This book shows that current environmental and natural resource
management policies will fail because they are too individualistic in
their social construction. That is, the legal reasoning focuses on
individuals and the state, but neglects a crucial component: the
community. While at first glance these two issues, environmental
policies and the neglect of community, may seem unrelated, the argument
of this book is that they are deeply intertwined. As our sense of
ownership of the environment became more individualized, so also did
legal rights, leading to the demise of mediating structures, those that
stand between the individual and the state. As all sense of
embeddedness in family and community was lost so also a sense of
embeddedness in nature and commitment to place.
The book describes the rise of the corporation and individualistic,
free market thinking, along with the subsequent decline in community and
local autonomy as the imbalance grew between the corporate person and
the individual human. This explication of the history then leads into a
discussion of environmental and natural resource management policies
today, and how they reflect larger societal conceptions of the nature of
the individual and community, and in turn, their relationship to nature.
The book concludes with a presentation of the ways of thinking and case
studies of actual practices that can and do preserve the environment and
empower community, illustrating the inherent connection between the two.
These are paralleled by alternative conceptions of law and of science
that focus on local knowledge rather than individualist assumptions and
disembodied universals. Thus this book embeds current environmental and
natural resource management policies (and positive alternatives) in a
more general history of the decline of the community, with reference to
the rise of corporations and the predominance of individualist
philosophy.
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