Ruth Irwin
I write on climate change, globalisation, education, and philosophy. Most of my work springboards off Heidegger's discussion of technology as Gestell, or the framework, or lens, of knowledge. Heidegger argues that technology is the governing constraint of knowledge production in the modern epoch. Its neither affirmative or condemning of technology in itself. Simply it registers the ways modern technology shapes comprehension; the storage capacity, and scale of modern technology and what it makes possible, and what it obscures from cognition. Modern technology makes it possible to be freed of our local ecological constraints. We can trade our way out of virtually anything. A local drought, pestilence, earthquake or other catastrophe is no longer life threatening, because refrigerated shipping containers can be brought in to replace all lost productivity (for a season or three anyway). Modernity is thus, freedom, and paradoxically, alienation, from our local ecology. Along with freedom, the alienation of technology is the reason why many people rarely even know if there is a drought, or the lambing is delayed. Our leisure time is shopping, and our work time occupies space created hundreds of feet in the air. For many, we have forgotten what soil even smells like.
A luddite response is not at all what I am interested in pursuing. I love the contemporary interest in collapsing the philosophical distinction between subject and object because it interrogates and corrupts the alienation of humanity from ecology and then, by extension, erodes the series of binaries that are contingent on the orginating 'hyper-separation' (Plumwood) of subject from object, for example, 'pure nature' from 'polluted civilisation.' However, I do not think a total collapse of the subject from the object is either possible or desirable. This is something I wrote about at length in several papers. This realm of interests leads my work on education, technology, economics, poetics, art, culture, climate, and epochal change. I am presently working on two new books, one on Nietzsche and Heidegger, and the other on An Ecology of Economics and Climate Change. You can contact me at ruth.irwin@gmail.com
A luddite response is not at all what I am interested in pursuing. I love the contemporary interest in collapsing the philosophical distinction between subject and object because it interrogates and corrupts the alienation of humanity from ecology and then, by extension, erodes the series of binaries that are contingent on the orginating 'hyper-separation' (Plumwood) of subject from object, for example, 'pure nature' from 'polluted civilisation.' However, I do not think a total collapse of the subject from the object is either possible or desirable. This is something I wrote about at length in several papers. This realm of interests leads my work on education, technology, economics, poetics, art, culture, climate, and epochal change. I am presently working on two new books, one on Nietzsche and Heidegger, and the other on An Ecology of Economics and Climate Change. You can contact me at ruth.irwin@gmail.com
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I want to suggest that our world-view needs to change, and say that the concept “world-view” itself privileges a solipsist orientation and we need to re-imagine ourselves as part of the world-scape. The concept of world-scape rather than world-view reflects a shift in approach to the interaction between people and environment. I take an important Maori concept of whenua and contemplate it in a contemporary context. I argue that the indigenous close relationship of people with the land and can be thought through again, and include a politics of difference, all held within the embrace of the placenta, or whenua. This world view is both contemporary, global, and fully engaged with the health and wellbeing of the environment and other people.