HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF (WHAT WE CALL) NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 9

rather than ephemeral - they do not come-and-go in a way that buzzwords
like 'globalisation' or 'post-modernism' do. Finally, keywords possess what
cultural critic Tony Bennett and colleagues, in their update of Williams's
topic, call 'social force' (Bennett et al. , 2005: xxii). In other words, because
their various meanings become normalised, they're able to govern (i.e. steer
or direct) not only our thinking but also a wide range of practices resulting
therefrom. A simple measure of the importance of 'nature' as an idea is to
imagine us dispensing with the term and its meanings altogether. The 'hole'
in our language would be enormous. We'd be rendered both inarticulate
and incapable in large areas of our thought and action. In short, if we didn't
already have the term in our present-day vocabulary, we'd probably have to
invent it.
To understand what nature means for us, we need to ask three ques-
tions. In each case, we're not looking for the 'proper' meaning. Instead,
we're searching for those meanings that have come, over a long period
of time, to seem like proper ones. This immunises us from the conceit
that our particular way of describing the world is a universal feature of all
societies worldwide. The first question is the obvious one to pose: 'what
is nature?'
What is nature?
This is an apparently difficult question to answer, at least if we remain at
the level of the myriad different phenomena to which the word refers. A
literal answer to the question would have us extending this chapter's open-
ing paragraph into an almost endless inventory of organic and inorganic
phenomena found on Earth (and in the stars). A more parsimonious (and
sensible) approach is thus to look for the shared meanings that we attribute
to these phenomena when we classify them as 'natural'. I make no claims
to originality in identifying them below. First, however, why don't you
haveago?
Study Task: Look around you right now or think about what you've seen
since getting out of bed this morning. Then list six things you consider to
be 'unnatural'. Ask yourself what it is about them that prevents you from
considering them to be natural. Aside from 'unnatural', what other words
come to mind to describe them (e.g. artificial)? This task should allow you
to define nature from the 'outside in'.
How did you do? It seems to me that 'nature' has four principal mean-
ings, all of which are quite venerable. First, it denotes the non-human world ,
especially those parts untouched or barely affected by humans ('the nat-
ural environment'). Second, it signifies the entire physical world , including
humans as biological entities and products of evolutionary history . 7 Third,