IEP 426: Contested Natures

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 1.

INTRODUCTION

Think: What is nature? What is the difference between the natural and the artificial or between the human and the nonhuman? Are the products of human endeavour – houses, factories, war, and climate change - ‘natural’? Why? Is ‘the environment’ natural?

In this module we seek to show that there is no singular ‘nature’ as such, only a diversity of contested natures; and that each such nature is constituted through a variety of socio-cultural processes from which such natures cannot be plausibly separated. We therefore argue against three doctrines which are widespread in current thinking about nature and the environment. We begin this module by briefly outlining these before seeking to develop our own position.

Three doctrines

The first, and most important for our subsequent argument, is the claim that the environment is essentially a ‘real entity’, which in and of itself and substantially separate from social practices and human experience, has the power to produce unambiguous, observable and rectifiable outcomes. This doctrine will be termed that of ‘environmental realism’, one aspect of which is the way that the very notion of nature itself has been turned into a scientifically researchable ‘environment’. Modern rational science can and will provide the understanding of that environment and the assessment of those measures which are necessary to rectify environmental bads. Social practices play a minor role in any such analysis since the realities which derive from scientific inquiry are held to transcend the more superficial and transitory patterns of everyday life.

The second doctrine is that of ‘environmental idealism’ which has partly developed as a critique of the first. This doctrine holds that the way to analyse nature and the environment is through identifying, critiquing and realising various ‘values’ which underpin or relate to the character, sense and quality of nature. Such values held by people about nature and the environment are treated as underlying, stable and consistent. They are abstracted both from the sheer messiness of the ‘environment’ and the diverse species which happen to inhabit the globe, and from the practices of specific social groupings in the wider society who may or may not articulate or adopt such values. This doctrine can coexist with the first.

The third doctrine specifically concerns the responses of individuals and groups to nature and the environment. It is concerned to explain appropriate human motivation to engage in environmentally sustainable practices and hence the resulting environmental goods or bads. It seeks to do this in terms of straightforwardly determined calculations of individual and/or collective interest (such as cost-benefit analysis and contingent valuation schemes). This doctrine we will term ‘environmental instrumentalism’ and is importantly linked to a marketised naturalistic model of human behaviour, and its radical separation from non-human species.

Obviously all these three positions have something to contribute to the untangling of contemporary debates on the environment. But it will be our view that all three ignore/ misrepresent/ conceal aspects of contemporary environmental change and human engagement. Our approach will emphasise that it is specific social practices, especially of people’s dwellings, which produce, reproduce and transform different natures and different values. It is through such practices that people respond to, cognitively, aesthetically and hermeneutically, to what have been constructed as the signs and characteristics of nature. Such social practices embody their own forms of knowledge and understanding and undermine a simple demarcation between objective science and lay knowledge. These practices structure the responses of people to what is deemed to be the ‘natural’. We thus seek to transcend the by-now rather dull debate between ‘realists’ and ‘constructivists’ by emphasising the significance of embedded social practices.

Such social practices possess a number of constitutive principles. These practices are:

• discursively ordered (hence the importance of the analysis of everyday talk especially as it contrasts with official rhetorics and models such as sustainability)

• embodied (hence the significance of identifying the ways in which nature is differentially sensed by the body)

• spaced (hence the importance of the particular conflicting senses of the local, national and global dimensions of the environment)

• timed (hence the analysis of conflicting times in nature including the apparent efforts of states to plan for the uncertain future)

• and involve models of human activity, risk, agency and trust (which are often the opposite of or at a tangent to ‘official’ models of human action, and which may or may not be at odds with the interests of non-human animals)

Much of the module is concerned with showing the character and significance of such social practices. Overall we seek to show that responses to and engagement with nature are highly diverse, ambivalent, and embedded in daily life. Such responses necessarily involve work in order that they develop and are sustained. This work is not just economic and organisational, but also cultural in often complex and ill-understood ways. These social practices are structured by the flows within and across national boundaries of signs, images, information, money, people, as well as noxious substances. Such global flows can reinforce or can undermine notions of agency and trust.

NATURE AND SOCIETY - A HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In historical terms the juxtaposition of society and nature reached its fullest development in the nineteenth century in the ‘west’. Nature came to be degraded into a realm of unfreedom and hostility that needed to be subdued and controlled. Modernity involved the belief that human progress should be measured and evaluated in terms of the domination of nature, rather than through any attempt to transform the relationship between humans and nature. This view that nature should be dominated presupposed the doctrine of human exceptionalism: that humans are fundamentally different from and superior to all other species; that people can determine their own destinies and learn whatever is necessary to achieve them; that the world is vast and presents unlimited opportunities; and that the history of human society is one of unending progress.

