Martin Bunzl, Our Relationship With Nature

Spiritual Gardening

I had the honor to have Martin Bunzl on the podcast this past week. He taught Philosophy for 40 years at Rutgers University. We discussed his new book, “Thinking While Walking: Reflections on the Pacific Crest Trail” along with several other topics extending from the subject of litter to the social forces that influence our relationship with nature. We touched on subjects such as removing CO2 from the environment, genetically engineered foods, energy consumption and climate change that is the result of these contributing factors.

About Martin Bunzl:

I taught Philosophy at Rutgers for 40 years before retiring. Philosophy is a hard task master – you can spend a lifetime thinking about a problem and hope to make incremental progress in clarifying what is going on, even if you can’t solve it. Frustrating as that may seem, to me, it has been a privilege to be paid to spend my days just thinking. My recent work lies at the intersection of philosophy and the environment, with a special interest in climate change. I’m interested in both questions of risk and questions of responsibility. Risk, when it comes to uncertainty about how what we do may produce catastrophic outcomes. Responsibility, when it comes to understanding our duty to do no harm without it being clear to whom, or to what, we have that duty. I blog about these, and other issues of pressing concern, at www.mbunzl.com which also provides information about other areas of my research. My just published book, Thinking while Walking: Reflections on the Pacific Crest Trail, is an invitation for the reader to walk sections of the trail from the Mexican border to the Canadian border with me and think about everything from the mundane (what makes litter litter) to the profound (how to make sense of our duty to nature). Throughout the book, I come back to one theme in one way or another - the “constructed” idea of ‘nature’ as a romantic ideal that blinds us to our role in shaping the world since we established settled agriculture thousands of years ago. I’m especially interested in the way that creates a false binary in responding to the climate crisis between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’. I’m also interested in the way our romantic conception of nature constitutes a rich society’s privilege that ignores what we need to do to insure the wellbeing of all people in the world.

Martin Bunzl also has a blog at www.mbunzl.com and you can find his other works available on Amazon by going to https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B001HCU8KC which I think you will find to be very interesting reads.

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