Abstract
It has long been supposed that the power of the sciences is the impressive capacity to shift things from where they are and activate them when they get there. Yet in the case of political ecology it is argued that this mobilization no longer seems to work properly. The worry is that the sciences cannot now effectively shift, nor can they activate, agents of the ecological cause. There must, it is hoped, be a way to “grasp the world otherwise.”1 This is the dilemma that invites reflection on ecological conflicts and religious passions. It would help to recognize just how entangled are these conflicts and passions. The connections are evident when, instead of conflicts about how a common world is seen by different groups, they instead concern the life of groups’ very different worlds. Thus, at the end of 1994 the leading science journal Nature carried an editorial captioned “Apaches against stars.” It referred to a letter from the Apache Survival Coalition protesting against the construction of an astronomical observatory on Mount Graham in Arizona as a threat to the sacred mountain and its many inhabitants, human and nonhuman. Amongst the observatory’s users is the Vatican. Under the subheading “socio-religious concerns,” the papal astronomers declared that “we do not expect the Apache nation to subject their divinities to the self-interest of a few any more than we would reduce the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that is, God Our Father, to self-interested science.”2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Bruno Latour, “Will non-humans be saved? An argument in ecotheology,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (2009): 459–475, 466–468, 462, 473.
For such contrasts see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging perspectives: the transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian ontologies,” Common Knowledge 10 (2004): 463–484, on p. 484.
See Robert A. Williams, “Large binocular telescopes, red squirrel piñatas and Apache sacred mountains: decolonizing environmental law in a multicultural world,” West Virginia Law Review 96 (1994): 1133–1164, citations from pp. 1151 and 1162;
John Welch, “White eyes’ lies and the Battle for Dzil Nchaa Si’an,” American Indian Quarterly 21 (1997): 75–109, citations from pp. 76 and 78; Coyne, “Statement of the Vatican Observatory.” When the University of Virginia, for example, considered joining the astronomy consortium at Mount Graham their delegation consisted of the provost, two astronomers and two anthropologists: “U.Va. officials to discuss Large Binocular telescope project,” University of Virginia News, April 17, 2002.
Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, new ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 34–37;
Charles D. Keeling, “Rewards and penalties of monitoring the Earth,” Annual Review of Energy and Environment 23 (1998): 25–82. Jeffrey Sachs is quoted in
Stephen Gardiner, The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 102.
Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), 144.
Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (London, 1776), 2, 119–120 and Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, edited by W. P. D. Wightman, J. C. Bryce, and I. S. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 45–46, 50.
See Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin, 1991), Chapter 4 (“The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century”).
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), 31.
Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 32;
Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), 37.
Drake, Galileo at Work, 320–329; C. S. Maffioli, Out of Galileo: The Science of Waters 1628–1718 (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 1994), 51–65. For the attack on Sarpi see
Frances Yates, “Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 7 (1944): 123–143.
Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968), 129;
Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California, 1967), 471–475.
Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 100–104;
Emma Spary, “Political, natural and bodily economies,” in Cultures of Natural History, edited by N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 178–196.
Antoine Picon, “L’Idée de Nature chez les Ingénieurs des Ponts et Chaussées,” in La Nature en Révolution 1750–1800, edited by Andrée Corvol (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), 117–125, 117–119;
Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the Improvement of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 50–59.
Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), Chapter 9;
E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), Chapter 9.
Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1719, reprinted Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), 88–90.
Jean Jones, “James Hutton’s agricultural researches and his life as a farmer,” Annals of Science 42 (1985): 573–601.
Hutton, “Theory of the Earth,” 291, 295 and Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations (Edinburgh, 1795), 2 vols., 2: 239. See R. Grant, “Hutton’s Theory of the Earth,” in Images of the Earth, edited by R. S. Porter and L. Jordanova (Chalfont St. Giles: BSHS, 1979), 23–38.
Hutton, Investigations of the Principles of Knowledge (1794), cited in Maureen McNeil, Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and His Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 173; Sarah Wilmot, “The Business of Improvement”: Agriculture and Scientific Culture in Britain 1700–1870 (Reading: Historical Geography Research Group, 1990), 22–23, 40–41.
H. T. Dickinson (ed.), The Political Works of Thomas Spence (Newcastle: Avero, 1982), 119;
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 254;
Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 42–49;
T. M. Parssinnen, “Thomas Spence and the origins of English land nationalisation,” Journal of History of Ideas 34 (1973): 135–141.
Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 176–179, 254; McCalman, Radical Underworld, 99; Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 460.
William Paley, Natural Theology, 12th ed. (London: Faulder, 1809), 479–480, and citation of Malthus at 505; Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 27–31.
Malcolm Chase, The People’s Farm (London: Breviary Stuff Publications, 2010), 134–140; Humphry Davy, Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (London: Longman, 1813), 24, 233;
W. Krohn and W. Schaefer, “The origins and structure of agricultural chemistry,” in Perspectives on the Emergence of Scientific Disciplines, edited by G. Lemaine, R. MacLeod, M. Mulkay, and P. Weingard (Paris: Mouton, 1976), 27–52.
Patricia James, Population Malthus: His Life and Times (London: Routledge, 1979), 278; Porter, Enlightenment, 319.
Norman Lockyer and W. W. Hunter, “Sunspots and famines,” Nineteenth Century 2 (November 1877): 583–602.
Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 216–224, 323–326; D. Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London, 1901), 216 is cited in ibid. 58.
Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 224–230; Richard Grove, Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History 1400–1940 (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1997), 144–146; Keeling, “Rewards and penalties,” 54–55.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Pasquale Gagliardi, Anne Marie Reijnen, and Philipp Valentini
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schaffer, S. (2013). “Dame Nature Cares Nothing for Us”. In: Gagliardi, P., Reijnen, A.M., Valentini, P. (eds) Protecting Nature, Saving Creation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342669_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342669_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47240-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-34266-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)