Leo Marx: The Idea of Nature in America
The Idea of Nature in America
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3671/is_200804/ai_n25419913/print?tag=artBody;col1
But it also should be said that the word nature is a notorious semantic and metaphysical trap. As used in ordinary discourse nowadays, it is an inherently ambiguous word. We cannot always tell whether references to nature are meant to include or exclude people. Besides, the word also carries the sense of essence : of the ultimate, irreducible character or quality of something, as for example, 'the nature of femininity' or, for that matter, 'the nature of nature.' When this meaning is in play, the word tacitly imputes an idealist or essentialist hence ahistorical - character to the particular subject at hand, whether it be femaleness or nature itself. The word's multiple meanings testify to its age : its roots go back (by way of Latin and Old French) to the concept of origination of being born. As Raymond Williams famously noted, nature is probably the most complex word in the English language. And when, moreover, the idea of nature is yoked with the ideologically freighted concept of American nationhood, as in the historian Perry Miller's sly allusion to America as Nature's Nation, the ambiguity is compounded by chauvinism.
Bob Herbert on Al Gore's Speech
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt9wZloG97U
No doubt, this is one of the greatest speeches I have ever seen. Please take 30 minutes of your time to watch it. Turn off your phone, lock your door, tell anyone who might distract you to go away. Then make a cup of tea and focus, hard. Do whatever you have to do. But make it happen. I don't think I am exaggerating when I say that this will be one of the most important 30 minutes of your lives.
And I'm not the only one who feels this way:
Yes We Can
Saturday 19 July 2008
by: Bob Herbert, The New York Times
http://www.truthout.org/article/yes-we-can
My view of Mr. Gore's passionate engagement with some of the biggest issues of our time is that he is offering us the kind of vision and sense of urgency that has been so lacking in the presidential campaigns. But the tendency in a society that is skeptical, if not phobic, about anything progressive has been to dismiss his large ideas and wise counsel, as George H. W. Bush once did by deriding him as "ozone man."