Thursday, January 29, 2009
Rewilding North America
For those interested, Harry Greene is giving the Natural Resources departmental seminar on February 3 on this topic. It was dismissed very easily in lecture as yet another primitivist idea. Knowing Harry as a friend and colleague I can say that ignoring the idea as primitivist is a fairly parochial perspective that actually detracts attention away from the very issues the idea meant to bring to light. SO! Harry loves to argue, and I'm sure the lecture would stir ideas and new perspectives.
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Michael,
thanks for the post and the notice about Harry Greene's lecture.
I'm not sure it's accurate to say, however, that the idea of rewilding was "dismissed very easily in lecture as yet another primitivist idea."
At the risk of sounding defensive, I think the point I was actually trying to make, more accurately described, is that I simply don't believe that the "rewilding idea," and the popular allure of the rewilding concept (particularly as advocated by Dave Foreman), can be adequately understood without some historical sense of the widespread cultural appeal of primitivism as it has manifested itself in virtually every human culture for thousands of years.
I don't "dismiss" the idea at all, in fact I've read Foreman, Donlon, et al, and take the idea very seriously. I just don't believe that in thinking about rewilding you can afford to leave the primitivism motif out, as I believe rewilding proponents as a group generally tend to do.
So saying that rewilding "was dismissed very easily in lecture" is not quite accurate, I think. But you can certainly come back and disagree with me on that if you'd like. :-)
Jim
p.s., incidentally, an argument premised on "Knowing Harry as a friend and colleague" that concludes "ignoring the idea as primitivist is a fairly parochial perspective" is itself an ad hominem argument, albeit an ad hominem defense of Harry Greene (as opposed to ad hominem attacks that were discussed the first week of class).
The question of whether Harry Greene is a great guy is wholly irrelevant to the argument that rewilding is simply a nutty primitivist pipe dream.
Not that I'd ever argue that rewilding is simply a nutty primitivist pipe dream.
;-)
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