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as a source of authority or legitimation for specifi c social arrangements (see Smith,
1984; Castree, 2000). On what basis could it be said that nature existed as an
immutable external force, to which humans must submit, if through their labour
humans transformed both external nature and their own internal nature? For writers
like Smith (1984) nature was best understood as something 'produced', rather than
something timeless and eternal. Nature did not stand outside history; its history was
still to be written.
An equally important contribution of historical materialist approaches to nature
came in the form of an explicit challenge to the 'deep green' or 'preservationist'
impulse found in so much of the North American environmental movement of the
1970s and 1980s. For many deep green environmentalists, nature was taken to be
a realm entirely separate from, and threatened by, humans. According to this view
nature was that place where humans were not, and thus the presence of humans,
considered by some as a cancer on a preexisting natural world, was taken to signal
the imminent
destruction
of nature (see, for instance, McKibben 1989). As numer-
ous commentators pointed out, this introduced a contradiction into ecological
thought, for if humans signaled the 'end' of nature, then the only way to save
nature would be to remove humans entirely. In short, such a perspective provided
no basis on which to determine
how
to live in the world (Cronon, 1995; White,
1995). From Smith's perspective, nature did not need to be 'saved' from humans,
since humans were part of nature. It is here where we can begin to see the impor-
tance of the production of nature thesis, for the insistence that humanity and nature
stood in an internal relation, rather than an external one, pointed to an important
analytical project: if nature is something produced, then the question becomes
how
and
why
it is that human and nonhuman natures are produced in the forms they
are at any particular historical moment. Likewise, the thesis provided radical envi-
ronmental geographers and environmental activists with a political project, for as
Smith (1996, p. 50) put it, eco-politics could no longer be about saving nature from
humans, but instead must fi nd answers to the question: 'how, and by what social
means and through what social institution is the production of nature to be
organized?'
Others in this volume have provided a thorough discussion of attempts by
Marxist geographers to account for specifi cally
capitalist
productions of nature, and
how they answered Smith's questions about social means and social institutions (see
George Henderson's chapter). Here I merely wish to note that not everyone was
convinced that historical materialists overcame the nature-society dualism as suc-
cessfully as they imagined. Critiques proceeded along several lines. On the one hand,
critics argued that Marxists conceived of the production of nature in much too
narrow a way, tending towards an economic reductionism that underplayed other
social and cultural processes that shaped nature's material transformation (see
Haraway, 1997), and paid inadequate attention to the connections between the
production of nature and relations of race, gender and sexuality. One of the stron-
gest challenges came from cultural and political geographers - many infl uenced by
post-structuralist writers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault - who sug-
gested that Marxist geographers had underplayed the role of ideas and images in
shaping how environments were valued and transformed. The argument here was
that the discursive construction of nature was
generative
in its own right, and not
simply epiphenomenal to the economy. How the nonhuman world was
framed
as
an object of knowledge or aesthetic appreciation was taken to be an integral part
