IEP 426: Contested Natures

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

Week 3. The Nature Crisis and Everyday Life

Exercise

What is the difference between the natural and the cultural?

Is the idea of an autonomous nature, separate from culture, still tenable?

How important is this idea of nature in our thinking of the ‘environmental crisis’?

Are there different ways of theorizing the environment in ways that respect its appeal in everyday life practices?

Please jot down a brief answer to each of these and send at least one of them to the discussion site.

Introduction

It is commonly asserted that the boundaries between culture and nature are in the process of dissolving (for recent accounts see Castree 1995; Demerett 1994; Fitzsimmons 1989; Harvey 1993; Harvey and Haraway 1995; Gerber 1997). The idea of an autonomous nature, separated and divorced from culture, is no longer tenable. Or at least, this is how the argument runs. A number of variants are available.

End of nature

One variant can be seen in the kind of millennial arguments proposed by Bill McKibben and his claims that we have now reached ‘the end of nature’ (1988; see also Robertson et al. 1996). McKibben claims that human activity, driven by the technological-industrial complex, has now altered whatever we once thought nature was. Wilderness no longer exists in a pristine state, anywhere; forests and farmland has become thoroughly domesticated; even the climate appears to be altered, possibly irrevocably, as we face the threats of climate change. Nature is here confronted by an array of human-imposed threats, from acid rain to global warming, from the extinction of species to the destruction of the rainforest. A new variant emerges with the advent of new genetic and nano-technologies, with the ability to alter and re-work DNA into new forms of life, evoking images of the ‘post-natural’ and indeed, the ‘post-human’ (Hayles 1999; McKibben 2003). Denuded of any external referent nature becomes merely a sign, commodified and preserved by consumer culture, often Disneyfied, devoid of any legitimacy (Wilson 1992).

This kind of argument appeals to a discourse of nature as origins, and of human activity as intrinsically separate from, and antithetical to, a state of nature. Most commonly this discourse is to be found in the writings of environmentalists and conservationists, as well as in environmental studies, environmental ethics, and environmental philosophy. As Kay Milton suggests, according to this discourse, ‘nature should be conserved in a pristine state, unaffected, as far as possible, by human activity’ (1999: 438).

Humans as part of nature

On the other hand, and currently in vogue in some popular science writing, is the proposition that nature refers to a chain of being to which human beings and everything else belongs. Current changes to the environment represent simply a new advance of an on-going process that has been unfolding since the beginning of life some 4 billion or so years ago. Humans are here seen as animals, as part of nature, and while they may possess unique qualities of language, written culture and opposable thumbs, all animal species are unique in their own way. As Matt Ridley recently wrote ‘there is nothing unique about being unique’ (2001: 76). This critique of ‘human exceptionalism’ is supported by strands of intellectual thought informed by evolutionary theory, not least in socio-biology.

Nature shaped by social forces

A third variant, common among many social scientists and historians, is that ideas of nature are, and always have been, informed, shaped and even constituted by culture and history. Raymond Williams, in a seminal essay on the subject, undertook a socio-historical analysis of some of the key transformations of people’s understandings of and relationships with nature in the west (1980). Numerous other writers have written about changing attitudes towards and relationships with nature from the time of the Greeks to the present, but it is Williams who most provocatively examines the proposition that ideas of nature contain ‘an enormous amount of human history’. Informed by such an approach are various social constructivist studies on environmental issues and controversies, aimed at identifying the ways in which what is taken as ‘natural’, is in fact shaped by social forces (see Burningham 1998; Burningham and Cooper 1999; Tester 1991; Yearley 1991 amongst others).

A variation of the above is the argument that the dominant enlightenment ‘culture of nature’ appears to have stopped working so well. Premised on a misguided metaphysics in which the world of facts (i.e. the domain of science) could be separated from the world of values (i.e the domain of values and politics), nature has been dislocated from due political process with all sorts of unforeseen political consequences ranging from BSE to nuclear waste to genetically modified foods (Latour 2004). Arguing that political ecology has to let go of nature, Latour develops the proposition of rekindling a new politics of nature, involving a constitutional agreement in which all kinds of actors are involved, both human and non-human.

