Primitives in the wilderness
Subtitle: deep ecology and the missing human subject
By: Peter C. van Wyck.
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Albany
Language: eng
Number of pages: 186
Subjects: Deep ecology -- Philosophy.; Human ecology -- Philosophy.; Primitivism.
Description: In Primitives in the Wilderness, Peter van Wyck brings the radical environmentalism known as deep ecology into an encounter with contemporary social and cultural theory. With an eye to critically exposing unexamined essentialist and foundational commitments, the author shows how deep ecology remains profoundly entangled with the very traditions of thought it has sought to overcome.

The author critically assesses deep ecology's relations with the Enlightenment, modernity, systems theory, anthropocentrism, the figure of wilderness and the trope of the primitive, and the imagined promise of posthistoric primitivism. He demonstrates the manner in which deep ecology (and much of contemporary environmental thought) has remained blind to the lessons (and possibilities) of contemporary social and poststructural theory.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 169-180) and index.