Opinion piece 1, 2023

On Nature

Nature is a paradox. Homo sapiens and everything we do in the world, our intellectual and material ‘culture’, are no less natural or ‘nature’ than bees and their hives, bowerbirds and their bejewelled nests, whales and their songs or orangatangs and their tree beds. This ontological monism (we are nature, everything is natural) is reinforced by genetic insights about the falsity of species integrity (we may be 40% virus) and biosphere realities about our impact (there is little of terrestrial non-human nature that hasn’t or won’t soon be changed by us). Philosopher Tim Morton thinks we need to discard the “ideological construct” of generic nature (as distinct from culture) altogether, in favour of the immense ‘mesh’ of human and non-human beings, objects and relationships encompassing that uber rubric, ecology. From a strictly objective and ontological point of view Morton is absolutely right. From a lived subjective, practical and political standpoint, however, he is almost certainly wrong.

The conviction that we are not nature has a lot to do with dualism, and dualism has had a bad rap. Plato and Descartes absolutely got it wrong supposing humans had souls and everything else were unfeeling automatons. Cultural theorists have warred for generations skewering binaries of all kinds. The problem is some dualisms are real or useful or both. A nature/culture split is how most of us experience the world. Cultural anthropologist Eduardo Kohn contends that even animists distinguish what is human from what is not: the separation may be lean and porous, but it is still palpable. We may not be a separate creation, but we do diverge from the rest of terrestrial nature. After all, we alone can bend nonhuman nature to our will and then think it’s tragic. More importantly, amid ecological crisis, an idea of the generic non-human as ‘nature’ versus culture or ecology may be simplistic, vague and contested, but it is essential in helping us to perceive, appreciate and defend what remains non-human. This is because seeing culture and nature as the false bifurcation of an infinitely differentiated whole obscures the vulnerability of that which is not us (nature) from the inordinate power and impact wielded by us (culture) over it. As environmental writer Eileen Crist writes, denying a coherent nature/culture distinction helps perpetuate the “recalcitrance of anthropocentrism” and its unremitting “drive to humanize the earth”. Philosopher Bryan Norton calls for a “weak anthropocentrism” which, unlike the “strong” anthropocentrism of traditional individualistic humanism resistant to ecological perspectives, remains open to revision in light of ecological knowledge and experience. A weak anthropocentric nature/culture split is an instance of why, as theists have long taught, an imagined dualism illuminates the deeper truth of non-dualism.

The inverse is also true. An ecological gaze is an expression of our human predicament and hence can never be truly non-anthropocentric. In fact, denial of our distinctive humanity is a perspective that would be, at best, self-hating or misanthropic and, at worst, an instrument for anti-human ends: evil. Rather, the anthropocentric impulse is mitigated not curtailed by a modicum of dualist ecological thinking. This self-limiting, contained, ecologically contingent anthropocentrism is, as Norton writes ‘weak’—or, as I prefer to call it—‘soft’, not extinguished. The nature/culture binary doesn’t need elimination. It needs recasting as a relationship of profound metaphysical, material and ethical interdependence.  A concept of nature helps us resist everything on earth becoming what Morton calls a “hyperobject”, a global, enduring, anthropogenic phenomenon. David Abrams’ graceful phrase the ‘more-than-human-world’ encompasses nature and culture without eliding either. Careening into the Anthropocene as we are, a concept of terrestrial nature as distinct from culture or ecology paradoxically helps us gaze ecologically. A species, an ecosystem or a landform might be anthropically re-formed, but its non-human nature can and should be discerned by the mind, the senses and the heart.