The Concept of Cultural Landscape

ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 11(2) 2006 ISSN: 1085-6633©Indiana University Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.Direct all correspondence to: Journals Manager, Indiana University Press, 601 N. Morton St.,Bloomington, IN 47404 USA [email protected]

THE CONCEPT OF ACULTURAL LANDSCAPENATURE, CULTURE AND AGENCY IN THELAND

VAL PLUMWOOD

ABSTRACTThe Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report issued in April 2005shows how severely our civilisation is degrading and overstressing thenatural systems that support human life and all other lives on earth. Animportant critical challenge, especially for the eco-humanities, is to helpus understand the conceptual frameworks and systems that disappearthe crucial support provided by natural systems and prevent us from see-ing nature as a field of agency. This paper considers the currentlypopular concept of a cultural landscape as an example of a concept thatdownplays natural agency, and discusses the epistemology of naturescepticism and nature cynicism that often accompanies its vogue in thehumanities. Can some philosophical disentangling of senses of nature(often considered the most complex term in the language) allow scepticstheir main points without placing them on such a strong collision coursewith the requirements of commonsense and survival?

ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 11(2) 2006

I. FRAMEWORK CHOICES: THE MONOLOGICALCREATION OF LANDSCAPE The Second Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report issued in April

2005 shows how severely our civilization is degrading and overstressingthe natural systems that support human life and all other lives on earth.The report has shown that the environmental systems that sustain ourlives are declining around us, and that a key cultural challenge for sur-vival is to recognize, represent, and value the health and services thesesystems, collectively designated ‘nature,’1 provide for us. A high priorityissue for theorists interested in changing the situation is: How we shouldrecognize the agency of these disregarded service-providers, and howshould we recognize and represent the ‘environmental services’ these sys-tems provide for us? Both aspects of this cultural change project raise bigissues for concepts at the base of our critical discourses.

First, there’s an important argument to be had here about how allthese concepts, especially that of environmental services, should be inter-preted. I would argue that genuinely sustainable relationships with serviceproviders cannot be systems that allocate merely minimum resources forproviders’ well-being or survival. This rules out instrumental, servant orslave-like relations as well as competitive market relations, to name a fewof those that define rationality so as to encourage cost-cutting at theprovider’s expense. An ecological rationality must be one where ecologi-cal providers are, at a minimum, reliably sustained and strengthened, andnot subject to the forms of minimization, denial and forgetting of creativ-ity, agency and contributions characteristic of hegemonic relationshipsand monological rationality. Monological relationships are thus ecologi-cally irrational, because they lead to distorting, hegemonic forms ofrecognition of agency that eventually weaken the provider. That require-ments of sustainability rule out monological slave-like relationships andselect for relationships of mutual adaptation and dialogue between mutu-ally recognizing and supporting agents was argued in EnvironmentalCulure: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (Plumwood 2002).

The second question, of how we distribute agency, is a question withvery big implications for environmental accounting, among other things;but it is much bigger than that, for it also raises further problems that areespecially appropriate for humanities analysis—how and why is it that wehave been unable to recognize the services and agency of the natural sys-

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VAL PLUMWOOD THE CONCEPT OF A CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

tems that support us? An account of how and why certain human formsof agency are disappeared or suppressed may be able to cast some lighton these questions. An associated critical challenge is to understand theconceptual frameworks and systems that disappear the crucial supportprovided by natural systems and prevent us from seeing nature as a fieldof agency. To build an ecological consciousness, we do not need to roll allthese agencies into a single one, perhaps humanized as Gaia or Goddess.But we do need to question systems of thought that confine agency to ahuman or human-like consciousness and refuse to acknowledge the cre-ativity of earth others, whether organized into a single system or not. It iseminently rational, in our present circumstances, to follow criticalmethodologies foregrounding multiple agencies in the more-than-humanworld, both in our immediate lives and more generally in the universe.

The third problem of understanding the role of our multiple conceptsof nature in disappearing agency definitely needs more of our criticalattention in the humanities, but at the present time the mood ofantipodean intellectual life is generally one of ‘nature cynicism,’ the beliefthat the term ‘nature’ is some kind of fraud or confidence trick. Of courseif we can’t use the term our cultural history has traditionally designatedfor these unnoticed service providers, these natural systems in their speci-ficity and collectivity—the term “nature”—we are pretty seriouslydisadvantaged in discussion of how best to react to our predicament. Soan important preliminary question, which I try to address here, is thelegitimacy, especially the political legitimacy, of the concept of nature, aswell as the political epistemology of backgrounding and agency denial.

Such a methodology of critical scrutiny reveals that many of our con-cepts and traditions of knowledge harbor hegemonic concepts of agencyin the land and natural systems. Hegemonic theories or representations ofagency legitimize hegemonic appropriations, to the degree that these callupon some idea of just deserts, a just distribution that corresponds to (oris proportional to) credit for an act—being seen as its creator, or genera-tor, as agent to act, producer to product, bearer of responsibility orrewards. In human-centered frameworks, hegemonic forms give rise to anexaggerated sense of the human side’s contributions and just deserts, andan underestimation of those of nonhumans. They promote slave-likemodels, and distort our understanding of both agency and co-agency. Iexamine below the politics of this kind of forgetting, and try to untangle

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this hegemonic skein of thought behind the nature-sceptical inclinationfrom those deriving from indigenous anti-colonial critiques or from post-modern idealist epistemologies.

According to a typical hegemonic pattern, the most general form ofmind/body dualism, matter itself (chaos) is not creative, but is silent andformless. Being is split into an uncreative, featureless material part and ahyperseparate, externalized, and often dematerialized ‘director’ or ‘driver,’usually identified as intelligence, mind, or reason. The ‘driver’ is theauthor of change (the outcome or issue), as a separate mechanism orintelligence driving the materially-reduced organism from outside, and itis to this external driver that true agency is attributed. Plato plays this outin the Timaeus with a cast of cosmos (rational principle) as driver ofchaos—prior, formless, empty, and inchoate matter. Aristotle does thesame with the distinction between active form and passive matter. Thisfamily of dualized mind/body concepts is highly gendered, as feministsincluding myself have argued,2 and carry other connected social meaningsthat naturalize the control of a plurality of privileged groups who benefitfrom unjust distributions justified by hegemonic understandings ofagency.3 External driver conceptual frameworks are especially suited toexpress the normative instrumental identities of master and slave, wherethe good slave is a passive instrument or tool that exhibits the leastagency of her own and minimum resistance to executing the driver’s will.Such dualizing frameworks are good for naturalizing power and inequal-ity, but are not good for encouraging the dialogue or other feedbackessential to rational decision-making in certain contexts. The problems ofremoteness from consequences and knowledge they generate canadversely affect their political and especially their ecological rationality.This is one (partial) explanation of why societies evolve conceptual struc-tures, such as those ‘forgetting’ essential services, that have negativesurvival value.

We can see these same hegemonic splitting processes at work in manyplaces in our contemporary world, for example in current moves to placepatented natural organisms under the aegis of intellectual property rightsas the creations of reason, where reason as research and knowledge isseen as created by corporations in the neo-liberal political economy.Smart managers or investors ‘create wealth’ as external, mind-associateddrivers of enterprise, and creativity is denied to the non-agentic, body-

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associated employees, who are mere ‘hired hands.’ DNA drives organis-mic being, reduced to matter, from outside. Software is separate from anddrives ‘hardware.’ Human intention operates on a passive, inert land,“which undergoes change” as a patient undergoes surgery. If we frameour concepts in terms of this master-slave splitting pattern, in due coursewe make a slave world which serves to model, confirm and exemplify it,and are unable to conceive anything beyond it.

For our own time, the power relations involved in this model of cre-ativity are perhaps best illustrated by the patriarchy, as in the monologicalreproduction theory of Aristotle. The father is the sole agent and creator,contributing the superior element of mind or form to the generative act.The mother, on the Aristotelean-Platonic account, contributes only theinferior element of matter, and is merely a nurse (medium) for the child—which the father alone created in his image.4 Woman is matter-associated,so only the mind-associated father can be credited with the creative role.It is the father who rightfully owns the child, on this view, which corre-sponded to the Greek system of patriarchy—a system which recognizedas creator only one parent, only one agency, the male.

Hegemonic distortions of agency attribution support inequality andunjust forms of appropriation. This pattern of attributing agency not tothe material sphere itself but to a separate, dematerialized, and mind-identified driver provides a template for patriarchy and its distribution ofgoods, but also for many of the other hegemonic distributions of creditand wealth that structure our lives. In these institutions, the contributionsand deserts of nonhuman systems and agencies are as completely ignoredand devalued as are those of the mother in Aristotle’s schema, and by thesame logical ruse of denying and backgrounding the creativity of theunnoticed and silenced element or medium. As far as recognizing the eco-logical embedding of the dominant culture in the larger system of natureis concerned, contemporary global capitalism is at the same stage of cul-ture as Aristotle’s time was in its recognition of women’s role in humanreproduction.

II. THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

The concept of a cultural landscape currently so popular in thehumanities is an example of a concept that invites us to downplay or hidenonhuman agency and to present humans as having a monopoly of cre-

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ativity and agency in the generation of what are called ‘landscapes.’ ‘Cul-tural landscape’ or ‘human artefact’ terminology for the land and thenature-sceptical claims often associated with them exemplify the poten-tial for concepts and terminology to hide or nullify what we can’t seem torecognize even to save ourselves—the way the systems of nature supportour lives. The concept of a cultural landscape has become a key part ofan agenda in the humanities of human-centered and eurocentered reduc-tions to culture that is the equal and opposite to the natural sciencesreduction of explanation to nature. This ‘two-cultures’ division of thefield of knowledge into a culture-reductionist humanities versus a nature-reductionist science is a direct contemporary expression of the polarizedand dualized choice of nature versus culture characteristic of western cul-ture since classical times. As we will see, the concept of a culturallandscape is crucially linked to this reductionist agenda.

An important initial motivation for the popularity of cultural land-scape concepts in the humanities has been the wish to recognize the priorpresence of indigenous people, and so to reject colonial representations ofthe land as lacking all trace of prior human agency. The concept of tar-geted land as pure wilderness removes constraints on colonialappropriation, so such a concept of ‘virgin’ land as an absence of agency,a realm of chaos, has often been stressed in colonial systems of appropri-ation5 as a way of denying indigenous human agencies. I discuss this casein more detail below. The concept of land as wilderness or pure naturecertainly carries some nasty historical baggage,6 and the idea of nonhu-man agency has been tainted by association. The idea of the land as theproduct of human culture has been stressed as a corrective—hence, ‘thecultural landscape’ vogue. But is it only indigenous human agency that isoverlooked or hidden in discourse about terra nullius, wilderness andnature?

However, an unfortunate and unnecessary side-effect of the longoverdue recognition of the creativity of indigenous humans has been adenial of creativity to nonhuman species and ecosystems—nature scepti-cism. This latter denial is unhelpful as well as unnecessary because thereis no necessary incompatibility between recognizing indigenous (cultural)agency and recognizing nonhuman (natural) agency. A related conse-quence of the denial of nonhuman agency in the land is the subtleimposition of a land creation story that is not at all culturally neutral but

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instead follows the standard western pattern of human agency acting ona passive land that I identify below. This cultural bias is disappointing—even paradoxical— given that part of the motivation behind the adoptionof the term ’cultural landscape’ is to disrupt dualistic concepts of thehuman as set apart from the natural world as well as to acknowledgeindigenous ecological agency in the land. I think it is important to seekout alternative ways to realize these admirable ideals that do not requirerejecting natural agency.

Looking back to the roots of the concept of a cultural landscape, wecan see the same pattern of an external mind-identified driver (culture)acting on a passive medium that I identified in Section 1 above. For exam-ple, the German geographer, Carl Sauer, defined the concept of thecultural landscape in its locus classicus, his 1925 work, The Morphologyof Landscape, in these terms: “Culture is the agent, the natural area is themedium, the cultural landscape is the result. Under the influence of agiven culture, itself changing through time, the landscape undergoesdevelopment, passing through phases.”7 There is no room here for natu-ral forces as significant creators of or elements in the land. All landscapesthat come within the imaginary of a human actor thus get to count as cul-tural, part of his sphere of influence, claimed as human cultural property.Where the possibility of some element in the land uncreated by humansis admitted, it is allowed little importance, generative force, or powers ofresistance; human will radiates outwards, and imprints itself as easilyupon the contours of the natural landscape as it does upon wax.8 Is thereno conflict, no lack of fit, between human designs and the character of theland?

This is a story of the reproduction or genesis of landscape which par-allels our stories of human reproduction, and their genderizeddistributions of power. With the father–‘culture’ counted as sole agent,and the mother as the mere “medium” or ‘nurse,’ the result, the ‘culturallandscape,’ is naturalized as the child of this Aristotelean father as solecreator. Similarly on Sauer’s model, humans are the sole agents or genuineactors in generating ‘cultural landscape.’ Nature, like the mother for Aris-totle, is relegated to the role of medium, rather than treated as a furthercreative agent in this theory of landscape production and reproduction.9

A similar erasure or denial inhabits the heart of the colonial project, inwhich the colonized other is seen as empty of potential for independent

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creativity, agency, or desire. This appears in an extreme form in the colo-nial construction of the Australian continent as terra nullius, an empty,available land—in contemporary capitalist terms, as vacant space ordevelopment potential.

III. MULTIPLE PROBLEMS IN THE MONOLOGICALACCOUNT

Both elements of the phrase ‘the cultural landscape,’ both the term‘cultural’ and the term ‘landscape,’ raise problems and difficulties of sev-eral kinds. ‘Cultural’ is usually used here as a synonym for ‘human,’ or, tobe more expansive, ‘human-created,’ ‘human-influenced,’ ‘humanized’(strong), or ‘bearing traces of the human’ (weaker). Although the term‘culture’ is clearly intended as a surrogate for ‘human,’ it is simply invalidto identify culture with the human. As animal studies are increasinglyshowing, culture as learned forms of adaptation and forms of life, is alsofound in other species, animals particularly, and is not exclusive to thehuman. If the term ‘culture’ is used more broadly, in the fashion ofanthropology, as meaning the sum total of a group’s knowledge and prac-tice in all spheres, there is even less case for confining it to the human.

In the stronger of the meanings of cultural landscape, ‘human-cre-ated,’ the phrase conforms to Sauer’s model, attributing agencyexclusively to the human element, and treating the land as a space ormedium, perhaps itself a human product, a ‘landscape.’ If all real, non-vir-tual landscapes are the work of nonhuman, including some pre-human,agencies, combined with some influence or work on the part of humans,then all involve collaboration between multiple agencies—although, asI’ll argue later, the claim that human agency must ALWAYS be involved istoo strong a claim, one that betrays an underlying resort to idealism. Sothis way of construing ‘cultural landscape’ represents agency in a waythat significantly understates the creativity of nonhuman elements.

In the weaker sense of human involvement, we can say that many,now perhaps most, lands show human influence, or bear some traces ofthe human, although these may be recent and not the major creativeforces involved in their development. These mixed ‘landscapes’ combinehuman and nonhuman influences, only the first being posited as ‘cultural.’But if the human forces are singled out for agency, we have to ask: whydoes the concept of a cultural landscape privilege human agency over the

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other agencies involved and credit this force exclusively with creation ofthe land we view? Why are no other, nonhuman influences recognized ormentioned? Why is the human cultural narrative assumed to silence ortake precedence over the other, nonhuman, narratives of creation andreproduction in the land? Such a model seems to reinforce the westerntradition of treating humans as superior and apart, outside of and hyper-separated from nature, rather than integrating the human narrative withother narratives of the land.

The ‘landscape’ terminology itself plays a role in writing passivity,visuality, and human-centeredness into the framework. In a typical colo-nial landscape painting, we have reached a peak, and the land is framedas laid out below us. In the 1846 painting by Samuel Thomas Gill enti-tled “Country NW of tableland Aug 22,” for example, that introduced theHRC’s 2005 series on the cultural landscape, two armed, male figuresoccupy an elevation, surveying a land spread out before them, open totheir gaze.10 This is a colonizing gaze, coming from outside, calculating itsown advantage, detached from what lies before it, a gaze that seeks noconsent. “Landscape” so framed draws on a colonial as well as androcen-tric model which frames the land as passive, visually captured, somethingto distance from, survey and subdue.

This aspect of the ‘cultural landscape’ terminology invokes a meta-elevator intended to hoist us cultured ones up a rung or two above thecommon run of things, including the land, as uniquely conscious andreflective beings. The lift in level indicated by the landscape concept doesallow us to reflect on our interactions with the land, but pictures thisknowledge to itself primarily through the metaphor of sight. Sight is alsothe metaphor of choice for scientific knowledge as the penetration by thelight of reason of a dark and formless chaos. To describe the land as a‘landscape’ is to privilege the visual over other, more rounded and embod-ied ways of knowing the land, for example, by walking over it, or bysmelling and tasting its life, from the perspective of predator or prey.Landscape concepts put a frame between the viewer and the land, dis-tance from the land, and invite virtual and idealist approaches to the land.(Can you talk or sing to the landscape, for example, as you can to theland?) As many have pointed out, visuality has been privileged in westernculture and closely linked with sado-dispassionate rationality because,unlike other senses, sight requires little in the way of symmetry (one can

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see without being seen), reciprocity, or consent, and allows the seer to beset sharply apart from what is seen. Sight has been interpreted and struc-tured through an account in which the object of attention is passive andothered as ‘object’ by a sado-dispassionate gaze.11

I don’t, of course, want to banish the faculty of sight or the term‘landscape,’ but I think we should try to be aware of the baggage of visu-ality and try to balance it with other senses, metaphors and narrativeswhere we can. The meta-level of reflection the concept of landscapeinvites can be useful, indeed often crucial. But we should be aware of thepenalties of overuse and the dangers of virtualization implicit in the meta-level hoister. We can imagine that this bit of philosophical technology, themeta-level hoist, has a serious design fault: it has a tendency to get stuckon return journeys to the ground floor, and the resulting monopolizationof attention by the meta-level is one of the secret tricks that makes ideal-ism seem plausible. We must be careful not allow meta-terminology todominate, and so I believe we should try, wherever possible, to talk aboutand to the land, rather than the landscape.

