fact, it is a trivial observation that ideas about nature are products of social life – so are all ideas – and a mysterious proposition that nature equals these ideas and change as they do. That would mean, for instance, that the sun once rotated around the earth and then swapped place with it. Either the actually existing forest contains a rich wildlife or it does not; either the biosphere is warming up or it is not – and how we come to regard the wildlife and the warming is another matter entirely. What Castree espouses, and others with him, is a form of constructionism about nature; although it might depart from the innocent insight that we think and talk when we think and talk about nature, it slides into the proposition that nature is thereby constructed, coming into the world through our ideas, and that no other nature exists.16 It is a constructionism of the idealist, neo-Kantian, distinctly postmodernist brand.17
It seems unable to inspire the kind of theory we need. Temperatures are not rising because people have thought about coal or made mental images of highways: that is not how environmental degradation happens. ‘In short’, in Kate Soper’s famous formulation, ‘it is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer’, not a text that is heating up, ‘and the “real” thing continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level of the signifier’ – what some social theory, even when it professes to deal with nature, continues to obsess about.18 What would an alternative view of nature look like? In What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, surely the most incisive inquiry into that question ever written, Soper defends the following answer: nature is ‘those material structures and processes that are independent of human activity (in the sense that they are not a humanly created product), and whose forces and causal powers are the necessary conditions of every human practice, and determine the possible forms it can take.’19 That definition deserves to be read again and memorised. Many others have been proposed – we shall inspect some of them below – but we shall treat this realist definition as capturing the essence of the realm we know as nature. The very existence of that realm thus defined, however, is hotly disputed.
THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE?
Can we really say that the climate of planet Earth, as a major component of nature, is independent of human activity – not created by humans? Is it not precisely the other way around now? This would seem to be a case for the theory of ‘the production of nature’. Laid out by Neil Smith in Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, it says that nature is anything but independent; it might have been so in some distant pre-human mist but no longer. Nowadays, nature is produced to the core, from within, in its totality, as the forces of capital reshuffle and rework matter in accordance with their logic. When did primeval nature succumb to such awesome social power? Smith is unclear on this point. In some passages, he seems to argue that the production of nature is indeed a phenomenon specific to capitalism; in others, he hints at a much earlier date of human annexation. Unproduced nature ceases to exist wherever one species has set foot: ‘Human beings have produced whatever nature became accessible to them’ – not only over the past few centuries, but as long as they have cuddled in caves and foraged in forests.20 Here, the purpose of the theory seems to be not so much to track a historical shift as to collapse the natural into the social altogether, irrespective of dates and epochs, a priori as it were. Indeed, Smith posits ‘a social priority of nature; nature is nothing if it is not social.’21 One geographer who has often stood up for his theory, Noel Castree, states that it ‘is intended to oppose the idea of an independent, non-social nature’, postulating a fusion ‘from the very start’.22
What are the analytical gains of this move? In the first edition of his classic from 1984, Smith precociously mentions anthropogenic climate change as one instance of the production of nature, but in the afterword to the third edition from 2008, he has something else to say: we cannot know to what extent the climate is changing due to human activities.23 Even trying would presuppose the false separation.
The attempt to distinguish social vis-à-vis natural contributions to climate change is not only a fool’s debate but a fool’s philosophy: it leaves sacrosanct the chasm between nature and society – nature in one corner, society in the other – which is precisely the shibboleth of modern western thought that ‘the production of nature’ thesis sought to corrode.24
This sounds like an admission that the theory would not, after all, be very relevant for the study of global warming. If we must refrain from saying that it is caused by social and not by natural factors – distinguishing the two: singling out one, ruling out the other – how could we acknowledge its existence, let alone investigate it as a result of history?
In Alienation and Nature in Environmental Philosophy, the most illuminating piece of work to emerge from that subdiscipline since Soper, Simon Hailwood underscores that the very notion of anthropogenic causation requires one of independent nature. ‘If it is important to say that humans made this, caused that, are responsible for such and such, then we need to run the idea of at least some occurrences as not of our doing’ – as that which, in our case, preceded the fossil economy and would have continued without it: the typical Holocene climate.25 As Smith himself admits, one cannot catch sight of global warming if one has removed the background of non-social nature (hence, in his logic, only a fool would try).26 It seems to follow that some sort of distinction between ‘society’ and ‘nature’ remains indispensable, both for research on the history of the fossil economy and for climate science as such; in the field of event attribution, incidentally, simulation of recent storms is contrasted to models of what the weather would have been like in the absence of human influence.27 That is how the historical imprint is detected.
But still: is not the climate of today precisely produced? Retaining a nature without human influence in counterfactual computer models is certainly not a way to prove its continued existence. Might the theory be useful if restricted to the past two centuries? To explore this possibility, we must turn to some other attempts to pursue the intuition that nature is now social all the way down.
THE END OF NATURE?
In 1990, one year after Jameson’s Postmodernism was published, Bill McKibben proclaimed ‘the end of nature’ in a book of the same name, today regarded as the first popular book on climate change. Before almost everyone else, he sensed that the altered composition of the atmosphere turns everything inside out: the meaning of the weather, to begin with. A sudden downpour can no longer be shrugged off or an Indian summer enjoyed as a caprice of nature. All weather must now be distrusted as an artefact of ‘our ways of life’, including on a Svalbard mountaintop or an Atacama sand dune, in areas that pass as remote wilderness: with CO2, the human fingerprint is everywhere. ‘We have produced the carbon dioxide – we have ended nature’ – or: ‘By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.’28
Under what definition has nature disappeared? It might seem, at first glance, that McKibben is operating with a definition akin to Soper’s – ‘independence’ being the key term – but he pushes it one crucial notch further. He is not referring to nature as a set of material structures and processes with causal powers of their own, not to the end of photosynthesis or respiration or cloud formation; all such things, he affirms, are here to stay. Rather, ‘we have ended the thing that has, at least in modern times, defined nature for us – its separation from human society’, meaning its purity, its condition of being perfectly pristine, untouched, unaffected by people.29 Only under this definition can nature possibly be said to have ended. But is it a reasonable one?
If I mix my coffee with sugar, I do not thereby come to believe that the coffee has ended. I believe it has shed one condition and assumed another:
