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Environmental Ethics

Perspectives From Chinese Scholars

Volume 42, Issue 3, Fall 2020
Nature, Wilderness, And Civilization

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Displaying: 1-8 of 8 documents


1. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
News and Notes
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2. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
Shan Gao Nature, Wilderness, and Civilization: Perspectives from Chinese Scholars
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features
3. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
Wang-heng Chen, Xin-yu Chen The Re-Enchantment of Wilderness and Urban Aesthetics
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According to the essence of industrial civilization, wilderness is bound to disenchantment. However, in the ecological civilization era, based on the demands of ecological balance, we must reserve a certain degree of wilderness in urban environment. Therefore, we need to bring back enchantment to aesthetic appreciation of wilderness. On the surface, the re-enchantment of wilderness seems to be a regression of agricultural civilization; however, in fact, it is a transcendental development of agricultural civilization. In recent years, there have been some deviations in the application of “garden urbanism” and “landscape urbanism” have existed in contemporary Chinese urban landscaping. To some extent, the recovery of wilderness is a major mission in Chinese urban construction.
4. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
Yuedi Liu The Paradigm of the Wild, Cultural Diversity, and Chinese Environmentalism: A Response to Holmes Rolston, III
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The so-called “Paradigm of the Wild” means either environmental ethics or environmental aesthetics has gone wild. According to Holmes Rolston, III, “philosophy has gone wild.” Chinese traditional environmentalism takes another anthropocosmic way, and it has a global applicability in cultural diversity. The dichotomy of “nature-culture” is already out of date, and humans have to face the new relation of humanized-nature today. From the perspec­tive of “ethics and aesthetics” in Chinese Confucianism, a different passageway between environmental ethics and environmental aesthetics can be shaped.
5. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
Shan Gao Nature, Wilderness, and Supreme Goodness: A Comparative Study of Transcendentalism and Confucianism
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Transcendentalism and Confucianism involve different understandinsgs of the concepts of nature, wilderness, and supreme goodness in terms of the metaphysical understanding of nature and how it influences the understanding of human nature. The goodness of Tao is not transcendental as understood by transcendentalism. Rather the goodness of Tao as the important moral values is shaped by human beings’ experience of the natural world. It is this deeper philosophical reason why transcendentalism encourages the aesthetic appreciation of wilderness while Confucianism encourages the aesthetic appreciation of humanized nature.
6. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
LuYang Chen, Ziao Chen Wilderness in Ancient Chinese Landscape Painting
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Chinese painting is dominated by landscape painting, which is a unique form of artistic expression for Chinese people, while landscape generally refers to nature. Wild natural landscape can be called “wilderness,” which embodies the vitality and upward vitality of nature, and also contains unique cultural characteristics. “Wilderness” is the most important “original ecological” environment in the natural environment. Its existence has natural, ecological, and aesthetic significance. It is nature in its primitiveness and ecology in its wildness; the aesthetic lives on in it. Compared with Western landscape painting, it pays particular attention to realism, good at depicting beautiful natural scenery and recording the reality of scenery. On the other hand, Chinese landscape painting pays more attention to the expression of connotation. Chinese landscape painting focuses on nature, takes meaning as its purpose and pursues culture. Chinese landscape painting is the outstanding expression of wilderness spirit, which is mainly manifested in three aspects: (1) Chinese landscape painting is of the same origin as “Tao” (道); (2) the “wilderness” in landscape painting has a strong vitality; (3) “wilderness” has a special cultural connotation. China’s wilderness is not ecological, but is vibrant; not in the dust, but out of the dust; not in nature, but in culture.
7. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
Yuling Che, Feifei Duan Cultural Roots for the Evolution of Wilderness and the Anxieties of Urban Living
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Space being the precondition for human existence, human perception and experience vary responding to different spaces. Modern urban dwellers live in urban space where they seem to have much space mobility but end up living in a homogenized concrete jungle. This fact has influenced, if not defined, modern urban dwellers’ life experience and caused their anxieties about such an existence. However, wilderness, as opposed to urban space, is not merely a type of space, but a way of existence relating to diversity, freedom, and healthy savagery. Civilizational evolution explains the change of human perception of wilderness from fear and desire to conquer to longing and affection, and in this sense the history of the evolution of space perception is also a history of civilization because space and culture are entwined and the more diversified the types of human living space, the more diversified their existences. In the contemporary world, the significance of wilderness not only lies in its resistance to the aforementioned homogenized, unidimensional, urban human existence, but the civilization of wilderness points to a new form of civilization that is intrinsically different from technological civilization for whose disease the civilization of wilderness per se may serve as a possible remedy.
8. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
Yanqiu Hu, Xiaotao Zhou Wilderness Spirit and Ecological Self in the Vision of Ecopsychology
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Ecopsychology holds that a full-fledged self should be in harmony with nature, but when the human’s social self, consumptive false self, and paranoid cultural narcissism prevail, the ecological self goes from dominant existence to recessive existence. Because of this predicament with regard to the ecological self, one should make full use of wildness spirit to reshape the ecological self. Due to the abstract nature of the wilderness spirit and in an attempt to present the wilderness spirit in a more concrete and vivid way, the wilderness spirit needs to be set apart from wilderness literature so as to analyze the role that the wilderness spirit plays in rebuilding the ecological self.