nature culture

Timeline of American Environmentalism and Car Culture

A work in progress, I created this timeline as a research aid and data storage tool. It lists what I understand to be key events in the development of American environmentalism, car culture and related policy, and of course some of the ads you will find on this blog. It is my hope that the ads will serve as cultural and visual markers whereby it is made more apparent they way the auto industry engages with the environmental movement by confusing consumer perceptions of nature and the role of automobiles in environmental degradation.

As the discourse unfolds and my research deepens, I will continue to populate this timeline with various media. It will serve as an a [linear] companion to this blog. It also foreshadows the additional software containing supplemental information that I will include at a later date. My hope is to provide you with multiple ways of engaging with this historical information, my literature base and visual data so as to sparking interesting conversation between us.

Any mistakes on this timeline are completely unintentional. If you happen to note a glaring omission or mistake, please do let me know. If you have a reliable or helpful source that you think I should refer to, please do not hesitate to send me the information to thinkfeelgrow@gmail.com.

Onward!

Myths of Nature in post-WWII National Geographic Car Advertisements by Shwandel N. Fraser is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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“Technonature: Artificiality and Virtuality” – regular layspeak entry forthcoming

Seemingly exists in opposition to Organic Nature, Escobar asks whether techno nature could serve us by helping us redefiine our conceptualization of and relationship with nature by virture of our “re-creation of a (different) continuty between the social and the natural?”
Further, are technonatures necessarily capitalist and how do ./ could they affect human sociality based on genuine connection rather than economic incentives.

Myths of Nature in post-WWII National Geographic Car Advertisements by Shwandel N. Fraser is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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“Capitalist Nature: Production and Modernity” - regular-speak layman’s definition forthcoming

1. “linear perspective”
2. “realist painting (freezing place from a particular point of view and locating the viewer outside of the picture and thus outside of nature and history)”
3. “objectification of landscape as vista with a concomitant politics of vision-a scopic regime”
4. “initiation of surveillance and monitoring on a large scale (Foucault’s [1979] panopticism)”
5. “totalizing male gaze which objectifies landscape and women in particular ways”
6. as in landscape art, nature takes on “a passive role deprived of agency under a totalizing perspective that create[s] the impression of unity”

Escobar, Arturo (1999). After Nature: Steps to an anti-essentialist political ecology [and comments and replies]. Current Anthropology, 40, 1-30

Myths of Nature in post-WWII National Geographic Car Advertisements by Shwandel N. Fraser is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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