Adam Creason - Eisenberg Leaps a Fence

         When I first read chapter 19, Leaping the Fence, I was extremely confused. I did not know why Eisenberg was discussing the reign of King Louis, the industrial leaders in England, nor why he would argue one thing, then refute it in the next paragraph. Then I became to realize, this is often how philosophical writing takes place. So, after the third read, I began to understand more deeply beyond his main argument of how these gardens can harm our relationship with nature by striving to reach Arcadia.

                Eisenberg’s central theme in this chapter is how formal (non-sustenance) gardens have distanced humanity from nature by creating a “green sameness” and enabled the exploitation of nature. This sameness harms our ability to discern wilderness from human constructs, thereby reducing our wild perspective of the wild. When we live in an urban area yet have a retreat to a formal garden, humans begin to think that those gardens are wilderness and nature. That is not so because humans have simply placed their utilization of nature’s aesthetic value above the complete respect of the wild. These garden retreats also allow their owners to detach from their harm to the environment, thereby acting as an enabler of exploitation. The owners of the most notable landscape gardens, for example, were of the wealthiest industrial families. These estates were products of industrialization. Industrialization, of course, required mass amounts of raw materials. This can be seen in Eisenberg’s example of Coal, Colonies, and Cash being represented by these estates. The owners can exploit nature in one place and destroy that habitat, while the profits from such exploitation produce an oasis away from the exploitation. These gardens allow them to ignore how they harm the environment, while utilizing it as a tool for their own pleasure. This is all in the pursuit of Arcadia, a mystical idyll in which humans seek a middle realm between wilderness and civilization in which all of humanity’s necessities are provided for, thereby creating a perfect realm where man and nature live in a balance. This idyll is not realistic, and its pursuit has created many negative impacts for the environment.

                This chapter provided a new perspective on how humans currently interact with nature. I have seen these gardens before, and wondered how great it was that people realized the beauty and inherent value of nature when they were built. But after closer analysis after this book, I have realized that while admiring nature’s beauty, that those humans were once again utilizing nature for their own desires. These gardens are products of the exploitation of nature. While they provide a sense of this Arcadia, they cannot truly deliver on it and thus have enabled the exploitation of nature to occur from outside of its sight. This bleeds into the American suburbs, in which a similar sense of Arcadia was sought after in dwelling. However, the suburbs fail to provide such a dwelling, because in the suburbs your water, electricity, etc. is provided, but at full cost to an environment in which you do not live. One is therefore not interacting with the nature surrounding them, and is thus once again utilizing nature for humanity’s purpose. This chapter has given me a new perspective on the value of dwelling in a place where you are connected with the surrounding environment, rather than separated and benefitting from the enabling of the separation.