Olivia Strittmatter - Feet Forbidden Here

Blog Post 2 - Assigned Class Readings 1

Week 2

This blog post is about Dr. Redick’s paper, Feet Forbidden Here. It’s a paper that argues that by limiting the interstate highways to only motor vehicles, they are alienating people from existential and mythical dimensions of the lived experience. I summarize the general idea of the paper, and then I add some of my own thoughts and opinions.

This means that because the highway system only allows vehicles, and not people walking on foot, biking, etc., it is separating humans from the nonhuman environment. As well as the interstate being a fast and convenient way to travel vast distances causing people to lose touch with each other and the natural environment that we would have traveled through prior to the interstates. This is also creating a loss of culture that is tied to an individual place, because we are able to get from place to place without experiencing all of the areas in between. The interstates have separated humans from the nonhuman environment, and that has severed some of the relationships that humans had previously had with their surrounding environments. Dr. Redick gives two steps towards promoting a healthier relationship between humans and their nonhuman surroundings. The first is that the government should stop expanding the interstate system, and the second is that we need to create an infrastructure for people to use free from motor vehicles.

I think that in order to mend these severed relationships with the nonhuman environment we have to actively work towards adjusting the way we think about ourselves and the nature that surrounds us. We should be working to view the nonhumans as a “Thou” rather than an “It” because this would chance our perspectives and change how we feel we should interact with the nature around us. I don’t agree with both of Dr. Redick’s steps to creating a healthier relationship between humans and nonhumans though. I think that at this point in our society we should still be expanding the interstate system because there are more benefits to having it than not. There are still lots of places that don’t have sufficient access to resources because delivery trucks are unable to get to them due to the lack of transportation systems in the area. We need to make sure all of the humans have the resources they need first. As a biology major going into a masters program for environmental science though, I also think that we need to be more eco-conscious and find ways to make the highway systems more eco-friendly. We need to start actively protecting our environment, and fix the issues we’ve caused with climate change before we can work on changing people’s spiritual/emotional interactions with the surrounding environment. I do think that people being alienated from their ecosystem is a problem though that needs to be addressed, and that people need some form of connection with the environment and their lived dimension. So I really like the idea of creating an infrastructure for people to use that is free from motor vehicles. I like to think that it would be like the Appalachian Trail, or the other long-distance hiking trails in the US. Creating more trails like this, all over the country, would create more opportunities for people to travel by foot and interact with the nonhumans that surround them, as well as create more personal connections with the people who travel the same paths that they do.

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