Such arguments all tend to support the proposition that the idea of nature as a unit of analysis – and indeed, of politics - is diminishing in potency. Yet, if this is indeed the case, how can such analytical frameworks help explain the continuing and indeed, increasing appeal of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’ in everyday life? It is instructive to ask how the popular appeal of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’ is configured within each of the broad discourses highlighted above. In the first and second variants it would appear that people have been duped, in that either nothing is natural or everything is natural. In both cases people are clearly deluded; in both cases the perceptual category of ‘the natural’ is of little utility, at least in terms of how it is used in common discourse. In more socially constructive accounts it would appear also that people are being tricked in that they are mistaking nature for what is in reality shaped by culture. Indeed, this is the putative power of the natural, to naturalise, and hence to hide from view, its effects in terms of reproducing, legitimating, classifying, excluding and validating certain dominant ideas in society (see Berger 1972; Bermingham 1986; Franklin, Lury and Stacey 2000; McClintock 1995; Williams 1980).

Of course the project of developing a way of talking about nature which both respects its cultural dimensions and which embraces its extra-discursive reality is not new, and considerable debate has focused at the level of ontology (see Benton 1993; Gerber 1997; Harvey and Haraway 1995; Murdoch 2001; Soper 1995). But little research has taken as its starting point how people themselves understand and relate to nature, and of the enduring and transformative context that nature plays in everyday life.

Think

Look back at your answers to the questions that started this week's web notes and see if you were tending toward any of these arguments.

In the next section I will set out research that examines how nature is understood and experienced across a variety of everyday European contexts. Through focusing on lived experience I will seek to develop an understanding which takes as its starting point, the passion, joy, fear and anxiety that permeates our experience of and relationship with nature.

Nature and Everyday Life

1. Nature as Environmental Issues

The idea of ‘the environment’ that tends to dominate in UK and European government policy-making - typically framed in formal sustainability initiatives - tends to be predominantly global in scale and physical in form (Grove-White 1991). In a recent research project on ‘Languages of the Environment’ we examined how people in Britain in fact responded to a variety of global environmental issues (see Macnaghten 2003). What we found was striking. The global environment was seen as somewhat ‘distant’ and ‘abstract’. Threats such as global warming, ozone depletion, loss of biodiversity, and resource depletion were perceived as a problem ‘out there’ and detached from everyday life, making it easy for people to turn off. The following passages are illustrative of public responses to global environmental threats, in the form of key icons such as the rainforest, the tiger, the whale, the smokestack, the blue globe:

the “Save the Whale” campaign and the “Save the Tiger” and stuff like that; it all seems a long, long way away; so it’s not my concern really... It feels a bit removed ... We’ve all seen a pile of rubbish, but how many of us have actually seen a whale, or a rainforest, or been to an Amazonian forest or anything like that. You know about it and you’re concerned about it, but it doesn’t have the [same] effect ...
(Single women’s group) female

When I’m confronted by it, I think yes, yes, I want to do something, and yes, it’s important. And then you get back on the treadmill of your life ... It’s quite hard to reach that world.
(Mothers group) female

Even though the reality of global environmental issues has become almost a commonplace, there was little sense that much could be achieved - either at the level of the individual or through existing avenues for collective action - to mitigate such threats. This perception of a fundamental lack of agency in the face of global environmental threats permeated all the groups. Individual action was seen as largely ineffective, both due to the global scale of the problems and to the perception of powerful commercial interests intractably embedded in systems of self-interest antithetical to global sustainability. Indeed, this whole domain of thinking about the environment was clouded in gloom and despondency, a finding that parallels previous research (see Macnaghten and Jacobs 1997; Macnaghten and Urry 1998). However, what appeared distinctive in these discussions were the strategies adopted. In different ways people were now choosing not to choose to dwell on global environmental threats, as a pragmatic response to apparently intractable problems, and in order to maintain a positive outlook on life:

