Yosemite Summary

Once upon a time two men were looking outside through the prison bars, one of the men saw mud while the other saw stars. The stories and experiences of our lives shape and channel the way we view our surrounding world. ideology, social and individual differences all reflect the differences in people’s conceptualisations. Bell emphasises this by telling the story of a grandmother and his grandson whom were viewing the glacier point in Yosemite. The elderly women saw wasted land that should be used for human need such as housing while his grandson saw the beauty of nature. Just as Barry attested, the environment can mean different things depending on how you define and understand it, or who defines it (Barry, 2007).
The power of ideology in
the ecological dialogue has had an impact in making human domination acceptable and tolerable throughout history till today. Theorizing and thinking about nature is one of the oldest aspects of human thought. Environmental domination is the ideology that humans are above nature. The fear of it is the fact that humans have at its disposal the capacity to radically alter the environment – through science, technology and other nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction possessed by a minority of the world’s nation (Barry, 2007). This fear makes it important for one to understand the rationales provided for environmental domination. This essay will look at three western intellectual traditional ideologies that provided rationale for environmental domination; which are Christianity, individualism and patriarchy.