Philosophy: Nature-Culture
Owain Jones
Synopsis
The division of nature and culture into separate realms in ontological and epistemological terms is one on the foundations of modern knowledge and how modern societies are regulated. The division of the sciences into the natural and the social shows the mark of this divide. It is also very evident in the bifurcation of geography into „physical‟ and „human‟. In the former the cultural is commonly
bracketed out of analysis, in the latter the natural is similarly excluded. The divide also exists in the realms of politics and ethics. Recently this divide has been
challenged as a profound misreading of the world by a number approaches within and beyond geography. The world in terms of everyday life - moment to moment and place to place - is always produced by a whole range of „natural‟ and „cultural‟ processes which are entangled together to the extent that the nature/culture divide is not really legible or credible. The challenge to this monumental dualism is not just an esoteric attempt to redraw the foundations of knowledge, politics and ethics. There is a suspicion that the nature/culture divide has allowed all kinds of monstrous
formations to develop in the world, including the great environmental challenges and tragedies we face today. This article will firstly outline the nature/culture dualism and its consequences. We then go through a range of approaches which seek to dissolve the divide. Firstly, two „one way‟ approaches are considered which make everything „nature‟ or everything „culture‟, then seven ways which seek to map nature-culture are
set out; Actor Network Theory, hybridity, new dialectics, new ecologies, dwelling, animal geographies, and new ideas of place. Following that, we consider the
challenges in thinking about agencies, ethics, politics and methodologies in these new ways of approaching nature-culture. Finally, we turn to the idea of site and difference,
considering ecologies of nature-culture in bodies, cities, countrysides, and spaces of biodiversity.
Actor Network Theory; agency; biodiversity; culture; dualism; dwelling; ethics; hybridity; modernity; nature; new dialectics; nature: new ecology; place; politics; social construction.
Glossary
Actor-network theory – an approach often associated with the work of Bruno Latour and John Law which sees any and all worldly formations as produced by integrated networks of differing actors, or rather actants, which include humans and
non-humans. It makes no ontological distinction between nature, humans and technology. Actants – entities that have effects upon other entities through combination effects. Thus a person and hammer combining in the act of the human hammering other objects comprise an actant. The point is that the entities that „act‟ in the world are not solely restricted to the human, or indeed to the animate, living being, but are now enlarged to include many other non-human „things‟ enrolled into actions.
Affect – systems of the body such as emotion, balance, senses, which underpin life and allow interaction.
Agency – the capacity to act creatively.
Dialectics – an approach to philosophy and critical thought which takes contradicting ideas about a matter in hand and seeks to synthesis a new understanding from the examination of the opposing positions.
Dwelling – A theory about life-in-environment and time which foregrounds a sense of being-amongst the world. Drawing from phenomenology and especially Heidegger, it emphasizes the co-constitution of subject and object, self and environment. It suggests the condition of being human is one of being in and amongst the world – rather than one of a separate thinking self.
First and second nature – The idea of first nature is that of pure nature before any human interference. Second nature is that which emerges as humans make changes to the environment
New dialectics – a version of Marxist dialectics pioneered chiefly by the geographer David Harvey
reappropriation of a biological term to invoke the fusing, or in more charged terms the miscegenation, of categories previously held apart.
Social constructivism, social constructionism – approaches that argue: first, that societies shape the world in which they act; and second, that we (humans) can have no direct access to reality independent of society, so our understanding of the world is in fact shaped and created by our social structures.
Cross references
actor-network theory/network geographies; animal geographies;
determinism/environmental determinism; historical geographies of nature; history of nature; hybrid natures; performance and dwelling; posthumanism/posthumanistic
geographies; poststructural natures; socialising nature; socially constructed nature; urban natures; wilderness
Introduction
„Nature-culture‟: we have „nature‟, we have a hyphen, then we have „culture‟. The job
of the hyphen is to reunite these two realms. They have been crudely and violently divided by modern knowledge which might be written as „nature/culture‟; two realms separated by a slash which represents a whole range of ways in which they have been forced apart. Reuniting them is a very big ask for such a small symbol, for the
division has been, and largely remains, a ubiquitous foundation of modern knowledge. This dualism‟s brutalist architecture is clearly visible in a number of forms; for
example, in the division of the social and natural sciences, the denial of agency in nature, and the exclusion of nature from dominant historical, political and ethical formulations.
Geography can be regarded as an unusual (and promising) discipline because of the way that it bridges between these two realms, dealing with both „the human‟ and „the physical‟. But this structure within geography is itself a symptom of the nature/culture
world view. Indeed, (sub)disciplinary, theoretical and methodological specialisations within „human‟ and „physical‟ geography often widen that divide rather than the
reverse. However, geography remains very well placed to play its part in the process
figures within geography, for example David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Nigel Thrift, Sarah Whatmore, and Margret Fitzsimmons (see references for specific texts).
The nature/culture division has profound implications for not only how we understand the world but also for how we act in and upon it. Some of these implications appear to be very troubling and problematic for the very well-being of life on earth. A range of environmental thinkers argue that the perilous situations that many sectors of global society seem to face, in terms of ecological, economic and cultural sustainability, are,
in part, driven by difficulties generated by the nature/culture divide. The stakes are very high in this philosophical naming game.
Can the difference between „–‟ and „/‟ be that important? In answer we might draw upon the environmentalist philosopher Mary Midgley, who compares philosophy to plumbing! If a bad smell develops in your house, or ominous damp patches appear in the ceiling, you call a plumber who might pull up the floorboards and investigate the hidden systems which service the obvious and visible facts of taps, toilets, sinks, and so on. The problem might well be some blockage in the hidden workings of the system. If worrying signs develop in the way society is working, we need to „pull up the floorboards‟, look beneath everyday understandings and practices for old
conceptual infrastructures which may have gone wrong. The nature/culture divide is one such - a blockage which needs to be cleared.
The nature/culture divide is then a pervasive problematic of modern knowledges. There are a whole host of vexed questions about the risks, and the rights and wrongs of how culture(s) engage(s) with nature in numerous ways, such as resource
extraction, food production, genetic modification, power generation, nature
conservation, understanding and practices of bodies, identities, landscapes and cities. All of these engagements weave across the so-called divide, operating through
networks of organic beings, technology, science, industry, economic, politics and culture.
thinking about nature/culture as ontologically discrete categories (as still represented in much geographical writing). Instead the world and the many formations which compose it, be they continents, cities, industries, habitats, bodies (human, non-human organic, non-human technological), are all hybrid assemblages of, and in,
heterogeneous entanglements or networks. These entanglements criss-cross the so called divide with such intensity, and moment by moment and place by place
frequency, that its only meaning stems from its falsity. Our knowledges, disciplines, methodologies, politics and moralities need to be adjusted to respond to this
challenge. Alongside the imperatives and concerns that derive from the problematic nature culture/world view, there are new forms of charm, beauty and „enchantment‟ to be found in nature-culture understandings and practices, as Jane Bennett vividly sets out.
