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It’s about how the degraded natural world leads children themselves to construct ideas that things are basically “normal” even when they are pretty bad. It’s not just about cultural conditioning.
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I have called this the problem of environmental generational amnesia. The crux is that with each ensuing generation, the amount of environmental degradation usually increases, but each generation also tends to take that degraded condition as the “non-degraded condition”, the normal experience. How do you explain this contradiction?Īll of us construct a conception of what is environmentally-normal based on the natural world we encounter in childhood. Yet, children living in urban spaces are considered to be ªenvironmentally consciousº. Urban ªnatureº has never been more artificial. So nature demands we pay attention and take care of ourselves. If a child pulls on the tail of a dog too hard, the dog may well nip the child lightly, in effect saying “not so hard please, that hurts”. On a cool day, sunshine is soothing no matter what culture says. On the other hand, there are qualities of nature that “push back” on cultural interpretations. So we need to change culture to be more relationally-oriented and less domination-oriented. It might work for you, but it’s not sustainable. If you grow up in a domination-oriented culture that seeks to subdue other people and nature, then you tend to look upon nature as just a resource to be used, and even more so you tend to have short-sighted personal interests that lead quickly to the destruction of nature. Culture matters a lot in terms of how we perceive nature. Like culture, does nature too change with time? What would this mean for the idea of sustainability? As this continues, we’ll lose some of the essential (natural) depth and authenticity and human-human interaction. And this definition is important because with Artificial Intelligence, we’re now beginning to replace human-human interaction with human-machine interaction (and human-robot interaction). Now there is also another definition that humans too are natural. We need this definition to get the attention away from ourselves and onto the “other”. One definition is that nature is everything that is non-human and non-artifact-flowers, earth, rocks, water, trees, ladybugs, sunshine, dolphins, elephants, ants, ocean or streams. Can there be a single definition of nature?