*This Olio will take place in an East Village apartment. Address provided upon rsvp*

We think of nature as the pristine, untouched landscape, the idealized version of the earth before or simply without humans. We even build ‘shrines’--as geographer Cindi Katz says--to this nature in the form of local and national parks, wildlife preserves, land trusts, etc. However ‘nature’ has never been completely devoid of people, so how did we come to this ideology? Whose interests does it serve to view nature this way, and how does this view shape the way we manage our shared landscapes?

This Olio will discuss how the ‘production of nature’ has supported projects that have drastically changed our social landscape from the positive environmentalist movement of the progressive era, to global land grabs, population control, and corporate environmentalism. We will talk about the ways that the assumption of a ‘people-less’ nature shapes the ways we form solutions to climate crises. If nature/natural resources are threatened at a global scale, who benefits when we think of solutions as individual? Who benefits when our environmental discourse lays the blame at plastic straws?