Of course another way of getting the meta-hoist stuck above groundlevel is through the concept of agency. Many philosophers try to imposeconsciousness as a condition of agency (and indeed any mentalistic con-cept)—thus confining agency to the human, as well as imposingunnecessarily high meta-level requirements and demanding unnecessarilyconsciousness-based language, a strategy I have identified as over-intellec-tualizing.12 Over-intellectualizing is linked with an analysis of agency thatsplits the act into a separate, conscious decision process followed by amaterial action, the whole making up agency. We can see here anotherexample of the splitting model I referred to earlier, which posits passivematter and a separate, mentalistic agentic driver. I think we can followWittgenstein towards a more behaviorist and less dualistic and over-intel-lectualized analysis of agency. Agency is legitimated through permissionto use agentic, intentional vocabulary and to occupy active rather thanpassive constructions, for it is this that has been denied the reduced andpassified field of matter. Important also is resistance to splitting the fieldinto dead and alive, machine and ‘external driver’ components, for it isthrough this splitting that agency is isolated and hived off to the mental-ized side. On this account of agency as active intentionality, agency neednot and should not be limited to the human or the human-like.

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IV. COLLABORATIVE MODELS Although recognition of cultural diversity is an important motivation

for talk about cultural landscapes, concepts of the cultural landscapeinvolve a subtle imposition of the dominant western model that posits ahegemonic, creative agent conceived as acting on an inert, passive fieldtreated as instrument (or ‘medium’ in Sauer’s terms). Like Aristotle’s nar-rative, the cultural landscape narrative recognizes the agency of only onecreative actor, or just one of the parents. We can see the erasure of theother parent more clearly if we look at a contrasting framework to cul-ture-reductionism. The monological kind of creation story can becontrasted with a dialogical kind of story that sees the land as a field of(product, outcome child/offspring of) multiple interacting and collaborat-ing agencies which can include humans but is never exhausted by them.

The concept of cultural landscape, despite some ambiguities, slidesmore easily into the first monological rather than the second dialogical setof stories. Focusing exclusively on the human element as creative, as instressing the human-surrogate ‘cultural,’ has the effect of disappearing theother, frequently much older and more important, form of agency or cre-ativity, the work of the earth, of the natural world, of nature, in formingthe land, also the agency of the earth itself, the biosphere, the otherspecies present in and formative of the land. Some critics of culture-reduc-tionism have suggested the term ‘biocultural landscape,’ which names na-ture as well as culture as responsible agents, but the term ‘bio’ still seemsto restrict agents to living beings rather than including other nonhumanelements less often seen as alive. So I suggest the terms “collaborative” or“interactive” landscapes, which seem clearer and more open to register-ing cultural difference and specificity.13

Looking at the land in ecological and geological, as well as human-cul-tural terms, we must surely see it as the product of multiple, mixed agen-cies. For any given piece of the earth’s surface, we can, indeed must, tell astory of landforms created by motions of the earth, by volcanoes, tsunamis,earthquakes, meteorites, geological depositions, and weatherings, for ex-ample. This is only the beginning, for, from an ecological perspective, allthe species belonging to the land influence and maintain the land. Thehuman is just one species among many here. This means that the outcomeof any given landscape is at a minimum biocultural, a collaborative prod-uct that its multiple species and creative elements must be credited for.

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But it is not even simply a question of recognizing multiple distinctagencies of equal priority, for in many respects the nonhuman elementsrendered invisible by culture reductionism have priority as enabling,foundational conditions which make the overlay of ‘cultural’ elementspossible. There are certainly cases of mutual dependency, where arrays offlora and fauna depend on culturally-evolved human skills and interven-tion (for example, regular burning) to survive.14 But there are also manyimportant cases and respects in which ‘nature’ is not symmetricallydependent, is prior to and enables ‘culture’ rather than vice versa. Aninteresting illustration of this dependency and the failure to recognize itis the recent attempt by Victorian mountain cattlemen to argue, inresponse to pressure to remove their ecologically-damaging grazing fromthe Alpine National Park, that grazing represents ‘cultural heritage,’which is just as important as ‘natural heritage,’ if not more important.

This form of culture reductionism suggests that cultural and naturalheritage are largely separate and independent systems existing side byside, and that we can simply decide to favor the first over the second. Theresponse from the ecological side has been to point out that this form ofculture is not compatible with the natural systems that support it. Graz-ing is severely degrading important water producing areas such as alpinebogs and wetlands, which are too fragile to survive the pressure of graz-ing and are, in terms of water production and other ecological services,far more valuable than grazing.15 Ecologically rational behavior must rec-ognize such priority. The assumption that ‘the environment’ is a furthercommodity we can decide to pay for after we have become richer simi-larly assumes ecological passivity and the independence (and evenintersubstitutability) of cultural and environmental goods, ignoring thefoundational and enabling character of environmental goods, the wayculture depends on and is supported by nature.

Which collaborators?There are many culturally variable ways to cut and identify these

multiple collaborative agencies to fit different cultural narratives. The castof actors the model of multiple interactive agencies makes available forthe drama of shaping the land can include disputatious or collaborativehumans, divinities and elements, and what some cultures identify asancestral creator beings. And the land itself may be conceived as an active

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and far from passive element in the creation drama. For the indigenouscultures discussed by Deborah Rose and Bill Neidjie, for example, theland is not a passive background but an active presence; it grows you up,teaches you, misses you, and calls to you.16 Country is a realm of pow-erful and intentional beings, the creator beings who shaped the land orwho are the land. According to Vandana Shiva,17 such collaborativemodels represent the way most non-western cultures have framed humanrelationships with the land.

Collaborative models may also include, for suitable contexts, modelsof human agents collaborating with what we in the west call ‘nature,’meaning natural systems, other species and elements, envisaged as nonhu-man agents. A collaborative framework opens the way to seeing “allspecies as part of an earth family,”18 and for indigenous accounts in whichall the species living in and from the land co-create the land—and perhapsall in some sense inherit or ‘own’ it. This is consistent with a worldviewin which the earth is to be shared between species, and is not exclusivelyhuman property.

A collaborative model allows for many different kinds of agents andnarratives about their creative expression in the land. So there is nothingconceptually absolute, for this kind of collaborative model, about cuttingthe cast of agents into humans and nature. Doing so will be appropriatein some natural and cultural contexts and inappropriate in others. I thinkthat over the longer term we should aim to decenter the human as a con-trast class and draw our distinctions in ways that do not constantly referback to the human as central.19 Nevertheless in our present context, thehuman/nonhuman contrast remains the site of a crucial drama and dis-course—that of the decline of natural systems with which this paperbegan and the need for human attention and action to reverse this situa-tion. I would claim that the human/nature interplay remains crucial inthis context, but not that it has some absolute and eternal status as a wayto divide up the world, or that it is free of problematic nuances and diffi-culties. Nature sceptics sometimes suggest we have moved past the timewhen the concept of nature is needful or useful.20 Elsewhere I’ve com-pared ‘post-naturism’ to ‘post-feminism,’ which invokes the retort: it willbe time for post-feminism when we have post-patriarchy. So the corre-sponding retort for post-naturism is: it will be time for post-naturismwhen we’ve learnt to stop erasing nature and to recognize and nourish the

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natural systems that support us. The Millennium Ecosystem Reportshows that we are still far from this goal, and moving still further away.

V. BACKGROUND TO HEGEMONIC ACCOUNTS OFAGENCY

We can map the monological creation account of land onto the alter-native model acknowledging multiple agents by treating it as the specialcase of erasure, and developing an account of how and why some agentsare foregrounded and others backgrounded or disappeared in collabora-tive or multiple agencies. For the human/nature case, we can bestunderstand this by seeing the human/nature division as parallel to othersimilar divisions that give rise to backgrounding and hiding agency.

