Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
...
go, nor a treasure to fence in or bank
' (1992: 296), she was reminding us
of this fact. Nature is not really 'over there', it's just that we think it is.
But we also spatialise nature in other ways, and this involves geographical
scale. On the one side, we imagine nature (in the second sense of the term)
to be almost imperceptibly small in its constituent parts (e.g. atoms, quarks
and 'dark matter'). It's thus all around us, and indeed part of us, yet hidden
from view. For instance, if we consider human biology and living creatures
more widely, a significant shift in our collective thinking has occurred since
James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of deoxyribonu-
cleic acid (DNA) in 1953. Imperceptible to the naked eye, the 'double helix'
has, over the past half century, come to represent the 'building block' of
all life in virtually all our imaginations. On the other hand, we also con-
ceive nature to be global, ambient and all encompassing (i.e. far bigger
than, and inclusive of, us). Notable here were the Apollo space missions
of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which provided an entirely new view of
the world. The striking photographs NASA astronauts and technicians pro-
duced allowed us to look at the Earth from afar as a blue sphere located in
the vastness of outer space.
Notwithstanding the fact that there are just shy of 7 billion people on
the planet, perhaps rising to 9.5 billion by 2050, many of us remain acutely
aware of our smallness relative to the Earth's biophysical systems. One rea-
son is because the Apollo images have been invested with specific sorts of
meanings connected to the widespread concern about 'the human impact'
on nature that found expression in the first Earth Day, held on 22 April
1970. The 'blue planet' imaginary that's today part of our cultural reper-
toire emphasises the finiteness of our home, our isolation in a vast universe,
and our shared occupation of (and responsibility for) Earth, regardless of
nationality or location (see
Plate 1.1)
. Iconic visualisations of the planet
subsequent to the Apollo photographs have been interpreted, at least in
part, in terms of this imaginary - such as the satellite images of a 'hole'
in the polar ozone layer that circulated far and wide through the 1980s
and 1990s.
When is nature?
If we have a propensity to spatialise what we call 'nature', we also
temporalise
it too. Indeed, each is the analogue of the other. If I ask the
seemingly strange question 'when is nature?', it soon becomes clear that
we think these days that it's ever more a thing of the past. This is surely
a key reason why Bill McKibben's
The end of nature
(1989) and Francis
Fukuyama's (2002)
Our post-human future
became bestsellers. It also explains
the bitter-sweet appeal of
Last chance to see
, a BBC television series about
threatened terrestrial and marine species fronted by writer-actor Stephen Fry
and wildlife photographer Mark Carwardine. The emotional charge of both
topics and the TV documentary resided in their reproduction of a widely