Yes, it [life] is what you make of it; it’s how you view things. I could be as miserable as sin, but there’s no point in being miserable, so you make the best of what you’ve got, whatever it is.
(Anglers group) male

I think when you are younger you think that your future is perhaps going to be far more worldwide, and that the whole of the bigger picture matters. But as you get older and you’re just trying to survive through your humdrum lives, you realise that you don’t matter to that huge world out there, unless something really exceptional happens out there.
(Mothers group) female

If you sat down and thought about that honestly, you’d be totally depressed all the time. You tend to close yourself off to it… You’ve got to get on with your own life. male

If we’re honest, really we can only control our own domain, our own environment that we’re for ourselves and our family.
(Parents group) Male

An added complexity was that people themselves felt implicated in global environmental problems. Although, on occasions, this led to a sense of the need for shared action, more commonly this led to feelings of resignation and detachment. For many people there were no easy answers; there was no longer a clear ‘good guy’ and ‘bad guy’, nobody to blame and no-one beyond blame. Constrained by everyday pressures of work and parenting, people accepted their own partial guilt as consumers, as motorists, as employees of business, and so on. All people could do was their (little) bit, thinking more about (manageable) local issues than (unmanageable) global ones:

All I do is try and do my bit, try and recycle things. I can’t really see the whole thing because the whole thing looks fairly bleak… Things like global warming, I am aware of it, holes in the ozone layer and things like that, but I feel I’m powerless to do anything about it except the aerosol thing. Again I go back to the little things - unleaded petrol as opposed to diesel. You just try and do your bit.
(Parents group) Female

You’re supposed to do your own bit but I think I’m selfish enough to think about my own bit. Female

Me too, what affects me. female

I try to recycle things but I am only thinking of my own environment, or my own area as opposed to the world as such. I don’t event think of the whole country, I think of my own area.
(Mothers group) Female

So far we have suggested that the idea of a ‘global environmental agenda’ appears distant and abstract, and unlikely to engage people in their day-to-day activities. This does not imply that people are no longer engaged or interested in environmental issues but that the character of public concerns towards environmental issues has subtlety altered. There is a body of thinking that suggests that public engagement with environmental problems has shifted from distant threats ‘out there’ to more proximate threats ‘in here’. Thus, issues such as Whales, the Amazon and Acid Rain, that were prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s, have migrated towards issues which impinge more directly and more immediately on ‘me’, my body, my family and my future - such as allergies, traffic, BSE and genetically modified foods (Jacobs 1999). Jacobs suggests that this shift in orientation, directly associated with sociological trends towards individualisation, changes how the environment is experienced and how people are likely to collectively respond to environmental initiatives and campaigns (1999: 24; see also Beck 1992; Giddens 1994).

In our research we found that the environment is experienced most intensely when it is part of the ‘personal’ realm of everyday life. The local and personal environment tends to ‘hit home’ and matter more. Indeed, it is often through personal, rather than mediated encounters, that people become involved in environmental matters:

A lot of what we are involved in has come out of personal situations, hasn’t it, more than anything. Whereas something like this, with it being such as global [thing], it’s sort of how we get actually involved in it. I think it’s something we all know it’s something we should be aware of, but it’s quite hard to reach this world.
(Mothers group) female

However, other factors are also at work. People don’t think in terms of ‘one big environment’ which is the same for all people. Rather, there are many different ‘environments’, each connected to people’s particular concerns, priorities, social relationships and responsibilities. For some, ‘the environment’ is a source of pleasure and escape from the burdens and stresses of everyday life. Activities of walking in the countryside, gardening, bee keeping and fishing were discussed as ways of ‘being in the environment’, in proximity to nature, removed from modernity. Below is one such discussion of a young woman describing her passion for scuba diving:

It's the tranquility kind of thing, you know, all you're concentrating on is breathing or not with snorkeling. And what's around you. It's like taking your life right back to basics, you know, you're alive, you're breathing and you're floating around and then there's the sort of thing like you're other world... it's just removes all the complications of modern life I suppose. For me that's why I go on holiday and spend most of the time under water. And it's so beautiful. The sort of crime and living in the city gets to me and that's one thing that is so completely the opposite that it's like, you know, some sort of therapy. It is like meditation, you're just concentrating on swimming or looking and just transported to another sort of level. It's so philosophical but you know what I mean.
(Single women’s group)

