through europe - mercer-eng

Gotta Catch ‘Em All: Navigating the Pokémon Environment

Lucy Mercer — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:43:46 +0000

Video gaming is an immersive experience that allows players to navigate new worlds and synthesise abstract concepts. However, the effect of video games on players’ perceptions of nature has not been particularly considered, despite the noted ‘stealth learning’ potential of video games as a tool for environmentalists. With this in mind, in this article I discuss Pokémon, a video game series that has been formative in the development of my own visions of a utopic environmental future.

Primarily, I suggest that Pokémon World can in some senses be perceived as a model environmental utopia, the flaws of which mirror the conflicting demands projected onto landscapes by ecological and free-market ideologies IRL (In Real Life). I then go on to examine the contradictory implications of the games’ adoption of scientific observation as a navigational framework in relation to its necessity of ‘winning’. I conclude by indicating that Pokémon’s attempt to reconcile some of these tensions between harmonious ecology and exploitative modernism assumes the form of a specific type of contemporary nature worship or totemism.

The Idea of Wilderness: Debunking New Primitivism

Lucy Mercer — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 11:42:42 +0000

The natural world may be conceived as a system of concentric circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations, which apprise us that the surface on which we stand is not fixed, but sliding.[i] (John Elder)

In this review, I would like to look at Max Oelschlaeger’s seminal environmental text The Idea of Wilderness[ii] (1991), an intellectual history of the Western world’s relationship to nature. This will be split into two parts: firstly, I will address the problematic dichotomy that The Idea of Wilderness is predicated on – the civilisation versus primitive binary – and examine the implications of positing primitivism as a solution to the current environmental crisis. I will then attempt to suggest an alternative approach for the modern environmentalist.

Is The New Environmentalism A Puritan Enterprise?

Lucy Mercer — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 20:30:18 +0000

I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the Earth

Genesis 9.13 King James Bible

Most types of environmentalists – environmental campaigners, ecologists, so-called ‘light greens’ and ‘deep greens’ – attract hostility, particularly from climate change conspiracists who label ‘believers’ as eco-fanatics. There is a general sense from the non-ecologically inclined that environmentalism is a new religion – and is therefore worthy of deep suspicion from religious persons and atheists alike. My own personal experiences of environmentalism suggest that there is indeed a religious undercurrent to modern environmental thought, but that this is more complicated than simply being ‘fanatical’ or a ‘believer’. Instead I would contend that Protestant – and Puritan – ethics have become distilled within new strands of environmentalism, in particular under the label of ‘neogreens’. Rather than debunking this as a negative force, I think examining just how this modern-day incarnation is manifested is perhaps more productive.