Below we will consider how the division was not always thus; some of its
characteristics and consequences; and how it is now being called into question for a number of reasons and in a number of ways. We consider two ways in which the dualism might be tackled - by making everything „culture‟ or everything „nature‟. But these „one-way‟ moves are also called into question as they deny the complexity and
heterogeneity of life. Then we gather together seven „two-way‟ approaches to treating nature-culture; Actor-Network Theory, hybridity, new dialectics, new ecologies, dwelling, animal geographies, and new readings of place. We then inspect four key challenges flowing from these various approaches: agencies of nature-culture, ethics of culture, politics of culture, disciplines and methodologies of nature-culture; and finally we address the idea of differences in nature-culture and some of the spaces in which they are enacted, including bodies, cities, countryside/wilderness, and spaces of biodiversity.
The Great Divide
biology, chemistry, physics, and geology. These have processes operating within them which can be understood as functioning independently of social life, therefore they can be studied without considering the social. In an attempt to understand the complexities of the „natural world‟, it seems to make sense to isolate and specialise.
Conversely, and somewhat understandably, humans tend to think of themselves and their societies as rather different to nature, and rather special. This specialness rests largely on our apparently unique capacities - our high levels of self consciousness, our
use of language, rational thought, developed knowledges, tools and technologies, and the subsequent production of culture. The dazzling complexity of both individual and collective human life, it seems, also merits a set of specialised studies – the social sciences and humanities, from which natural processes are generally excluded. Politics and ethics have been thought of predominately as stuff of this realm - of people and for people. If nature is a set of mechanical, predetermined, unreflexive processes (albeit highly complex), then politics and ethics are not of nature, or for
nature, but can only be about nature; as resources, for example.
Cartesian dualism
Descartes is often cited as the founder of modern philosophy and science. His contributions to mathematics and logic were part of the foundations that he laid. So too was the famous mind/body dualism. This did not exactly split humans and nature apart, but it split mind, thought, and language apart from the nature of the human body and certainly from the rest of nature. Mind, thought and language were the defining characteristics of self and humanity, and had to be understood as such. The rest of nature operated through mechanical, automated, material systems. Other, related, dualisms such as subject/object and agency/structure, where the cultural is the
separate, primary actor and nature (the rest of the world) an outside, passive recipient of action, also became part of the modernist architecture of knowledge. Ecofeminist
monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), as they too have tended to separate „man‟ from nature.
Reaping the whirlwind?
There is a philosophical imperative here which argues that this bi-focal reading of the world is deeply flawed. And this imperative spills out of the realm of philosophy and into some of the most pressing practical questions global society faces today. The emergence of environmentalism and ideas of sustainable development in the latter
decades of the 20th century came about as result of increasing evidence that global society has been on an unsustainable trajectory since (at least) the Cartesian revolution, and the subsequent industrial/capitalist „revolutions‟ which are now increasingly globalised.
It might seem perverse and dangerous to try to dissolve the idea of (separate) nature as the apparent global environmental crisis deepens, and global society is belatedly waking up to this predicament. The spectre of anthropogenically induced climate change is just one of a number of profound concerns which are novel to the human story thus far. Deforestation, the over fishing of the oceans, the degrading of soil and water resources, pollution, and the overall decline in biodiversity, are other very pressing matters. Nature is in trouble. Should we be attacking it conceptually as well?
For some the answer is that we need to dissolve the nature/culture divide in order to avert disaster and to better understand our relationships with and within bio-physical systems. Our conceptualisation of nature as separate from, and subordinate to, culture has allowed corrosive entanglements, often emanating from industrial cultures, to ensnare and overwhelm the beings, spaces and processes which comprise „the natural realm‟. Nature and culture were imagined and studied as separate, and so much of the
traffic which has routinely crossed the „divide‟ has gone unnoticed and unpoliced.
Fresh waves of intense and novel mixings of „social‟ and „natural‟ elements, which are poorly understood and which still go unpoliced, may throw up further major problems which are global in reach.
such as the melting of the ice caps, sea level rises, and realignments of climate zones and ocean currents, which will not be at all sympathetic to many settled cultural and ecological arrangements. A number of environmental writers are pointing out that this has already started, for example, Elizabeth Kolbert (2007) and Mark Lynas (2008)
Learning the long game!!
The increasingly detailed evidence of past geophysical processes now being gathered by environmental archaeologists, when put alongside histories of human societies,
shows that what were once hard to explain rises and falls of power, success and failure in social/political systems can sometimes be attributed to long-term variations and cycles in bio-geological systems such as shifting climate zones, or the fall-out from extreme events like super volcano eruptions. Nature and society have always much more entangled than our histories have envisaged. Nature is not merely a passive stage for human history but rather one of the lead players in the show. Mega-systems such as the sun-earth-moon interactions, ocean currents, and exchanges between ocean and atmosphere shape the very conditions within which the human-social exists. Time is a vital aspect of all this. The temporalities of cosmology and geomorphology are extremely hard to read in terms of social time, and it only quite recent discoveries which allow us to read these huge rhythms and cycles in which „social‟ life is enframed. To better grasp the entanglements of nature-culture, we need
to readjust the temporal horizons and sensitivities of our understandings.
It was/is not always thus!!
Finally in this section, it is worth noting that the nature/culture divide has not always been in place, and in some non-modern societies was never established. Excellent histories of environmental thought, for example by David Pepper (1996), take us back
to the inception of the dualism and to what was in place beforehand, where nature-culture conceptualisations were very different. We are told of the „great chain of being‟ where humans, animals, plants, and natural materials were in one overarching,
Two simple points are to be made. The first is that under these differing
conceptualisations, differing practices, politics and ethics of nature/society emerged, showing how basic understandings of how the world is then underpin actions, politics and ethics. The second is that recognising these alternative models shows that the nature/culture divide, and the view of nature that it creates, is not „natural‟ or
inevitable. Understandings of nature-culture relationships have changed, can change and will change again. The nature/culture divide is showing distinct signs of wear and tear as it comes increasingly besieged from a range of perspectives. Various branches
of knowledge - philosophical, environmental, social theory/science, the natural sciences - need to play their part in questioning the divides that seem to have served us so ill, and in trying to unravel the myriad nature-culture entanglements which in fact make the world.
All nature or all culture?
