TY - JOUR
AU - Hess, Scott
AB - SCOTT HESS Nature in environmental writing and culture today often appears as a form of refuge—for biological diversity, endangered species, and equally endangered forms of sensual, aesthetic, and spiritual life, all threatened by an increasingly destructive and all-pervasive world economic and social order. Nature is the place where we go, both imaginatively and physically, to escape from this modernity, as well as the place from which we seek to protect it. In providing this sense of refuge, though, our ideas of nature too often lead us away from where we actually are, promoting a model of Romantic imaginative escapism and autonomous individualism that in many ways actually supports the same modern consumer order that it claims to oppose. This tendency to locate “nature” apart from ourselves skews our environmental awareness and priorities in ways that blind us to the devastating ecological impact of our own everyday lives and inca- pacitate us from pursuing realistic alternatives. If we seek nature apart from our lives, how can we restructure those lives—not just individually, but socially, politically, and economically—in order to change the current patterns of environmental destruction? “Nature” in environmental literature and in the public imagination has been defined in opposition 
TI - Imagining an Everyday Nature
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isp152
DA - 2010-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/imagining-an-everyday-nature-3WRl2UdOW0
SP - 85
EP - 112
VL - 17
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -