Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature

From Library Journal
In this thought-provoking collection of essays edited by environmental historian Cronon, scholars such as Carolyn Merchant, Richard White, Kenneth Olwig, Donna Haraway, and others "contribute to an ongoing dialog about the environment." The book has its roots in an interdisciplinary seminar on "Reinventing Nature," held at the University of California, Irvine's Humanities Research Institute in 1994, and is similar in scope to another Reinventing Nature project entitled Reinventing Nature?: Responses to Postmodern Deconstructionism (Island Pr., 1995). This work explores our ideas of nature in a cultural context, for "if we hope for an environmentalism capable of explaining why people abuse the earth as they do, then the nature we study most become less natural and more cultural." By using materials such as photographs, advertisements, and paintings (termed "found objects" by Haraway) to stimulate fresh ways of viewing and responding to nature, the group has produced an enlightening work that challenges our very ideas of the natural world. Highly recommended.S. Maret, Univ. of Colorado, DenverCopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


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Uncommon Ground is the best kind of book, one that shocks the reader into entirely fresh ways of seeing. Perhaps the most important work facing us over the next several years involves the reconception of nature and our relationship to it. This indispensable volume makes a bold start on that project attacking it with imagination, insight, originality, and wit.


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