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Paper short abstract:

What if the environment is not "out there" but rather the world available through our different senses? This paper considers Lewis Mumford's and other historical thinkers' notion of the environment as primarily the world of concrete experience, secondarily the world as an abstract object of mind.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the nature of the environment by thinking through the American intellectual Lewis Mumford (1895–1990). We can study shifting understandings of the environment, be it the term itself or what we today put into it, but is it possible to establish a philosophical and metaphysical basis for what it means to be environed? Mumford thought so and tried to root his environmental awareness in awareness itself. Drawing from philosophers, poets, and scientists alike, he embraced an experiential approach to the environment that was at once psychological, ecological, and philosophical. This interdisciplinary interpretation of the environment, grounded in concrete experience, came to constitute the basis for our relation to the surrounding world, relating the subject not only to an inner life but to the outer world. By contrast, Mumford stressed that abstract understandings of the environment were at least one remove away from reality, and that our various conceptions of it will have consequences also for how we act in relation to it.

The second part of the paper considers the environment through the categories of the abstract and the concrete from an interdisciplinary perspective, arguing that we have much to gain from grounding our notion of the environment in Mumford's and other historical thinkers' insistence on the primacy of raw experience. To understand the nonhuman world, we must paradoxically begin by thinking like humans. What this means to environmental history, which cannot but use abstraction to make sense of past environments, is the subject of the conclusion.