Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
dualism brings risks and that we 'should not be too quick, in our renewed under-
standing of its contingency, to now jettison any concept of nature at all' (Castree
and Head, 2007, p. 2). But surely it has to be admitted that the modern constitution
has failed us in certain key ways, not least in terms of environmental security and
how we live with what has been termed nature and how we understand ourselves.
Constitutional reform is needed now!
Understanding the World 'After' Nature
Pressure on the modernist nature/culture dualism has come from various sources.
Somewhat ironically perhaps, some of the most important infl uences have been
developments in the natural sciences, which have exposed the implausibility of any
sharp break between the social and the natural. Donna Haraway (1992a, p. 193)
suggests that 'biology and evolutionary theory . . . [have] reduced the line between
humans and animals to a faint trace'. Increasing understanding of complex processes
of interchange between systems (e.g., ecologies and biospheric exchange systems)
shows that no clear divide exists between the living community of the world and
its material environment. The fundamental condition of all life is relational rather
than autonomous and independent.
Putting the increasingly detailed evidence being gathered by environmental
archaeologists alongside histories of societies shows that what were once hard-to-
explain rises and falls of social systems can often be attributed to long-term varia-
tions and cycles in natural systems, such as shifting climate zones or the fallout from
extreme events like super volcano eruptions. The interpenetration of natural and
social systems has always been far greater than we have allowed. History has been
a narrow, partial story of the strictly social. But if we look closely enough
What we will fi nd there . . . is not so much an interplay between two kinds of history,
human and non-human, as a history comprised by the interplay of diverse human and
non-human agents in their mutual relationships (Ingold, 2005, p. 506).
In addition to these emerging knowledges of relational life processes spun around
the world are knowledges of nature-culture entanglements on a different scale - that
of the body. Scientifi c advances in genetics and neurology challenge ideas dating
back to Rene Descartes and the origins of the Enlightenment, of a conscious, ratio-
nal, language-using mind as something set apart from, and in command of, its
material body. Instead contemporary biological science emphasises the complex
relationships between mind and body, while also holding out the prospect of human
enhancement through pharmaceutical and other interventions at the molecular level
that call into question any simple idea of a fi xed and essential human nature (Rose,
2001). As Thrift (2008, p. 252) points out in relation to non-representational
theory, 'affect is a challenge to what we regard as the social because it involves
thinking about waves of infl uence which depend on biology to an extent that is
rarely recognised or theorised in the social sciences'. In turn the body is not set apart
from, or at odds with space/environment, but a dwelt inter-emergent production.
Challenges to the intellectual divide between society and nature are also emerging
thick and fast from a range of other disciplines across the social sciences and
humanities, including environmental ethics, environmental history, sociology, poli-
tics and geography and also in art and literature. Within these are a series of theo-
