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11

revitalizes politics and foments engagement with the issues and the political
discussion itself (124).
Leaving aside the problematic notion that the advocates of the approaches
discussed by Machin actively suppress conflict (an assertion that folks familiar
with environmental literature might find a tad hard to swallow), two interesting problems manifest when reading these final chapters. First, a conceptual
problem. Weve just read four chapters in which Machin criticizes (sometimes
brutally) various approaches for not being able to deliver a total, universal
answer to the climate change problem. This was because, in Machins
simplified version of agonism, such a unified solution is impossible in the
first place. Here, however, in place of other approaches, Machin offers her
own universalizing solution: we must all agree to disagree, we must all welcome all points of view, we must all agree that other approaches are missing
something, and we must all celebrate difference. Sounds great. But agreeing
to disagree is still agreementit is still consensus. And it is precisely the impossibility of consensus (both practically and ontologically) that this book
claims, in part, to be about. Second, an ethical problem. If real engagement
actually means perpetual discussion, with decisiveness itself held in perpetual
suspicion, how do we act? As academics, the temptation to revel in the eternal debate is strong. The vita contemplativa. Its what we do, after all, and it
both allows and encourages a supreme luxury: indecisiveness. While Machins
radical democratic approach has much to recommend it, at this stage in the
climate change game, any model that idolizes yet more deliberation might
need to be viewed with a touch of self-conscious skepticism, especially by
those of us who live in the ivory tower.

Yi-Fu Tuan. Romantic Geography: In Search of the Sublime Landscape.

Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. 205 pages. ISBN: 978-0299-29680-3 (cloth). US $24.95.
Reviewed by David Seamon, Kansas State University
In most ways, the discipline of Geography has played a peripheral role in
contributing to environmental philosophy. One significant exception is humanistic geography, a sub-field of the discipline emphasizing the importance
of human experience and meaning in understanding peoples relationship
with places, landscapes, and the natural and built worlds. Recognizing that
human involvement with the environment is multivalent and complex, humanistic geographers have interpreted human action, awareness, and meaning
as they both sustain and are sustained by such geographic and environmental

2014. Environmental Philosophy 11:2

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Environmental Philosophy

phenomena as space, place, home, mobility, landscape, region, nature, and

human-made environments.
Chinese-born Yi-Fu Tuan is one of the best known and most productive humanistic geographers. His Romantic Geography: In Search of the Sublime
Landscape is his twentieth book in a line of publications that includes such
significant works as Topophilia (1974), Place and Space (1977), Segmented
Worlds and Self (1982), Cosmos and Hearth (1996), and Human Goodness (2008).
Though Tuan first formally coined the term humanistic geography (in a
1976 article in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers), he has
eschewed conceptual labels like phenomenological, hermeneutic, or existential. Though these philosophical traditions clearly underlie his work, he
has generally avoided their explicit discussion and, instead, moved directly
toward the specific real-world topic at hand, which in this case is romantic
geographythe human desire to encounter environments and places that
are remote, exotic, dangerous, or even beyond reach, whether practically or
existentially.
Throughout Tuans writings, dialectical aspects of environmental and
place experience have been a central conceptual means for his shaping intellectual argumentsfor example, space vs. place; home vs. journey; hearth vs.
cosmos; mundane vs. festive; individual vs. group, and so forth. In Romantic
Geography, the central dialectic is what he terms polarized binarieslived opposites that include darkness and light; chaos and form; low and high; house
and city; and brain and brawn. These binaries become Tuans major organizing device for explicating a romantic geography because they highlight lived
extremes rather than a middle range of human experience. These binaries
affect our feelings and judgments toward objects and people in the ordinary
encounters of life, but alsoand more central to romantic geographyin the
envisioning and experiencing of large, challenging environments (10).
In chapter 1, Polarized Values, Tuan delineates the lived qualities and
meanings of seven polarized binaries and, in chapter 2, Earth and Its Natural
Environments, he considers how these binaries contribute to the romantic pursuit of environments that are remote and inaccessible (167)viz.,
mountains, oceans, forests, deserts, and the icy regions of the Arctic and Antarctic. Tuan claims that human encounters with extreme environments like
these revealas midrange values and small accommodating environments
do notwhat human beings truly fear and desire (173). In chapter 3, The
City, Tuan argues that, in many ways, it is modern urban environments that
are the most extreme result of romantic geography because they evoke the
urge to reach beyond the norm, beyond what is natural and necessary (117).
Continuing his use of polarized binaries, he offers evidence for this claim via
the themes of cutting agricultural ties, civilizing winter, and conquering night. In the books last chapter, The Human Being, Tuan considers
whether the constructive impulses of romantic geography might be regener-

