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developed, by whom, and with what consequences are vital questions to be asked
in this era of globalised capitalism (Demeritt, 2001). We can never talk simply of
'nature' or, the particular things and spaces to which that term refers, such as
forests, oceans, and climate systems, without recognising how culture and economy
are always at work shaping these objects.
Social construction dissolves the nature/culture divide by swamping the appar-
ently natural with fl ows of constructive power and practice from the other side of
the divide. This one-way traffi c has attracted critical comment. Whatmore (2003,
p. 165) complains that 'the world is rendered as an exclusively human achievement
in which “nature” is swallowed up in the hubris of social construction'. This is not
an adequate position because, as already declared, if the 'nature' of the nature/
culture dualism is unsustainable, then so too is the 'culture'. If these two realms are
always entangled together, we need new ways of thinking about the world that do
not rest on
either
wing of the old foundation.
New dialectics
Marxism had a central interest in nature and nature-culture relationships from its
inception, not least in how capitalism alienates society from nature and renders it
as property. Latterly, various attempts have been made to project Marxism into
ecologism (or visa versa) so as to make 'green Marxism'. At the heart of the Marxist
approach is dialectical materialism in which nature is seen as embedded in social
processes as both a cause and effect.
Particularly as developed by David Harvey, new dialectics attempts to develop
these key trajectories of Marxism and embrace a more fully relational and fl uid
view of the world (see Braun, 2006 for detailed review). As such, it makes a sus-
tained attack on the nature/society dualism
and
the dualisation of space and time.
Here there is a relational view of things very similar to that propounded by Actor
Network Theory (ANT) (see below). Things are not understood as separate, or in
possession of innate, stable identities; rather their natures are relationally inscribed
through the networks that constitute them. Harvey, from his Marxist base, suggests
that the imperatives of capitalism are now central to organising and transforming
the networks of the modern world, and that this fundamental and problematic
process needs to be confronted. Humans and non-humans in 'socio-ecological for-
mations', as Harvey puts it, 'become the “arteries” through which an invisible
process of ceaseless [economic] value expansion operates' (Castree, 2005, p. 233).
His materialist theory sees (capitalist) society making nature in its image and actively
transforming elements and organisms, for example highly bred, even genetically
modifi ed, poultry raised to grow so rapidly that they cannot express any meaningful
kind of (natural) life/behaviour. Nature, in turn, dialectically reworks society (think
of crises in capitalist industrial food chains). There is often a resistance from natural
elements as they are forcefully enrolled into capital accumulation networks, which
sets-up the dialectical dynamic (see George Henderson's chapter, this volume).
Castree (2005) feels that the impact of new dialectics has been limited by the
more general turn away from Marxism in geography and the social sciences. Also
new dialectics is thought by some to slip inadvertently back towards a dualised view
of nature/culture embedded in dialectical reasoning. As Braun (2006, p. 202) sum-
marises, 'a number of scholars - like Sarah Whatmore, Donna Haraway and Bruno
Latour - suggest that dialectics is too crude a method for understanding the hetero-
