Human Settlements Review - Parliamentary Monitoring Group

Human Settlements Review, Volume 1, Number 1, 2010
healing, we do (14).
As Ian McCallum (2005) argues, having turned
a blind eye to the fact that we are part of nature’s
great diversity, we have become ecologically
unintelligent (14). We have steadily distanced
ourselves from our biological past. “We have
ignorantly, if not arrogantly, placed ourselves
at the apex of creation. It is time to come down
from that precarious pedestal” (McCallum,
2005, 14) “Let’s become conscious of the
animals that we have on board with us and of
what they mean to us” (McCallum 2004, 229).
Urban people tend to have less and less
contact with nature and as a result, they
may be less inclined to behave responsibly
towards the environment, however unwittingly,
as they become more removed from the very
natural systems that underpin their survival.
If sustainability and humanity’s continued
survival on this planet is the project, we need
to start imagining and implementing the notion
of nature into those domains of the ‘civilized’,
the urban and industrial centres and the way
they work.
The idea of human as separate from nature is a
binary deeply rooted in western civilization. It is
present in the Judeo-Christian traditions which
describe an origin in which man was given
dominion over the beasts. In ancient Greece
and in the Tale of Gilgamesh, the forests were
the representation of all brutishness and evil,
the domain of wild irrational female forces
which contrasted with the city state that was
associated with rationality and maleness. In
middle ages Europe, the image of an ordered
world of culture managed by civilized men
surrounded by a chaotic wilderness inhabited
by savages, pagan warlocks and witches who
drew their power form nature itself continued
(Colchester 1994). An idea that continued,
and still continues, to inform the activities of
fundamentalist Christian missionaries, that
see the practices of shamanism by indigenous
peoples as “devil worship” as such, the project
of taming the wilds and civilizing the savage
became a fundamental truth and clear destiny
(Chidester 1996, Colchester 1994). The flip
side of this was that with white expansion
and increase in urban dwelling, a notion of
the wilderness as a refuge from the ills that
accompanied civilization arose. John Muir,
one of the driving forces behind the national
parks movements in America insisted that
wilderness as primitive and natural, be
preserved as untouched. Wilderness was
thus set to become the sphere of recreation
(for definite sections of the population). This
philosophy was then put into law with the
1964 U.S. Wilderness Act which states that
wilderness is a place “where man himself is a
visitor who does not remain” (Gomez-Pompa
and Andrea 1992, 271). This idea has persisted
in the global creation of parks and protected
areas. That these old notions of nature as
separate have informed many policies makes
the finding of solutions, at a policy, and onthe-ground
level, an immense challenge. The
images are potent. Attempting to unpick the
dynamics of this so-called conundrum is akin to
wading through thick mythological soup. Scott
(cited by Parajuli 2001) identifies ingredients
of this “soup” as created by the modern state:
“firstly, an administrative ordering of nature
and society, plus a confidence in scientific and
technical progress, add the authoritarian state
that used its full weight and power to bring high
modernist designs into being, as well as a
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