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But what if nature were not natural at all? What if, instead of it being
an object or domain we make sense of in various ways, our sense-making
practices reveal something wholly 'unnatural' to us? What if it's a world
whose naturalness is not given but merely appears to be so? What if the so-
called Book of Nature is legible to us because we wrote, rather than simply
read, the contents (plot, character, scene)? I ask these questions because in
this topic I aim to make sense not of nature but of the various ways in which what we
call 'nature' has been made sense of . Nature doesn't exist 'out there' (or 'in here',
within us) waiting to be understood. Rather, the very category of nature is
part of the way we make sense of the world for ourselves. In other words,
I'm interested not so much in what nature is, as in how those various things
convention teaches us to call 'natural' are represented by us and to us, and
with what implications.
In truth, it is more 'to us' than 'by us'. As I asserted in the Preface, most of
what we know and feel about nature derives from the claims made by myriad
others, for instance wildlife film-makers, journalists, chemists, environmen-
tal activists and professional ecologists. Some of these others are individuals
who attain special prominence, for instance the science-documentarians and
authors David Attenborough, David Suzuki and Brian Cox. But these indi-
viduals are usually members of larger epistemic communities who specialise
in producing particular kinds of representations of nature. We consume
and internalise these representations, placing us in a situation of 'epistemic
dependence' that is, in my view, writ large in the modern world. If you
like, this is a topic about what philosophers call epistemology (i.e. knowl-
edge and its effects). I am interested in social epistemology, to be specific,
because knowledge and belief are not created by sovereign (Cartesian) indi-
viduals and nor do they possess absolute foundations located outside the
realms of social discourse or social practice. Equally, we might say that
Making sense of nature is about ontology , but not in the classic philosoph-
ical sense of specifying what's fundamentally 'real' and listing (in typically
rarefied language) that 'mind-independent' reality's signature characteristics.
My interest, instead, is in what various representations of nature commu-
nicate to us. They shape what they ostensibly depict - including us - and
are thus worthy of close scrutiny. I thus regard 'nature' as a particularly
powerful fiction: it's something made, and no less influential for being an
artefact.
So, I am interested not in beluga whales, natterjack toads, Siberian tigers
and hermit crabs but in our shared ideas, feelings and beliefs about the phe-
nomena so named and all the other things I listed at the outset. We all
too often proceed as if these ideas, feelings and beliefs refer to a 'nature'
that's self-evidently 'there', waiting to be catalogued, understood, appreci-
ated, managed, enjoyed, explored, protected, improved or otherwise altered.
We often presume there to be no difference between word and world, image
and actuality, thought and matter. Or we seek to 'correct' the difference so
that a 'proper fit' is achieved cognitively, morally or aesthetically. As critic
 
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