HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF (WHAT WE CALL) NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 16

NATURE Signifier

The entire
physical world

The non-
human world

The essence
of something

An inherent
force

Signifieds

Referents

Figure 1.3 The concept of nature: its meanings and referents
The two-way horizontal arrows indicate that more than one of the four meanings can be in play in
any given reference to 'nature'. The meanings can be attached to the totality of what we call 'nature'
and, equally, to any of the myriad of different phenomena we consider to be natural in kind or
degree.

BOX 1.1

A KEYWORD IN ACTION: THE SELECTIVE AND COMPLEX
USE OF 'NATURE'

Because its meanings and referents are plural, the term nature performs
diverse and complicated linguistic 'work' in the Anglophone cultures
to which most readers of this topic will belong. Two examples will
suffice to make the point. In his collected poems, entitled No nature,
the American 'green' poet Gary Snyder says this in the preface: 'The
greatest respect that we can pay to nature is to acknowledge that it
eludes us' (1992: v). Snyder here uses the term nature to denote the
non-human world ('external nature'), but the 'we' he refers to does
not include all of humanity. Rather, it's those of us living in highly
technologised, high-consuming capitalist societies. His key point, as an
environmentalist, is that 'nature' is an ultimately unknowable other.
We should not kid ourselves that we can ever understand or control it
completely. His use of the word 'respect' indicates clearly the moral and
political aims of his poetry. He derives these aims from what he takes
to be nature's ineffable qualities. For him, when properly understood,
nature can tell us how to behave towards it.
A very different example of nature's invocation comes from a white
New Zealander reflecting on so-called 'mixed race' individuals when
interviewed by two university researchers. 'You'll find it's very com-
mon amongst people of mixed blood,' the respondent said. 'With
anyone who has two cultural backgrounds', he goes on,

'one part

...

is usually stronger than the other [He] has difficulty balancing

themselves ( sic ). And often it comes out in the form of racial intolerance