Within the public discourse of climate change and what to do about it, there is the ever present competition of Nature versus Culture (not to be confused with Nature versus Nurture). Are humans separate from nature? Should they completely shut themselves off from it, or should they try to understand it more? Do humans even have the right to ask or answer questions of nature, and if not, what do we do? Obviously these are tough questions that aren’t going to be answered overnight. Well, they could be, but it would be by a million different academics, from a million different perspectives…and no way of knowing which one is “the right one.”
That being said, we worked hard last week to decipher different articles on nature, culture, and offered our own thoughts and critiques:
Jim Proctor’s articles on nature and culture caution the separation of the two, particularly in the environmental studies and science world. In his article on Environment after Nature, he suggests that to keep the two concepts in the same domain leads to both conflict and harmony, which is better than the independence of two domains without the possibility of either conflict or harmony (Proctor 2009). The independence of the two relieves the world from the guilt of (dis)connecting with nature, as well as letting the world off the hook of needing to adapt to/compromise in the case of conflict.
To me this connects to the Local or Global conversation of how to approach environmental change. Do we focus on our immediate surroundings or the world at large? Having come from a background of TGAL (Think Local Act Global), it has been a huge shift in my beliefs to see the problems with localizing environmentalism. This doesn’t mean that thinking global is always the right course either. As Proctor wrote in Concepts of Nature, Environmental/ecological, “The desire to ‘think globally’ is laudable; what is more problematic is the gulf between nature and culture implied in the process by which people have come to think globally” (Proctor 2001). My previous experiences with local, and Jim’s critique of global are the perfect juxtapositions to support the idea of Glocality, in which both the local and global are considered together.
These background understandings of the discourse of nature led us to weak critiques of nature and strong critiques of nature. A weak critique would be one that does not take out the concept of nature from the discourse, but rather edits or adjusts it’s meaning or use (“Nature is too narrow of a concept”). A strong critique would take out the idea of nature completely (“There is no nature”).
The weak critiques that we came up with as a class included:
- We must recognize nature as a constructed idea with human meaning that we should still use
- Nature is a hybrid object
- Nature is gendered; “Man” attempts to conquer nature
The strong critiques that we came up with included:
- We should discard the concept of nature as a system
- Nature is relative to culture and background; it has no real meaning in and of itself
The point to remember with weak and strong critiques is that one is not better than the other. Discarding the idea of nature completely is not inherently better than revising the way nature is understood. However, being able to critique nature in regards to culture is important in both further discussion of the topic, but also helps to critique other related topics. This seemed even more relevant as we shifted to the discussion of place and how it is used.