Can 'Nature' teach anything?

Ken Liberman argues that environmental studies has been burdened with perspectives that have failed to afford access to the actual experience of living in a landscape, and that dualist and nondualist inquiries alike are plagued by anthropocentrisms that seem impossible to escape. This lecture explores how we can investigate the relation of humans and landscapes in ways that preserve what really occurs there, and begin to open those lived phenomena to rigorous scrutiny. To this end, resources are drawn and synthesized from the thinking of Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Derrida, as well as Liberman's field research about nature, scientific praxis, human identity, and anonymity. Kenneth Liberman is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Oregon. For ten years he served as Chair of the Board of Directors of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy, and he is presently Co-Chair of the ASA's Section on Ethnomethodology. He has published sixty articles and eight books. His "More Studies in Ethnomethodology" (SUNY, 2013) won an ASA Distinguished Book Award. He has led one thousand people on backpacking trips on four continents, and has lived with traditionally oriented Aboriginal people in Central Australia for two years and Tibetan refugees in India for four years.