This dichotomisation of nature and society possesses a number of deficiencies and has been subject to various kinds of critique. The following deficiencies should be noted: the dichotomisation has led to exceptional levels of exploitation and degradation of land and landscapes and of other animal species which many humans now find intolerable; humans have themselves suffered from being relatively estranged from these ‘natural’ processes; and there is no simple entity which we can designate as ‘nature’ which is to be regarded as waiting to be subject to enlightened human mastery. Indeed, the very idea of nature has been analysed as having multiple and even oppositional meanings: it can refer to the essential quality or character of something; the underlying force which lies behind events in the world; the entirety of animate and inanimate objects and especially those which are threatened; the primitive or original condition existing prior to human society; the physical as opposed to the human environment and its particular ecology; and the rural or countryside (as opposed to the town or city) and its particular visual or recreational properties (see Williams 1976).

We now provide a brief historical sketch of the changing interpretations of human/nature relations; an exercise designed to show the multiple, contested and differentially embedded notions of nature even within the west during the high point of the doctrine of human exceptionalism. This delineation of some of the key transformations of people's understandings and relationships to nature in the west is usefully outlined by Williams (1972). He argues that the term nature is perhaps the most complex and difficult word in the English language; that the idea of nature contains an enormous amount of human history; and that our current understandings of nature derive from an immensely complicated array of ideas, linked to many of the key concepts of western thought, such as God, Idealism, Democracy, Modernity, Society, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and so on.

Please now read Raymond Williams 'Ideas of nature' in Benthall, J. ed. Ecology: The Shaping Enquiry. This is available on the discussion site.

However, it is the abstraction of a singular nature from the multiplicity of lived experiences (starting over 2,000 years ago) that was to prove so critical for subsequent human responses to the physical world. Indeed, the ways in which nature has historically been made singular, abstract, and then personified, provides key insights as to how people thought about themselves, their place in the world, their relationships with each other and with the land, and their sense of general power and powerlessness in shaping their lifeworlds. Starting with mediaeval cosmology Williams identifies the social significance of the formation of a series of abstracted, singular, and personified natures. Thus, first as a goddess, then as a divine mother, an absolute monarch, a minister, a constitutional lawyer, and finally a selective breeder, the appeal to a singular nature defined respectively the changing and often bitterly contested relationships between a state of nature, a state of God, and humanity. Indeed, once the idea of a singular nature became established, it then became possible to consider whether human activities did or did not fit into such a pre-existing and pre-ordained natural order. Williams argues:

For, of course, to speak of man [sic] ‘intervening’ in natural processes is to suppose that he might find it possible not to do so, or to decide not to do so. Nature has to be thought of, that is to say, as separate from man, before any question of intervention or command, and the method or ethics of either, can arise (1972: 154).

C.S. Lewis suggests that it was the pre-Socratic philosophers of Greece who invented the first singular and abstracted nature. It was they who first had the idea that the "great variety of phenomena which surrounds us could all be impounded under a name and talked about as a single object" (1964: 37). Then, and only then, could nature be personified, starting with nature as Goddess. However, the idea of nature was soon seen not to cover everything, and in not covering everything nature came to locate itself in relationship with humans and God. In the mediaeval European idea, for example, nature was believed to have ‘her’ own particular place in the grand scheme of things:

She had her proper place, below the moon. She had her appointed duties as God’s vicegerent in that area. Her own lawful subjects, stimulated by rebel angels, might disobey her and become ‘unnatural’. There were things above her, and things below. It is precisely this limitation and sub-ordination of Nature which sets her free for her triumphant poetical career. By surrendering the dull claim to be everything, she becomes somebody. Yet all the while she is, for the medievals, only a personification (Lewis 1964: 39).

Within this grand design people too had their precise and pre-ordained place in the scheme of things, a place distinct yet bounded and connected to that of nature. In such a world nature was commonly portrayed as God’s creation, and as reflecting a divine and perfect order in which everything had its right place, its home, its sense of belonging. Or, as Lovejoy says: ‘the men of the fifteenth century still lived in a walled universe as well as in walled towns’ (Lovejoy 1936: 101). The mediaeval relationship between God and nature was often described though the analogy of nature as a book, requiring attentive reading. Glacken describes in scholarly detail how much of mediaeval theology was concerned with the two books in which God revealed himself: through the bible (the ultimate book of revelation), and through the book of nature (through which the work and artisanship of God could be revealed; 1967: 176-253). Moreover, as Williams points out, the inclusion of people within nature was not static:

The idea of a place in the order implied a destiny. The constitution of nature declared its purpose. By knowing the whole world, beginning with the four elements [i.e. earth, water, fire and air], man [sic] would come to know his own important place in it, and the definition of this importance was in discovering his relation to God (Williams 1972: 153).