The pattern involved in hegemonic accounts of agency can be seenmost clearly in the context of colonizing relationships. Both Eurocentricand anthropocentric erasures of agency are suported by larger dualisticconceptual structures that mark emphatic divisions or hyperseparationsbetween ‘us’ and ‘them,’ superior colonizers and inferior colonized. Inboth cases relationships of dualism or binary opposition are createdaround the identities of the One and the Other, ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’peoples, or human and nonhuman, and the Other is treated as somethingto distance from and subdue. Hyperseparation is an emphatic form ofseparation that involves much more than just recognizing difference.Hyper-separation means defining the dominant identity emphaticallyagainst or in opposition to the subordinated identity, by exclusion of theirreal or supposed qualities. The function of hyper-separation is to markout the Other for separate and inferior treatment through a radical exclu-sion. Thus colonizers may exaggerate differences, and deny relationship,conceiving the subordinated party as less than human. The colonized maybe described as “stone-age,” “primitive,” as “beasts of the forest,” andcontrasted with the civilization and reason attributed to the colonizer.21

Hyperseparation between the sphere of the human and that of natureleads humans to see themselves as ‘outside nature,’ and correspondinglyto ignore or deny their reliance on biospheric services. Countering hyper-separation of humans from nature implies recognizing continuity andhybridity between the human and the natural, and also dependency ofhumans on nature. It does not require us to deny nature’s otherness orseparateness, or to deny or submerge human distinctness from other

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species, for example, by the claim that humans are just “part of nature.”Humans are part of nature, in the sense that they are subject to ecologi-cal principles and have the same requirements for a healthy biosphere asother animals, but they, like all other species, also have their own distinc-tive species identities and relationships to nature. To counterhyperseparation, we need a de-polarizing reconception of nonhumannature which recognizes the denied space of our hybridity, continuity, andkinship, and is also able to recognize, in suitable contexts, the differenceof the nonhuman in a non-hierarchical way. We should be suspicious ofhyperseparated senses of “human” and “nature,” since to be other (or sep-arate, distinct) is not the same as to be purely other (or hyperseparated).A number of paradoxical and sceptical arguments trade on this ambigu-ity to make it seem that, because of the pervasiveness of human presenceand influence, nature as the purely other, and therefore nature as such,does not exist. I discuss some of these arguments below.

Another very important feature of hegemonic frameworks is back-grounding, a form of simultaneous reliance on but disavowal of theagency of subordinated Others. When the dominating party comes tobelieve that they are radically different and superior to the subordinatedparty, they are also likely to devalue or deny the Other’s agency and theirown dependency on this devalued Other, treating it as either inessentialand substitutable or as the unimportant background to their own fore-ground. Thus women’s traditional tasks in house labor and childraisingare treated as inessential, as the background services that make “real”work (the work of the male) and achievement possible, rather than asachievement or as work themselves. In the case of nature, both nature’sagency and dependency on nature is denied, systematically, so thatnature’s order, resistance, and survival requirements are not perceived asimposing a limit on human goals or enterprises. For example, crucialbiospheric and other services provided by nature and the limits theymight impose on human projects are not considered in accounting ordecision-making. The conceptual means by which this simultaneousreliance and disavowal is accomplished is through the hegemonic con-struction of agency

Contemporary hegemonic constructions of agency are the other sideof and are encouraged by hyperbolized conceptions of autonomy “con-joined with individualistic conceptions of subjectivity and agency.”22 The

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self-made achiever is an hyperseparated and hyperbolized autonomousself whose illusion of self-containment is built on denying or background-ing the contributions of subordinated others and re-presenting the jointproduct in terms of a hyperbolized individualistic agency.

When the other’s agency is treated as background or denied, we givethe other less credit than is due to them, we can come to take for grantedwhat they provide for us, and to starve them of the resources they needto survive. This is of course the main point of hegemonic construals ofagency and labor—they provide the basis for appropriation of the Other’scontribution by the One or center. The “profound forgetting” of naturewhich ensues from the hegemonic construction of agency, the failure tosee otherized nature as a collaborative partner or to understand relationsof dependency on it, is the basis of the now global economic system ofself-maximizing economic rationality in which the maximum is extractedand not enough is left to sustain the other on which the ‘rational’ systemis dependent.

Hegemonic constructions of agency that justify appropriation areespecially encouraged in western thinking because its systems of appro-priation are based on the idea of applying labor to “pure” nature, as inLocke’s argument.23 The process opens the way for enrichment, but itsother side is that the blinkered vision involved is a problem for prudenceas well as for justice in the case where the One is in fact dependent on thisOther, for the One can gain an illusory sense of their own ontologicalindependence and ecological autonomy. It is just such a sense that seemsto pervade the dominant culture’s contemporary disastrous mispercep-tions of its ecological relationships. As backgrounding is perhaps the mosthazardous and distorting effect of Othering from a human prudentialpoint of view, so the reconception of nature in agentic terms as a co-actorand co-participant in the world is perhaps the most important aspect ofmoving to an alternative ethical framework.

VI. NATURALIZING AND DENATURALIZING STRATEGIES

How to attribute credit for mixed forms of labor is always a complexmatter—think of the problems that can arise in recognizing the contribu-tions of others to an academic paper, for example. But when thehegemonic patterns of backgrounding and denial of agency I have out-lined are operative, recognizing contributions and apportioning credit

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between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, can be especiallycomplex and involve multiple and cross-cutting denials that overempha-size or underemphasize the various elements. The sort of pattern ofdomination of nature I have outlined has a major bearing on how far andwhere agency and labor are recognized, as well as on how the structuresof denial of agency— human and nonhuman—work and what they aredesigned to achieve. Generally the agency of nature is under-recognized,but there is an important class of cases that seem to present exceptions tothis rule. In anthropocentric culture, attributions tend to overemphasizethe human (especially the privileged human) and underemphasize or denythe agency of nature. But they may also underemphasize or hide the socialand overemphasize the natural, for example in the interests of makingoutcomes appear less open to change than they really are, or from someother motive

Numerous examples spring to mind of hegemonic constructions ofagency involving nature. Thus Kate Soper points to the failure to recog-nize the labor of otherized human groups (the laboring people) and thehuman social relations that have gone into places now presented as“nature,” for example, the countryside of England.24 As Vandana Shivapoints out, corporations involved in genetic engineering patent as“nature” seed varieties the represent the labor of hundreds of generationsof indigenous farmers.25 In Australia, the colonizers denied the possibilitythat the indigenous inhabitants could have ecological agency, and land-scapes that often had substantial indigenous inputs and managementwere taken to be in “the pure state of nature,” including no element ofindigenous human labor in their formation. ‘Nature’ can be used to hidehuman contributions, especially those of non-privileged groups.

“Nature” can also be used to hide possibilities for social change.Intelligence and other human characteristics that have a substantial rela-tionship to nurture, are written down by conservative social forces ashereditary, as “nature,” in order to give the inequalities in society they areassociated with an air of inevitability. Certain sorts of focus on eco-catas-trophe as phenomena of nature, for example of population growth,preclude any adequate examination of their social aspects and causes.26

Cosmetic strips of unlogged forest along highways in logging areas areoften used to hide destructive logging activities, and give the impressionthat there is much more “nature” around than there actually is so that

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destruction of the remainder can continue without objection or hin-drance.

In the case of deceptive naturalness, describing something as ‘nature’tends to be not so much a way to overacknowledge the contributions andworkings of nature as a way to underacknowledge the human social rela-tions involved and the extent of prior ownership or human construction.In these contexts we may need to “denaturalize,” to demote or supple-ment the emphasis on nature and note the presence of human influenceswhich have been hidden, although this will rarely involve a completedenial of the influence of nature. Although these cases seem to be anexception to our general claim that in dominant anthropocentric culturenature’s influence has been denied in favor of overcrediting the human, itin fact it involves a more complex, multiple set of denials registering mul-tiple forms of oppression and colonization. We need a complex,case-sensitive response to these complex denials, involving both natural-izing and denaturalizing strategies in combination.

We can sum up some of the complex classes of cases and strategiesrequired as follows:

Type 1: Naturalizing 1: (deceptive naturalness 1) Counting something as ‘nature’ in the sense of ‘pure nature’ when it

in fact has a human contribution (not merely a human influence) hides ordenies the human social relations (culture) that have gone into that con-struction, often in the interests of making it seem unchangeable, (genderoppression, “woman’s nature”), of appropriating it (the labor of indige-nous people), or for some other deceptive purpose such as suggestingthere is more of it than there is (the logging case). For these cases, we needstrategies of denaturalizing, that is, of recognizing the denied form ofhuman agency or work. Note that, although there may be some need forrebalancing, this rarely if ever requires any complete denial of the nonhu-man contribution.

Type 2: Over-Humanizing: (deceptive humanness)Counting something (e.g., a place) as purely human (or ‘cultural’)

when it involves the labor of nature jointly with human labor hides ordenies the work of ecological systems and human dependency relationson it. This is the dominant position, because as we have seen, nature’soperations and contributions to our joint human-nature undertakings areoverwhelmingly denied or backgrounded in the dominant culture. To


counter this, we need strategies of “naturalizing” in the sense of recogniz-ing nature’s agency, for example, as in acknowledging and providing forthe continuation of “ecosystem services.”

