This looks interesting. It connects Heidegger to leisure and the wilderness experience. A lot of Australian environmentalism has its roots in the value of wilderness as distinct from ruralism.
Though European romanticism was the first expression of the ecological impluses response to the initial impact of capitalist industrialization, the romantic impluse in Australian environmentalism is concerned to preserve remaining wilderness areas. This kind of romanticism, which is particularly evident in Tasmania, where the highest priority is preserve the old growth native forests from clearfelling, places an emphasis on region, lived place and organisms situated in particular places.
This means that it stands in opposition to the emphasis on historical time and location [of capital] in historical materialism and the submerging of place into empty space by Australian materialism. The latter does not think that place exists in nature. Place has been excauvated of its properties, content or characteristics and reduced to position. What exists is space. In Australian materialism space triumphs over concrete place.
What sort of materialism is that? Though it did talk about bodies --as distinct from minds--these (natural bodies as machines) were located in space.
What we need is a materialism that finds its way back to place---bodies in places.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at August 19, 2004 11:02 PM | TrackBack