Saving Nature in Time: Lessons of Environmental History for American Environmental Politics in the Twenty-First Century

In this lecture drawn from a book of the same title that he is currently completing, William Cronon analyzes key cultural assumptions about humanity and nature that have characterized modern environmental thinking in the United States for the past several decades. He will be to seek to understand how these unexamined assumptions have sometimes undermined the effectiveness of environmentalism as a political, social, and cultural movement. His goal will be to try to imagine how environmentalism might be more effective if its followers did a better job of mingling the natural and the cultural in the service of humane values.