Type 3: Naturalizing 2: (deceptive naturalness 2)Given the structure of type 2, one common way to hide certain

human social relations and contributions (e.g., to a place) is to count thehuman groups involved themselves as nature. Then their contributionswill not need to be credited or noticed. So in this case too we need torespond by to ‘denaturalizing,’ in the sense of foregrounding and distin-guishing the human groups concerned themselves and showing how theirrole has not been credited. But at the same time we need to naturalize, tocredit the nonhuman agency that has not been credited, and to under-stand the many ways in which we are all, from the margin or the center,part of nature, reliant on nature’s well-being and services.

Some groups historically identified with the body and the animal,such as indigenous people, women, and those who do manual work areespecially likely to have the outcome of their labor represented as“nature” rather than as mutual constructions between humans andnature. This hegemonic construction of agency seems to be what liesbehind the case of patenting seeds, the case of indigenous people in Aus-tralia, and the case of the agricultural workers whose bodily labors overgenerations helped form the countryside now seen as “nature.” The basicmotivations for such denials of their contribution is clear—it opens theway ethically for appropriation by the more powerful or prestigious ofwhat the Others have helped create. Thus Australia was seen as “terranullius,” the land of no one, open to appropriation because indigenouspeople were counted as semi-animal “nomads,” and their ecologicalagency in and attachment to the land discounted.

It is important to note that this strategy relies on discounting theagency of the nonhuman sphere, that is, nature itself. It has been possibleto discount the agency of subordinated groups of humans by countingthem or their agency as nature only because nature’s agency is itself nor-mally denied and backgrounded in western culture. Now Soperproblematizes cases of type 1, but not any of the remainder, and gives usan inadequate sense of our embeddedness in nature by failing to prob-lematize cases of type 2 and 3. Cases of type 3 make up an important classof cases where the agency of certain groups of humans in the land is hid-

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den, but we cannot understand type 2 cases without understanding type 3cases. We can be grateful to Soper for clarifying cases of type 1. But westill need to take account of the other two types, and this means under-standing and countering the dominant tradition’s denial of recognition tonature and nature’s agency. As deception can move in either the directionof culture or that of nature, so our countering of cases of deceptive natu-ralness needs to be balanced and supplemented by countering cases ofdeceptive humanness.

Indigeneity and Wilderness Scepticism

A major idea behind contemporary uses of the concept of culturallandscape is to assert the ecological and cultural agency of indigenouspeople and their alteration of the land that is clearly denied in the colo-nial concept of terra nullius and thought to be denied in concepts ofnature and wilderness. This is also often a motivation for nature scepti-cism. The idea that the Australian continent, or even substantial parts ofit, are pure nature, is insensitive to the claims of indigenous peoples anddenies their record as ecological agents who have left their mark upon theland. Indigenous critics such as Marcia Langton have rightly objected thatsuch a strategy colludes with the colonial concept of Australia as terranullius and with the colonial representation of Aboriginal people asmerely animal and as “parasites on nature.”27

Nature scepticism based on the association of nature with terra nul-lius has important points at its heart—a perception of the way certainexclusionary and purity—based concepts of nature have been used as‘genocidal concepts’—but these points are mixed up with some muchmore confused and problematic assumptions. It is important to note thatcertain wilderness claims have been (and are still being) used in certaincontexts to justify the annexation of new worlds, by hiding some kinds ofhuman agency. Concepts of wilderness as an absence of agency lay thefoundations for private property by erasing all other claimants (bothindigenous human and nonhuman) as presences that might constrainannexation.28 As we have seen, this cannot only be conceded butexplained and elaborated in the larger context of an account of agencyand its hegemonic development in situations of appropriation and colo-nization.

Once we have grasped the bigger picture of hegemonic systems for

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disappearing agency, we can begin to appreciate the potential for nonhu-man agencies to suffer the same fate of disappearance as indigenousagency. To recognize that both nature and indigenous peoples are subjectto colonization, both sides need to rethink, relocate, and redefine theirconcepts of wilderness and nature within a larger anticolonial critique. Ageneralized nature scepticism then appears as a very indiscriminate andhuman-centered way to rectify the denial of indigenous agency, one whichreplaces one victim of denial by another and carries the heavy cost of con-firming the dangerous backgrounding of nature. These costs resultingfrom nature scepticism are unnecessary, for there is no necessary incom-patibility between recognizing denied forms of human agency and ofnatural agency, provided we make some simple but important distinctionsbetween different senses and concepts of wilderness and nature. To rec-ognize that both nature and indigenous peoples have been colonized, weneed to rethink, relocate, and redefine our protective concepts for naturewithin a larger anti-colonial critique.

It is crucial for understanding this issue to make certain distinctionsbetween wilderness and nature, which in set-theory terms turn on the dif-ference between intersection and exclusion. Wilderness, in its colonialmeaning, is a polarized dualistic category that makes a claim to totalhuman exclusion, while ‘nature’ as a category only makes a claim to ameasure of independence of the human. The difference between making aclaim to some independent agency and insisting on full independence ofthe human is very great indeed—as great as the difference between someand all. To put it simply, “wilderness” requires complete independence,while nature only requires some independence. One makes a claim toexclude all human influence, the other makes a claim to elements of inde-pendence from the human. The first claim is much stronger than thesecond. It may be reasonable, in the present context, to doubt that thereis any part of the earth has not felt human influence, but to doubt thatthe world itself has elements of independence is an indication of the needfor therapy, philosophical (Wittgenstein) or personal, depending on thekind of doubt it is.29

The distinction I am making here between nature and wilderness is asimple one and draws on several sets of logical distinctions, for example,in set theory—between intersection and exclusion senses of nature, and ofnegation accordingly in the term ‘nonhuman,’ between an ‘all’ and a

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‘some’ claim as the distinction between complete and partial independ-ence. It draws too on the related distinction between hyperseparation(emphatic separation of exclusion) and simple separation or difference.Where the term ‘nonhuman’ indicates a positive presence of other-than-human agents, there is an implication of independence, but noimplication of human absence. Thus there is no incompatibility betweenrecognizing the presence of nature or the nonhuman, as the claim thatthere are elements of independent agency in the land, and recognizing ahuman presence, indigenous or otherwise. The only incompatibility isbetween recognizing indigenous agency or influence in the land and theclaim that the land was wilderness—in the purist, “virgin” sense in whichwilderness means the land has evolved in complete exclusion of humaninfluence. In short, indigenous objections to the strong, colonial conceptof wilderness cannot validly be extended to the much weaker concept ofnature. Thus the indigenous case for wilderness scepticism does not jus-tify or lend force to a generalized nature scepticism.

But given the apparent importance of wilderness to conservationists,the implication that wilderness is implicated in colonial annexation andgenocide is surely bad enough. The importance of the virgin concept ofwilderness for conservation practice is contested. Some have argued thatthere is an independent case for moving to less oppositional and dualizedconcepts, since the virgin concept creates many difficulties for environ-mental understandings and activism.30 The purity of virgin nature ishighly suspect, and the dualistic reading yields a concept of nature whichis incompatible with and unhelpful for many everyday usages, as whenwe speak of nature in our daily lives, on the farm, or in the suburbs. It iscertainly understandable that indigenous advocates would strongly rejectthe pristine concept defined in terms of nature/culture dualism, because itis the one under which indigenous people were denied full humanity forfailing to evidence European-style culture. It is not so clear why anyonewould take this to be the only concept of nature available. The “virgin”usage is only one reading of the highly variable concept of “nature,” onethat was dominant mainly in the colonial past.

The case for treating colonial ‘virgin’ wilderness concepts as “genoci-dal concepts” does not extend convincingly either to concepts of natureor to the main contemporary concepts of wilderness. The role the latterplay in contemporary conservation strategies, in national park formation,

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for example, is now rarely that of making a general claim to past purityor to complete exclusion of human influence, but more often is that ofprioritizing nonhumans in the event of conflict with human interests. Inthe current situation where nature is hard-pressed, allocating some areasfor nonhuman priority is justifiable if we are to begin sharing the earthfairly between species. Many conflicts between different species can benegotiated, to be sure, and land can be shared between humans and otherspecies. Certainly we can, and should, do far more of this sharing andnegotiation in human living areas than we do today. But it is a feature ofspecies difference, as opposed perhaps to social difference, that not allsuch conflicts can be negotiated. For example, the conflict between pred-ators (whether humans or nonhumans) and prey cannot be negotiated bypredators agreeing to eat someone else, but often requires effecting somedegree of separation, having special, identifiable areas where the interestsof the politically weaker, nonhuman party do not always have to take aback seat, and where humans go at their own risk. This function of pro-viding some pieces of the earth where the nonhuman has ethical priority,whether or not it is called wilderness (and given the disreputable or mixedhistory of the concept I think another term than wilderness would bepreferable here), is essential if we hope to carry biodiversity into thefuture. This sense of wilderness recognizes as precious a nonhuman pres-ence (or set of presences), which is not at all the same as claiming absenceof human influence in the land.

