War Against Ourselves. Jacklyn Cock

of nature ... The second pattern of the relationship established at the origins of the Modern age, and associated with the Industrial Revolution and with the triumph of Reason, saw the domination of Nature by Culture ... We are just entering a new state in which Culture refers to Culture, having superseded Nature to the point that Nature is artificially revived (‘preserved’) as a cultural form ... we have entered a purely cultural pattern of social interaction and social organisation ... [we now] live in a predominantly social world (Castells, 1997: 477).

      The same idea is expressed by Beck when he talks about the ‘societalization of nature’, and writes:

      At the end of the twentieth century nature is society and society is also ‘nature’. Anyone who continues to speak of nature as non-society is speaking in terms from a different century, which no longer capture our reality. In nature, we are concerned today with a highly synthetic product everywhere, an artificial ‘nature’. Not a hair or a crumb of it is still ‘natural’ if ‘natural’ means nature being left to itself (Beck, 2005: 81).

      Furthermore, Beck writes:

      Nature is not nature, but rather a concept, norm, memory, utopia, counter-image. Today more than ever, now that it no longer exists, nature is being rediscovered, pampered. The ecology movement has fallen prey to a naturalistic misapprehension of itself. ‘Nature’ is a kind of anchor by whose means the ship of civilization, sailing over the open seas, conjures up, cultivates, its contrary: dry land, the harbour, the approaching reef (cited in Giddens, 1994: 212).

      These and other theorists are pointing us to the ‘end’ or ‘death’ of a nature that exists independently of human action. The distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ blurs. The postmodernist theorist Fredric Jameson argues that the disappearance of nature was a necessary precondition for the emergence of the postmodern mentality. ‘Postmodernism is what you have’, he asserts, ‘when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good’ (Jameson, 1991: ix). The best known of the obituaries for the idea of nature is Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature. He suggests that nature is at an end both as a discrete biophysical entity and as a meaningful concept: ‘We have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society’ (McKibben, 1990: 64).

      CONCLUSION: THE NEED FOR CHANGE

      In all of these various formulations, different ideas of nature co-exist and collide with each other. The result is that our attitudes to nature are complex, changing and contradictory. Attempting to address this complexity, Macnaghten and Urry maintain that there are two key ways in which nature has been represented in recent times:

      First, there is the notion of nature as ‘threatened’. This sense can be seen in the panics over rare and endangered species, especially those which are spectacular and aesthetically pleasing; in the perception of nature as a source of exhaustible resources which should be stewarded for future generations; the sense of nature as a collection of rights-bearing subjects; and in the notion of nature as a healthy and pure body under threat from pollution; a nature which according to Rachel Carson is fast becoming a ‘sea of carcinogens’. The second set of representations of nature construct it as a realm of purity and moral power. Here nature is characterised as an object of spectacle, beauty or the sublime; as a recreational space to be roamed across; as a state of presocial abundance and goodness in the notion of natural healing; as representing a return from alienating modern society to an organic commodity; and as a holistic ecosystem which should be preserved in its diversity and interdependence (Macnaghten and Urry, 1995: 224).

      Generally, our understandings of nature are marked by an ambivalence — nature as home, as resource, as threat, as refuge and inspiration, as playground, as laboratory, as profit-based. All these ideas flourish. But whether conceptualised as threatened or valued, all these perspectives externalise nature: they reinforce the understanding that we are separate from nature, rather than part of it.

      The crucial question is the place of human beings in the natural world. Williams argues that humans were included in the Western European medieval concept of nature, ‘man’ occupying the top of the hierarchy in God’s creation. But, according to him, this inclusion changed over time, and by the eighteenth century ‘nature is decisively seen as separate from men’ (Williams, 1980: 79). This dualism between ‘nature’ and ‘society’, the notion that nature is a place apart, is deeply rooted in modern thinking. Nature is ‘the other’.

      Another idea with deep roots is that only human beings have value. As Wilson expresses it: ‘Part of our cultural heritage in the West is a deep belief that humans are the source of all value and meaning in the world’ (Wilson, 1997: 128). As Soper wryly puts it, we define nature as ‘the idea through which we conceptualise what is “other” to ourselves ... nature is “that which we are not, which we are external to”’ (Soper, 1995: 16). ‘As a metaphysical concept ... “nature” is the concept through which humanity thinks its difference and specificity. It is the concept of the non-human’ (Soper, 1995: 155).

      The idea of nature as a place apart, separate from human experience is a distortion. The only way out of the present crisis involves alternative ways of thinking, talking and feeling about nature that recognise our inclusion. Such an inclusive conceptualisation was suggested by Leopold’s notion of a ‘land ethic’, which implies an expansive notion of community.

      While hunting in Arizona in the early decades of this century, Leopold shot a female wolf with a pup. He reached her in time to watch ‘a fierce green fire dying in her eyes’. His perspective on the natural world was utterly changed by this experience, and he formulated his ‘land ethic’. This involves the extension of our human ethics to include the other species with which we share the land. It ‘changes the role of Homo sapiens from conquerer of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such’ (Leopold, 1949, 1968: 240). In this perspective ‘all ethics … rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community with interdependent parts’ and ‘the land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively: the land’ (Leopold 1949, 1968: 204). ‘A thing is right’, Leopold says, ‘when it tends to preserve the integrity, beauty and stability of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’

      Leopold formulated this notion in the 1940s, and it has been elaborated as ‘ecocentric’ or ‘biocentric’ ethics by different philosophers over the past decades, who assert that we are all part of a biotic community. In the ecocentric perspective, all living things have intrinsic worth — value in and of themselves — not just instrumental or utilitarian value. So,

      biodiversity is necessary not only for utilitarian and humanitarian reasons (for maintaining the present and future health of the entire biosphere, for enhancing the quality of life, and for aesthetic enjoyment), but for its own sake. Ecocentrism expands the good of the human community to embrace and include within it the good of the biotic community (Merchant, 2004: 211).

      This emphasis on a shared, biotic community confronts the false dualism implied by Soper when she is sceptical about nature having an intrinsic value. She writes:

      Generalized accusations of ‘human speciesism’ invite us to overlook oppressions and divisions within the human community and are ethically irresponsible if they imply that the cause of nature should be promoted at the cost of a concern with social justice and equity in the distribution of resources (Soper, 1995: 13).

      This is a common critique of the ‘biocentric’ or ‘ecocentric’ vision associated with the perspective labelled ‘deep ecology’. Bookchin emphasises that this perspective neglects the roots of ecological problems, which, in his view, lie in the social structure, in inequalities in access to power and resources. This is at the core of his conception of ‘social ecology’. In his view, deep ecology is misanthropic: it ‘reduces humanity to a parasitic swarm of mosquitos in a mystified swamp called nature’ (Bookchin, 1980: 133). From the standpoint of social ecology, resolving the crisis in nature means that social relations based on dominance and hierarchy must be replaced by egalitarian and