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biodiversity - for them to exploit in urban areas than in the modernist countryside.
Wildlife can be found in the heart of our biggest cities, not only in the mosaic of
urban green spaces, but also in apparently unlikely habitats such as building facades
and rooftops.
These ideas of rich, productive co-habitation can be expanded to a more global
scale and to ideas of biodiversity. Whatmore (2002, pp. 90-91) recounts how The
United Nations Food and Agriculture organisation dedicated the 1993 World Food
Day to the business of linking the primary ambition of 'food for all' to the equally
important aim of sustaining 'the biological diversity of our planet' (FAO, 1993).
Their report stated:
Humanity's place in nature is still not widely understood. Human infl uences on
the environment are all pervasive; even those ecosystems that appear most 'natural'
have been altered directly or indirectly during the course of time. Starting some 12,000
years ago, our forebear, as farmers, fi sherman, hunters and foresters, have created
a rich diversity of productive ecosystems. (FAO, 1993, p. 1, in Whatmore, 2002,
pp. 90-91).
Whatmore contrasts this relational view with the defi nitions and ontologies of the
United Nation's Convention on Biodiversity in which nature is still seen as a pure,
separate realm once intact, but increasingly under threat from human activity.
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 diversi-
ties of cultural practices (Whatmore, 2002, pp. 115-16).
If we try to hold nature and culture apart and regard the relationship between
them as an inevitably zero sum game, then we are in big trouble. As the fi rst views
of earth from space showed, we live on one world, in a gossamer biosphere gathered
to the planet's fl ank by gravity, and shielded from harmful solar emissions (as we
now know) by its magnetic fi eld which is generated by the molten iron core.
Some people worry about where we stand - about the foundations of our
knowledges. If nature as a separate, fi xed ground is lost, what do we stand upon
when deciding how to know, judge, and act? The answer is that we are never
standing: we are always on the move along with the unfolding world around us.
It is constantly being made, unmade, and remade (even if it is at speeds as various
as the drifting of continental plates and the pulse of fi bre optic communication).
This is a slippery context in which to practice knowledge, politics, ethics and sus-
tainable societies. But it is a hopeful slipperiness. In fl ux is possibility. Process
ontologies such as those discussed above espouse knowledges and politics of experi-
mentation through which new entanglements might fl ourish. In a world that is
after nature and after culture, where entanglement is all, we must, as the song
goes, 'accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and don't mess with Mister
In-between'.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to David Demeritt and Noel Castree for their patience, support and
guidance.