VII. THE LAND AS A HUMAN ARTEFACT

The idea that all nature is a human creation because it now showssome human influence rests on prioritizing the human or cultural elementin mixtures of nature and culture; a comparable argument in the humancase would license the claim that someone was our creation and lackedall independence (was patentable) because they had taken some sort ofinfluence from us. But such cultural reduction, which is often associatedwith certain forms of postmodernism, would abolish conceptual condi-tions for sensitivity to nature’s limits, and to the variations andinterweavings of the human and nonhuman narratives an ecological con-sciousness aims to foster. These arguments and stretched senses thatsystematically overstate the human contribution and understate nature’scontribution testify to the growing extent of human insulation and self-

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enclosure. Those postmodernists who employ them may think of them-selves as in opposition to the dominant tradition,31 but are in fact at onewith its dualizing approach in continuing to represent the Other, nature,as an absence or void, and to demote its agency.

A major Australian advocate of this hyperbolized account of thehuman contribution to forming the land is Tim Flannery. In several placesFlannery has described Australia as “a vast, 47, 000 year old human arte-fact.” For example, in his recent essay “Beautiful Lies” (2003, 41),Flannery writes: “If we look back on the fossil record, it’s not an exagger-ation to say that Aboriginal fire and hunting literally made the Australianenvironment that Europeans first encountered. It was a vast, 47,000 yearold human artefact, designed to provide maximal food and comfort to itsinhabitants in the most sustainable manner.”

The OED defines ‘artefact’ as “the product of human art and work-manship . . . as distinct from a similar object naturally produced.” Thepicture of Australia as a human product presents creativity as the prerog-ative of the human and denies the role of forces much older and morepowerful than the human in shaping the continent. The artefact terminol-ogy is a strong restatement of Sauer’s concept of the human as the onlytruly creative agent and the land as a passive, instrumentalized mediumor tool shaped to human design. This terminology is presented as the wayto recognize indigenous contributions that were previously denied, (themain ‘beautiful lie’ in Flannery’s title) but, as we have seen, it is neitherthe only or the best way to think about our continent and the combina-tion of human and nonhuman forces that have shaped it.

The systematic overestimation of human agency and underestimationof nonhuman agency is fed by the tool imagery and its human-centered-ness. The implications of over-estimating human control and agencyinclude not only the failure we have noted to observe and value nature’screativity and services, but also exaggerating the potential for control ofnatural systems and processes, denying the need for negotiation withnature, and reinforcing settler traditions of forcing the land to adapt to usrather than vice versa. An assumed polarity of pure nature vs. pure cul-ture governs our choices, disappearing mixtures and collaborativeoutcomes, including the biocultural. This form of polarization plays a rolein Flannery’s artefact claim, as the move from (a) Australia’s ecology haselements of human influence to (b) Australian ecology exhibits onlyhuman agency, is a cultural artefact.

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Flannery’s human-centered framework leads to a failure to acknowl-edge nature’s agency and to a systematic overestimation of the extent andeffectiveness of human agency which has appeared in arguments aboutthe role of human-induced burning and climate change in the bioforma-tion of the Australian continent. The main scientific basis for Flannery’sclaim that Australia is a human artefact is the idea that indigenous burn-ing was responsible for transforming the continent from rainforest withmegafauna to the largely sclerophyll form we see today, so that humanalteration of the land by burning is responsible for the current array offlora and fauna. But recent ecological work has pointed strongly to non-human agency, for example, climate change, as a major, and possibly themain, reason for megafauna extinction, creating the woodland conditionsthat favored humans and reduced the megafauna. Even the dominance ofeucalypts so characteristic of Australian landscapes, a feature usuallyattributed to indigenous intervention, should be seen as an example ofmixed human and nonhuman agency rather than purely human agency;a recent article by Tim Low envisages eucalypts themselves as ecologicalagents in this context, because they selected for their own dominance overmesophyll flora by developing growth habits that promote fire.32

Flannery’s thoughts on sustainability draw strongly on dualistic tra-ditions of naturalizing gender through placing rationality in opposition toemotionality, (or reason/emotion dualism),33 and on the associated divi-sion of environmental concerns into hard and soft, both implicitly andexplicitly gendered. Concern with the sustainability of systems that obvi-ously impact human welfare such as salination and river systemdeterioration, is portrayed as hard and tough, whereas concern for ani-mal welfare and whales is portrayed as soft, emotional, feminine, andirrational. Indeed, Flannery often seems to identify the main enemy as thefeminized environment movement, which is convicted of emotionality inits concern with other species, and of irrationality in failing to pay enoughattention to the ‘hard’ projects Flannery presents as scientific, rationaland sound.34

This results in much unnecessary polarization, and a simplistic polit-ical model in which society consists of a zero sum game in which moreattention and concern for koalas and whales, to nonhumans loved fortheir diversity and wonder rather than what they can contribute to ourcoffers, must be entirely at the expense of ‘hard’ human sustainabilityissues of soil and water conservation, salination, and land clearance. The

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difficulties environmentalists have in getting attention for crucial landmanagement issues are portrayed as a conspiracy on the part of soft con-servationists to take public sympathy and attention away from the realissues, those of hard conservationists. A ‘sustainability’ agenda of casti-gating as an irrational diversion the direction of environmental concernto anything that is not an issue of immediate human survival or self-inter-est underlies Flannery’s advocacy of whaling and castigation of greenies.35

Sustainability is the concept invoked to justify Flannery’s conclusion thatwhaling is good for whales, and to support the assumption that anythingless than maximum sustainable exploitation of other species is irrational.

But this is not the only way to understand sustainability. On an alter-native view of sustainability as involving nourishing what sustains us,rational sustainability is not at all the same as human self-interest, andcompassion, generosity, and care for other species are far from irrational.In reality our lack of sensitivity to nonhuman nature is the other side ofour failure to understand our dependency on it, so the presentation ofsympathy for nonhumans as irrational depends on a false choice of non-human versus human welfare. False choices based on the dualisms ofemotion and reason, nature and culture, as well as a false choice of ‘purenature’ versus ‘pure culture’ lie behind Flannery’s choice of ‘hard’ ration-ality and condemnation of ‘soft’ environmentalism.

VIII. NATURECULTURES AND CULTURALREDUCTIONISMS

The cynicism about the concept of nature that is often associatedwith concepts of cultural landscapes is fed by several sources, one ofwhich, as we have seen, is the indigenous argument, combined with somerather confused thinking about boundaries that fails to distinguish natureand wilderness.36 Another major source of nature cynicism and the thrustto reduce nature to culture is the continuing appeal, especially in thehumanities, of philosophical idealism. The major idealist argument hereis that all land is grasped through a cultural framework, and this premiseleads the nature sceptic to say that all landscapes are cultural and thushuman-produced, even human artefacts perhaps.

It is hard to contest the claim that the land is grasped always throughthe prism of culture. But then, so is everything that is grasped conceptu-ally by any group of cultural beings. We do not usually go on to insist on

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putting ‘cultural’ before everything we speak of, all the objects of thoughtand perception this can apply to—the cultural shoe, the cultural sock, thecultural lake, the cultural sky. Yet these similarly are grasped in andthrough a culturally variable framework of thought. So why must weinsist on doing this in relation to the land? If we have to call everythingwe can think of ‘cultural,’ we get the meta-hoist seriously stuck. If we endup considering the Sun or the planet Uranus ‘cultural landscapes’ simplybecause we cultured ones have thought of them or seen photographs ofthem, clearly we have entered the classic territory of philosophical ideal-ism, in which we remain forever trapped inside ideas, with no exit to theground-floor world. This idealizing argument would rob the concept of‘cultural construction’ of any genuine contrast class and weaken it to thepoint of triviality or meaninglessness.37

Nature scepticism is often, of course, a reaction, if a mistaken one, tothe difficulties of traditional western dualistic conceptions of nature andculture, which are conspicuously inadequate for thinking about the landin our contemporary context. Nature/culture dualism distorts the way wecan represent agency in the land, obliging us to view it as either purenature or as a cultural product, not nature at all, thus hyperseparatingnature and culture and representing nature as an absence of the human.Hyperseparation and homogenization lead us to classify the land as purenature or ‘wilderness,’ in ways that obscure its continuity with anddependency on culture, and erase the human stories interwoven with it,especially those of its indigenous people. On the other side, conceiving aplace according to the opposite homogenized pole of culture has the samedistorting result because nonhuman influences and creativities must beerased or reduced. Neither way can we adequately recognize the uniqueinterwoven pattern of nature and culture which makes up the story of aplace, and makes each place unique. Recovering the lost ground of conti-nuity dualistic conception has hidden from us allows us to conceive thefield in more continuous and less regimented ways, recognizing nature inwhat has been seen as pure culture and culture in what has been seen aspure nature.

