FROM ENVIRONMENTALISM TO ECOLOGY
The lecture revisits the environmental movement’s late 19th-century origins, examining Yosemite imagery by Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and Albert Bierstadt. While these works depict untouched wilderness, the speaker challenges this view by highlighting Native American land management, drawing on M. Kat Anderson’s 'Tending the Wild'. Native Californians shaped ecosystems through controlled burning, pruning, and selective harvesting long before European settlement. The discussion then shifts to Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology,” which rejects the notion of pristine nature, emphasizing interconnectedness and ecological strangeness. Concluding, the lecture reflects on the irony that Silicon Valley, a hub of visualization technologies, exists near the national parks that shaped American environmental thought.
The lecture revisits the environmental movement’s late 19th-century origins, examining Yosemite imagery by Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and Albert Bierstadt. While these works depict untouched wilderness, the speaker challenges this view by highlighting Native American land management, drawing on M. Kat Anderson’s 'Tending the Wild'. Native Californians shaped ecosystems through controlled burning, pruning, and selective harvesting long before European settlement. The discussion then shifts to Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology,” which rejects the notion of pristine nature, emphasizing interconnectedness and ecological strangeness. Concluding, the lecture reflects on the irony that Silicon Valley, a hub of visualization technologies, exists near the national parks that shaped American environmental thought.