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ated in a postmodern world largely insulated from danger, risk, and authentic
experience. He finds possibilities in romantic geographys implacable drive
toward the transcendent that gives one a serene disregard of worldly goods
and social conventions (165).
According to Tuan, the high point of romantic geography was the time of
intrepid nineteenth-century European explorers who, at great personal sacrifice, sought to record and understand Earths uncharted places, often without
guarantee of financial or social reward. As examples, Tuan discusses the expeditions of several polar explorers, including Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen and
Englishman Ernest Schackleton. Drawing on the polarized values of home
vs. journey and stability vs. adventure, Tuan concludes that, for these men,
family, home, communitythese concrete, down-to-earth experiences of
goodness[were] the anchorage, the source of stability, for the more abstract,
mind-directed, ethereal-aesthetic satisfactions of [these] romantic quests
(1045).
Tuan argues that, by the early twentieth century, the keen public interest
in the romantic geography that these explorers represented largely dissipated
as the halo of their work was dimmed by economic considerations such as
finding coal, oil, and precious minerals. More so, claims Tuan, the nihilism
of a post-religious and post-romantic age called into question the purity of
any geographic quest, the real purpose of which was cynically presupposed
to be selfish personal gain. Tuan argues that one current result, academically,
is that Geography and other environmental disciplines overly emphasize a
bureaucratic frame of mind and give too much attention to the nitty-gritty
details of housekeepingwhat Tuan calls home economics (177). Tuan is
not opposed to this mode of academic effort but ends his book by calling for
a supplementary style of discovery resonant with the earlier romantic geographya romantic, transcendental source of insights (177) that would extend
the realm of housekeeping and contribute a zest for living and knowing that
would renew a romantic impulse in ways not currently imaginable.
Tuans explication of the past and future of romantic geography is provocative, but the substantive argument and manner of presentation are too
sketchy and frail to be convincing. In almost all his work, one notes that Tuans scholarly strength is mastering and integrating an intimidating amount
of secondary material within which he discovers linkages and relationships
that otherwise would remain unrecognized. The weakness of this approach is
a breezy, disengaged style and presentation that sometimes seem little more
than an ingenious compilation of insightful information. For Romantic Geography, this weakness is intensified by the fact that, of the books 158 endnotes,
only twelve refer to work published in 2000 or later. One wonders why Tuan
did not incorporate important recent research that would bolster many of his
interpretive claimsfor example, theologian Belden Lanes The Solace of Fierce
Landscapes (1998), a remarkable account of desert and mountain quests; or

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Environmental Philosophy

literature scholar David L. Pikes Subterranean Cities (2005) and Metropolis on

the Styx (2007), a spirited consideration of the role of underground spaces in
organizing and imagining life in the modern city.
Romantic Geography works best as a set of allusive intellectual insights and
connections that other environmental researchers might probe more thoroughly, both for correctness and error. Ironically, the book lacks the resolute
spunk of romantic geography and, like the dry academic writing that Tuan
criticizes, seldom exciteseven when it goes beyond detailing resources and
livelihoods to considerations of human conflict (171).

Bryan E. Bannon. From Mastery to Mystery: A Phenomenological Foundation for an Environmental Ethic.
Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014. 208 pages. ISBN 978-0-8214-2064-5
(paper). US $34.95
Reviewed by Cian Whelan, University College Cork
Bryan E. Bannons From Mastery to Mystery is a perfect example of the potential of eco-phenomenology, a compelling invitation to transform the basic
assumptions that inform contemporary environmental discourse. The kernel
of Bannons argument is the rejection of nature as composed of substance.
Instead, Bannon argues for a relational concept of nature. Drawing from the
phenomenological tradition, Bannon maintains that nature isnt constituted
of plants or animals or wild spaces, nature is the relations between bodies
(both human and nonhuman).
In exploring the contours of this claim Bannon takes us on a journey,
from practical considerations like the debate between conservationists and
preservationists, right down to the ontological characteristics that nature
must have, and back again to how metaphysical assumptions and commitments structure and inform public discourse.
Bannon begins by giving a brief introduction to the salient conflicts
within the environmentalist movement that he believes phenomenology can
assist in dissolving. To name a few: the tension between seeing nature as having instrumental value or intrinsic value, the value laden distinction between
corrupting human culture and pure, unspoiled, nature, and the shortcomings
of looking to the science of ecology for normative inspiration as to how humans should interact with nonhumans.
According to Bannon, underneath the myriad perspectives of all of these
conflicts lies the same basic presumption that nature is a substance, whether
it is a resource to be used or an independent agent deserving of respect. By
interrogating this basic presumption Bannon sets the stage for an alternative

2014. Environmental Philosophy 11:2

All rights reserved. ISSN: 1085-1968
doi:

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