S5 E3: "Managing" Nature

Scene on Radio: Capitalism

Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University

Society & Culture, Audiodoc, Radio, Documentary, Stories

4.9 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2021

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If the Enlightenment was so great, why was it not a course correction? In fact, did cultural values that took hold in the West in this period speed up our race toward ecological suicide? Part 3 of our series, The Repair, on the climate crisis.

By season co-host Amy Westervelt, with host and producer John Biewen. Interviews with Devin Vartija, Darren Dochuk, Melissa Aronczyk, and Amber Kanazbah Crotty.

The series editor is Cheryl Devall. Music in this episode by Lili Haydn, Kim Carroll, Chris Westlake, Lesley Barber, and Cora Miron. Music consulting by Joe Augustine of Narrative Music.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You all helped to make this season possible.
0:07.4	Those of you who are donated to the show.
0:10.5	We also received support from the International Women's Media Foundation.
0:15.1	Amy, there's a word that I've been meaning to bring up.
0:21.2	I came across it in doing research for this season.
0:24.0	Oh, tell me.
0:25.0	The word is Thingification.
0:27.9	Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, spoke it in a TV interview in 1967.
0:33.2	The Negro was brought here and changed, treated in verin human fashion.
0:37.6	And this led to the Thingification of the Negro.
0:41.4	So he was not looked upon as a person.
0:44.0	He was not looked upon as the human being with the same status and worth as other human
0:50.4	beings.
0:51.4	But it seems Amet Sezer coined the term, the Afro-Caribbean poet from Martinique.
0:57.7	In a poem about colonization in 1955, Sezer wrote, colonization equals Thingification.
1:06.0	Oh, wow.
1:09.0	That just hits so much harder than commodification or even objectification for some reason.
1:16.1	I can see why this idea clicked for you.
1:19.5	We ended last episode talking about the ways that Western culture came to use people
1:25.6	in earth and land and other living things as objects to profit from, rather than treating
1:33.3	them as sacred beings with inherent value and rights.
1:37.6	We looked at the forms that took through conquest and colonization, racialized slavery, and
	...

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