Humans, Technology, and Nature

This week, we read chapter 16 of “The Perception of the Environment” written by Tim Ingold. This chapter discusses how the mission of mankind in the Western world has been to achieve mastery over nature. Society is thought to be a grouping of rational people, nature is the external world, and technology is a rational understanding of this external world. In the 18th and 19th centuries, anthropologists during this time noticed that the universal thought was that the more civilized a society meant there was more complex technology to control nature. It is also commonly supposed that where there is technique there is also technology. This viewpoint is incorrect. Technological knowledge is explicit rather than tacit, and it is objective rather than subjective. There is a common misconception with hunters and gatherers that within their society of primitive people, their practical activities were entirely bound to the operation of technology. There needs to be more of a heavy realization that technology and society and two separate beings.

I read an article written by BBC Journalist Molly Flatt (http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150703-can-nature-and-technology-be-friends) titled: “Why we should concentrate on helping nature and technology to flourish and stop seeing them as sparring partners.” Flatt wrote about how, “We despair about poaching while helping the culprits track down rare animals with our social media posts.” This comment stood out to me particularly more than the other comments she made, considering all of the controversy around our President Donald Trump allowing the hunting of endangered animals such as the African elephant to be killed and brought back to the U.S. as trophies. Flatt made a great point that even the people simply taking pictures of these endangered animals and posting them on social media while tagging their location is actually showing hunters what animals are in a certain location; therefore helping them hunt. These people’s intention may not be to help these poachers hunt, and may despise hunting, but their use of technology just so happens to be helping poachers; perhaps unintentionally. I think this feeds off of Tim Ingold’s point that people think technology should or can control nature. In this case, technology is “controlling” by “capturing” nature in the form of a picture or video with a tagged location and increasing its human predators. Technology’s ability to increase human hunters in a certain area is a form of “control” over nature and over society.