For other people the environment was seen as a set of problems, such as pollution, food safety and road safety, whose putative effects had to be tacked as part of people’s evolving responsibilities as mothers and parents. The environment was very much an issue in relation to its known or unknown effects on oneself or one’s family. Health and food issues were particularly prominent and especially mothers were familiar and concerned over an apparently unending succession of food-health scares in recent years: from Salmonella in eggs to BSE to pesticide residues to GM foods.

For others still, the environment was seen as providing an opportunity for maintaining important ties and bonds. Fathers, in particular, saw the environment as providing a context for the development of good parenting.

This suggests that the environment is commonly experienced, not as a set of physical issues, but tangled up as part of social life. The ‘human’ and ‘relational’ aspects of the environment are often what are resonant. The environment becomes meaningful when it engages with life, inhibiting or facilitating the development of on-going human relationships, whether in the context of the family, friends or communities of interest.

2. Trees and the embodiment of nature

In another research project we focused in more detail on people’s experience of, and engagement with trees and forests. We found that trees, with some notable exceptions, appeared to have an intense and intimate personal significance for most people in Britain today (Macnaghten and Urry 2000). Indeed, the discussions with a variety of groups across Britain were often moving, to myself as much as to our respondents, as people spoke about their feelings, memories and experiences of particular trees and woods.

In everyday life the significance of trees was reflected in a wide variety of micro-practices, such as walking, rambling, picnicking, watching wildlife, mushrooming, playing ‘hide and seek’, making dens, and climbing. In our research we found that woods and trees were seen as affording particular settings for relaxation, tranquillity and bodily relaxation where one could escape the perceived stresses of modern life. Trees remove the presence of modernity and provide a setting for intimate social relations, for therapy, for play, for fantasy, for revitalisation. As one woman stated, ‘as soon as our relationship gets under stress we need to go to the woods, and that really does us, it really sorts us out’. What many people desired was accessibility to spaces that they see as free from signs of human interference and control, in which they experience a profound engagement with oneself or others through a ‘raw’ and unmediated nature. The passages below illustrate how the bodily confrontation with trees and woods enabled people to feel a closer relationship with the natural world:

You walk out in the countryside and the winds blowing you can see the gust on the trees and the trees waving. It’s just [great] to see the way the fauna and the vegetation actually move and stuff. It’s like if you watch rivers, you see that the flowing of the river is very tranquil and very therapeutic… male

So there is something quite therapeutic about trees? Moderator

I don’t feel alone when I am around trees really [laughter]. I think trees have been there so long … They seem so alive.
(Students - Oxford) female

I think it’s a mystique, you go in there and you never know what you are going to see, and you see a woodpecker or something, [and think] that’s great, even though you’ve seen a woodpecker hundreds of times before. F

It’s always a surprise. F

I long for the trees to get their leaves again … when the leaves come back in spring. Trees are so essential to my well-being … That’s the planet that we live on, with trees on it, and it’s meant to have [them], and we’re meant to be amongst them. That’s the only way I can put it.
(Outdoor Specialists - Lancaster) F

In such ways trees are the embodiment of nature – as live, sensuous indicators of the changing seasons, offering an intimate connection with seasonal cycles and deeper senses of time, through growth and regeneration, changing colours, natural variety, smell, and experiences of tranquillity, peace, and the mysterious. Indeed, when people speak about trees and woods, they appeared to be trying to articulate a personal sense of what they mean by nature.

Please now read 'Embodying the Environment in Everyday Life Practices' available from the discussion site.

Conclusion

The above findings are indicative of a wider body of research, which point to ways in which the idea of nature is being reconfigured in Britain, and possibly more widely, today.

