Gina Maranto's Profile

eminent

Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which
so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest.
The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most
important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time
more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as
the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world.
Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization
that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover
the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial
lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining
the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the
frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and
so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be.

This would seem to exclude from the radical environmentalist
agenda problems of occupational health and safety in industrial settings,
problems of toxic waste exposure on “unnatural” urban and agricultural
sites, problems of poor children poisoned by lead exposure in the inner
city, problems of famine and poverty and human suffering in the “overpopulated” places
of the earth—problems, in short, of environmental justice.

...the situationists developed an armoury of confusing weapons intended
constantly to provoke critical notice of the totality of lived experience
and reverse the stultifying passivity of the spectacle. 'Life can never
be too disorientating,' wrote Debord and Wolman, in support of which they
described a friend's experience wandering 'through the Harz region of Germany
while blindly following the directions of a map of London.'