Reading for 4/20

What I thought was interesting about these articles is that they all brought up (yet again in anthropology) the problem with definitive answers, versus the problem with not having definitive answers. By that I mean straddling both meta social constructions ideas, as well as having certain (albeit changeable) definitions and meanings. Obviously the articles were all looking at these concerns through bio-diversity and what constitutes nature.

I really enjoyed the Tsing article which talked about the human understanding of biodiversity, through cultures, as a collaborative act. Tsing examines alternative cultural definitions of the natural world in context with Western science, which she shows can be quite similar in various ways. This is also an interesting idea when thinking about the Ereshefsky piece. Ereshefsky shows the complexity of defining what is natural, when only defining it in juxtaposition with humans. In fact he shows that humans and animals have a lot of similarities, but that plants and fauna do not. He explains that humans agency doesn't determined naturalness because it's comparable and definable by things that are determined to be natural. I also really enjoyed that despite the implication that conservation is useless, because everything can be argued to be natural, we should focus on protecting things in a collaborative effort as opposed to placing everything on a scale of naturalness.