Nature+(Wilcox)

A cipher of a term signifying a number of different, sometimes conflicting, ideas and sentiments—including that which is proper, right, correct, without artifice, savage, innocent, unaltered, made up of plants and animals, made up of everything that is not human and not fabricated by humans, and revealed-true-by-Science—Nature is not what it used to be. As anthropologist and political ecologist Arturo Escobar asserts (borrowing from Raymond Williams), “[t]he meaning of nature, to be sure, has shifted throughout history according to cultural, socioeconomic, and political factors. As Raymond Williams succinctly put it, "the idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history" (1980:86). p.1. [i] Indeed, work such as that of environmental historian William Cronon has demonstrated that one would be hard pressed to find a more historically contingent and culturally determined category than that of wilderness. [ii]

A casualty of the twentieth century’s philosophical attack on essentialism, nature no longer begins with a capital letter, to the extent that the term is used at all in the human and social sciences. When encountering //nature//, one often finds it hybridized, as in the works of Haraway (nature/culture) [iii] or pluralized, as in Latour’s “multinaturalism. [iv] ” Most scholars interested in the question of what has happened to nature would agree with the idea that nature is now widely acknowledged to be socially constructed. This position is often mistaken for the belief that there is ‘no such thing’ as nature. Again, Escobar (with help from Soper and Latour):

We are talking here about nature as an essential principle and foundational category, a ground for both being and society, nature as "an independent domain of intrinsic value, truth, or authenticity" (Soper 1996:22). To assert the disappearance of this notion is quite different from denying the existence of a biophysical reality—prediscursive and presocial, if you wish—with structures and processes of its own which the life sciences try to understand. It means, on the one hand, that for us humans (and this includes life scientists and ecologists) nature is always constructed by our meaning-giving and discursive processes, so that what we perceive as natural is also cultural and social; said differently, nature is simultaneously real, collective, and discursive--fact, power, and discourse--and needs to be naturalized, sociologized, and deconstructed accordingly (Latour 1993). [v]

It is this point which is tragically (and perhaps understandably in the face of the more hubristic strains of constructivism) missed by Gary Snyder, when he quips:

for all the talk of ‘the other’ in everybody’s theory these days, when confronted with a genuine Other, the nonhuman realm, the response of the come-lately anti-nature intellectuals is to circle the wagons and declare that nature is really part of culture. Which maybe is just a strategy to keep the budget within their specialties. [vi]

Biologist Jacob von Uexküll articulated a prototypical version of constructivism that clearly leaves a place for a “real” biophysical world yet holds the implication of the nature/culture hybrid in his development of the //umwelt// concept close to a century ago:

The role which nature plays as the object of different scientists' worlds is highly contradictory. Should one attempt to combine her objective qualities, chaos would ensue. And yet all these diverse //Umwelten// are harbored and borne by the One that remains forever barred to all //Umwelten//. [vii]

Escobar sees in political ecology an iterative, hybrid way forward that attempts to bridge the strange divides and alliances resulting from the positivist and constructivist differences on nature, making the claim that “political ecology is concerned with finding new ways of weaving together the biophysical, the cultural, and the technoeconomic for the production of other types of social nature [viii] ” and that “the ‘question of nature’ may well be the most fertile terrain...for a new dialogue among the natural, human, and social sciences. [ix] ”

Notes:

[i] Escobar, A. (1999). After nature: Steps to an antiessentialist political ecology. //Current Anthropology//. 40(1). p. 1. [ii] Cronon, W. (1995). The trouble with wilderness: Or, getting back to the wrong nature. In William Cronon, ed., //Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature,// New York: W. W. Norton & Co. p.69-90. [iii] Haraway, D. J. (1989). //Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science.// New York: Routledge. [iv] Latour, B. (2004). //Politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy//. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. [v] Escobar, A. (1999). After nature: Steps to an antiessentialist political ecology. //Current Anthropology//. 40(1). p. 2. [vi] Snyder, G. (1998). Is nature real?. //Resurgence//. 190: p.195-198. [vii] Uexküll, Jacob von. (1957) “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds.” In Schiller, Claire H. (ed. and trans.), //Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept//. New York: International Universities Press. P.80. [viii] Escobar, A. (1999). After nature: Steps to an antiessentialist political ecology. //Current Anthropology//. 40(1). p. 4. [ix] //Ibid.// p.15.