Issue 44, 1st quarter 2009
Best kept Secrets
David E. Cooper
Pages 27-35
Art, nature, significance
It is by now something of a cliché of Green discourse that environmental degradation and devastation is grounded in a sharp opposition – the legacy, it is often charged, of Christian metaphysics – between the human and the non-human, between the realms of culture and nature. If one is to understand, let alone endorse, the very general environmentalist ambition to dissolve the dualism of the human and the non-human, it is by questioning rather more tractable and particular dichotomies, like that between art and nature appreciation, where it would seem wise to begin.