolated ridge in what feels like the middle of nowhere to wonder if anyone has set foot there but never knowing for sure. What is significant is that the landscape itself is left in such a condition that it isn't evident. Some places ought to be kept that way.
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