Understanding the Paradox of our Political Moment

As more and more humans came up against the edges of wilderness in American history, new laws were needed to help guide and shape what the process would look like. As time changed, so did the laws dealing with preserving nature and society’s view on its importance. 

Jedediah Purdy is a professor of Law at Duke Law and the author of several books. His latest work is called Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening―and Our Best Hope.

Jedediah and Greg discuss the complex terrain of America's environmental laws, tracing the roots from the liberal tradition of conquering Fortuna to modern ecological movements. They also dissect the tension between preserving nature for human benefit and maintaining its mystical allure. They also talk about the often overlooked role of class in environmental politics, analyzing in-depth how this has influenced public debates over laws and public lands.

Listen in and explore these intersections of politics, law, and nature with Jed Purdy.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

On the four different visions

04:02: There are definitely, even more than four kinds of ways of experiencing and relating to the natural world that exist in the broad shape of American life. And then, especially if we were to take account of the variety of indigenous ways of relating that continue to have a life and have their own kinds of futures, these are four that are really embodied in legal regimes. So, they're a way of trying to understand how environmental imagination has been very practical in lending a shape to the law's world making activity.

Viewing nature as a spiritual source

12:00: There is this very different way of seeing nature, which is as a spiritual source, as a way of connecting us with a meaning that goes beyond and, in a way, above our practical and material projects. And has a religious significance, whether understood theologically or in a romantic register, that replaces religion traditionally understood with aesthetic experience and mystical intuition of a sort of world soul.

The paradox of political energy and political aversion

35:00: The book begins with the observation that our political moment feels paradoxical and that it's extremely politically energized, but the mobilization often feels connected much more with fear and despair around politics than any real sense that it's a constructive or hopeful activity. So we're very political, but we're very, obviously, big and crude, inviting people to recognize some part of their own experience and observation. But we are also very anxious about and averse to it.

Climate crisis is an everything problem, not just an environmental one

54:17: I don't think anyone would want to make averting the climate crisis hang on our ability or willingness to change all of those things at once. In some ways, the environmental question finally refuses to be siloed, and it may lose some of its distinctiveness. It may even be a residual habit—that sort of category error—to think of climate as an environmental problem rather than an everything problem.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Alexis de Tocqueville
• John Locke
• The Homestead Act of 1862
• National Park Service Organic Act
• The Wilderness Act
• Henry David Thoreau
• The Frontier Thesis

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Duke Law

His Work:

• Two Cheers For Politics
• After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene
• For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today
• The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and the Legal Imagination
• Jedediah Purdy Amazon Author Page
• This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth
• A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom
• Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World
• New Yorker Articles
• The Atlantic Articles