Why is the idea of nature as a set of ‘environmental issues’ failing to mobilise large swathes of the public in government-sanctioned environmentally responsible behaviour? And, if this is indeed the case, why does the idea of nature remain powerful and enduring in everyday life?

Following Goodin’s green theory of value we can concur that people want to see some sense and pattern to their lives, that this requires their lives to be set in a wider context, and that nature provides that context (1992). This theory can be used to explain the appeal of nature when it becomes embodied in particular localised practices, whether this is walking, gardening, fishing, even hunting. In all such activities we – in the west, at least – appear to be striving towards a relationship in which we can interact with a nature in a way in which we are only a part of nature, and where nature goes on, more or less, regardless of our own actions.

The depiction of nature as ‘the environment’, as a set of issues, global in scope and physical in substance, is a configuration that remains universal and abstracted from life. Ingold usefully critiques the conception of the ‘global environment’ as one that separates the human from their environment, positioning the subject as if he/she was looking at the globe, detached and outside (1993). By contrast, the nature of the ‘lived-in’ world, is active and changing, and experienced through practices that actively connect to ‘life’. Perhaps this is one explanation for the above.

The temporal aspects are further highlighted by Barbara Adam who distinguishes between nature as a thing (natura naturans) and as a process (natura naturata) (1998). Adam argues that:

‘we need to reconnect the externalised phenomena to their generative processes, the countryside to its re/production, the forests to its formation. We need to bring into conceptual unity natura naturata and natura naturans... We need to see the ‘product’ produced, nature natured, life lived.’ (1998: 33)

Take the tree as an example. Trees live a long time, ranging from hundreds, even thousands of years. The life of a tree commonly exceeds that of humans. Trees change both seasonally and annually, at a pace that unfolds often in symmetry with the unfolding relationships of people, families and communities. Trees are regularly a central features in people’s sense of place; they are alive yet also fixed in the landscape. Trees mark history in ‘lived’ terms. As Ingold points out, ‘people … are as much bound up in the life of the tree as is the tree in the life of the person’ (2000: 204). Trees thus exhibit a rhythmic pattern of persistence and change, from the swaying, bending and twisting of branches, to the growth of leafs and ripening of fruit, to eventual death and decay. Like humans, each tree is unique, exhibiting an underlying form or character that transcends the vagaries of illness, the weather and the seasons. In this sense the popular appeal towards trees noted above, and the common symbolism of trees as nature, can be seen as a prime site where people can connect with nature as a living process.

This type of analysis of emerging nature-culture relations is at odds with many of the arguments outlined earlier. Goodwin’s theory does not require any fundamental divide (or convergence) between a state of nature and one of humanity; nor does it seek to focus on how we commonly confuse nature for what is shaped by culture.

However, perhaps there is a wider societal context in which to situate the current appeal to nature. Environmentalism emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as part of a cultural response to unease with industrial modernity (Grove-White 1991). The urgency of the appeal to nature today is largely a reflection of new forms of technological advance. For example, the promise of new genetic technologies lies in the introduction of new crops, new landscapes, new habitats, new animals, even new humans. In this sense we could say that Goodwin’s theory of green value is conditional, the key condition being a profound and enduring sense of unease that industrial modernity is contributing towards ‘the death of what [people] are part of, a natural rhythm that operates beyond human control’ (Milton 1999: 444). In such conditions the wildness of ‘nature’, as non-human nature, becomes the needed ‘other’. In less pressing times, and in more benign contexts, the ‘other’ of nature may be less wild and more harmonious, with promises of practices that restore constitutive harmony. We navigate, one might say, between the metaphor of the garden and the wilderness. And when the garden becomes transgenic we flee for the wild woods.

Think:

Reflect on why ‘nature’ matters to you. Is nature the needed ‘other’ in everyday modern living? If so, how does this become expressed? Is this appeal culturally and historically specific? Will nature still be an important social category in 50 years time?

Exercise

Develop a critique of the idea of ‘the global environment’. To what extent is this ‘language’ of the environment unhelpful in fostering an environmental ethic. How useful is Ingold’s notion of dwelling as an alternative?

Send your ideas to the MAVE discussion site.

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