Nature And Ideology

The essays in this volume explore the broad range of ideas about nature reflected in twentieth-century concepts of natural gardens and their ideological implications. They also investigate garden designers' use of earlier ideas of natural gardens and their relationship to the rich model that nature offers.

This book explores the role of the ideology of nature in producing urban and exurban sprawl. It examines the ironies of residential development on the metropolitan fringe, where the search for “nature” brings residents deeper into the world from which they are imagining their escape—of Federal Express, technologically mediated communications, global supply chains, and the anonymity of the global marketplace—and where many of the central features of exurbia—very low-density residential land use, monster homes, and conversion of forested or rural land for housing—contribute to the very problems that the social and environmental aesthetic of exurbia attempts to avoid. The volume shows how this contradiction—to live in the green landscape, and to protect the green landscape from urbanization—gets caught up and represented in the ideology of nature, and how this ideology, in turn, constitutes and is constituted by the landscapes being urbanized.

Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan is the first systematic study of Shinto's environmental turn. The book traces the development in recent decades of the idea of Shinto as an 'ancient nature religion,' and a resource for overcoming environmental problems. The volume shows how these ideas gradually achieved popularity among scientists, priests, Shinto-related new religious movements and, eventually, the conservative shrine establishment. Aike P. Rots argues that central to this development is the notion of chinju no mori: the sacred groves surrounding many Shinto shrines. Although initially used to refer to remaining areas of primary or secondary forest, today the term has come to be extended to any sort of shrine land, signifying not only historical and ecological continuity but also abstract values such as community spirit, patriotism and traditional culture. The book shows how Shinto's environmental turn has also provided legitimacy internationally: influenced by the global discourse on religion and ecology, in recent years the Shinto establishment has actively engaged with international organizations devoted to the conservation of sacred sites. Shinto sacred forests thus carry significance locally as well as nationally and internationally, and figure prominently in attempts to reposition Shinto in the centre of public space.

This text examines the role which music and landscape played in the formation of Norwegian cultural identity in the 19th century, and the function that landscape has performed in Edvard Grieg's work. Grieg's work presents several perspectives on the relationships between music, landscape and identity.

The Nature of Fascism draws on the history of ideas as well as on political, social and psychological theory to produce a synthesis of ideas and approaches that will be invaluable for students. Roger Griffin locates the driving force of fascism in a distinctive form of utopian myth, that of the regenerated national community, destined to rise up from the ashes of a decadent society. He lays bare the structural affinity that relates fascism not only to Nazism, but to the many failed fascist movements that surfaced in inter-war Europe and elsewhere, and traces the unabated proliferation of virulent (but thus far successfully marginalized) fascist activism since 1945.

Has a new political ideology emerged in the aftermath of the Sixties? Gayil Talshir examines the ideological evolution of green parties in Britain and Germany and traces the formation and transformations of a new type of ideology - a modular ideology. In the 1980s, the 'extraordinary opposition', New Left and ecology movements developed, a distinct and social vision that paved the political road for the transformation of democracy. Talshir explores this journey from the politics of nature to changing the nature of politics.

In this interdisciplinary study, Ann Bermingham explores the complex, ambiguous, and often contradictory relationship between English landscape painting and the socio-economic changes that accompanied enclosure and the Industrial Revolution.

This book shows that polemical environmental and ecological debates are governed not so much by access to 'facts' as they are by the political ideology of the expert advancing a particular argument. Moreover, the thoughts of these experts tend to be based largely in just one of three competing streams of political thought: the left, the center, or the right. Drawing on social theory, the author explains the philosophical origins of this tendency to rely on just one of three traditions, and why this poses a serious obstacle to conceptualizing the cause, nature, and resolution of environmental problems.