One way to dissolve the divide is to simply say “all is nature”, or, “all is culture”. The divide disappears. On the face of it good cases can be made for both these positions. It is reasonable to think that there was a time before humans evolved that all was
natural. Humans and their culture have evolved from nature and thus can be seen as extensions of nature. They are just very particular forms of nature. Even the most cultural, artificial things one can think of, say, the Manhattan skyline, is composed of natural elements which have been assembled by human animals. Perhaps they should be treated and studied as such - as natural objects, not that dissimilar from the
towering termite mounds of Africa. Alternatively all could be said to be culture. The very idea of nature, our knowledges of biology, chemistry, physics and so on are all productions of human mind, thought and language. In this sense, everything we know we have created. We can only think of nature once culture has invented it. Before
Newton has his encounter with the apple, gravity simply did not exist as a force to be reckoned with.
These „one way‟ approaches to dissolving the divide are discussed below. They are important because they point to the huge constructive power of both nature and
All is nature: new life sciences
It could be seen as ironic that some of the more recent insights and discoveries of natural science have challenged the great divide and make a strong case for all being nature. They show the great extent to which human life and culture has emerged from, and exists as little more than faint flickerings within processes of bio-chemical
existence. Foremost amongst these are developments from Darwin‟s theories of
evolution which place the cultural firmly as an extension of the natural. This is not only in terms of how we evolved but in how many cultural forms stem from more basic animal functions. Donna Haraway (1992, p.193) pithily asserts that biology and evolutionary theory have reduced the line between humans and animals to a “faint trace”.Theories of affect as far back as Spinoza, as well as more recent psychological and neurological insights, all show that rationality, language and consciousness are not isolated from the body and bodily processes such as the unconscious and the emotional, but rather are emergent from it. At this point culture becomes little more than a thin film of extension on these natural processes. Supporting and extending these interconnections is the recent decoding of DNA, apparently showing the
mechanisms by which the forms of all life unfolds. The line between humans and not only animals, but all living things, and between determinism and free will becomes increasingly faint.
Yet further layers of interrelation can be wrapped around this unity of living things. All life, and the very stuff of our planet, has been spun out of the processes of cosmological evolution. The popular music star Moby sings “we are all made of stars”. All the complex atomic elements which go to make up the earth and life on it
were produced by the nuclear fusion of distant, ancient stars. These exploded, scattering the elements into vast stellar dust/gas clouds which, eons later, compress
and form planets, then, perhaps, life on them, then, perhaps, culture from that life.
determinism‟; or our biology - „biological determinism‟, or a combination thereof?
Perhaps all we can say here is that these are some of the most profound and
challenging questions in science and philosophy, and that many cases are made for varying degrees of freedom of action at any given moment, albeit set within the shaping contexts of unfolding processes.
All is culture: social construction and the end of nature
In human geography and the social sciences, rather predictably perhaps, it has been
more fashionable to see culture framing nature rather than vice versa. This is the insight of social construction, and we think about it here because it forms another sustained attack on the nature/culture dualism. In this case the divide is collapsed by overwhelming the apparently natural with flows of constructive power and practice from the realm of the social.
Popular accounts such as Bill McKibben‟s The End of Nature depict culture overwhelming nature so that no part of it remains untouched. The atmosphere has been changed, even the frozen wildernesses of the poles contain traces of pollution. Nature has lost its purity and independence, and that is what made it „nature‟ in the first place. The argument is that nature and culture once did stand apart, and that separation was key to their very being, but culture has now corrupted nature in qualitative and quantitative terms. McKibben subsequently qualified his argument, but it rests on restating the problematic dualised view of nature as different and separate from culture.
Social constructivist work, as geographers such as Noel Castree have pointed out, instead argues that „nature‟ never was or is, simply natural. Rather it is a collection of
powerful cultural ideas which become understood as „real‟ or „natural‟. If nature is created by culture then the creation is commonly denied, or forgotten, and the product
seen as outside culture. This process, for some, constitutes the very „essence‟ of nature, which is really “discursively constructed all the way down”. William Cronon shows that such processes even apply to wilderness, the space where a
culture into the North American west (and elsewhere). To see these places as wilderness was to deny the complex histories of the landscapes which had for millennia included the presence and effects of aboriginal populations.
Noel Castree and Bruce Braun point out that de-mystifying nature in this way is intellectually and politically radical and liberating. They further add that “there is no generic social constructionist position, only specific modalities of social construction” (2005: p.161) emanating from differing cultures in differing places and times which
generate a whole range of contested and contesting natures. Rather than one
untouched, unchanging „nature‟, this work points to the creation of a hybrid „social
nature‟ which is constructed and can come in a number of forms, ones that Castree lists as, „Knowing Nature‟, „Engaging Natures‟, and „Remade Nature‟. These are about the ways in which we (humans) understand what is natural, and how these understandings are played out as we encounter and remake that nature. This becomes an ever more pressing question as politics play out in bodies and identities, and as scientific and technological interventions remake nature right down to, and beyond, the bone. The phrase „artefactual natures‟ has been coined to represent this idea of nature which is „purposefully engineered‟. Geographers such as David Demeritt stress that we must ask what types of artefactual natures are now being developed, by whom and with what consequences?
Even advocates of constructionism admit that we are now in a post-constructionist era in geography and beyond. Critiques of social nature can accuse it of what Castree calls, hyperconstructionism, the idea that there is no stable, object, material nature „out there‟. Geographers such as Chris Philo and Sarah Whatmore suggest that
constructionism has resulted in geographies of nature which empty nature of its
vitality and agency to an extent where (at worst) the world is rendered as an
exclusively human achievement in which „nature‟ is “swallowed up in the hubris of
social construction” (Whatmore 2003: 165). Demeritt argues that conflicts over ideas of social nature arise partly out of the great complexity and varieties of meanings attaching to the components of the concept; and he seeks for a clearer position by pointing to ideas of „constrained construction‟ where there is a material process, say,
Despites its apparent decline, Neil Smith‟s assertion that the insight of social construction cannot be bypassed or set aside seems hard to gainsay.
“The central and undeniable insight is that the authoritative appeal to reality as
the ground of truth claims is always filtered through the social muslin of representations gathered into discourse (no matter how liberal and permissive the muslin may be) and that no kind of purely extra-social authority is available
for arbitrating the shape and dynamism of nature.” (Smith 1998: 273).
This view of the power of thought, language and culture at the heart of constructive discourse does need to be heeded, but in ways somehow still allowing nature life and power (and, of course, a pre/extra human history).
These „one way‟ approaches reveal the power of both nature and culture, but only at the expense of the other. The seven approaches to which we now turn, in differing ways, seek more „symmetrical‟ ways of dealing with nature-culture.
Re-weaving the torn asunder world: seven approaches to nature-culture What is in a hyphen? Or, in what ways are the relatively settled, separated ideas of nature and culture being linked or re-entangled? Do we need to see nature and culture as somehow extant, but thoroughly interpenetrated? Or do we need to go further still, to a point where we think about the world, and facets of it, in ways which do not even recognise the old division and old terms at all, but rather in ways which only allow for many other, smaller differences? What kind of categories, languages, methodologies, politics and ethics are needed to construct such a new world view? This section
outlines seven approaches that variously seek to tangle and to combine categories of nature and culture.
