New Visions of Nature Complexity and Authenticity

About this book

New Visions of Nature focuses on the emergence of these new visions of complex nature in three domains. The first selection of essays reflects public visions of nature, that is, nature as it is experienced, encountered, and instrumentalized by diverse publics. The second selection zooms in on micro nature and explores the world of contemporary genomics. The final section returns to the macro world and discusses the ethics of place in present-day landscape philosophy and environmental ethics.

The contributions to New Visions of Nature explore perceptual and conceptual boundaries between the human and the natural, or between an 'out there' and 'in here.' They attempt to specify how nature has been publicly and genomically constructed, known and described through metaphors and re-envisioned in terms of landscape and place. By parsing out and rendering explicit these divergent views, New Visions of Nature asks for a re-thinking of our relationship with nature.

Contents

Part I: Introduction
1. Nature in Motion

Part II: Public Visions of Nature
2. Technological Nature -- And the Problem When Good Enough Becomes Good
3. "They Could Have Used a Robot". Technology, Nature Experience and Human Flourishing
4. The Authenticity of Nature: An Exploration of Lay People's Interpretations in the Netherlands
5. The Hierarchical and Unconscious Mind: Reflections on the Authenticity of Nature
6. The Problem with Plovers
7. About Snow Plovers, Lapwings and Wolves: How to Include Contrasting Visions of Ecologists and Laymen in Decision-making

Part III: The Genomics View of Nature
8. Detachment, Genomics and the Nature of Being Human
9. The Detached Animal -- On the Technical Nature of Being Human
10. Metagenomic Metaphors: New Images of the Human from "Translational" Genomic Research
11. The Metagenomic World-view: A Comment on Eric T. Juengst's 'Metagenomic Metaphors'
12. Genomics Metaphors and Genetic Determinism
13. Maps and the Taxonomic Style

Part IV: Philosophy of Landscape and Place
14. "Thinking Like a Mountain": Ethics and Place as Travelling Concepts
15. Towards an Epistemology of Place
16. Developing Nature Along Dutch Rivers: Place or Non-place?
17. Restoring Nature in a Mobile Society
18. Between Nativism and Cosmopolitanism: Framing and Reframing in Invasion Biology
19. Further Towards a Continuum between Nativism and Cosmopolitanism

Part V: Conclusions
20. Nature, Technology and the Human Condition

Index

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