Objectified vs Relational Views of Nature
Discussion
The Objectified View of Nature
Zak Walsh:
"One of the main challenges is of an ontological and epistemological nature, as the very concept of Nature in the modern period was constituted by the separation of humans from non- humans. The concept of nature inherited from the Romantics is of wilderness— a pristine natural environment unimpacted by human activity. Although this concept is historically and socially constructed, it persists in the public’s imagination. Popular campaigns to promote environmentalism and outdoor recreation depict scenic and exotic environments devoid of people. Conservation ecology views nature and ecology through the lens of scientific management. Nature is conceived as a resource—an object to be preserved or exploited for human ends. Restorative ecology seeks to return environments to their “natural state” before human impact, using strategies of rewilding. The separation of nature and culture is tied to a colonial history and the political economy of primitive accumulation that generated it. Modern conservation, for example, continues to be predicated on the extermination and disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples. The heyday of American Conservation and even the romanticism of nature, for example, coincided with indigenous genocide. Today, conservation biologists continue to remove indigenous people from land to make national parks, claiming that scientific conservation is more ecological than indigenous stewardship of land. In all cases, nature is conceived as an object, not a subject in its own right. The human-nature dichotomy was artificial to begin with, but of course, it created certain affordances. It allowed Enlightenment thinkers a means of domination, it allowed Romantics a means of escape, and today, it allows capitalists and consumers a commodity to exploit or derive pleasure from. This separation jointly promulgates specie-ism and racism since the ways in which we classify various animals and humans directs our ways of caring for them. Whether species are considered alien, invasive, or pests and whether people are likewise considered subhuman, foreign, or Other depends on categories that order life to establish places of belonging. Those who are excluded, whether the colonized species or peoples of this planet, are similarly objectified and treated instrumentally, as either natural or human resources. Capitalism’s appropriation and exploitation of nature extends this logic on a global scale via the biopolitical control of human and nonhuman populations. In contrast to the separation and management of nature by humans, an alternative relational understanding of nature-cultures has emerged from discourses on the Anthropocene."
The Relational View of Nature
Zak Walsh:
"The separation of nature and culture is tied to a colonial history and the political economy of primitive accumulation that generated it. Modern conservation, for example, continues to be predicated on the extermination and disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples. The heyday of American Conservation and even the romanticism of nature, for example, coincided with indigenous genocide. Today, conservation biologists continue to remove indigenous people from land to make national parks, claiming that scientific conservation is more ecological than indigenous stewardship of land. In all cases, nature is conceived as an object, not a subject in its own right. The human-nature dichotomy was artificial to begin with, but of course, it created certain affordances. It allowed Enlightenment thinkers a means of domination, it allowed Romantics a means of escape, and today, it allows capitalists and consumers a commodity to exploit or derive pleasure from. This separation jointly promulgates speciesm and racism since the ways in which we classify various animals and humans directs our ways of caring for them. Whether species are considered alien, invasive, or pests and whether people are likewise considered subhuman, foreign, or Other depends on categories that order life to establish places of belonging. Those who are excluded, whether the colonized species or peoples of this planet, are similarly objectified and treated instrumentally, as either natural or human resources. Capitalism’s appropriation and exploitation of nature extends this logic on a global scale via the biopolitical control of human and nonhuman populations. In contrast to the separation and management of nature by humans, an alternative relational understanding of nature-cultures has emerged from discourses on the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is invariably altering humanity’s self-understanding. Discussions around the Anthropocene have unsettled the entrenched binaries which shaped modernity, and which generated its social and ecological crises — traditional binaries between humans and nonhumans, nature and culture, subject and object, and mind and matter. Concepts of nature have changed as they have become influenced by more complex understandings of human activity as a geophysical force in its own right. New lenses have appeared that view the Earth as a product of civilizational history, as much as natural history, and that view humanity as inhabited by other species and technologies. The accelerated pace of technological development, the complexification of social organization, and the entanglement of the human and nonhuman, living and nonliving across vast spatial and temporal scales all create the conditions for progressive thought to flourish. Post-humanists like Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti as well