ABSTRACT
Returning from Glacier Peak, Owens encountered two old, Native American women hiking up the mountain. They were headed to the shelter Owens had just finished destroying. Owens's story succinctly captures and critiques a troubling environmental rhetoric that places humans outside of nature. Environmentalism and its concomitant rhetorics, however, frequently draw a bold line between humans and nonhuman nature: the animate and inanimate, and the animal, vegetable, and mineral. Nature, it is presumed, is that which is free from human contact and intervention. Object-oriented ontology and new materialism can thus complicate and invigorate environmental rhetoric. Contention arises, then, in terms of how best to address the environment, to speak for or about it, to raise awareness, and to motivate action. Harman and his allies argue that philosophy largely concerns itself with the problem of access rather than things in and of themselves.
