미국의 자연관과 정치관간의 상관성의 변화--크뢰베케르, 핀초트, 스나이더를 중심으로

Abstract

Nature has had great influence on the American mind since the time of discovery and has been an important part of the American national ego. For the optimistic faith holders, nature embodied all elements for America's future and hope. On the other hand, others, who were suspicious of negative tendencies in the optimistic ideals, sensed that something was wrong in America. Crevecoeur, one of the optimistic faith holders, saw American nature and land as a kind of matrix where his social and political philosophy originated and developed. He preferred cultivated and improved nature, and relied on pastoralism or what Leo Marx calls "the middle landscape" for his political faith in an agrarian democracy. Pinchot's conservationism emerges from integrating his instrumental view of nature with faith in American democratic politics. For him, nature exists for the welfare of human beings and, in turn, they must be responsible for using nature. Pinchot advocated conservation of natural resources because this movement, he believed, would lead to a program to guarantee equality of opportunity, distributive justice for all individuals, and democratic equality. He was strongly convinced that conservation would maintain a democratic system in America, which explains why his conservationism amounts to his political movement. From wilderness, Snyder learns the precepts of what he calls "climax", which are diversity, multi-centeredness, and non-hegemony, and takes these values as his bioregional manifesto. Opposed to centralized, abstract, and monocultural consciousness, his bioregional politics is based on a sense of place and acknowledgment of the ecological, cultural, and traditional realities of a place. This politics, therefore, can be regarded as an alternative to the views of politics which are reflected in pastoralism and conservationism.