A completed book manuscript by Jennifer Bernstein
Natural Orders examines how different understandings of nature shape efforts to organize social and environmental life. As the world confronts accelerating environmental change, questions about the proper human–environment relationship are increasingly important. Beginning with the intellectual traditions through which these understandings developed, the manuscript traces their realization in a series of historical and contemporary land-based projects. Across cases, ideas about the human–environment relationship become realized through landscapes, governance, infrastructure, and everyday practice.
The first half of the book develops a conceptual framework explaining how understandings of nature become actionable and traces four recurring understandings—Harmony, Independence, Hierarchy, and Resilience—through their intellectual histories. The second half follows these understandings into case studies of intentional communities, homesteading movements, white separatist settlements, and elite preparedness communities in New Zealand. Together, these cases examine how understandings of nature become negotiated through ecological processes, inherited landscapes, material constraints, and everyday social organization.
The cases examined in Natural Orders show that there is no singular natural order capable of resolving fundamentally different understandings of the human–environment relationship. Environmental governance increasingly involves negotiation among groups that remain materially dependent on the same landscapes despite conflicting ideas about what those landscapes mean. By tracing recurring understandings of nature from their intellectual traditions into lived environmental projects, Natural Orders offers a framework for understanding how ideas about nature continue to shape landscapes, institutions, and environmental futures.
Excerpt:
Bernstein Natural Orders Introduction.pdf
Current Status:
About the Author:
Dr. Jennifer Bernstein is a faculty member in the Department of Geosciences at Texas Tech University and Editor-in-Chief of Case Studies in the Environment.
She can be reached at [email protected]; [email protected]