Going Beyond ‘Nature’
We tend to talk about ‘nature’ or the ‘environment’ as a kind of theatrical stage - with humans as the cast of actors, animals as props, and plants and other creatures as the colourful background scenery. We think that the central ‘story’ (or indeed ‘history’) presented on this stage is a strictly human one, centred around our exclusively human lives and dramas, with everyone else relegated to the background. This worldview is called ‘anthropocentrism’ - the belief in the existential superiority and centrality of human beings.
With all that we now know about the cognition, behaviours, and inner lives of non-human animals, plants, fungi, etc., it is no longer even remotely tenable to argue that we are the only ‘actors’ on this planetary stage. There are countless actors, countless interwoven stories in motion, and humans have known this for generations untold. All of our worlds were once built upon this knowledge - upon relationship and more-than-human sociality - but today things look phenomenally different. Most of our modern imaginations and institutions are rooted in the myth of anthropocentrism. We have managed to convince ourselves that we are the only beings with intrinsic value in the world, or even the only beings with a subjective dimension of experience at all. Both ‘sides’ of the environmental debate generally agree on this basic premise - they merely disagree about how to proceed.
Mainstream approaches to environmentalism usually focus on the question, ‘How should we best sustain our resources so we don’t destroy ourselves?’ But I argue that we need to take a fundamentally different approach, with an entirely different set of questions, starting with, ‘How did we forget that the world is more than human?’
The Problem with Ecology
‘Nature’ is commonly perceived as a purely external domain of resources and biological machines, standing in stark existential opposition to the cultural domain of ‘humanity.’ We rarely acknowledge that we are every bit as much a part of ‘nature’ as a tree or a bird, or that other kinds of beings have always been integrally involved in the development of ‘culture.’ The perceived separation of humanity and nature is neither a scientific fact nor a universal idea, but rather a very specific philosophical notion with its own distinct pedigree.
Our English term ‘nature,’ like many of its European cognates, is derived from Latin natura, based on a verb meaning ‘to be born.’ This term was used to translate Greek physis, which has a similar etymological basis. In their original usage, these terms were used to describe the specific ‘essence’ of a person or thing - e.g. the ‘nature’ of a snake is to bite. But over the millennia, the term ‘nature’ has taken on a wildly diverse array of meanings: it can be used to describe the wild (rather than the civilised), the organic (rather than the synthetic), the material (rather than the divine), the spontaneous (rather than the contrived or cultivated), and even in some cases the entirety of the known world. (1)
By the 18th century, European thinkers began to imagine ‘nature’ as an intricate clock-like system, with countless interconnected ‘parts’ set into a precarious state of equilibrium by a divine intelligence. Famed Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus spent his life recording, classifying, and ranking the many plants and animals that comprise this natural order, establishing the basis for what we now term ‘ecology.’ In his time, however, this system was termed oeconomy (’economy’), with both ‘ecology’ and ‘economy’ derived from Greek oikos, meaning ‘house’ or ‘household.’ While we now think of these as very different fields, our modern conception of ecology is very much rooted in economic principles and the management of ‘household’ resources. At the dawn of European modernity, the study of ‘nature’ was wholly indivisible from the categorisation, valuation, exploitation, and distribution of ‘humanity’s resources.’
Fortunately, many aspects of the Linnaean approach have since been abandoned in the hard sciences: biologists no longer group organisms into hierarchical ‘ranks,’ and they use genomics, rather than mere physical traits, to classify species. But the underlying principles and philosophies remain as popular as ever. Linnaeus was among the first to formally posit racial ‘varieties’ of human beings, and by the 1750s he had constructed an entire theory for establishing the distinctive ‘natures’ of different races, positing, for instance, that Europaeus albus (’European white’) is naturally buoyant, inventive, and wise, while Africanus niger (’African black’) is sly, sluggish, and neglectful. The father of our modern approach to ‘ecology’ is also the father of pseudoscientific racism - a point that should send a shiver down all our spines.
Natural Hierarchies and Exploitation
This impulse to systematically classify and rank beings is at the very core of our social and ecological crises. The idea that some beings are higher or lower than others was readily accepted as a justification for the natural supremacy and domination of certain ‘kinds’ of beings (specifically certain kinds of humans) over all others. White supremacy, androcentrism, ethnocentrism, and anthropocentrism all operate on this basis, and while we have made some progress in deconstructing some of these worldviews with time, others remain largely unchallenged. In their most oppressive manifestations, any beings who fall outside of certain constructed ‘master identities’ are routinely stripped of any intrinsic value or rights - relegated to the inferior and exploitable domain of ‘nature.’ In a sense, they are forcefully un-seen as ‘beings,’ and reduced to mere ‘objects.’
For at least hundreds of years, ecology, economics, and the systemic oppression of ‘lesser’ beings have gone hand-in-hand. The Industrial Revolution, deemed by many to be the starting point for the so-called ‘Anthropocene’ epoch, was itself fuelled by centuries of genocide, colonisation, terraforming, ecological destruction, and the exploitation of race-based slave labour. These were the building blocks of modernity as we know it - a modernity founded upon division, natural hierarchies, and systematic exploitation.
When it comes to our climate crisis, the toxic influence of anthropocentrism is specifically underappreciated. This myth has compelled us to entirely forget that we are living beings in a living world. We have convinced ourselves that we are the only ‘conscious’ agents in the world - the only beings who have intrinsic value, who desire to live and flourish, or who avoid suffering and pain. But as long as we cling to this myth and characterise our environmental crisis as an issue of managing the sustainability of ‘natural resources,’ we will entirely miss the root causes of our chronic disease - the unflinching exploitation of all those we deem to be ‘others.’
For the vast majority of human history, however, most human societies have not shared our modern ecological ontology. Most non-European linguistic traditions don’t even have a word for the ‘nature’ we speak of when we say we want to ‘visit nature,’ ‘get closer to nature,’ or ‘save nature.’ The idea that there is a single, unconscious, undifferentiated ‘natural world’ that exists in opposition to ‘humanity’ is a very specific and enigmatic story - one that has risen to global popularity not by virtue of its rationality or sensibility, but through centuries of colonisation, oppression, forced conversion, and cultural erasure. Colonisation didn’t just destroy human and non-human communities, it systematically eradicated and undermined any approaches to living in the world that ran contrary to the pursuit of domination. (2)
If we intend to prevent the most devastating consequences of climate change, we need to go beyond seeking more ‘sustainable’ forms of ecological exploitation. We need to re-evaluate our concepts of ‘ecology’ and ‘nature’ themselves. We need to tell different stories - those that compel us to truly care about the vitality and welfare of other beings. We need to resist alienation and disregard and recover a sense of what it truly means to be human in a more-than-human world.
(1) Lorraine Daston (2019), Against Nature. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 7-9.
(2) Philippe Descola (2013), Beyond Nature and Culture. London: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 3-31.
Erik Jampa Andersson is the author of Unseen Beings: How We Forgot the World is More Than Human (May 30, Hay House UK), now available for pre-order everywhere.