Similarly, traditions cast in the mold of Nature/Culture dualism tendto assume that human life takes place in the sphere of culture, while non-human life is part of the radically different sphere of nature—that is, theyassume separate casts of characters in separate dramas, nature for nonhu-

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mans, and culture for humans. The home of the human is the domain ofindividual consciousness, of ethics, politics and morality, of social changeand justice. In this tradition of apartness and segregation, the ecologicalside of human existence, of human impacts on and inclusion in ecosys-tems, is routinely ignored or denied.38 Humans stand apart asirreplaceable and unique individuals, who gain their right to control andsacrifice other species from their rational superiority. Nonhumans on theother hand are cast in a very different story, in which they figure asreplaceable members of much more holistic groupings such as popula-tions and species, as characters in Heraclitean ecological narratives ofenergy flows and exchanges in the food web, in “nature.”

An ecological consciousness strongly challenges these entrenchedmisconceptions and segregations, insisting that both casts of charactersare in both dramas. As the discipline of ecology, developed originally fromanimal studies, has shown us, humans are indeed in the ecological drama,not as an audience looking on but as actors on the stage, and the greattask of sustainability is desegregation, to accept our ecological identityand situate human life and settlement in ways that maintain the long-termfunctioning of the ecosystems we participate in. Likewise, the various ani-mal/nature respect positions and movements have shown us thatnonhumans too are in the “culture” drama, both as creators of their owncultures, especially in relation to place, and as crucial stakeholders in ade-quate human systems of ethics, politics and justice. Ethical and politicalconsiderations are certainly applicable to our relationships with them,and in varying ways to their own relationships with one another. Theother great task of countering nature-culture dualism becomes that of sit-uating our relations with the nonhuman world in ethical and politicalterms.

Critics of traditions of the hyperseparation of nature and culture,39

such as Donna Haraway, have been right to reject the picture of segrega-tion and stress the ways the dramas are imbricated in each other. They donot run in separate theaters, as in parallel universes, but have importantrelationships to each other it is our task to try to understand. Where thesecritics have not been right, however, is to go on from these insights toembrace the indistinguishability of nature and culture, indicated by theuse of the combined term ‘naturecultures.’ The assumption thatnature/culture frameworks are segregated and hyperseparate is one of the

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foundational illusions of western culture, and the first point of an ecolog-ical consciousness must be to correct it. But although we should reject thesegregation of casts, it doesn’t follow that the dramas themselves are justthe same, are indistinguishable, or that one can be reduced to the other.Although this is the conclusion often drawn from objections to hypersep-aration, it is not warranted by the logic of dualism or negation.Differences between segregated and hyperseparated groups (for example,men and women, whites and blacks), are often distorted and hyper-bolized, usually for political purposes, but we cannot conclude from thisthat the groups themselves are indistinguishable, that there are no salientdifferences between them.

In the case of nature, however, valid objections to hyperseparationand to the way science ‘naturalizes’ political constructions of the nonhu-man sphere40 are taken to validate inseparability and reductions of natureto culture. This rival, indeed reversal, reduction of nature to cultureappeals as a counter-agenda for the humanities to the naturalizing agendaof science and its blindness to cultural construction. The seductions ofidealism and social constructionism are again employed to support theculture-reductionist project. “Nature is a product of culture,” Cecile Jack-son asserts baldly. “The meaning of nature is dependent on historicallyand culturally specific understandings, which reflect gender differences aswell as other social divisions.”41 The plausibility of this argument seemsto rest on a simple use/mention confusion. Meanings and concepts maybe cultural products, but it does not follow that what they designate arealso, or we are forced to the extreme idealist conclusion that the entireuniverse, including distant stars we know nothing about, is a cultural con-struct.

Donna Haraway employs a more subtle but essentially similar semi-otic argument to support the conclusion that nature and culture cannotbe separated, arguing for a very strong form of nature/culture fusion thatinvolves “implosions of the discursive realms of nature and culture” in theconcept of “naturecultures.”“Natureculture is one word but we’ve inher-ited it as a gapped reality. . . .”42 Haraway’s underlying philosophy envis-ages reality as made up of fused “material-semiotic entities” and “empha-sizes the absolute simultaneity of materiality and semiosis...theinextricability of these two elements as well as the deeply historically con-tingent quality of it all.”43 Haraway is not a classical idealist in that she

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does not prioritize ideas or meanings as the only or primary reality, but itis not clear how this ‘natureculture’ position escapes the well-known dif-ficulties of idealism. The world of material-semiotic entities still has no in-dependence of its conception or conceivers. If humans are identified as theonly or primary conceivers or communicators, the position implies astrong form of human-centeredness. Aspects of the world prior to or un-known to the human sphere become inconceivable, as in idealism, and thehuman–identified ‘semiotic’ sphere takes on exaggerated importance asco-constitutor of the world.

What is lost when we refuse to acknowledge difference betweennature and culture, or when we accept an idealist or social construction-ist reduction of nature to culture? There may be a range of situations inwhich they are hard to separate, but there are are an important range ofothers in which recognizing their difference is crucial—including ecology,often engaged in discriminating anthropogenic factors that are underhuman control. First, as we saw in the case of High Country grazing, welose the ability to deal with cases of conflict between nature and culture,since conflict implies distinguishable elements. Second, we lose somethingthat is crucially important in the context of the ecological crisis, the ideaof constraints or limits, which as Haraway herself notes, is one of themeanings carried by the concept of nature. “The foil for culture, nature isthe zone of constraints, of the given, and of matter as resource; nature isthe necessary raw material for human action, the field for the impositionof choice, and the corollary of mind.”44

I think we should uncouple the various meanings here, which lumptogether the hyperseparated concept of nature as a mindless instrumental(resource) field oppositional to choice-imposing culture with the furthermeaning of nature as a zone of constraint or resistance. There is an impor-tant ambiguity in the way the ‘foil’ is imagined, as resource or asindependent agency, and a corresponding difference in the way constraintis recognized, as obstacle vs. difference, mastery vs. respect. The ‘brutematter’ or mindless resource construction Haraway associates withnature is aligned with a reluctant recognition of limits, as unreasonableobstacles which issue a challenge to overcome, conquer, and control. Inthe warrior mode of heroism this construction helps form the imaginaryof a science preoccupied with the imposition of human choice. Anotherway is through envisaging limit as resistance arising from the projects of


independent systems and agencies recognized as legitimate further occu-pants and constitutors of a fruitfully shared world. This is the friendliermode of encounter, respect, negotiation, and (possibly mutual) adjust-ment. An ecological consciousness would aim to replace the first form ofrecognition, by the second, but could continue to think of nature as azone of constraint. Distinguishing these forms of recognition of limitmakes it possible to reject the ‘mindless resource’ aspect of traditionalmeaning in favor of respect for independent agency, while retaining whatis important in the idea of constraint, the givenness or ‘thrownness’ ofnature, its priority, temporal or foundational, to the human sphere, andthus its role as limit.

Haraway is right that the idea of limit or constraint, whether con-strued in terms of mastery or respect, is central to concept of nature. Aswe saw in section 5, the dialectic of conservative versus radical under-standings of nature, the tug-of-war over nature’s extent, turns on this‘constraint’ meaning in which ‘nature’ demarcates the zone of acceptanceof limits, versus culture as a zone of freedom, choice, and challenge toapparent limits. The acceptance of limit is what the conservative ‘natural-ization’ of unjust distributions is about, what the attempt to discover anunchangeable ‘human nature’ or ‘female nature’ which legitimates them isabout, all of which the radical rejection of ‘nature’ is designed to chal-lenge. In this context it has seemed radical to reject both limits and natureindiscriminately, but this project has often taken the dubiously radicalform of reversal, retaining the mastery interpretation of the limits pre-sented by nature as unreasonable obstacles to human self-realizationrather than as limits on human self-expansion created by the presence ofnonhuman others, and differing from conservatism only in minimizingrather than maximizing their extent.

An age of ecological crises, as we press the oceans, the atmosphere, theecosystems, the species, to their limits of survival to meet our demands, isa time to acknowledge limits. We need a new dialectic of nature, culture,and boundaries that retains the radical objective of ‘denaturalizing’ andopening to question existing social power relations and distributions, butdiscards the automatic radical tendency to reject nature as limit in reactionto the conservative naturalizing agenda of modernity. A new dialectic willfoster ecologically-informed dialogue about what we can aim to change orcontrol and what we cannot, what we must adjust to, and which bound-

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aries we should respect. This dialogue on the self/other boundary willhardly be facilitated if it must start by imploding nature/culture discoursesand refusing conceptual expression to difference. Erasing difference in nar-rative here means failure to respect important boundaries, between aspectsof the world we humans have constructed (and might have constructedotherwise), and aspects that register the agency and operation of inde-pendent systems, processes, and cycles we do not control. Certainly eachsphere of nature and culture may be impure, may have more of the otherin it than we have been wont to admit, but implosion is a poor way to dealwith issues of gradation and purity, one that is complicit with the domi-nant narrative of control and supports the dangerous illusion that natureis no less malleable than culture. The recognition of nature as limit isrecognition of the foundational elements of the world that not only sup-port but literally ground our lives, not as tradeable conveniences but as un-compromisable primary enablers. An ecological discourse may certainlyprefer alternative terminology to that of nature used here, but the recogni-tion of limits that is lost in nature denial must be basic to it.

