I’m certainly not an cultural anthropologist, but I imagine the concept of ‘park’ or ‘protected area’ – an area deliberately set aside to be free of human ‘interference’ for its own safety – would have been completely foreign and nonsensical to the majority of human societies that have existed to date.
It seems the need for protected areas is the result of at least two things:
- A worldview that has a concept of ‘nature’ and sees humans as somehow distinct from it, and
- An economic system that can’t sustainably co-exist with ‘nature’
Regarding #1, I’m sure there has been much ink spilled to examine and explain how this worldview came about – I recall reading something by Alfred North Whitehead many years ago that placed the blame, and not without merit, at the feet of a certain understanding of Christian theology.… Read the rest