Below is a theme summary, with annotated bibliography at bottom. For IG posts related to this theme, see the NatureCulture category archives, or the recent posts at right.
Theme Summary
The division between the realms of nature and culture seems obvious to most of us. Any idea of the global would presumably concern biophysical vs. anthropogenic objects and processes, or sometimes interactions between the two, but the division would remain. This is understandable: for starters, we humans weren’t around when the universe came into being—in fact, it took us awhile to show up, and we still don’t have a clue as to how certain biophysical processes work, much less are they under our control. And who could call the Internet, or the arcane rules of a card game, or cosmetic makeup “natural”?
Yet the distinction between nature and culture is blurred by an increasing number of entities that are reducible to neither—think agriculture and food, for instance. And, at a deeper level, we can’t even talk about “nature” and “culture” without invoking some implicit idea of both—e.g., of nature as remaining in balance until disrupted by cultural (human) activities. This is why Raymond Williams (1980) famously observed that “the idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.” These two levels, of reality and our ideas about reality, will be considered in turn below.
One major point of contemporary discussion around how nature and culture are mixed in today’s global reality is the notion of the Anthropocene, an idea of the world as now fundamentally shaped by humans. First proposed in the earth sciences community by scientists such as Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000) as an appropriate term for the current geological epoch, the Anthropocene has entered the popular imagination as well, via a range of publications (Proctor 2013) and websites such as Welcome to the Anthropocene depicting the remarkable extent of human transformation of the earth.
Though the discussion is still ongoing in the earth sciences community, a larger debate now pits those who consider the Anthropocene a “planetary opportunity” (DeFries et al. 2012) against others who consider it the pinnacle of hubris to imagine that humans do, or should, dominate the earth (Wuerthner et al. 2014). In other words, those who embrace the Anthropocene embrace a mixing of the natural and cultural realms, and those who oppose this idea oppose this mixing as well, at least in certain (e.g., conservation) contexts. Also evident in this popular debate is a profoundly different sense of our future global reality, with hope among those who embrace the Anthropocene, and feared apocalypse among its detractors.
At the level of ideas and knowledge, the debate is equally fierce. In what was known as the science wars stemming from the 1990s, fundamental differences arose as to whether scientific and popular knowledge reveal truths about nature, or are more a reflection of our culture, class, and politics (Hacking 1999). On the pro-science side of this debate were realists; its critics were constructivists. The differences between these two positions can be understood in terms of whether knowledge is, or should be, more grounded in nature (realists) vs. culture (constructivists). Realist and constructivist positions on knowledge continue today, in part because the two positions resonate with a good deal of the sciences and the humanities, respectively. Ideas of the global condition based on these differing perspectives generally build on different forms of evidence and different methodological approaches—as students in the sciences and humanities immediately realize.
Some contemporary scholarly theories are moving beyond this impasse in ideas of nature/culture, embracing a hybrid approach to knowledge—and a hybridized reality. As one example, Bruno Latour (1993) has argued that “we have never been modern”: though we think of institutions such as science, religion, and politics in our modern global setting as distinct from premodern times in having successfully separated nature from culture (e.g., to create objective knowledge grounded in nature, or to rise above nature as civilization evolves), in fact our global condition is one of increasing connection and hybridization. In more recent work (e.g., 2013), Latour has applied this hybrid, “nonmodern” approach to what he sees as the urgency of the Anthropocene, hoping that it will help heal the rifts of the science wars to more successfully build the knowledge we need to live well in a world where nature and culture are thoroughly intermixed—to the point that the two terms become meaningless.
Imagining the global, then, is intimately associated with the relationship between nature and culture, whether at the level of biophysical and anthropogenic processes and patterns in the world, or at the deeper level of our knowledge of the world. Recent scholarship suggests that at both these levels nature and culture are intermixed—with profound implications for the current and future global condition, and how we will come to better understand it.
Annotated Bibliography
Note: All abstracts below are unmodified from article source database or Google Books.
Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. 2000. “The ‘Anthropocene.’” IGBP Global Change Newsletter, 2000. http://www.igbp.net/download/18.316f18321323470177580001401/1376383088452/NL41.pdf.
Abstract: Abstract N/A.
DeFries, Ruth S. et al. 2012. “Planetary Opportunities: A Social Contract for Global Change Science to Contribute to a Sustainable Future.” BioScience 62 (6): 603–6. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2012.62.6.11.
Abstract: The global change research community needs to renew its social contract with society by moving beyond a focus on biophysical limits and toward solution-oriented research to provide realistic, context-specific pathways to a sustainable future. A focus on planetary opportunities is based on the premise that societies adapt to change and have historically implemented solutions—for example, to protect watersheds, improve food security, and reduce harmful atmospheric emissions. Daunting social and biophysical challenges for achieving a sustainable future demand that the global change research community work to provide underpinnings for workable solutions at multiple scales of governance. Global change research must reorient itself from a focus on biophysically oriented, global-scale analysis of humanity’s negative impact on the Earth system to consider the needs of decisionmakers from household to global scales.
Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Harvard University Press.
Abstract: Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social construction, Ian Hacking reminds us. His book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality.Especially troublesome in this dispute is the status of the natural sciences, and this is where Hacking finds some of his most telling cases, from the conflict between biological and social approaches to mental illness to vying accounts of current research in sedimentary geology. He looks at the issue of child abuse–very much a reality, though the idea of child abuse is a social product. He also cautiously examines the ways in which advanced research on new weapons influences not the content but the form of science. In conclusion, Hacking comments on the “culture wars” in anthropology, in particular a spat between leading ethnographers over Hawaii and Captain Cook. Written with generosity and gentle wit by one of our most distinguished philosophers of science, this wise book brings a much needed measure of clarity to current arguments about the nature of knowledge.
Latour, Bruno. 2013. “Telling Friends from Foes at the Time of the Anthropocene.” Lecture presented at the EHESS-Centre Koyré- Sciences Po symposium “Thinking the Anthropocene,” Paris, November 14. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/131-ANTHROPOCENE-PARIS-11-13.pdf.
Abstract: In spite of its pitfalls, the concept of Anthropocene offers a powerful way, if used wisely, to avoid the danger of naturalization while ensuring that the former domain of the social, or that of the “human”, is reconfigured as being the land of the Earthlings or of the Earthbound. Like Aesop’s tongue, it might deliver the worst – or worse still, much of the same; that is, the back and forth movement between, on the one hand, the “social construction of nature” and, on the other, the reductionist view of humans made of carbon and water, geological forces among other geological forces, or rather mud and dust above mud and dust. But it might also direct our attention toward the end of what Whitehead called “the Bifurcation of nature,” or the final rejection of the separation between Nature and Human that has paralyzed science and politics since the dawn of modernism. The lecture is dedicated to Clive Hamilton.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press.
Abstract: With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith.What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour’s analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming–and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture–and so, between our culture and others, past and present.Nothing short of a reworking of our mental landscape. We Have Never Been Modern blurs the boundaries among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance understanding on all sides. A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and replacing the rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility.
Proctor, James D. 2013. “Saving Nature in the Anthropocene.” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 3 (1): 83–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-013-0108-1.
Abstract: This essay reviews six books broadly addressing the Anthropocene—the recent epoch in which humans play a dominant role on the face of the earth. Concepts of nature are still significant in contemporary American environmentalism despite its increasing diversity of issues, and no matter what the Anthropocene’s challenges to naturalness nor what level of comfort or discomfort these works display regarding the Anthropocene, they largely retain some notion of nature. For balance, three books are included that generally speak positively of the Anthropocene, and three that express various concerns: the former include Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene (2011), Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World (2011), and Living Through the End of Nature (2010); and the latter include Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (2010), The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder (2011), and Authenticity in Nature: Making Choices About the Naturalness of Ecosystems (2011). The latter group continues to distinguish nature from culture in the Anthropocene, thus effectively counting to two, whereas most among the former tend to count to one in celebrating a cultured nature. Embrace of the Anthropocene could, however, lead to counting beyond two by letting go of nature (and culture) as metaphysical categories qua moral shortcuts. The science and politics of living well in this enduring age of the Anthropocene may require attention less to generalities of nature than the interwoven details that constitute our environment.
Williams, Raymond. 1980. “Ideas of Nature.” In Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, 67–85. Verso.
Abstract: ‘The essays gathered together here, written over twenty years, reveal a brilliant mind ever open to new ideas.’ New Statesman
Wuerthner, George, Eileen Crist, and Tom Butler, eds. 2014. Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth. Island Press.
Abstract: Is it time to embrace the so-called “Anthropocene”—the age of human dominion—and to abandon tried-and-true conservation tools such as parks and wilderness areas? Is the future of Earth to be fully domesticated, an engineered global garden managed by technocrats to serve humanity? The schism between advocates of rewilding and those who accept and even celebrate a “post-wild” world is arguably the hottest intellectual battle in contemporary conservation.In Keeping the Wild, a group of prominent scientists, writers, and conservation activists responds to the Anthropocene-boosters who claim that wild nature is no more (or in any case not much worth caring about), that human-caused extinction is acceptable, and that “novel ecosystems” are an adequate replacement for natural landscapes. With rhetorical fists swinging, the book’s contributors argue that these “new environmentalists” embody the hubris of the managerial mindset and offer a conservation strategy that will fail to protect life in all its buzzing, blossoming diversity.With essays from Eileen Crist, David Ehrenfeld, Dave Foreman, Lisi Krall, Harvey Locke, Curt Meine, Kathleen Dean Moore, Michael Soulé, Terry Tempest Williams and other leading thinkers, Keeping the Wild provides an introduction to this important debate, a critique of the Anthropocene boosters’ attack on traditional conservation, and unapologetic advocacy for wild nature.