Eileen Crist has a new article in Earth Tongues entitled “Are humans part of, or apart from, nature?”:
To be sure, everything is caught up in one existential process of unfolding within the common world. But something of critical importance is lost when all the categories of the world are flattened, and the technological is made ontologically continuous with the natural and the artifactual is made equivalent with the living. Relatedly, keen discernment is preempted when humans are offhandedly declared to be part of nature and not apart from it. Here, I counter this familiar platitude by arguing that the human—qua the dominant human identity—is very much apart from nature. Precisely because human separateness from nature is largely the reality of our situation, we need to protect the natural world expansively (and on all scales) from the de-parted dominant human (a point to which I will return).
