[...]This story has been told ad nauseam in philosophy classrooms and in books of environmental thought. What is given less consideration is the way that, as the Christian God retreated after Descartes, the attributes traditionally ascribed to Him — goodness, perfection and permanence — were in different ways transposed onto the body of nature.
[...]In the late-18th century, though, this framework begins to undergo a reversal — cruel nature is transformed into the Garden of Eden. This identification of nature with the Christian notion of the divine is one foundation of the philosophy of environmental sustainability.
[...]Yet one need not go so far back to observe the changing environment. Events like the disappearance of lions from Europe, as well as the extinction of the mastodon and the woolly mammoth (and climate change), all likely resulted from human activity. But the planet has seen mass extinctions of species and significant alterations to the climate before. The fact that they are traced to the behavior of an individual species only makes them particular, not in some way “unnatural.”
When we talk about sustainability, then, what is it that we hope to sustain? We certainly do not sustain nature “in itself.” Rather, we sustain nature as we humans prefer it. More precisely, we preserve the resources needed for human consumption, whether that means energy consumption or aesthetic consumption. In one sense, we preserve nature for industry.
[...]The contemporary French theorist Bruno Latour has also argued for discarding the idea of nature and the entire framework that puts human culture and the natural world in opposition. In its place he suggests we instead consider a unified network of “actants,” human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. Nature, after all, includes us in its list of animals, and our products differ in degree, not kind, from those of beavers, bees and spiders. Because we are necessarily engaged with it — with it’s development, history and activity — we cannot simply let nature be, as the deep ecologists wish. And because nature drives and shapes humans in ways we don’t understand, neither can we fully become its “masters and possessors,” as Descartes imagined.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opini ... ility.html
Viniendo de donde viene, ya sabemos que el trasfondo del artículo es el que es: el capitalismo no es tan malo, la deforestación no es tan mala, que EEUU contamine y arrase el planeta a lo loco no es tan malo, etc. Aun así, creo que el texto es interesante y arroja algunas ideas sugerentes.