Such a perspective on nature, Williams argues, produced a quite considerable tension concerning the appropriate limits of physical inquiry and thus of human ethical action. To inquire too deeply could be construed as transcending one’s allocated place, as an attempt to intervene ‘unnaturally’ in God’s work. Such views of one’s relationship to nature led to vigorous study of and reverence towards the visible world of creation. Indeed, although during the middle ages there was substantial intervention in physical nature - from the clearance of forests and woodland for agriculture, to the quarrying of millions of stone for cathedrals and building - progress and intervention in nature were predominantly conceived in spiritual terms, in terms of discovering God’s providential design and in constructing artefacts designed to express the perfectibility of God’s order.

Yet, even in mediaeval times, there was ambiguity in people’s relationship to nature, an ambiguity captured in two singular and largely competing personifications: that of nature as God’s absolute monarch who possesses such powers of destiny we cannot escape; and that of nature as God’s minister or even mother earth, that nurtures and provides for the needs of humanity. Williams (1976) argues that such singular natures helped make sense of the uncertainties in everyday life. When times were good, nature was personified as a mother, a provider, a goddess who sustained and nurtured; whereas in times of famine and plague, nature became personified as a jealous and capricious monarch.

As described above, pre-modern cosmology involved the idea of an overarching order within which humanity, nature and God were inextricably bound together in the Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy 1936). Moral judgement was then largely understood in terms of whether human action conformed to this ‘natural’ God-given order.

Two transformations

Two crucial transformations took place from the 16th and 17th centuries onwards, both dependent upon the separation and abstraction of a ‘state of nature’ from that of humanity and God, both effectively denying the possibility of an all-inclusive cosmological order. The first transformation involved the deadening of the state of nature: from a life giving force to dead matter, from spirit to machine. In effect, through the new sciences of physics, astronomy, and mathematics, the study of nature became the study of how nature is materially constituted. Nature became a set of laws, cases and conventions, discoverable through the new rules of inquiry; forms of inquiry which could be carried out in their own terms without any recourse to a divine purpose or design (see Williams 1972).

Such a transformation was pioneered by the mechanists, and in particular by the physicalist ontology provided by Galileo, by the philosophy of Descartes which removed everyday sensed reality from nature (through distinguishing the world of science and primary qualities from the world of appearance and secondary qualities), and later by the scientific ‘world picture’ put in place by Newton. The scientific method no longer required teleological explanation. By contrast, the basic forces controlling creation could be described in mathematical or geometrical terms (Glacken 1967: 505; see also Whitehead 1926: chapter 3). God no longer had to be conceived within nature, but could now be detached from nature, placed in the heavens overlooking ‘his’ mechanical creation, intervening periodically with the occasional miracle. Such detachment is reflected in Kepler’s clockwork analogy of the universe:

My aim is to show that the heavenly machine is not a kind of divine, living being, but a kind of clockwork (and he who believes that a clock has a soul, attributes the maker’s glory to the work), insofar as nearly all the manifold motions are caused by a single, magnetic, and material force, just as all motions of the clock are caused by a simple weight. And I also show how these physical causes are to be given numerical and geometrical expression (Kepler 1605; cited Koestler 1964: 340).

The second transformation involved the contrast between a state of primeval nature and a formed human state with laws and conventions. Mythologies of an original state of nature, of a golden age in which humans and nature were in a state of balance and harmony, have been commonplace since the ancient Greeks. They have often coincided with the myth of Eden, of ‘man’ before the fall. However, such mythologies themselves have been ambivalent, based on a tension between nature as a state of innocence (nature as the state before the fall), and nature as the wild, untouched and savage places metaphorically outside the garden (the fall from innocence as a fall into wild and savage nature). Two variants of this idea evolved broadly into what we now term, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. These two variants were grounded in the dispute over whether this ‘pre-social state of nature’ was the source of original sin or of original innocence. An early articulation of this dispute can be seen in Hobbes and Locke. While Hobbes famously described the pre-social state of nature as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, Locke described this state as one of ‘peace, goodwill, mutual assistance and co-operation’. As such Hobbes argued that the basis of civilised society lay in overcoming ‘natural disadvantages’, while for Locke the basis of a just society lay in organising society around ‘natural laws’. These novel constructions of nature had major consequences for the relationship between forms of social activity and a state of nature.

