Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1151399
29 1890, there were nine cities with over 1 million inhabitants, whereas now more than half the human population live in cities; the world GDP amounted to 470 tril- lion US dollars (from 1990) in 1870, but reached 11.664 in 1992; and so forth. As John McNeill has put it: "The human race, without intending anything of the sort, has undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment on the earth" (McNeill 2000: 4). Such collective unawareness is not a mere nuance. As he himself points out, "the regime of perpetual disturbance is an accidental by-product of billions of human ambitions and efforts, of unconscious social evolution" (2000: xxii). In other words, it is an species issue, the result of a process of creative and destruc- tive adaptation—an aggressive one in any case—whose denouement is yet unclear. To many commentators, though, there is nothing essentially human in the cur- rent socionatural relations, nor in the cultural and social path that has led to them. Both the cultural understanding of nature and the social practices that derive from it may be said to be the product of a cultural construction that, by definition, can bear many different fruits. Therefore, it is important not to forget that there have been and still are conceptions of nature other than the Western one, even though they have not become dominant for reasons that remain to be singled out. 2.5 Other Views of Nature? We is a dangerous pronoun, because it tends to take too much for granted, hid- ing or repressed alternatives that lie within a tradition or exist outside of it. For that reason, the Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole asks himself in his Twitter account: We who? The same goes for nature: Whose nature? What other concep- tions of it have circulated in human culture, and what kind of practices have they supported or helped to create? In a famous article published in 1967, in the height of the Western counter- culture that looked East in the search for alternative social values, Lynn White alluded to Zen Buddhism as a tradition that embodies a different—more respect- ful—view of nature. Deep ecologists have also searched in Eastern traditions for a more spiritualized relation with the environment, wherein the latter is less a human instrument than an end in itself. On the face of it, Eastern religions and philoso- phies tend to see existence as a web of intricate and cyclical relations between the material and the spiritual spheres, as well as between the human and the natural, rather than as a set of dualisms (Egri 1999: 66). Those are interesting ideas, that can be actually traced back in time and be found also in the Western world. The problem, again, is how little those ethical mandates are respected in the realm of material practices, a constant that suggests a different function for the former: they might be less absolute prescriptions than general orientations for behaviour, whose goal is not that nature remains untouched, but to reduce the impact of its human appropriation. In his survey of those systems that formed human ideas about the natural world in Antiquity, Hughes (2009: 53) distinguishes three main categories: traditional 2.4 Nature After Darwin