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Modern green movement: Eco-pragmatists are challenging traditional environmentalists over scope of nature.
Keith Kloor at Slate:
There is—dare I suggest—a new and improved environmentalism in the making.
One of the other heavyweights in the conservation world, Peter Kareiva, the Nature Conservancy’s chief scientist, has recently emerged as a blunt-talking modernist green—an environmentalist who has made it his mission to loosen nature’s grip on the green movement.For example, earlier this year, he and a co-author wrote that “ecologists and conservationists have grossly overstated the fragility of nature, frequently arguing that once an ecosystem is altered, it is gone forever.” This belief has flowed from the long-held notion (one that Marris has also forcefully challenged) of a pristine nature that exists apart from people.
But that is a false construct that scientists and scholars have been demolishing the past few decades. Besides, there’s a growing scientific consensus that the contemporary human footprint—our cities, suburban sprawl, dams, agriculture, greenhouse gases, etc.—has so massively transformed the planet as to usher in a new geological epoch. It’s called the Anthropocene.
Modernist greens don’t dispute the ecological tumult associated with the Anthropocene. But this is the world as it is, they say, so we might as well reconcile the needs of people with the needs of nature. To this end, Kareiva advises conservationists to craft “a new vision of a planet in which nature—forests, wetlands, diverse species, and other ancient ecosystems—exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes.”…
2012-12-14 09:23:03
Source: http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2012/12/modern-green-movement-eco-pragmatists.html
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