Indeed, the effect of the new abstract and geometrical ‘natures’ of the Enlightenment tradition not only legitimated theoretical inquiry: ‘a separated mind looking at separated matter’, ‘man looking at nature’, but also new applications. Williams argues that the separation of nature from society was a prerequisite for practices dependent on constituting nature instrumentally: as a set of passive objects to be used and worked on by people (1972; the doctrine of ‘environmental instrumentalism’ we introduced in the Introduction). The morality used to justify the enormous interference which occurred from the 18th century onwards arose from this construction of a separate nature, whose laws became the laws of physics. And since these were considered God's laws, physical interference came to represent the continuation of God's creation. Indeed, it led to systems of thought where it became considered fundamentally purposeful for people to interfere on a massive scale for human use, first in the field of agricultural innovation, and later in the industrial revolution. And also it led to arguments proclaiming not only the ‘naturalness’ of interference, but also to the argument that interference in and on nature was so inevitable that any criticism of the argument itself became classified as unwarranted interference in the mastery of nature. Hence a particular version of the socio-economic order, that involving a Hobbesian vision of struggle, of self-interest, and of the sanctity of physical intervention on nature for human use, came to be read as an extension of nature and of a naturalised order.

However, the formulation of ‘natural laws’ in the 18th century, alongside a renewal of interest in the state of natural as of original innocence (Rousseau), was closely aligned to the rise in popularity of natural history. Such interest itself arose partly from the life sciences where the mechanical doctrines had not effectively supplanted the much older idea of the earth as a divinely designed environment, reflected in the very same sensory qualities (its beauty, form, smells and colour) that had been dismissed by the mechanists as unimportant and secondary.

Such interest in natural history was to prefigure the development of a new and important idea of nature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Just as the ‘improvers’ of nature were claiming the inevitability of their actions and their transformations of nature, so many people began to experience the turmoil which followed from this massive interference in ‘nature’. From work-houses to smog filled factories, from child chimney sweeps to the destruction of the countryside, from tuberculosis to syphilis, these processes rapidly became criticised as inhumane, unjust, and most relevant here ‘unnatural’. However, as Williams argues, while these many negative impacts of industrialisation were relatively easy to identify, it was much harder to imagine and to articulate a coherent ‘natural’ alternative (1972).

Two of the most distinctive contributors in England to this Romantic critique were Wordsworth and Ruskin who have both been viewed as early environmentalists. Ruskin’s views were probably the most developed. He argued that good design in industry depends upon appropriate organisation, that this in turn depends upon the proper structuring of society, and that this in turn depends upon how faithful it is to the natural form. Ruskin particularly criticises the ways in which industrial society produced forms of social organisation that were not organic and functional as in nature; but involved competition, individual achievement and the division of labour. The division of labour is particularly criticised by Ruskin.

Some of the ‘unnatural’ phenomena that Ruskin critiqued included the railway, industrial pollution, litter, water reservoirs, cast or machine-made objects, industrial cities, suburban housing, plate glass and so on.

Ruskin though stood out in his condemnation of the effects of the market. For most nineteenth century commentators it was the market which was taken to be natural. As it and the associated division of labour were increasingly institutionalised in society, it became difficult both to criticise the mechanism which was identified as the creator of wealth, prosperity, profits and liberal democracy, and to devise a coherent alternative that did not entail the domination of nature (most socialist and Marxist alternatives equally implied the ‘death of nature’). Indeed thanks to the utilitarians and late nineteenth century neo-classical economics, the market itself and the associated division of labour rapidly came to be understood as ‘natural’. The laws of the market were viewed as natural, analogous to the laws of the natural world and therefore not to be interfered with or contested. Williams argues:

The new natural economic laws, the natural liberty of the entrepreneur to go ahead without interference, had its own projection of the market as the natural [sic] regulator... a remnant ... of the more abstract ideas of social harmony, within which self-interest and the common interest might ideally coincide (1972: 158).

This naturalising of the market strikingly showed how the restructuring of nature as ‘natural science’ was to cast its baleful influence over humanity and the social world. All kinds of inquiry became subject to the same search for natural laws.

