Man-Forest Interaction in a Metropolis: Perspectives from Hermeneutics

Abstract

The looming threat of climate change, terrorism and rising trend of conspicuous consumption have necessitated a process of global change that has not only brought death, destruction and damage but has also questioned the very ethics of civilization and human conduct. Our greed has long overridden our needs and hurtled us towards an economy and lifestyle that has little concern for ecology, environment or ethics. Indeed, the need to underline a social policy that would instil environmental consciousness would automatically make it imperative to take account of social diversities and human angularities. Hence, the need is to go beyond the instrumentalities of reason and competence of empiricism for that they do not enable us in depicting and comprehending the reality besides failing to take into account the variability of context. The WTO regime has seen plenty of conflict among the developed and developing nations over the issue of standardization of global environmental norms, for many developing nations it is not merely a choice between ethics or economics but the very survival in a competitive market, needless to add that it has also its corollary in local context as well. The dominance of developed states and developed communities in exploiting natural resources is a case in point. In this background, the paper is an attempt to use the hermeneutic framework to interpret man-forest interaction in an unlikely context, i.e. metropolis and develop a framework for understanding current environmental concern.

I love the forest. It is bad to live in cities: there are too many of the lustful.

—Nietzsche (1940)