Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature
* Book: Gardeners of Eden: Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature. By Dan Dagget. University of Nevada Press, 2017
URL = https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/gardeners-of-eden-dan-dagget/1113933426
Description
"This is the most important conservation manifesto since Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic."—Gary Paul Nabhan"
"Dan Dagget believes that humanity can have a positive effect on the land. He demonstrates case after case of positive human engagement in the environment and of managed ecosystems and restored areas that are richer, more diverse, and healthier than unmanaged ones. Much of pre-Columbian America, he contends, was not a pristine wilderness but an ancient garden managed over millennia by native peoples who shaped the plant and animal communities around them to the mutual benefit of all.
Dagget recommends a new kind of environmentalism based on management, science, evolution, and holism, and served by humans who enrich the environment even as they benefit from it. His new environmentalism offers hopeful solutions to the current ecological crisis and a new purpose for our human energies and ideals. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned with the earth and anyone seeking a viable way for our burgeoning human population to continue to live upon it."
More information
* Article: Lindholm, M. (2022). The Earth has Become the Garden of Mankind. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 18(1), 83–102.
URL = https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1004
"On the right relation between humanity and the biosphere\"
"The environmental crisis challenges our faith in humanity. Building on deep ecology and recent insights in evolutionary psychology, this article elaborates evolutionary peculiarities of our species, in order to develop foothold for new perspectives on the relation between man and earth. Premodern cultures managed to interact with their environments by establishing bio-cultural interfaces, thereby maintaining sustainable resource use. Homo sapiens has not generally been 'a plague of the earth', but rather a species that enhanced local biodiversity. In addition to genetical information, humans share a reservoir of cultural meaning. This reservoir has been coined 'the noosphere' and probably make up the last stage in a series of major evolutionary transitions since the Precambrian. Through the noosphere, the earth has become the garden of mankind. Such perspectives may open for re-establishing faith in man and in his ability to develop flowering relations to his environment."