Actor-network theory: a world of networks
unnoticed and unpoliced. ANT has sought to develop a symmetrical view across the previously inscribed nature/culture/technology divides. This symmetry dissolves not only the nature/culture dualism, but also those of subject/object and agency/structure. Indeed, Latour has recently written that we should now completely by-pass the old dualisms. We should no longer treat them as starting points for discussions (as so many do) or even as grounds of debate and attack. We should get on instead with tackling the world of actualities - networks or assemblages which contain unique, complex and changing populations of people, organisms, things, substances and
processes. ANT hence argues that all manner of things (as many as you can imagine) are variously entangled together in specific formations or networks in the making of the world. These networks produce any given achievement in the world, be it
education, power generation, food production, politics, music and so on. Four points can be made about these networks which underpin the relational world view more generally.
First, the networks that ANT envisages make up the entirety of the unfolding fabric of life. They come in many forms and scales. They are unstable and prone to breakdown, and lots of effort goes into stabilising and repairing them. Many networks fail or just moulder away, others constantly emerge. Second, networks make space rather than trace across previously present „empty space‟ which is waiting for life to fill it. Straightforwardly Euclidean notions of space are rendered topological - space is crumpled, lumpy, folded. For example, Latour says that a journey on a modern train across Europe is an entirely different time-space matter that a perilous hike through thick jungle. Old notions of space - place as bounded locality, distance and nearness, local and global - are all problematised. Offices and computers in distant world cities may be in effect closer to each other than they are to areas of poverty which might be
physically just down the road.
another. How are actants enrolled into a network? How are they held in place? What manner of translations and translating devices are needed to allow differing types of actants to communicate and thereby to maintain network stability?
The historical argument is that the nature/society divide was a creation of modernity which ignored the true conditions of relational life. If „modern‟ means nature/society divided, then „we have never been‟, and never will be, „modern‟, as Latour famously put it. This is not just some esoteric philosophical argument. Latour points out that our
divided vision of the world has made us blind to the traffic which criss-crosses between the apparently separate realms of nature/society, and also to the monstrous formations which can thus form.
ANT has been questioned for its lack of interest in uneven power relations and thus in victimisation. Nigel Thrift, while acknowledging its insights, has suggested that it fails to deal with ideas of place. Nick Bingham with Thrift suggest that it misses „the sizzle of the event‟, i.e. the complexities of encounter between entities. ANT also has
a strongly technological inflection which seems to under-represent organic living things. Some have questioned whether it is reasonable to treat different types of actants in networks - for example, machines and animals - in the same (truly symmetrical) way. The life of animals here seems to be denied, almost as in social constructionist approaches.
However, as in social construction, the power of the central insight of this approach needs to be carefully heeded as we contemplate nature-culture assemblages that make up the world. It seems undeniable that everyday processes unfolding in the world do involve a whole host of actants from right across the spectrum of existence working
together (ideas, texts, chemicals, machines, organisms, processes, finances, and so on) – all being assembled together in forms of „heterogeneous engineering‟, a key ANT
motif. The study of these networks requires new approaches which inevitably break out of settled disciplines and disciplinary „regions‟, and requires new suites of methodologies (although specific methodologies will remain useful as forensic techniques of investigation).
Hybridity relates very closely to ANT, but it also brings certain nuances and emphases which deserve specific attention outside, or along with, the „strictly network‟ approach. A dictionary will tell you that hybrid means something like, “anything derived from heterogeneous sources”. Often it refers to plants or animals
which are interbred rather than pure in origin. The heterogeneity, the impurity, of
theoretical hybridity is an attack on dualised and purified identities and categories, notably that of nature/culture.
ANT networks are clearly hybrid in their combining of a variety of actants into assemblages, but hybridity adds to this vision in two ways. Firstly, it stresses that individual bodies are never pure. It becomes too easy to see networks as assembled from elements of nature, technology and culture whose form and identity still retain the foundations of the modern settlement. Secondly, hybridity stresses more open, other, spontaneous and unruly forms of becoming than ANT sometimes does. This emerges in part from hybridity‟s intersecting of bio-philosophy with feminist theories of fleshy living bodies, as in the work of Sarah Whatmore (2002). One famous
example of a hybrid body is Haraway‟s „cyborg‟, who is part-machine, part-woman, part-animal. She/it deals in and through instinct (nature), language, body and
technology. This might seem a bit fanciful to some. But at much more prosaic levels we humans are all cyborgs: people with hearing aids, glasses and a range of medical implants are to a small, but significant effect, hybrid entities. Their capacities are changed; nature (the body) and technology blur into each other. The same could be said for all the clothes and tools that we use every day: these cannot but shape our very capacities. Deleuze and Guattari offer hybrid views of conjoined bodies formed of human, non-human and technology making new entities with new capacities for action. For example, a rider, a horse and the riding technology (saddle, stirrup, reins)
together become a new entity which has new power and space/life making potentials (think of the Mongol empire).
research projects. Geographers such as John Murdoch (2003) and Paul Cloke (2003) use the term hybridity (and co-constitution and co-construction) as a broad approach of which ANT is one part. They argue that hybrid approaches focus our attention on the ways in which the previously held-apart worlds of nature and society routinely and inevitably mix.
At the heart of the notion of hybridity, and ANT, are questions about the balance between relationally and individuality. Whatmore is keen to increase the pressure on
the notion of the autonomous individual (human and non-human) and the mind-body, subject-object, self-other divides, in order to build knowledges, politics and ethics of affective intercorporeality. This is moving towards ideas of geophilosophywhich are best exemplified by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). These authors build a new set of conceptual tools and categories which can address the complexities, hybridities, and fluidities of the entangling world. New spatial languages are developed such as smooth and striated space, lines of flight, flows and grids; new terms for being are developed - becoming-animal, bodies without organs. In terms of logics of knowledge and logics of networks, rhizomic replaces arboreal hierarchy. Unlike trees, rhizomes are non-linear and non-hierarchical; they can grow and branch at any point, in any direction.
Some proponents of the hybridity approach feel that it becomes problematic in the way that everything becomes, somewhat perversely, the same; in that everything is just made up of disparate elements which have come together in some way or other. The way around this problem is to take notice of the differences in the precise ways that specific hybrids are formed, noting crucial differences in their spacings, timings and capicities. This noticing of difference begins to divide the world up again, but not
along the old line(s) and not on the old scales, and we will return to this point later. We now consider five further approaches in which nature/culture is re-rendered into
nature-culture.
