Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
presented as qualitatively equivalent to the profound, unplanned alterations
of life on Earth previously only achieved over millennia. McKibben calls it,
'the great simplification', the 'most disconcerting, strange, jarring, out-
of-the-ordinary stretch of time since we climbed down from the trees'
(2006: 36).
We have, it is said, exceeded our ecological niche and consigned ever
more life forms to history. We are eliminating 'natural time' - for instance,
the cycles of birth, growth and death in insects - with 'social time'. This is
a calendar suited to our own frenetic wishes and desires. We are, it's also
said, approaching an epochal 'tipping point'; we even risk 'messing up' our
own nature if new, more invasive biomedical technologies get the go-ahead.
This, as readers will recognise, is a dominant narrative of our age. We regard
it as a 'fact' because so much evidence (apparently) tells us it's true, such as
the recent worldwide Census of Marine Life (COML). Published in summer
2010 to coincide with the International Year of Biodiversity, it was a decade
in the making and as might be expected, it makes for grim reading. Or,
to take a second example, look at the time-lapse images of environmental
change on NASA's Earth Observatory website: in a few seconds, years of
environmental degradation pass before the viewer's disbelieving eyes (go to
∗∗∗∗
Having identified the principal meanings of the term 'nature', we're bound
to conclude that it's an unusually tricky word to understand. For Candace
Slater, it's 'a noun with a necessary multiplicity of modifiers, if not a singu-
lar in desperate need of pluralisation' (Cronon
et al.
, 1996a: 451). Indeed,
it is arguably 'the most complex word in [our]
...
language', as Williams
(1976: 219) famously opined.
To use classic semiological terms, we might describe it as a
signifier
(token
or sound) with several different
signifieds
(or meanings), which, in turn, get
attached (alone and in combination) to a very wide array of
referents
(or
material phenomena). In its range of applications, it takes us from the ordi-
nary to the extraordinary, from the banal to the sublime, from the familiar
to the strange. Of course, in any given situation we do not - and could not
possibly - invoke the whole complex of meanings and referents. Instead, we
deploy the term 'nature' in a wide range of different contexts in specific and
circumscribed ways. It is thus remarkably promiscuous, but the point is that
this single word signifies a plurality of different things in a range of ways,
references to 'nature' are 'usually selective, according to the speaker's gen-
eral purpose' (Williams, 1980: 70). Thus, 'To [understand]
...
the nature
that is all around us', as William Cronon insists, 'we must think long and
hard about the nature we carry inside our heads' (Cronon, 1996a: 22). See
Box 1.1
.
