Invisible Nature

By Kenneth Worthy

Polls show that most Americans care about environmental quality, yet they often behave as if they do not. Empty houses heated to tropical warmth in the dead of winter and huge car dealerships ablaze with security lighting at midnight are just two examples of conspicuous waste.In Invisible Nature, environmental scholar Kenneth Worthy attributes these strange contradictions to a problem that runs deeper than just thoughtless choices. Our modern lifestyle is disconnected from nature in almost every aspect. Though we depend on nature to sustain our lives, most of us experience it only remotely and in processed forms. We are so deeply dissociated from the sources of the products we consume that we have difficulty realizing the consequences of our actions.Worthy traces the broken pathways between consumers and clean-room worker illnesses, superfund sites in Silicon Valley, and massively contaminated landscapes in rural Asian villages where electronics recycling is done. The unintended harms caused by consumption result from a lifestyle in which most people live and work in artificial surroundings and are removed from any sensuous engagement with nature.The author concludes by discussing the ways in which we can reconfigure modern life to create more involvement in our own food production, more education about how goods are produced and waste is disposed, more direct and deliberative democracy, and greater contact with the nature that sustains us.Invisible Nature offers a revolutionary new understanding of the precarious modern human-nature relationship and a path leading to a healthier, more sustainable world.