earth (and logically this should extend to the moon and Mars and other celestial bodies as well). The conspicuous Achilles heel of this syllogism, propping up the whole argument, is the use of ‘build’ as a synonym for ‘affect’ or ‘change’. Vogel defends the conflation by averring that ‘to build something is to “affect” some material and thereby transform it into something new – wood into a bookcase, clay into a pot, silicon into a memory chip.’41 Sure, but this is not what is at stake here. If I cut and mould wood into a bookcase, I have undoubtedly built that bookcase – but if I cut a branch off a tree, have I also built that tree? This is what Vogel’s argument amounts to: not that to build is to affect matter, but that to affect matter is to build it. In the common idiom, this is not what the word refers to. The consequences would be enormous if we were to subscribe to Vogel’s proposed redefinition: look at the marks I have left in my apartment – see, it is I who have built this condominium. Or, as Val Plumwood has pointed out: I affect the persons close to me, indeed change their lives quite thoroughly; hence I could make a claim to have built or produced or constructed them.42 Verily, constructionism runs wild here.
So what does it mean to have built or produced – literally constructed – something? Kate Soper again provides the most convincing answer: the crucial criterion is ‘to inaugurate a product which previously did not exist.’43 When we say that pharaoh Khufu built the great pyramid of Giza, we mean that it did not exist at first, but then this man set in motion a process of construction some 4,600 years ago that brought the structure into being and there it has stood ever since. The human constructor gives rise to an entity. Something like a watch or a computer is indeed built or produced, for it owes its existence to human actions – by affecting select matters in specific ways, humans have created them de novo – but coal and oceans and the carbon cycle fall into another category. So, it seems, does the climate. Earth had it before it had humans.
WHAT IS CONSTRUCTED AND WHAT IS NOT
The metaphor of construction should indeed be taken quite literally: when building something, you do not merely change or affect it but call the structure into existence.44 Ironically, building is the human praxis around which Vogel builds his argument, while entirely missing the quick of it. One could turn instead to William H. Sewell, who delineates the real utility of the metaphor with precision in his Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. In contradistinction to synchronic thinking so typical for postmodernity,
the construction metaphor implies a very different, thoroughly diachronic, temporality. Construction is a noun formed from a verb; it signifies a process of building, carried out by human actors and stretched out over time. (Rome, as the proverb puts it, was not built in a day.) The social or cultural construction of meaning is also, by implication, a temporally extended process that requires the sustained labor of human actors. Social construction also implies that when a meaning has been built it has a strong tendency to remain in place: socially constructed gender relations or scientific truths often become naturalized, accepted, and enduring features of the world, just as buildings, once built, continue to remain as an enduring feature of the physical environment.45
In none of these senses would the climate be a good fit for the metaphor. But in every one of them, the fossil economy would.46
If the term ‘social construction’ is to be meaningful, it must refer to some X that has come about ‘in consequence of a sequence of social events’, to follow Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? A constructionist typically believes that the X in question ‘need not have existed’ had it not been for those events.47 Applied to the realm of nature, such a belief has something absurd about it. Three storylines have the potential to turn literalist constructionism into intelligible propositions: 1.) Human beings were beamed onto an empty planet (or universe) and then constructed nature from scratch, starring in the role of divine non-produced producers. Here it would indeed seem that the X came about through social events. (The question of where the raw materials came from would, of course, remain unanswered.) 2.) Human beings emerged from pre-existing nature, but the moment they did so and started to roam the planet, they annulled it. Fresh from that feat, they then proceeded to build all environments on earth. This is Vogel’s logic, which begs a few questions, including how humans could be at once the direct offspring and the instant annullers of nature (a storyline only conceivable on the basis of the purist definition). 3.) Humans lived for a very long time among pre-existing nature, but in recent years, they have come to wield such detrimental and pervasive influence over it that it no longer is what it was. This seems to be an activity rather different from construction – more like destruction – but the storyline does at least render the earth and everything on it as outcomes of social events. Other questions then arise. If nature ended with late human influence – read: anthropogenic climate change – what forces and causal powers now determine the possible forms that influence can take? Where do they come from? Were the channels into which CO2 emissions run built by humans just now?
The absurdity extends to both varieties of constructionism about nature.48 Perhaps this is why their proponents, who are no fools, cannot avoid slips of the tongue. All of a sudden, Castree mentions ‘a biophysical world that at some level exists’ and ‘knows nothing of the values and goals according to which we discuss, respond to and intervene in it.’49 Smith gives away just the distinction he seeks to corrode: ‘unlike gravity, there is nothing natural about the law of value; no society has lived without experiencing the operation of gravity, but many have lived without the law of value’ – nature in one corner, society in the other.50 Vogel, for his part, posing as the sternest enemy to any use of the term, says things like ‘we human beings are ourselves natural.’ In fact, halfway into his book he spends a whole chapter reflecting on the fate of artefacts at the hands of nature. Every edifice is subject to precipitation and oxidation and entropy and heat and other ‘processes whose fundamental character – whose nature, I might even be willing to say – is not and cannot be fully known to us’, since they ‘are currently [sic] operating independently of humans’, not ‘something we produce’.51 Claims such as these might be intended to provide nuance to arguments sorely lacking in that quality, but the effect is rather to betray some damning inconsistencies.52 Sometimes constructionists appear to insert them as caveats of common sense, allowing them to wash their hands of the implications of their argument – but of course we do not believe that the earth is a fairy-tale! Who could be so crazy? Before and after such brief parentheses, whether composed deliberately or by accident, however, they continue to bracket, relegate, dismiss and exclude nature in their actual accounts of the ways of the world.53 Until inevitably, at some point, they step out into that world and have to repeat the admission. Not even its most militant detractors can dispense with the category of nature, and that must be because no one can.
Similarly for those who grieve its end: McKibben cannot help talking about a ‘new’ nature that behaves differently, but is still, so it seems, that which was supposed to have ended.54 In After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, Jedediah Purdy offers yet another variation on McKibben’s necrology, declares that nature is gone for good – ‘in every respect, the world we inhabit will henceforth be the world we have made’ (in every respect!) – and adds, for good measure, that nature ‘is not the sort of thing that has a meaning’.55 And then, without even noticing it, he spends page after page making statements like ‘our control over nature seems a precarious fantasy’, ‘there is no separating human beings from ecological nature’, ‘we are less distinct from the rest of nature than we often imagine’, ‘trying to build a peaceful and humane world means finding a way to live peacefully with nature’.56 After nature? It does not sound like it. Not even its necrologists can write about the corpse without mentioning its movements, and that must be because it is still quite alive.57
The category cannot be stamped out from human vocabularies. It refers to the part of the inhabited world that humans encounter but have not constructed,