New dialectics; certain kinds of networks (capitalism)
ecologism (or visa versa), seeking to make „green Marxism‟. At the heart of the Marxist approach is dialectical materialism in which nature is embedded as a
generative force. Particularly as developed by David Harvey, new dialectics attempts to extend these key trajectories and embrace a more fully relational, hybrid, view of the world. As such, it makes a sustained attack on both the nature/society dualism and
the dualism of space and time. Here, as in ANT and hybridity, there is a relational view of actants. They are not separate, or in possession of innate, stable identities, rather their natures are relationally inscribed. But Harvey, from his Marxist base,
suggests that capitalism infuses the majority of networks, or relations, which have constructed the modern world, arguing that this fundamental process needs to be confronted. Humans and non-humans in „socio-ecological formations‟, as Castree (2005: 233) sums up, “become the “arteries” through which an invisible process of ceaseless capital value expansion operates” . His materialist formation then sees not only society making nature in its image but transforming nature, and nature in turn dialectically reworking society. There is a resistance from natural elements as they are forcefully enrolled into capital accumulation networks, which sets up the dialectic dynamic. Noel Castree offers fish farming as an example of this kind of dynamic between economy and nature. It seems to be a logical market response to the challenges and expenses of sea fishing and fish stock crisis and resulting quota systems, but the many well-documented problems with fish farming reveal natural elements not simply conforming to capitalist logics but instead, subverting, resisting and out-flanking the impositions placed upon them.
Margaret Fitzsimmons supports this focus on industrial capitalism which over the last two hundred years has, as she puts it, ushered in “massive ecological change … writing over the landscapes and lifeways of other human cultures” (Fitzsimmons,
2004, p.30). She points to the four basic interactions amongst living organisms; „competition and struggle‟ „adaptation into niches‟, „collaboration and cooperation‟, and „environmental transformation‟, and how, through the study of their
entanglements, Harvey‟s purpose is to find
break between „society‟ and „nature‟ must be eroded, rendered porous and eventually dissolved” (Harvey, 1996, p.192).
From this base, Fitzsimmons, after Harvey, advocates academic interaction between the natural and social sciences, and solidarity with active socio-ecological projects that address both justice and difference.
Castree feels that the impact of the new dialectics has been limited by the turn away from Marxism in geography and the social sciences. That said, even the new
dialectics is thought by some to slip back inadvertently towards, or never properly to shake off, a dualised view of nature/culture embedded in dialectical reasoning. Another criticism is that relations are defined almost inevitably as conflict, whereas other approaches are keen to seek out positive sum relationships, between, say economy and ecology. Nevertheless, this perspective offers a focus upon the key role of industrial capitalism in shaping the spaces and networks of the world in which human and non-human elements are relationally articulated. Felix Guattari, in his book The Three Ecologies, makes it plain that it is capitalism which is denuding cultural, psychological and ecological diversity to the extent that we are witnessing „ecocide‟.
New ecologies: mobile, impure natures
Since it was coined by the 19th century German biologist Ernst Haeckel, ecology has been regarded as one of the natural sciences and a branch of biology. It focuses on the study of organisms and their relationships with their environment (including other organisms). Thus mostly, but not exclusively, it has focused on the nature side of nature/culture. Given its focus on relationships, however, on occasion it has moved towards a thoroughly relational view of life and drawn in other disciplines in order
effectively to map life, meaning that it has, in effect, bumped up against the limits of narrow disciplinary foci and the nature/culture worldview.
Ideas of new ecology have emerged which question established ideas of separate nature and various assumptions about that nature, particularly assumptions of
instability, complexity, uncertainty and even chaotic fluctuations as being more the norm for biophysical systems. This is thought to be so for both apparently natural and apparently human-impacted spaces.
Along with a greater emphasis on disequilibria in new ecology, there is a (related) assumption that systems are more open than closed, with exchange and flux between systems occurring constantly. There is concern for spatial and temporal dynamics developed in detailed and situated analyses of “people in places,” using, in particular,
historical analysis as a way of explaining environmental change across time and space. There is a rejection of the view of nature as separate realm into which human life intrudes, and any correspondingly simple idea of „first nature‟ being superseded by „second nature‟.
So new ecology regards ecosystems and habitats as systems which may be more or less open or closed, stable or volatile, certain or uncertain, fleeting or enduring, spatially focused of diffused, and in which a whole host of agents are interacting, including humans. The challenge from new ecology, according to Castree (2005, p.235) , is „to regard human actors as always already part of complex and changeable biophysical systems‟ whose actions do not necessarily „corrupt‟ or reduce nature.
New ecology offers a more hopeful, but still challenging, view that nature-human interactions can be positive. It is not hard to find at least some obvious examples. Bill Adams (1996) points out that some of the richest habitats in the UK in terms of biodiversity are adaptive, such as chalk downland grazed by domestic animals, and coppiced woodlands. Here economic production has gone hand-in-hand with the production of rich (in biodiversity terms) natures. These hybrid ecologies where both culture and nature seem to flourish have often been relatively neglected in scientific
and political agendas.
non-human conviviality. Recent studies have shown that the biodiversity hotspots of Germany are not to be found in the countryside or nature reserves, but in cities such as Berlin. Given the rise of the urban world, this is a vital realisation, and it also offers wider lessons in the possibilities of human and non-human flourishing. One
challenges of new ecologies, however, is that a recognition of complexity and uncertainty shows how (simple) prediction, management and control are unlikely, if not impossible.
Dwelling: human and non-human life as emergent, relational and emplaced
If new ecology sees human action as part of the natural world, then perspectives on dwelling tend to see nature as part of humanity. Dwelling is about addressing life in terms of being-in-the-world as an active, embodied, immediate yet also temporal (enduring) relational process. It is about living-body-in-environment (space and place) which is sensing, responding, engaging, exchanging, remembering, knowing and doing. Dwelling offers a more organicist view of the world than that of ANT. Here we have the world constructed of the many co-minglings of nature-culture actants within the everyday dwellings of particular worldly locations. Sarah Whatmore and Steve Hinchcliffe (2003, p. 5) have discussed how dwelling is about the ways in which “humans and other animals make themselves at home in the world through a bodily
register of ecological conduct”. Springing from the later work of Martin Heidegger and related phenomenological approaches, dwelling offers a ground from which life (human and non-human) can be rethought away from Cartesian-derived dualisms. Dwelling differs from social construction approaches through its stressing of the physical, the relational, the sensed, the orchestration of body and space/environment.
The work of anthropologist Tim Ingold is key to the current upturn in interests in
dwelling in geography, sociology and beyond. For Ingold, dwelling is a perspective that treats the immersion of the organism-person in an environment or lifeworld as an
Dwelling is often explained as a switch from a „building perspective‟ to the „dwelling perspective‟. The former rests on the notion that human thought and action is
somehow isolated from the world and thus in a position to impose on the world, literally to build upon it ideally generated blueprints. The latter points out that any form of life emerges from the world, and that there is never a gap through which thought/practice can completely free itself. The two are always entangled, meanings do not overlay the world but are immanent in the contexts of engagements which perform it moment by moment. This turn has also been mapped as a switch from „thinking space‟ to „thinking place‟. Both human and non-humans are given active
roles in this interplay of body and environment.
