The Environmental Subject and Oppressive Culturization Practice

Traditional 13 destructive/unjust relationships (in chronological order) to the land:

1) abuser-victim; rage and a will to dominate taken out on an unsuspecting and largely trusting other; wanton destruction of trees and animals with no rationale; a psychotic gain from the pain of others;
2) explorer-adversary; the land made malevolent, perverse, dangerous by the brave and ultimately successful adventurer or tragic hero;
3) spectator-spectacle; a trip to the zoo, an aesthetically pleasing view, watercolour painting from a car; idealized photography;
4) scientist-specimen; a object of the scientific gaze, complete with named categories, an aura of mastery, and cultural bias/blinkers; Eurocentric classification (Linnaeus);
5) controller-controlled; via barriers, boundaries, deterrents, herbicides/pesticides, parks, reserves, population control, the introduction of invader species, etc.; symbolic hedge cutters;
6) user-used; economic opportunism, husbandry, the harvest, agricultural transformation and maintenance; land as avenue to wealth; single-species ecosystems artificially maintained; the road to the good life;
7) desirous-exotic; the mysterious land, wild, romantic, aestheticized, feminized, sexualized;
8) samaritan-pitiful; sympathy, feelings of moral superiority, appeased conscience, token gifts/no shifts in thinking;
9) narrator-stereotype; static images, misinformed myths, useful types/categories, cliché, repetitive scenes, the land as known, stock character;
10) denial-erasure; the city-dweller, the land erased from consciousness; the insulated life; the urban annihilation of natural beings;
11) ‘gone native’-salvation; the ‘wild man’, benevolent/idealized ‘Nature’, always ends badly;
12) politician-obfuscated space; deliberate misinformation, disorder, willful confusion, the evasion of the known for the sake of power;
13) academic-other; knowledge control, authority, identity construction around the mastery of the discourses that stand in for the land; related to 4); see “Environmental Studies” . . .