CONCLUSION

Nature scepticism and idealism are deadends in the quest for a routeto an ecologically-sensitive humanities consciousness. Culture reduction-ism cannot distinguish between presenting the zone of nature as one ofoptions and trade-offs, and treating it as foundational enabler whose sur-vival must constrain our choices. I have tried to suggest ways we mightdevelop alternative accounts of nature that start from our ecological con-text, taking account of what is valid in the indigenous, anti-dualist, andsceptical critique of nature and discarding the idealist and human-cen-tered elements. Our argument aimed to show that concepts of nature neednot involve the denial of indigenous presence in the land, that we canreject nature/culture dualism without rejecting difference and limits, andthat an ecological recognition of nature as a zone of limits need not sup-port a conservative agenda naturalizing social injustice. Perhaps we arecloser to being able to reconcile ecological, indigenous, and radical socialchange projects. That has been my aim.

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NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Reports, UNEP, 2005, forthcoming,Island Press. The Report speaks variously of ecosystems, ecosystem serv-ices, nature services, and nature, with mounting levels of generality.

2. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason (London: Methuen, 1984); ElizabethSpelman, The Inessential Woman. (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1988); Val Plum-wood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993).

3. If the master possesses reason, and the slave body, the master is essential tothe slave’s welfare, as Aristotle remarks, for the slave would be mindlessand will-less without him. The pattern supplies agency attributions thatjustify power relations and the profitable interventions of rational middle-men.

4. This model is suggested in Plato’s Timaeus and elaborated in Aristotle.5. The classic examples are Australia, Rhodesia, and the US. In the latter case,

the idea that the land has no prior human labor underlies models justify-ing colonial annexation of Native American lands and the formation ofprivate property.

6. As argued in Val Plumwood, “Wilderness Skepticism and Wilderness Dual-ism,” in J. B. Callicott and M. Nelson (eds.) The Great New WildernessDebate. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 652–690, and Envi-ronmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. (London: Routledge,2002); terra nullius is one of these. The term “first nature” goes back toclassical literature, but is ambiguous between ‘pure nature’ with no influ-ence of the human, (human being the privileged source of contrast), andthe idea of “what was there before some more specific context of or pro-posal for (humanized) change”: nature has both historical (pure) andrelative (‘the prior presence’) senses.

7. P. 7. We can see similar erasures of nonhuman agencies in such stockphrases of geography as: “Making (empty ?) spaces into places,” where thelatter is assumed to be an exclusively human activity. Also in the reductionof land to culture implicit in Sauer’s idea of landscape as ideology, theproduct of human customs, traditions, and life.

8. For example, Pearce F. Lewis, “Axioms for Reading the Landscape SomeGuides to the American Scene,” in D. W. Meinig (ed). The Interpretation ofOrdinary Landscapes, Geographical Essays (London: Oxford UniversityPress, 1979), states that “It is both proper and important to think of cul-tural landscapes as nearly everything we can see when we go outdoors.”This seems a more timid but equally unviable form of culture reduction-ism.

9. Some have argued a similar case that the dominant Christian model, asexemplified in the Virgin Mary, treats the mother as passive medium. See,for example, Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston, MA:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).

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10. The original is found in the National Library of Australia.11. See Teresa Brennan, History After Lacan (London: Routledge, 1996).12. See Plumwood 2002.13. Perhaps ‘interactive’ is the more general term of choice here, since not all

human-influenced land can be described as collaborative. Only some casesof nature–culture interaction involve working fruitfully or harmoniouslytogether, others involve destruction or disruption of the work of oneagency by another. If we mean by “collaborative” working harmoniouslytogether for an agreed end, we can’t reasonably call a gully of Gondwanicrainforest disfigured by the removal of tree ferns for sale a “collaborativelandscape.” But there are broad senses in which a piece of work, a reportfor example, may be collaborative even though those involved in it havelimited areas of disagreement.

14. See Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country (Sydney: UNSWPress, 2004).

15. A similar fallacy appears in many pro-whaling and other arguments that ap-peal to tradition (alias ‘cultural heritage’). Traditions that promote speciesextinction or land degradation are prime candidates for replacement.

16. See Bill Ne idjie, Kakadu Man (Canberra: Mybrood: P/L, 1986) and Rose2004.

17. See Vandana Shiva, “Democratising Biology: Reinventing Biology from aFeminist, Ecological and Third World Perspective,” in Linda Birke andRuth Hubbard (eds.) Reinventing Biolog, (Indianapolis: University of Indi-anapolis Press, 1995), pp. 50–74.

18. Shiva 1995.19. As I argued in Plumwood 2002.20. See Donna Haraway, Modest Witness @Second Millennium (New York:

Routledge 1997).21. For examples see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).22. Lorraine Code, “The Perversion of Autonomy and the Subjection of

Women,” in Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar (eds.) RelationalAutonomy : Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 181–212. 23 For details seePlumwood 1998.

24. Kate Soper, What is Nature? London: Routledge, 1994).25. See Shiva 1995.26. For a critique of this tendency, see Giovanna DiChiro, “Nature as Commu-

nity: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice,” in MichaelGoldman (ed). Privatizing Nature : Political Struggles for the Global Com-mons (London: Pluto, 1998), 120–143.

27. Marcia Langton, “What Do We Mean by Wilderness? Wilderness and terranullius in Australian Art,” The Sydney Papers. The Sydney Institute, Vol. 8no. 1, (1996) pp. 10–31.

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28. See Plumwood 1998; Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: IndianRemoval and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford, 1999;John O’Neill,”Wilderness, Cultivation, and Appropriation,” Philosophyand Geography, Vol. 5 no. 1 (2002), pp. 35–50; Andro Linklater, Measur-ing America: How the United States was Shaped by the Greatest Land Salein History (London: HarperCollins, 2002).

29. Wittgenstein in The Investigations famously refers to philosophy as ther-apy—for ailing concepts.

30. See Arturo Gomez-Pompa and Andrea Kaus, “Taming the WildernessMyth,” BioScience Vol. 42, no. 4, 1992, pp. 271–279; William Cronon,Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England(New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); “The Trouble with Wilderness: or, Get-ting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in William Cronon (ed.} UncommonGround: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995),pp. 69–90; Val Plumwood, “Towards a Progressive Naturalism,” Capital-ism, Nature, Socialism, Vo.l 12, no. 4, (December 2001), pp. 3–32.

31. This tradition, often situated as the dominant culture of the west, is to beidentified historically rather than geographically. See Carolyn Merchant,The Death of Nature (London: Wildwood House, 1980), and ReinventingEden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003).

32. See Tim Low, The New Nature (Melbourne: Viking, 2002), and WildThings: Born to Burn, forthcoming; R. W. Mutch, “Wildland Fires andEcosystems—a Hypothesis,” Ecology Vol. 51, no. 6, (1970) pp. 1046–1051.

33. See Plumwood 1993.34. Tim Flannery, Beautiful Lies: Population and Environment in Australia,

Quarterly Essay Issue 9, 2003, pp. 1–73. When you get to the discussion ofthe ‘real issues’ (sustainability) it is something of an anti-climax to discoverthat after all these have not been neglected because our attention has beendistracted by whales and koalas but because the market values that havebeen allocated to ecosysytem maintenance by economic rationalists ignoreenvironmental services and environmental flows, and for other reasons ofpolitical structure that remain unanalyzed in Flannery’s work.

35. As opposed to the generally friendly assessment of kangaroo hunters, forexample, in Tim Flannery, Country (Melbourne: Text, 2004).

36. I discuss other sources in Plumwood 1998.37. Thus we can no longer make sense of unexpectedly discovering (for exam-

ple ,by finding indigenous artefacts) that a particular landscape thought tobe natural was really cultural, since all conceivable landscapes are auto-matically cultural ab initio.

38. Or, it is assumed that inclusion in nature is a relic of an earlier, ‘primitive’stage of human existence, we civilized ones having found freedom fromnature.

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39. Hyperseparation at the conceptual level, the radical rejection of kinship,and exaggeration of differences, is usually accompanied by strong forms ofsegregation at the level of social arrangements.

40. See especially Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Naturein the World of Modern Science (new York: Routledge, 1989).

41. Cecile Jackson,“Women/Nature or Gender History? A Critique of Ecofem-inist ‘Development,’ ” Journal of Peasant Studies 20 (3): pp. 396–97.

42. Donna Haraway, How Like a Leaf (New York: Routledge, 2000) pp. 105–106. Note that there is a crucial ambiguity in the concept of the gap, as themaximum gap of hyperseparation versus the minimum gap of difference.

43. Haraway 2000, p. 137.44. Haraway 1997, p. 102.

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The Concept of Cultural Landscape

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