＂이용하되 낭비는 말라＂--환경생태사상 개척자로서의 쿠퍼의 개척자들

초록

Contemporary environmental discourses have developed and directed into various ways including almost all of the fields, but the core of the discourses has always circled around the question of how we humans look at nature, that is, how much nature exists for human well-being? Historically nature has been fluctuated between two opposite ends--anthropocentric perspective at one end and ecocentric perspective at the other end. The conflicts between conservation and preservation not only aptly represent these two opposing perspectives, but they also have helped launch environment movements. In the United States it was with the help of the concepts of conservation and preservation that modern environmental movements and environmental consciousness have been initiated and developed. The concept of conservation has led to the awareness that natural resources are not limitless so they could be exhausted with reckless exploitation. The concept of preservation has helped with the awareness that American wilderness and sublime landscapes which distinguish America from Europe are the sources of national pride and identity. American environmental philosopher George Perkins Marsh has been credited as the pioneer who first theorized the importance of conservation and preservation in the mid-19th century. However, it was in fact the American novelist James Fenimore Cooper who for the first time embodied the concepts of conservation and preservation into his work, especially The Pioneers, which preceded to Marsh's Man and Nature by nearly 40 years. The ecocritical value of The Pioneers lies less in its premise of ecocentric perspectives than its narrative of conflicts among different viewpoints of man-nature relations: Judge Temple's vision of conservation, Natty Bumppo's preservation, and frontier town people's utilitarianism. Through the clashes among these different viewpoints of nature in the American frontier, Cooper not only questions the established Western anthropocentric approach to nature, demonstrating the awareness of the importance of conservation and preservation, but also he further leads modern readers to ponder the difficult question of choice or compromise between conservation and preservation.

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