Thinking naturally

Thinking naturally

John O'Neill

The richness of the debates about the environment has its source not just in the importance of the issue, and the significance for the future of radical politics of dialogues between socialists and greens, but also in the fact that it lies at a point of convergence between a number of other arguments: between realism and constructivism, Enlightenment and its critics, humanism and anti-humanism; on the relation of economy, culture and nature; on the future direction of feminist thought and action. This richness is represented in Tim Hayward's and Kate Soper's recent books. Both are important contributions. Both are likely to have a wide readership and a large influence on current debates in environmental politics. Both certainly deserve to do so. They combine intellectual clarity and rigour with political commitment and purpose. The arguments amongst socialists and greens about the political and social implications of our current environmental crisis will be the richer for them.

Kate Soper's What is Nature? is engaged in a project of reconciliation between two conflicting perspectives on nature to be found in social theory. On the one side stand broadly `naturalist' or `realist' approaches which take the concept of nature to refer to a concept-independent reality - a natural world that has been the object of human exploitation and destruction, and which we have good reason to protect from further spoliation. On the other side stand postmodernist and post-structuralist approaches that are standardly anti-realist and relativist in orientation, and that focus upon the ways in which different conceptions of `nature' are culturally constructed and employed to legitimate a variety of social and sexual hierarchies and cultural norms. As Soper notes in outlining these conflicting perspectives, they do not map directly onto two theoretically and politically self-contained oppositional blocs. Green, Marxist and feminist positions exist which both reject the anti-realism of postmodernism and accept the significance of the ways in which the concept of `nature' has been used for ideological purpose.

Soper's own position occupies that political space. Her strategy is to carve out more clearly this position between the `nature-endorsing' perspectives of naturalists and the `nature-sceptical' perspectives of constructivists, by exploiting what are taken to be the strengths in one position to highlight the weaknesses in the other. In general, against the postmodernist focus on cultural construction of nature, she insists upon the importance of recognizing the existence of a discourse-independent natural world on which humans have real impacts that have to be addressed, and defends critical realism as the necessary basis for a coherent political project of social change. At the same time, she criticizes the tendency of the nature-endorsing positions for their insensitivity to the ways in which the concept of nature has been historically shaped for ideological effects, some of which have implications for the environmental cause itself. The argument is played out over a wide range of topics, from the use of the concept of nature to exclude or downgrade those associated with the natural - the primitive, corporeal, feminine - through to examination of the ways in which the modern conservation movement appeals to an ideological representation of the `rural'. In each case the anti-naturalist tendencies in constructivism are set against what is defensible in the ecological naturalist and realist positions.

The discussion is always rich, and much of the argument it will engender will concern the detail. To take just one example, Soper makes a useful demarcation between different levels of nature, pointing out that the source of aesthetic pleasure and value is the `surface' lay nature of our everyday encounters and not the `deep' level of causal powers and processes to which the scientific realist refers. The point is an important one and is broadly right. However, the two-way contrast between surface and deep tends to invoke a picture of natural science as physics. There are more layers to the nature we encounter than the division of surface and deep might suggest: it is not clear to me where the work of the biologist, geologist or ecologist fits. To the extent that their work generates knowledge of the deeper structures, it can transform our ways of experiencing the surface order. For example, when I walk in marshland with one of my botanist friends I am constantly aware of how much more she sees, and am rewarded by the details she can add to my experience: what is initially aesthetically dull becomes a more interesting place.