Ideas of dwelling are potentially bound up with the notions of home, local and (rural) rootedness. This sits uneasily with the apparently mobile, speeded-up, stretched-out nature of much contemporary (urban) life. But in such life, time-space deepened experience remains inevitable, and new forms of repeated encounters still abound, such as commuting to and from work. Examples of life without enduring relationships with places such as home (of some kind or other), workspaces and cities, and with patterns of rhythm and repetition, are non-existent. Dwelling then inevitably leads to an emphasis on temporality/process in the consideration of landscapes. To capture the relational, emergent, creation of space, Ingold coins the term „taskscape‟, where the spatio-temporal patterning of the environment takes relatively settled physical form though repeated practice. But this is to make the point that all landscapes/places are taskscapes, in which case the distinctions between them are ultimately dissolved.
Sociologies of nature suggest that dwelling overcomes conflicts between „realist‟ and „idealist‟ approaches to nature and environment. Adrian Franklin places dwelling at
the heart of a new anthropology of nature which pushes towards an animated, turbulent vision of the world unfolding in a burgeoning far-reaching (in time and
dualisms with a dwelt/authentic - undwelt/inauthentic life dualism which is present in Heidegger, which can lead to a dualism between bounded space and network. John Wylie further adds that dwelling must confront the novel, the fleeting, the singular, and the moment in emplaced becoming, as well as the longer patterns of familiarity, practice, habit upon which dwelling has tended to focus.
Animal geographies
One important development in notions of dwelling is the use of the concept to
consider the lives of non-human animals. The dwelling of animals as well as of humans, and the continuities between them, are important threads in Ingold‟s work. Geographers such as Nigel Thrift use the related notion of Von Uexkűll‟s lifeworld to stress the particular intelligences and spatial practices of dwelt (animal) life. More generally the somewhat oxymoronish focus on animals within „human geography‟ emerges form a recognition of intense mixings and intimacies between humans and nature in the particular forms of animals, and the myriad spatialities of differing animals‟ presences in differing societies. The thrust of this can be traced in two edited collections, one by Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel (1998) and the other by Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (2000), which study how animals are implicated in the social in a vastly diverse range of ways; how the acknowledgement and study of these
implications has been marginal(ised); and how the questions and implications posed range from the ecological, through the political, to the ethical.
In animal geography David Matless and various colleagues have developed ideas of nature-culture by considering what they call „animal landscapes‟. Using examples of hunting and other forms of animal-human interactions historically embedded in place and landscape at a differing range of scales, they show how relations with animals can
be a powerful part of human identify and place formation. These processes vary form example to example, and will almost certainly contain conflict as animals are
ways. The geographical context of encounter, the nature of the animals involved, the class and culture of the human actors all fold into highly dense, and highly specific, geographies of culture-nature-animality-place.
Places as entanglements
Place is a complex and somewhat fuzzy term, but in various guises it has a track record of scrambling, to some extent at least, the nature/culture divide. Places, in terms of somehow distinguished local spaces, have obvious material, physical and
cultural dimensions. There has long been an interest in the interplay of these
dimensions in the very formation of place. Humanist geographers such as J. Nicholas Entriken have sought to develop ideas of place which also scramble simply dualised notions of objectivity and subjectivity, but beneath all this scrambling the
nature/culture divide often tacitly remains as place beds down into being „humanised‟ space and nature.
There has been a concerted effort to rejuvenate approaches to place in human geography which are keen to jettison any notion of them as simply bounded, static, social spaces, all too easily demarcated on a map by a line. The aim instead is to propose places as temporal processes where all manners of trajectories - of people, non-humans, economies, technologies, ideas, and more - contingently settle out into distinctive local patterns. These are always changing, yet enduring for now, until forced apart, perhaps through new flows of forces from elsewhere, as they always remain networked into the wider world. Thus these views try simultaneously to hang on to both a topographical, located, dwelt view of life and a topological, networked view of life.
As Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift (2002: 30) summarise, “places are best thought of not so much as enduring sites but as moments of encounter, not so much as „presents‟,
Many other natural processes operate in flows, rhythms and velocities equally unamenable to everyday human apprehension, yet also which remain highly various, such as ice ages, sun spot cycles, long-term weather patterns. These we need science to read. Other rhythms such as planetary movements and the seasons, and
corresponding movements/rhythms of oceans, animals and plants are amenable to „ordinary‟ sensing and memory. All these velocities and rhythms flow together into
ongoing makings of place.
All manner of actants thus bring their agency to the formation of place, which are one key outcome emerging from eddies or entanglements in trillions of intermeshing flows patterning space-time. Cities, houses, offices, parks, cars, desks can all be seen in this way. Stephan Harrison, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (2004, p.40) argue just this; “[a]ll kinds of things can come together in the world and, in that process of encounter
and settling down into at least a short-term equilibrium, they can creatively produce new kinds of organisations that are greater than the sum of their parts.” Thrift (1999) incorporates a whole range of approaches including dwelling and ANT into what he calls „ecologies of place‟. To this he adds yet further entanglements of memories,
longing, affect, and even hauntings. Place can be a receptacle which holds together all of these rich entanglements of the social, the natural, the material the imaginary, the past and the present.
Four key challenges of nature-culture
As we have already set out, the modern settlement of nature/culture sits at the very foundation of modern knowledge along with related dualisms such as subject/object and agency/structure. It is inevitable that, if these foundations are successfully
undermined, the ramifications will be far-reaching and a lot of rebuilding work will be
required. Understandings of agencies, ethics, politics, disciplines and methodologies need to be urgently reworked as we change nature/culture to nature-culture.
Agencies of nature-culture
creatively depart. Below them, lower-order animals, plants and materials are deemed purely mechanical followers of set processes. This privileging of human agency has been a ubiquitous factor in modern knowledge and a key architecture of the
nature/society divide. Margaret FitzSimmons and David Goodman (1998) claim that it has been a commonplace in social theory to ignore the specific “agency” and “materiality” of nature. We have discussed agency already in the approaches to
nature-culture outlined above, but it is important to note that they all, albeit to different extent and in somewhat differing ways, challenge the privileging of human
agency. As this is a key architecture of nature/culture, it has become a prime target for those seeking to move to nature-culture.
