Adam Creason - Feet Forbidden Here

In class, we have talked about how modern technology changes the human relation with habitat. This concept can be applied to the vehicles that technology creates, such as cars, planes, etc. This connection is drawn in Dr. Redick’s Feet Forbidden Here, in which he argues that technologically advanced travel has severed the human connection with the habitat and environment. How exactly has innovation in travel severed the human connection with ecology?

The drivers on the highway lack a participation in the environment. In other words, there is no encounter by those in cars with the habitat around them. Instead of participating, those in the cars simply experience the environment they go through. This emphasis on the difference between experience and encounter lies in the definition. To experience something is to watch or listen to it happen, suggesting an experience to be a passive act. To encounter something is to participate in its existence by interacting with it, suggesting an encounter to be an active act. However, it goes deeper than active vs. passive. In an active encounter with the environment, man is able to interact physically and emotionally with nature. To feel the dirt and shrubbery under your feet as you walk off the side of that highway allows man to have that physical interaction. Suddenly, one notices that landscape being passed by thousands without a thought begins to crawl. Different species of shrubbery, the various insects that feed on those shrubs, the snakes that chase the lizards, the rain that morphs the rocks and waters the plants, all of nature comes alive. One then realizes all of this beauty is passed by every day. It is more than beauty, however.

The forbidden landscape robs humanity from fully connecting with our intersubjective dwelling. As Dr. Redick mentions, we are barred from encountering the world freely; Instead, being held to what could be termed as an approved landscape. This limits our ability to encounter nature through physical and active encounters. We are thus slowly removed from these encounters and driven to mere experience. As our feet become forbidden from more and more landscapes, humanity slowly travels farther and farther away from the inherent connection between man and nature.