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of how nature was made an object of economic and political calculation, and the
sorts of cultural politics in play in specifi c environmental practices (see Braun,
2002). This applied equally to science as it did to art, each of which carried a force
that could not be reduced to the dictates of capital.
As we will see later, the emphasis on nature's cultural construction was not
inimical to the notion that nature was materially produced. Where such accounts
differed was on how and why nature was produced in the form it was in any given
context, and how scholars and critics could claim to know this nature in any direct
or unmediated way. Others took exception to what they considered the anthropo-
centrism of
both
positions. We can understand this in two ways. On the one hand,
constructionist accounts were said to be anthropocentric in an ethical-political
sense, since they privileged the needs and desires of humans, and tended to treat
nonhuman nature as mere means for human ends. On the other hand, these accounts
were also said to be anthropocentric in an analytical sense, since they tended to
place
human action
at the heart of their accounts of nature's production, rendering
nature a static and inert realm. In other words, it was not clear that the
matter
of
nonhuman nature mattered. Hence, while Marxist accounts sought to overcome the
nature-society dualism, they tended to retain a subject-object dichotomy, and by
doing so collapsed nature into society (see Castree, 1995).
As is discussed elsewhere in this volume, recent work by Marxist scholars has
responded in a robust fashion to this charge, with various degrees of success. David
Harvey (1996), for instance, expanded his dialectical approach to include the envi-
ronment as a constitutive moment within a larger 'relational' ontology. How this
dialectic unfolded, then, depended upon the specifi c elements of the economy and
environment in question in any given occasion. Likewise, James O'Connor (1996)
proposed that Marxist theory should be augmented by noting a 'second contradic-
tion' to capitalism, in which the degradation of what Marx called the 'conditions
of production' created a specifi c form of economic crisis. The material properties
and processes of nonhuman nature, then, had some infl uence on how economic
crises occurred, and on the social forms that emerged in attempts to overcome them.
A great many Marxist geographers have explicitly taken up this question. In his
work on forestry in the northwest United States, for instance, Scott Prudham (2005)
gives full weight to the specifi c biological features of Douglas Fir forests and the
mountain topography of Oregon, both of which presented immense challenges to
capital, and shaped the technologies, work regimes, politics and labour relations
that emerged in the region. A similar argument has been made by Karen Bakker
(2004) who has shown how the physical properties of water repel attempts at com-
modifi cation. Others, like Noel Castree, James McCarthy, Gavin Bridge, Becky
Mansfi eld, Matthew Gandy, and Eric Swyngedouw have all registered the ways in
which nonhuman nature is both a
problem
and an
opportunity
for capital, at once
interrupting circuits of capital, and providing new spaces for commodifi cation, a
point which is perhaps made best by George Henderson (1999), in his classic work
California and the Fictions of Capital
.
A fi nal point of contention with historical materialist accounts of nature has
turned on the adequacy of
dialectics
for overcoming dualist conceptions of nature
and society. The problem, in the eyes of critics, is that in important respects dialecti-
cal approaches still presume the existence of the initial categories (nature and
society) even as they seek to multiply the connections between them. For the soci-
ologist Bruno Latour (1993) dialectics remains too crude an analytical device that