as new materialists and process thinkers like Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and Bruno Latour have become particularly interested in understanding the co-production of nature-cultures. Timothy Morton (2010) uses “mesh” as an apt metaphor for the entanglement of human and nonhuman objects, whether at the micro-level of gut bacteria or the macro-level of climate change. The defining environmental objects of our time, he argues, are hyper-objects which are distributed, non-local assemblages of human and nonhuman objects (Morton, 2013). Global warming is the quintessential hyper-object. It both surrounds us and is reflected in us. We can neither locate it, nor escape it; but we can know it intimately through the air we breathe and the products we purchase. It brings us face to face with the more-than-human. One may even claim that humans have always been more-than-human—inhabited by other species both in our phylogenetic structure and experience. On the one hand, evolutionary theory has illustrated that every species’ genome is a mosaic of genes from other unrelated species, transferred horizontally from one organism to another, rather than just vertically from parent to child (Jabr, 2014). On the other hand, human-animal studies have explored ways in which humans are materially and discursively dependent on non-humans (DeMello, 2012).Because climate change contests and reconfigures long-standing distinctions between the human, social, and natural sciences, the anthropocentric worldviews that have afforded humanity an exceptional identity and status are now giving way to more embodied and situated knowledge- practices that view humanity in ecological terms. The Anthropocene does not just inaugurate a time when humanity’s impact on nature is experienced viscerally and globally. It also inaugurates a time when shaping the environment is understood to fundamentally shape what it means to be human. Human bodies are now understood to have no discernible limits with their environment. Consciousness and ecology cannot be separated but are continuous and extended (Hutchins, 2010; Thompson, 2007). Geological reality has become human reality (Wapner, 2010). Subjectivity and agency are now understood to be distributed across vast human-nonhuman assemblages, and humanity is situated within networked sets of social, biological, and technical relations. Our capacity to control environments is becoming ever-more elusive. Just as humans have always been more-than-human (posthuman), nature has always been more-than-nature (post-natural). Leading intellectuals such as Bill McKibben (1989) and Timothy Morton (2007) have called for an “end of nature” or an “ecology without nature.” Humans and nature have always been co-constituted, and this is only more evident today, given the reach of our technologies and the ways in which globalization entangles everything. Of course, we have always coevolved with socio-technical advances, whether through the advent of writing, guns, or computers. Now, however, the scale and pace of change is increasing, and we are witnessing important qualitative changes. Klaus Schwab (2016), founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, says we stand at the precipice of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which new technologies fuse the physical, biological, and digital worlds. Our consciousness is now unloaded on smart devices and our lives are increasingly mediated by sophisticated brain-machine interfaces, smart algorithms, and biochemical devices. These ongoing shifts in our cultural and scientific understanding of the human-nature relationship illustrate our together-ness with environments, objects, and nonhumans. But of course, there are many antecedent intellectual traditions that have explored such territory outside Western discourses. Many aboriginal peoples and premodern cultures practice embodied forms of knowing. These forms of knowing are often situated within relational worldviews that conceive humans as part of nature, and nature as not ontologically divided from humans, but as already co-constituted by humans and nonhumans. Buddhism is one such tradition that challenges the epistemological and ontological basis of Enlightenment thinking and the various bifurcations of nature/culture, subject/object, and mind/matter. Shinto Buddhism’s view of sentience, for example, is extended to both animate and inanimate matter; while Zen Master Dōgen famously claimed that mind is not other than mountains, rivers, the earth, sun, moon, or stars (Walsh, 2018).It is not surprising then that relational epistemologies and ontologies like those found in indigenous wisdom traditions are increasingly relevant for our understanding of humanity’s role in the Anthropocene. The complexity of life in the Anthropocene not only questions the relationship between humans and nature; it also demands the development of an ethics that respects the dignity and agency of nonhuman actors, both living and nonliving. Change along one axis does not necessarily lead to changes along the others. Cultures that embody relational ontologies, epistemologies, or ethics do not necessarily live within equitable and sustainable societies; in fact, historical experiences provide abundant evidence that the two are often causally unrelated. Likewise, the transition to a postcapitalist commons-based economy does not necessarily entail the realization of a relational paradigm. Nevertheless, this dissertation posits that structuring society— its spiritual, cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions— via a relational paradigm helps it transition toward an Ecological Civilization."