The alternative conception of nature which did emerge in the nineteenth century, from the Romantic rather than the Enlightenment tradition, was more escapist than visionary. Instead of efforts to re-invoke a morality and ethics within nature by thinking through new ways to rework nature into the social, nature sustained ‘her’ separation by departing from the predominant human sphere to the margins of modern industrial society. Nature was increasingly taken to exist on those margins, away from the centre of industrial society:

Nature in any other sense than that of the improvers indeed fled to the margins: to the remote, the inaccessible, the relatively barren areas. Nature was where industry was not, and then in that real but limited sense had very little to say about the operations on nature that were proceeding elsewhere (Williams 1972: 159).

Seeing nature as the other, as on the margins of society, also relates to the ways in which nature is often presumed to be female (and God to be male). This we now know has been a characteristic conception, that nature has often been constructed as female, as a Goddess or as a divine mother. Further it often claimed that the taming of nature through the industrial economy, reason and science involves its ‘mastery’ and a form of domination analogous to how men master women, both directly and through the power of the ‘look’.

Implicit then in certain notions of nature have been male sexualised conceptions of the raping and pillaging of nature, akin to men’s treatment of women. Central in many such accounts is the similar priority apparently given to the malevolent power of the visual sense. Moreover, in some versions of eco-feminism it is claimed that women are in some sense more ‘natural’ and closer to ‘nature’ than are men; and this is particularly because of their role in childbirth and reproduction. It is also argued that women are often the ‘guardians of biodiversity’ since in developing countries they often know more about local farming practices, the soil, weather and so on (Shiva 1988). Many feminist utopias have been built around an all female society which lives at peace with itself and with the natural world (Plumwood 1993). Some of the discourses surrounding recent environmental politics have particularly emphasised the way that women ‘naturally’ will be more concerned to protect and conserve the environment, partly it is said because they will be more likely to take into account the interests of their children However, other recent theoretical formulations have criticised what can be seen as essentialist conceptions of men and women, society and nature (Haraway 1991).

It should also be noted that the history of nature further needs to account for how colonialism and racial oppression have also been premised upon a separate nature which is there to be exploited by and for the west (which in total now takes on the character of society). This nature has been seen to consist both of separate ‘virgin’ territories of often extraordinary natural abundance, and of peoples who are seen as more ‘natural’ as workers and later as objects of the colonizing tourist gaze. Plumwood neatly summarises the effects for social groups of thus being presumed to be natural, as located actually or imaginatively away from the centres of reason and science:

To be defined as ‘nature’... is to be defined as passive, as non-agent and non-subject, as the ‘environment’ or invisible background conditions against which the ‘foreground’ achievements of reason or culture ... take place. It is to be defined as ... a resource empty of its own purposes or meanings, and hence available to be annexed for the purposes of those supposedly identified with reason or intellect (1993: 4).

The conclusion of this brief historical account is that there is no singular nature as such, only natures. And such natures are historically, geographically and socially constituted. Hence there are no simple natural limits as such. They are not fixed and eternal but depend on particular historical and geographical determinations, as well as on the very processes by which nature and the natural is culturally constructed and sustained, particularly by reference to what is taken to be the ‘other’. Moreover, once we acknowledge that ideas of nature both have been, and currently are, fundamentally intertwined with dominant ideas of society, we need to address what ideas of society and of its ordering become reproduced, legitimated, excluded, validated and so on through appeals to nature or the natural. And the project of determining what is a natural impact becomes as much a social and cultural project as it is ‘purely’ scientific.

Think about how you responded to the earlier questions of ‘what is nature’. How did you responses to these questions correspond to the history of ‘nature’ as an idea in western culture?

Can you think of an example of how ideas of ‘nature’ are multiple and contested? Think through current environmental issues – climate change, deforestation, loss of wilderness, pollution. How is ‘nature’ contested in debates around these issues? Send your ideas to the MAVE discussion site.

References:

Glacken, Clarence. (1967) Traces on the Rhodian shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Haraway, D. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The reinvention of nature. London: Free Association Books
Koestler, A., 1964: The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Lewis, C. S., 1964: The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Lovejoy, A., 1936: The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.
Plumwood, V., 1993: Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London, Routledge.
Shiva, V., 1988: Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, London, Zed Books.
Whitehead, A., 1926: Science and the Modern World. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Williams, R., 1972: Ideas of nature, in Benthall, J. (ed) Ecology: The Shaping Enquiry. London, Longman.
Williams, R., 1976: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London, Fontana.

Web Notes by Phil Macnaghten April 2005