Paisagem, historicidade e ambiente: as várias naturezas da natureza

Abstract

This article analyzes, from a hermeneutic perspective, the historical production of meanings about the nature and the environment in order to think what could be called an environmental tradition in the context of modernity in the West. This tradition refers to a long duration history of the senses of the environment which are located within the (re) interpretations of contemporaneity and from where one (re) construct the meanings of the actual experience of nature and the environment. In this environmental tradition is possible to detach: enlightened understanding of nature controlled by reason, the vision of the idyllic pastoral; the english naturalism of the seventeenth century; the new bourgeois sensibilities of the eighteenth century; the european romanticism of the XVIII-XIX centuries; the imaginary about America like a Eden. Go along with to these different historical landscapes evoke different kinds of nature as fields of meaning, memories and experiences that are constantly renegotiated in contemporary modes of experiencing the environment. This is the case of the ecological movement and its intersections with the counterculture and new left movements. By drawing this line of analysis the article highlights the elements of a historicity that is (re) update in permanent renegotiation of meanings in contemporary experience.