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."