Williams, James C. (Author)
Icon: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology
Volume: 25
Issue: 2
Pages: 8-28
Edition Details: Kransberg Lecture 2020
Language: English
To understand the human/nature relationship, one must look at how people, technology, and nature interact. Because humans come from many cultures and experiences, we have not always understood our relationship to nature in the same way. Nevertheless, we are all part of nature, and our physical beings are comprised of many of the same natural elements and rhythms that make up the world around us. Since the Enlightenment, however, Euro-American rationalism cleaved humans from nature even as they remained conjoined. This Cartesian duality led people to harness their technologies toward exploiting the Earth for their own needs and desires, nature’s agency acting as the only constraint against them. Our voracious appetite for control over nature begat an entirely new epoch, the Anthropocene, and consideration of it in the history of technology requires us to examine how the relationship of humans, technology, and nature has been and will continue to be a recipe for crises for humanity and nature.
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