Environmental philosophers such as Val Plumwood and Arne Naess have long argued that agency needs to be given back to nature. In Plumwood‟s (1993, p.5) terms, “once nature is reconceived as capable of agency and intentionality, and human identity is reconceived in less polarised and disembodied ways, the great gulf which Cartesian thought established between the conscious, mindful human sphere and the mindless, clockwork natural one disappears.” Put at its simplest, „we‟ humans would not be here without (amongst many other things) the sun (and other stars), the moon, the millions of microbes which occupy our bodies, the plants and animals with which we share the world; without, in short, non-humans of many a hue. Life itself is a creative force. Surely this is a form of agency?
There are however challenges to thinking about the agencies of non-humans alongside those of humans. The answer is not to deny humans agency, but rather to re-think what agency is and how it is enacted. There is now a concern to redefine agency in ways which allows it to arise through nature-society assemblages, and which
recognise the specific, embodied, agencies of beings and things other than human. This is not to deny the uniquely distinctive capacities of humans, but rather to expand
the notion of agency. Whatmore (1999, p.26) suggests that agency should be seen as “a relational achievement, involving the creative presence of organic beings,
authorise, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid and so on” (Latour, 2004, p.226). He feels that “no science of the social can even begin if the question of who and what participates in action is not first opened up, even though it might mean letting elements enter that, for lack of a better term, we call nonhumans” (Latour, 2004, p.226).
Two further brief points need to be made about agency in nature-culture. The
movement of attributing agency to non-humans is in a way an extension of the idea of
human agency. It is the capacity of individuals to act. Latour talks of „things‟ acting. The more relational processes set out above seek to destabilise this view by saying it is the relational interaction which generates agency, not from individuals alone but between things. We also need to recognise the agency of processes, for example of photosynthesis and of tidal fluctuations. In a world of process, these are the major creative forces which flow through things and in which things cause turbulence. The second point relates to the idea of place set out above and is also returned to below in the discussion of sites. If the world is made up of mixings, a vast interrelating set of mixings across space and time which are always in flux (in a whole range of
velocities), then the contingency, the turned-upness of those mixings has an agency. What are we bumping up against in the course of our everyday life makes a
difference. This is the agency of chance and of difference.
Ethics of nature-culture
The opening up of questions of agency goes hand-in-hand with the opening up of questions of ethics. The environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston notes how the common assumption persists that ethics are for people. People are both the subject and the object of ethics, in the sense that only humans are deliberative moral agents
and also that humans have ethical obligations only to other humans. Under modernism, ethical consideration has largely operated only up to the supposed
boarder of nature, or stopped very soon after it. Environmental political philosophies such as ecofeminism and deep ecology, however, have long contended that the application of ethical concern solely or principally to the culture side of the nature/culture dualism alone is deeply unethical in itself, and a key driver of unsustainable practices. Vandama Shiva argues that the scientific revolution in
constraints against its violation and exploitation. Questions of animal rights form a small but significant disturbance at this nature/society boundary.
Reconfiguring ethics to work throughout the entire body of nature-culture is then a primary and again urgent task. Lawrence Buell argues that the environmental crisis involves a crisis of the modern imagination, the amelioration of which depends on finding better ways of imagining nature and humanity‟s relation to it. This
reimagining requires as, Jim Cheney (1999, p.144) puts it, an “act of considerable
moral imagination for those raised in the heart of the monster, the Western dualism of moral insiders and outsiders.” We need forms of ethics which can follow
entanglements, relationality and hybridity through nature-culture, and which are thoroughly embedded in ongoing practice so as to acknowledge the vitality, agency and value of human and non-human life. We need somehow to heed the voices of „nature‟ and let them speak in our (human) political and ethical deliberations. Michel
Serres (1995) has eloquently stated that, through exclusively social contracts, we have abandoned the bond that connected us to the world. He asks “what language do the things of the world speak that we might come to an understanding of them
contractually?” (Serres 1995, p. 38), And he answers that, in fact, “the Earth speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds and interactions, such that each of the partners in any symbiosis thus owes life to the other, on pain of death” (Serres 1995, p. 38).
This heeding of nature will include acknowledgement of difference and otherness not only between people but between all humans and non-humans, who remain also interdependently bound together in life on earth. Geographers such as William Lynn have opened up the idea of the geography of ethics, while Owain Jones has pointed to the ethical challenges of life which comes in very different scales and forms of
embodiment and very different spaces, and even elements, such as the oceans.
Politics of nature-culture
critiqued in turn for providing an uncertain ground on which to build any form of politics. The first answer to this difficulty is that to reveal the relational, hybrid nature of everyday formations, and to begin to break up the modernist settlement of
nature/culture, is a political act in itself. Key non-modern thinkers such as Latour suggest that not only can effective science (both natural and social) only begin once the divide is breached, the same goes for politics too. In his key early work, Latour set out the notion of „the parliament of things‟, which has been taken up as a motif for a
new kind of politics in which hybridity, complicity and process are central.
In his more recent idea of Dingpolitik, Latour is seeking new practices of politics, which form through and around networks, collectives and „issues of concern‟, where the more-than-human is given voice, where political assemblies are mobile (such as portable legislature buildings) and of multiple form. The „grand‟ succession narrative
of adversarial, ideologically founded, conventional politics, is replaced, or broken up into many streams flowing at once. No longer are we faced with a simple, entrenched frontline between the left (and environment) and capitalism. Capitalisms, and other institutional arrangements, now take many forms, large and small actions with novel, local alliances and objectives are occurring worldwide. There is, as Latour ( ) puts it, „a pixelisation of politics‟. New forms of politics and governance are hence being proposed through which the active agencies of things/nature can represent themselves, or at least be better represented. Jonathan Murdoch sets out some principles of
„ecological planning‟ where the processes and forces of nature are built into the very
fabric of planning processes. Hinchcliffe et al (2005), in the context of nature in the city, call for a cosmopolitan politics of conviviality. They draw upon the
cosmopolitics of Isabelle Stengers which is a politics in which the recognition of non-humans into the body politic generates new formations of scientific and political
practices, as well as more democratic distributions of expertise.
Disciplines and methodologies of nature-culture
If particular, formations in the world, say networks of food production/consumption, involve a whole set of interacting processes and elements, including the bio-physical, social, economic, political, cultural and technological (as they clearly do), then the forensic skills of the natural and social sciences are still needed; but they need to be employed firstly in the acknowledgement that they are studying a symptom, a pulse in a larger body (rather than a entire body), and secondly in such a way which can communicate with other investigators. Thus we come to multidisciplinary and
interdisciplinary approaches. But Whatmore warns that this needs to be about more that just placing disciplines side by side, it is also about changing the ontological and political basis of knowledge. We also need to embrace the pragmatist and non-representational realization that knowledge is not simply a representation of the worldview from the outside, but a creative practice in the world which changes it. If all is flows, processes, entanglements and hybridity, in differing networks,
assemblages and places, then we need, as Marcel Henaff (1997, p.72) puts it, “procedural methodologies, taking seriously the particularities of the sites, the
unpredictability of circumstances, the uneven patterns of landscapes and the hazardous nature of becoming.”
