Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred: Transdisciplinary Perspectives
Language: English
Pages: 306
ISBN: 1472444108
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The capacity of human beings to invent, construct and use technical artifacts is a hugely consequential factor in the evolution of society, and in the entangled relations between humans, other creatures and their natural environments. Moving from a critical consideration of theories, to narratives about technology, and then to particular and specific practices, Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred seeks to arrive at a genuinely transdisciplinary perspective focusing attention on the intersection between technology, religion and society and using insights from the environmental humanities. It works from both theoretical and practical contexts by using newly emerging case studies, including geo-engineering and soil carbon technologies, and breaks open new ground by engaging theological, scientific, philosophical and cultural aspects of the technology/religion/nature nexus. Encouraging us to reflect on the significance and place of religious beliefs in dealing with new technologies, and engaging critical theory common in sociological, political and literary discourses, the authors explore the implicit religious claims embedded in technology.
Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); Maialen Galarraga and Bronislaw Szerszynski, ‘Making Climates: Solar Radiation Management and the Ethics of Fabrication’, in Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management, (ed.) Christopher Preston (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 221–35. 9 Robert Scharlemann, Inscriptions and Reflections: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 130. 10 David E. Klemm and William Schweiker, Religion
and demographic data of Amanbaev village for the year 2009, obtained from the statistics department of the local government, Amanbaev Aiyl Ökmötü. 4 Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006), 32. 5 Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 315. 6 Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 314. 7 Henri Bortoft, Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought
Programme’ in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She has also worked as a Facilitator and Consultant for the ‘Certificate in Holistic Science and Alternative Development’ Distance Learning Course for Schumacher College, UK. She now lives with her family in Devon, England. Matthew Kearnes is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and convener of Environmental Humanities at the School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales. Before arriving at UNSW he held postdoctoral positions at the
role in the bomb project to that of a world-destroying Hindu god, and later to Prometheus, the bringer of fire. He also alluded to the scientists’ state of innocence, and their subsequent acquisition of sinful knowledge.2 In fact, as one atomic historian notes, many of the scientists who were present for the bomb’s detonation, even those ‘ordinarily without religious faith or even any inclination thereto, recounted their experiences in words derived from the linguistic fields of myth and
contrary, provided that they share their superfluous possessions with the needy and embrace moderation and a voluntary frugality.33 In doing this, he incorporated elements of the notion of self-sufficiency as understood in the major philosophical schools. In Antiquity, Stoics, Peripatetics and Platonists all shared a basic framework for their ethical theories, according to which all questions of value fall under the basic question of what brings happiness (εὐδαιμονία) to humans.34 For Plato,