Geoscience Reference
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or wider than themselves. Some people do this intentionally as a matter of
professional practice, such as physical scientists or environmental activists.
The reason, it seems to me, is because the conventional definitions of nature
actively
invite
us to do so: each is predicated on the assumption that 'nature'
is not any (or only)
one
thing in particular, but the
totality
of things, their
myriad interrelations and their qualities.
Study Task:
Take a minute to think about polar bears and giant pandas.
Both are iconic species. The former inhabits the Arctic region and is the
largest land carnivore on the Earth. Meanwhile, there may be as few as 1,500
wild pandas, with over 200 in captivity. When you think of polar bears and
giant pandas, what are they metonyms for?
I earlier mentioned the 'blue planet' imaginary, a particular framing of
'global nature' or the 'web of life' that is now common sense. This imag-
inary, it seems to me, is a pervasive context in which specific references
like polar bears and giant pandas are metonyms for loss of nature at the
hands of humans on an epic scale. Similarly, in 2010, there was a lot of
media reporting about the death of bees in Britain, United States, Canada
and worldwide - the so-called 'colony collapse disorder'. Notwithstanding
their capacity to sting, bees have long been a favourite insect in Britain,
my home country. Attractive and industrious, some of them produce that
delicious confection my children love to have spread on their morning
toast (honey). Their apparent demise thus carries an emotional charge for
many, but it arguably signifies something else too: our continuing ability
to 'disrupt' 'natural systems' and the 'balance of nature' worldwide. This
much is obvious from Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum's book (2008)
A world without bees
, whose title announces explicitly the link between the
general and the specific, the global and the local. Such is the level of concern
about the wider effects of bee decline that several British research funding
bodies launched, in mid-2010, the Insect Pollinators Initiative. The largest
programme to date of its kind, it was designed to look at the multiple reasons
thought to be behind this devastation in the bee population. See
Box 1.2
for a second example of the 'nature effect'.
BOX 1.2
If bee decline is today a metonym for ecosystem destruction world-
wide (i.e. a shrinkage of non-anthropogenic 'external nature'), it is
also a metonym for a failure to respect the particular qualities of the
