All this has implications for achieving environmental sustainability in a 'real' biosphere that still supplies the 'ecosystem services' that allow humans, and the rest of the biomass, to actually survive (at the same time that its custodians of mind-us- are 'escaping' into customised neo-worlds). This thesis makes some preliminary enquiries into these new logics, the new 'selectors' at work in human meaning making ecosystems that owe little to those produced by billions of years of 'natural selection'. What seems to be at work at present is an enormously accelerated 'cultural selection' of winners and losers in the 'real' and 'imaginary' world. It would be unwise for the modernist systems of thought that still inform many of our institutional responses to the biosphere to ignore the pre-eminent affect of these cultural processes and the strange and possibly disturbing (at least to the ecosystemic biological purists) new 'weedy' entertainment-ecosystems that might arise from their deployment. / This thesis reviews some aspects of these 'new selectors' at work and begins to chart- with an Australian focus- the tentative development of institutional/legal responses and emergent socialites that acknowledge and even leverage, these new forces. It finally suggests a radical set of possibilities, which if they came to pass, would signal the end to the kind of 'public reservationism' that has characterised the 20th century response to nature, wilderness and the 'environmental crisis', and usher in a more chaotic (but still possibly sustainable) era of 'winners' and 'losers' mediated by new social selectors of post-consumption voluntary affiliation. / The 20th century will be remembered for many 'firsts' and many 'revolutions'. One of these 'revolutions' was the process whereby issues surrounding 'nature', the non-human organisms that inhabit it, the human relationship to these organisms, and the human impact on the planet as a whole, came to occupy such a considerable amount of our individual and collective 'attention space' as the century progressed. In a nutshell, over the course of the 20th century 'the environment' became a 'thing' that almost everyone recognised, and which became associated with a wide range of qualities, dreams and fears that impacted, to varying degrees, on almost every human meaning-making system and institution. / 'Environmentalism' has largely been a product of enlightenment, modernist thinking. From the romantic philosophers, poets and travellers of the 18th and 19th century, to the founders of the ecological sciences, to the eco-activists and 'green' political parties of the 20th century, a whole series of intertwining enlightenment systems of thought and practice have informed its discourses and narratives. The logics of these discourses are all around us in our newly networked global mediasphere- at work in environmental organisations, informing government policy- and they form the basis of the environmental story telling that have made green issues so prominent in the media in the last several decades. / Thesis (PhDSoSc(Communic,InformatStud))--University of South Australia, 2005.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/266983 |
| Creators | Bagust, Phil. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | copyright under review |
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