The nature of artifacts

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 25, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 149-168

  Vogel, Steven ^a  

^a DENISON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 0038710541     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics200325230     Document Type: Review

References (41)

1. Robert Elliot, "Faking Nature," Inquiry 25 (1982): 81-93. Elliot later expanded his ideas, and to some extent modified his views, in a book: Faking Nature: The Ethics of Environmental Restoration (London: Routledge, 1997).
2. Robert Elliot, "Faking Nature," Inquiry 25 (1982): 81-93. Elliot later expanded his ideas, and to some extent modified his views, in a book: Faking Nature: The Ethics of Environmental Restoration (London: Routledge, 1997).
3. Katz's article was originally published as "The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature," in Research in Philosophy and Technology 12 (1992). It has been reprinted in a revised version as chapter 7 of his book Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), and it is to this book that I refer in what follows.
4. Katz's article was originally published as "The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature," in Research in Philosophy and Technology 12 (1992). It has been reprinted in a revised version as chapter 7 of his book Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), and it is to this book that I refer in what follows.
5. See Katz, Nature as Subject, pp. 103-04, and Elliot, Faking Nature, pp. 116-30.
6. See Katz, Nature as Subject, pp. 103-04, and Elliot, Faking Nature, pp. 116-30.
7. Katz, Nature as Subject, p. 103.
8. Ibid, p. 94.
9. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), p. 58. See also Alastair S. Gunn, "The Restoration of Species and Natural Environments," Environmental Ethics 13 (1991): 297-98.
10. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), p. 58. See also Alastair S. Gunn, "The Restoration of Species and Natural Environments," Environmental Ethics 13 (1991): 297-98.
11. Katz, Nature as Subject, pp. 109-110 and p. 116.
12. ibid, p. 104; see Elliot, Faking Nature, pp. 123-24.
13. ibid, p. 104; see Elliot, Faking Nature, pp. 123-24.
14. Elliot, Faking Nature, pp. 122-23.
15. Katz, Nature as Subject, p. 104. Katz goes on to speak of "natural childbirth," and to say that - presumably unlike more medicalized obstetric practices - it is correctly called natural because it eschews "actions designed to control or to manipulate natural processes." Yet, when a midwife encourages an expectant mother to get into a position where gravity will assist the birth, doesn't that manipulate a natural process? On the other hand, why are the processes through which an aesthetics is produced not natural ones, unless we've already presupposed that human technologies are not part of nature?
16. Elliot, Faking Nature, pp. 122-23.
17. Gunn, "Restoration of Species," p. 297.
18. Katz, Nature as Subject, pp. 102-03.
19. See ibid, p. 98. See also pp. 114-15 and 121-22, where this point is repeated.
20. See e.g., ibid, p. 122.
21. Ibid, pp. 127-29.
22. Ibid., p. 128.
23. See on this point Yeuk-Sze Lo, "Natural and Artifactual: Restored Nature as Subject," Environmental Ethics 21 (1999): 259.
24. Katz, Nature as Subject, pp. 128-29.
25. See Lo, "Natural and Artifactual," p. 253.
26. Katz, Nature as Subject, p. 126.
27. Ibid., p. 122.
28. Quoted in William K. Stevens, Miracle under the Oaks (New York: Pocket Books, 1995), p. 290.
29. Elliot, Faking Nature, pp. 108-10.
30. Ibid, p. 108.
31. Ibid, p. 109.
32. Katz, Nature as Subject, pp. 109-10 and 116. On p. 116, Katz actually says that "in my lucid rational moments, I realize that [the deer] are not 'wild,'" but I'm not quite sure how to take this realization; it seems to suggest (a) that the rest of his essay is not lucid or rational, which is clearly false, and (b) that he has somehow been taken in by a forgery or a big lie of the very sort he's arguing against. In fact, as I'm arguing here, I think the deer are wild, although on Katz's account they may not be natural. They may indeed be artifacts!
33. I am grateful to John O'Neill for this point.
34. Elliot, who owes a bit too much to utilitarianism, seems to hold a quantitative conception of value. But I don't know how to compare the quantity of value in the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef, and Times Square; their values simply seem to me to be different.
35. Elliot, Faking Nature, p. 108.
36. Elliot points specifically to this issue in showing how his views remain opposed to those associated with restoration ecology; see Elliot, Faking Nature, p. 145.
37. Andrew Light has argued similarly for the importance of the hands-on character of restoration projects as a way to "restore . . . the human connection to nature by restoring the part of culture that has historically contained a connection to nature." See his "Ecological Restoration and the Culture of Nature: A Pragmatic Perspective," in Paul H. Gobster and R. Bruce Hull, eds., Restoring Nature: Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000), pp. 64-65.
38. Elliot, Faking Nature, p. 145.
39. Ibid, pp. 86-90.
40. Elliot at one point briefly asks whether someone might find a value in an artificial wilderness if he or she knew the artifice, but dismisses it quickly, writing that he "find[s] it difficult to see. . . . how art that mimics nature in quite this way would have any value at all." (Elliot, Faking Nature, p. 89.) But mimicry scarcely seems the right word here, given the complexity of what would need to be achieved; only a misanthrope, it seems to me, could fail to find it impressive.
41. Note that even Martin Krieger, whose article "What's Wrong With Plastic Trees?"Science 179 ( 1973): 453, seems to approve of plastic forests (and who serves as a bête noir for Katz), talks of deceiving viewers into believing in their reality. (I myself have never been able to shake myself of the idea that Krieger's piece is actually a dark joke.)