Ecological Nature: A Non-Dualistic Concept for Rethinking Humankind's Place in the World

In a series of papers, J. Baird Callicott criticizes the wilderness concept of nature and the associated approach to environmentalism which focuses on the preservation of areas of land free of human intervention. As he notes, this concept rests on a human/nature dualism which defines the natural in opposition to the cultural and the artefactual, and thus in principle places humans outside the natural realm. This makes it conceptually impossible for humans to intervene in nature without denaturing it. Callicott rejects this concept of naturalness for two general kinds of reasons. First, because it is socio-politically oppressive, as it is frequently applied to areas where some aboriginal...