A comes into contact with B it ceases to exist – a private company remains a private company as it parleys with the state; a lake stays a lake even if tons of sediment pour into it. This should be an idea particularly commonplace to anyone familiar with Marxist dialectics: capitalist property relations do not vanish the moment they become entangled with feudal or socialist ones; capital can only expand by constantly relating to its arch-foe labour, and so on, throughout a world in which a unity of opposites is an unsurprising state of affairs. Should we proceed differently with nature? Is there any reason to build a certain condition – namely, absence of social influence – into the definition of this particular thing, as a touchstone of its very existence?
We might call this the purist definition. McKibben presents no justification for it; he simply takes it for granted. But if we consider nature on a slightly smaller scale, it does seem difficult to uphold. Take the oceans. They are now marred by plastic waste swirling around in giant gyres, acidification, overfishing and other human impacts that extend into the deepest, darkest recesses – so can we say that they ipso facto are no more? Hardly. The oceans are in a different state, but they are with us as much as ever – and if this applies to the oceans, which form a fairly significant component of what we know as ‘nature’, why not also to that majestic totality? There seem to be two possible solutions here. Either one injects sacredness, some form of (ironically) supernatural value into the definition of nature, or one holds on to an extreme form of dualism, which would allow for the belief that the essence of nature is its absolute segregation from human society.30
Now, if we conclude, as we should, that the purist definition is analytically untenable, it does not follow that McKibben is wrong to lament the end of a certain condition of nature.31 I might have reason to cry out in distaste when someone pours sugar in my coffee; there might be a good deal more compelling reasons to mourn the loss of every pristine place on earth. The point here, however, is that McKibben’s sad tidings are analytically unhelpful for our purposes. On the purist definition, the coal the British uncovered on faraway shores belonged to nature prior to their arrival, but as they (or rather their workers) began to dig and heave it, the material somehow fell out of nature, into the sphere of humans. But if the coal had already exited nature, how could the CO2 then possibly have a lethal impact on it? The antinomies of dualism would reappear at every stage of such a history.
IS ALL ENVIRONMENT BUILT ENVIRONMENT?
If climate change signifies the end of nature, we would be forced to conclude that it sets the postmodern condition in stone. In another sign of the times, McKibben published his book the year after Francis Fukuyama wrote his essay ‘The End of History?’; while the latter thesis has since become the laughing stock of theory, the former is held in the highest regard. McKibben himself has moved on to more productive pursuits, as perhaps the single most important leader of the global climate movement, but his obituary of nature has stuck in the intellectual climate despite the reasoning behind it being, as we have seen and shall see more of, questionable. It serves as the point of departure for Wapner’s discussions of the dilemmas of environmentalism, as well as for the most recent instalment of the most philosophically advanced attempt at defending constructionism about nature: that of Steven Vogel.
In his first book Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory, Steven Vogel spins a constructionist programme out of an idiosyncratic reading of the Frankfurt School canon. Here, he points to four senses in which ‘nature is a social category’: one can never step into a nature outside of human preconceptions; the nature scientists claim to study is a product of their own practices – postmodernist stock-in-trade, so far – natural objects are integrated into social life; and they are built by labour.32 Only the last sense, the most original of the four, is retained in Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature. Although he backtracks on his earlier idealism, Vogel here takes constructionism farther than ever before. He sets out from the assertion that McKibben was right: nature has indeed ended, most obviously because of the rising temperatures. Accepting the purist definition, however, Vogel takes McKibben’s thesis to the next step and claims that if nature expires the moment humans touch it, then it must have been dead and gone long before any CO2 plumed from chimneys.33 Not linked specifically to global warming, ‘the end of nature might be something that, in the Heideggerian phrase that seems relevant here, has always already happened’; by axiomatic necessity, nature ‘ceased to exist at the moment the first human appeared on the scene’ – ‘so long ago that we cannot even fix the date’.34
So what is it that seems to surround us now? Not discourses or the ooze from epistemic communities; this is not what Vogel is getting at any longer. We are surrounded by a solidly real environment, but it is a built environment, one that humans have literally, physically constructed from the ground up. Since there is no way humans can ‘encounter a landscape at all without transforming it’, every landscape humans have encountered must be classified as built, far-flung islands as much as conurbations, the deserts as much as the highways, the atmosphere every bit as much as – this is the gist of the book – the shopping mall.35 Not quite the deduction McKibben had in mind, it does follow a quirky but inexorable logic. Paraphrasing Aldo Leopold’s classic injunction to ‘think like a mountain’ so as to get closer to the land, Vogel advises environmentalists to rather think like a shopping mall, for a mall is just as much a piece of the environment as the mountain and no less deserving of protection and awe.36
The variety of constructionism fleshed out here is different from the idealist type: as Vogel stresses repeatedly, he is using the word ‘construction’ in the literal sense, exactly as he would in front of the pyramids. We may thus distinguish between idealist and literalist constructionism about nature; Vogel and Smith have both moved to the latter, while Castree has drifted from the latter to the former.37 Neither, it is important to note, is a straw man. Vogel really means what he says. ‘There is nothing in our environment that we have not, in some sense or other, had a hand in producing’, nothing physical or chemical around us originating outside labour, ‘no raw materials, no “natural resources,” that have not themselves already been the object of prior practices of construction’ – statements on repeat throughout the latest opus.38 All indications are that Vogel wants us to take them seriously. Let us do so. They are not true. Coal is disproof enough: we know that it formed when vegetation slumped into bogs, whose water protected it from oxidation; as the dead plants sank deeper, temperatures and pressure rose; slowly, gradually, the matter solidified into coal, mostly during the Carboniferous era some 286–360 million years ago, when no humans could possibly have assisted in the process. Finding coal in a Borneo jungle is to open a culvert to that past and draw in what no humans had a hand in producing, and the same holds for the extraction of any bit of fossil fuel from the bowels of this planet.39
Very easily – so easily as to court ridicule, but such is now the state of this theory – literalist constructionism can be shown to be empirically false. Fossil fuels are no trifling matters in our environment; neither are the sun, the earth’s crust, oxygen, the element of fire … One would have to go to extraordinary lengths of sophistry to present a case for these as in any sense ‘constructed’ or ‘built’ by humans, and yet they constitute the mise en scène and the sine qua non and whatnot of a warming world. The only way to buttress constructionism against them would be to insist on an extreme version of the purist definition: by any contact whatsoever with humans – be it falling on them or carrying them or passing through their lungs – solar radiation and sedimentary rocks and the air and everything else magically become their products. And when Vogel talks about ‘buildings’ and ‘construction’, he does seem to presuppose something like this metamorphosis. To affect something is to build it. ‘There is nothing we do that does not change, and therefore build, the environment’, Vogel spells out his generous extension of the term.40 With this usage, I could make a rightful claim to have built a pyramid in Giza merely by scaling and throwing black paint on it.
When humans come