Sites of nature-culture
With new approaches to nature-culture set out above, and new views of agencies, ethics, politics and methods, we can begin, at last, to begin to confront the legacies of geographies of nature/culture and the false divisions that it engendered. Geography has a distinct advantage in this respect, since one highly productive way of thinking nature-culture is through spaces, or sites, of one kind or another. Geographers do not see the world as generally divided into ontological sections, but a world made up of
many different places and other forms and types of sites, patterns and processes. There are many types we could choose to consider but here, as particularly telling
examples, we briefly consider bodies, cities, countrysides and spaces of biodiversity.
Bodies (human)areprimary sites of nature-culture. They are at once intensely „natural‟ and „cultural‟. We (humans) are entirely dependent upon a whole host of
live in and on our bodies. The desire for a sterile, „germ free‟, environment, one which is reflected/fuelled by the promotion of many products impregnated with indiscriminate anti-bacterial agents, is a reflection of the imagined separation of human life from nature. It is a dangerous illusion. Some have argued that the rise of a number of health problems in developed societies is partly put down to the over-sterilisation, purification and isolation of human bodies, thus breaking the relational, trans-body functions on which healthy life depends.
Secondly the „cultural‟ manifestations of bodies (rational thought, language, self-density, free will, voluntary movement) are emergent from and dependent upon all manner of affective systems which include memory, emotion, and various
physiological and bio-mechanical systems which are also common through the non-human world. The complexity of the nature-culture within us all remains one of the great challenges to knowledge of ourselves and (our place in) the world. The
reunification of nature/culture perhaps has to start with the body, just as the Cartesian dualism started at the bodily level.
Cities, like New York or Mumbai, can be, as Harvey points out, read as natural as well as cultural phenomena. They are raised out of wood, sand, iron, and the like. The point is not that these apotheoses of urbanity are especially „natural‟. The same could be said for any city, town or village, any house, or any artefact which, in the end (or beginning), emerges from raw material and chemical compounds extracted from the earth and/or from living organisms. The point is that these cities and the spectacles that they offer (such as the Manhattan skyline) perhaps the most extreme, intense forms of cultural artifice seemingly a million miles „away‟ from nature, can in a very real sense be seen as extrusions of natural substances and processes through complex
dies which have created „culture‟. Not only are they made from „raw materials‟, but structural techniques such as columns, beams and arches began their lives as mimics
of natural arrangements and still adhere to the „the laws of nature‟. They are assembled by the work of social organisms as much as is animal architecture.
out-number the human population. As already mentioned, cities can be biodiversity hotspots and more hospitable to many creatures than the countryside that might surround them. If human geographies of the city have tended to downplay the natural, then the study of physical geography has tended equally to ignore the urban. Again, as in bodies, cities are sites where nature-culture is very vividly and excitingly evident, once we choose to see them in these new ways.
In the instance of countryside, for example the British countryside, the idea of
nature-culture is perhaps less novel, for it has long been claimed that the British countryside is as much a thing of culture as it is nature. Most of the land (and the very form of the land) has been adapted over centuries of agriculture, forestry and other land uses. But the specificities of nature still hold great sway in how things go. For example, the changing bands of rock types which help determine soil, vegetation, and landscape form. The patterns of the country are not simply inscribed by culture, but rather they are outcomes of differing trajectories of various beings and processes coming together, in various ways at various speeds and momentums, and more-or-less conflictually, and perhaps heading off in new relational directions.
(Spaces of) biodiversities, spaces of difference: in her 2002 book Hybrid
Geographies, Whatmore identifies two readings of biodiversity, one which follows the nature/culture divide, another which does not. In the former, nature is seen as a pure, separate realm. Under this view, spaces of rich, pristine, biodiversity are identified, and conservation efforts are based on separating and protecting these important areas from human society. This policy is even to the point of evicting indigenous peoples from spaces such as national parks. The alternative view which Whatmore finds in United Nations literature for the 1993 World Food Day sees things
differently. This claims that humanity‟s place in nature is “still not widely understood. Human influences on the environment are all pervasive; even those ecosystems that
From this remarkable, hybrid nature-culture view of biodiversity, Whatmore concludes that there is no „state of nature‟, only richly inhabited ecologies in which
the “precious metal of bio-diversity is intimately bound up with the diversities of cultural practices” (Whatmore, 2002, p.116). These alternative definitions of biodiversity-human relationships, Whatmore argues, are important in terms of proprietorship and governance. How nature is named and seen makes a difference to who can own, control or shape it. Here, though, we are more interested in the idea of difference in terms of how the world is always being made and unmade through
distinctive and particular ecologies of nature-culture.
This hybrid view of biodiversity thus presents us with a range of different, rich, bio-cultural ecologies. They return us to ideas raised earlier of ecological and bio-cultural diversity being conjoined. A number of perhaps surprising bedfellows are seeking to focus on these kinds of links. Common Ground, the UK-based arts-and-environment organisation, has devoted much of its effort in identifying and promoting what it calls „local diversity‟, where biodiversity, such as local fruit varieties, plant species, breeds
of livestock, are intimately bound into local economic, cultural and social practices. Common Ground therefore fears the loss of this richness through homogenisation, be it ecological, social, cultural and/or economic. Guattari, in TheThree Ecologies, similarly sees ecological „ecocide‟ going hand-in-hand with the devastation of cultural and psychological diversity. At the hand of what could be called modernist capitalism.
Conclusions
The last point raised above is very important. In relational, hybrid spaces and
processes, cultural (economic) processes and ecological processes can both flourish. For example, in the developed world, modern nature conservation efforts often involve separating and protecting nature, perhaps in nature reserves, from socio-economic activities (not least agriculture). But this denies that fact that much of the „nature‟ to be protected was created by agriculture and other land uses in the first
If nature and culture are held apart, and encounters between them are seen as zero sum games (initially for nature, but eventually for all), then planetary prospects looks gloomy. With the global population rising past 6.2 billion people and more of the planet following the consumption styles of the developed world, not least in dietary terms, culture will literally consume some elements of nature (such as old growth forests). But nature cannot really be displaced, rather it will be rendered into different, less diverse forms. These forms, in turn, might consume culture. Rather that thinking
nature/culture, then, we need to think and act upon nature-culture formations which may come in a myriad array of combinations and spaces. We need to heed their composition and their processes. We need, as in new ecology, to assess if these assemblages are bringers of growth, well-being, richness and diversity, or otherwise. We need sites, networks, spaces and places where different nature-cultures can flourish - bodies, parks, streets, ponds, houses, rivers, gardens, oceans, windowboxes, forests, towns, cities, farmland, countrysides, wilderness, markets …
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