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Alienation
From: Finding Our Niche
$2.60
In the first chapter of Finding Our Niche, Alienation, Loring introduces the eco-modernist philosophy that humans are inherently destructive of and separate from nature, and explains how that leads us to feel alienated from the natural world. Then, he looks at a process he refers to as "The Great Forgetting", when modern humans lost the stories of how Indigenous peoples lived on the earth in relation to other species to the stories of key works in Western social philosophy such as works from Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. Next, he traces the idea that humans are flawed yet special to Western religions. He shares some new, helpful metaphors for human relationships with nature from the study of ecology, such as the idea of ecological niches. The chapter closes with the possibility of healing our alienation to the natural world.
Contributors
Philip A. Loring
Philip A. Loring is an anthropologist who holds the Arrell Chair in Food, Policy, and Society at the University of Guelph. He is also an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Geomatics.
