Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 18
After Nature: Entangled Worlds
Owain Jones
No-one yet has made the crossing from nature to society, or vice versa,
and no-one ever will. There is no such boundary to be crossed. (Ingold, 2005,
p. 508)
Introduction
Although there is but one world in common, somehow it has long been common
to suppose that the world is in fact divided in two: into a world of nature and
another, one of culture. For more than four centuries this nature/culture dualism
has shaped knowledge, politics, and ethics in the West - with often debilitating
consequences.
From this long-established perspective, the title of my chapter, 'After Nature',
might be understood as referring to the pursuit of nature, as if nature were some-
thing elusive or endangered that I am seeking or lamenting. This is a very common
rhetoric at a time when human impact on the environment all around us seems
greater than ever. Bill McKibben (1990) has written movingly about the 'end of
nature' now that global climate change means there is no place left on earth free
from the mark of human infl uence.
In contrast to that vision of what comes after nature, this chapter understands
what is entailed by 'after' rather differently. My focus here is on the end of that
binary understanding of a world divided cleanly in two. In its place, this chapter
explores a number of new analytical approaches in geography, and elsewhere, that
seek to abolish this binary division. Despite important differences among them,
these approaches are all 'after nature' in the sense that they reject the idea of nature
as an ontologically pure realm that exists outside, and apart from, a separate one
of human knowledge, culture, and society. Instead they address life in ways that
recognise it as an ongoing outcome of complex interplays, or entanglements, between
all manner of processes and elements - bio-physical, economic, cultural, technologi-
cal, human and non-human. It should also be clear that not only is the 'nature' side
of the nature/culture dualism being called into question, but so too is the 'cultural'
