Brooke Rudow

In this article, I explore how our engagement with the technological materiality of our homes promotes or disrupts healthy relationships with natural and built environments. I will argue that committing to certain home maintenance practices has the potential to overcome, what Albert Borgmann (1984) calls, “the device paradigm.” I begin by outlining Martin Heidegger’s (1971) fears about modern technologies and how he sees them undermining our relationships with a dynamic, more-than-human world. I use the work of Val Plumwood (1993) to reconceive Heidegger’s technological divide through the lens of pernicious dualisms. I then trace the development of focal practices to focal places, moving from Borgmann to Paul Thompson (2000). Embracing the concept of focal places, I argue that the home is the quintessential focal site where our maintenance practices can create embeddedness in our material environments and overcome dangerous technological patterns of being.

I argue that environmental ignorance is a group-based form of substantive ignorance that is analogous to race-based ignorance, showing that they are structurally and functionally similar and sometimes overlap. While race theorists offer promising solutions toward eliminating race-based ignorance, I argue that something far more is needed in the environmental case. I turn to panpsychism as a possible solution. Though I conclude that it is too radical for most Americans to willingly embrace, I incorporate a notion of “encounter” to argue that an expanded conception of home helps with the conceptual overhaul needed to overcome environmental ignorance.

Drawing on Forrest Clingerman’s work in environmental hermeneutics, I explore the technological mediation of nature apps and social media, particularly as they shape experiences of place and memory. I argue that in significantly undermining one’s capacity to experience the natural environment aesthetically, one’s memory of place is similarly undermined. Losing this trace of place in memory, one’s sense of being in the world is transformed. That is, by using digital technologies to navigate nature, we shift modalities from aesthetic engagement to displacement, or in Tim Ingold’s words, from “wayfaring” to “transport.” In the final section, I suggest a shift to dancing in nature as a means by which to recapture an aesthetics of place.

In this article, I explore how our engagement with the technological materiality of our homes promotes or disrupts healthy relationships with natural and built environments. I will argue that committing to certain home maintenance practices has the potential to overcome, what Albert Borgmann (1984) calls, “the device paradigm.” I begin by outlining Martin Heidegger’s (1971) fears about modern technologies and how he sees them undermining our relationships with a dynamic, more-than-human world. I use the work of Val Plumwood (1993) to reconceive Heidegger’s technological divide through the lens of pernicious dualisms. I then trace the development of focal practices to focal places, moving from Borgmann to Paul Thompson (2000). Embracing the concept of focal places, I argue that the home is the quintessential focal site where our maintenance practices can create embeddedness in our material environments and overcome dangerous technological patterns of being.

Abstract:In this paper, I argue that our lives are situated in territories of natural and built environments that should be included in our conceptions of home. I maintain that this expanded conception is indispensable for an environmental ethic that is both well- grounded and practically efficacious. Thus, I take a serious look at the things, places, and others that ought to be included in our concept of home.In the first section I discuss persistent problems for dominant theories of environmental ethics, namely that they fail to connect or give equal weight to value in nature and valuing nature. In the second section, I rely on the work of Hans Jonas to show that ethical responsibility is central to any robust theory of ethics. Ethical theory requires both a source of value and a feeling of responsibility toward that value to be appropriately grounded. Sections three and four contain my arguments for a conception of home in an expanded sense. There I also argue that homes act as primal sites of responsibility, ones that establish both value in nature and a feeling that grounds an environmental ethic. The final section builds on this ground by providing a set of values or ideals to which individuals can commit in order to make their homes good ones in an ethically- charged sense.