Performing Nature: Truth and the Body in Environmental Consciousness

Performing Nature: Perception, Practice, and the Body in Environmental Consciousness

Prelude

Everyone knows that protecting nature is the point of environmentalism. Early conservation efforts in the United States were focused on the protection of wild places that were the very geophysical embodiment of nature. It was a feeling of solidarity with nature that was successfully mobilized in the mid twentieth century to forge a political movement that resulted in far-reaching environmental legislation in the United States and beyond during the 1970s. But today this ethical naturalism no longer seems able to bear the weight of an effective political movement. The very idea of nature seems to be crumbling, leaving environmentalism suspended awkwardly in ideological space.

Politically, the beginning of the “end of nature” may have come soon after environmentalism’s political victories in the 1970s. The anti-environmentalist backlash that would become the “wise use” movement during the 1980s was quite successful in pushing back strongly against the supposed rights of nature, which large majorities had so vigorously defended in previous decades. This anti-environmentalism has persisted as some social conservatives have conspired with the powerful interests of a global capitalism to undermine the old concept of nature by naturalizing the very forces of industrialization and development from which nature was supposed to be protected. The blows dealt to ethical naturalism by the Right were not decisive, but looking back now we can see how they dovetailed with certain ideological critiques of naturalism coming from the Left. Post-modern social theory, which largely grew out of the New Left of the 50s and 60s, spent much of the late 20th century assailing the naturalism that had been mobilized by social and economic conservatives in the 20th century to defend capitalism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. 

As these ostensibly opposing ideological forces played out, environmental activists, theorists, and writers were generating their own internal critiques. By the mid-1990s prominent environmentalists began to call “nature” into question. Bill McKibben, perhaps unwittingly, initiated a deep critical questioning of the “nature” concept with his popular book, The End of Nature (1989). Ecological theorists such as Daniel Botkin (1990) unspooled the concept further by showing the distance that had long existed between the findings of ecological science and the popular conceptions of “ecosystem harmony” and the “balance of nature” that had been so effectively mobilized by science writers such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson in the mid-twentieth century. And William Cronon (1994) followed suit by publishing a now well-known article calling into question the idea of wilderness, which had been so important to the early preservationist movements. 

Recently these criticisms have begun spilling out of the pages of books and journals and into mainstream environmental politics. Old Guard environmental organizations such as the Nature Conservancy have begun to embrace a new, corporate-friendly version of “conservation science” geared toward managing “ecosystem services” in “mixed-use” landscapes, leaving many of the group’s members wondering whether the group is really still conserving nature, and some others wondering whether there was ever any nature to conserve in the first place.

It is a remarkable irony that the normative foundations of environmentalism are being shaken just as environmental concerns are finally being pushed to the forefront of politics all around the world. The concept of the Anthropocene—a recently coined term that is rapidly expanding into the popular lexicon—is bound up with this irony. The Anthropocene marks both the contemporary strength and the contemporary dissolution of environmentalism. The term first of all registers a widespread acknowledgment that humans have become a geophysical force with planet altering effects. However, the Anthropocene has also come to stand for a larger melding of the human and the natural estates, undermining the traditional dichotomy of nature and “Man,” and therefore undermining the normative standard ecologism has relied upon. Recent research in ecology and environmental history stresses that humans have been radically altering ecosystems, driving extinctions as well as speciations, for many thousands of years. We are also becoming more aware of the non-linear dynamics and instabilities that have characterized the planet and the biosphere long before the advent of the genus Homo. The idea that the earth is stable and that humans are the disruptive force was a key component of the old idea of nature, traceable at least as far back as George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864). But as political theorist William Connolly has recently written, “planetary gradualism is dead.”

While this deep self-questioning of environmentalism is only recently seeping into mainstream culture, environmental theorists in academia have been grappling with the “nature” question for a long time. The pace has picked up especially in the last decade or so, with a number of recent books critiquing “nature” as a guiding concept, and trying to articulate the values that might motivate an updated, post-natural environmentalism. This sort of scholarship takes on increasing importance as a wider public is now beginning to look for answers to the ideological uncertainties surrounding contemporary environmental politics. And yet, at the same time, this sort of scholarship—contesting a concept as broad, as abstract, and as plural in its meanings as nature—always teeters on a knife edge of relevance above an abyss of frivolous sophistry and useless academic hair-splitting. This is especially true of critiques that target “nature” as a social construct, or focus on artistic and literary renderings of an idealized state or situation, such as the “state of nature,” or the “wild frontier,” or the pastoral “middle landscape.” Post-natural environmental critiques of this sort have made valuable contributions, but the premise of Performing Nature is that such critiques are incomplete when they operate only in the cognitive realm—the realm of ideas, discourses, images, tropes, and ideals. Concentrating only on ideals and imagery makes it too easy to miss the ways in which concepts are forged, energized, and even reshaped and contested in the material and practical world. A warning offered by the political theorist Hannah Arendt is appropriate here: “Tempting as it may be for the sake of sheer consistency...it would be a delusion and a grave injustice to the problems of the modern age if one looked upon them merely from the viewpoint of the development of ideas” (1958, 333). It is necessary, in other words, to periodically revisit how ideas, in their effects and in their historical dynamics, are inextricably linked with matter, bodies, and praxis. 

While concepts are embedded in discursive structures, and can even be firmly stabilized within binaries such as “nature/politics” or “nature/human,” such discursive structures are themselves embedded in what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called “forms of life,” which of course include embodied practices and projects carried on in the physical world. It is a mere truism to say that words and concepts refer to the physical world, and thus to the world of practice. But what is important to attend to is that it is also within our practical lives that concepts originate. Of course, the practical origin of concepts has long been pointed out by the proponents of philosophical pragmatism. And the pragmatist’s point is quite obvious when we consider more concrete, specific concepts such as chairs and tables. We have the concept “table” because we set things on things. However, when we consider more abstract and normatively freighted concepts like nature, the tendrils of connection to the practical world are less clear. 

“Nature,” after all, is not just any concept. Like “God,” “life,” or “truth,” “nature” is an especially philosophical concept. This basic insight helps explain why environmentalism has always found itself immediately, and often begrudgingly, entangled with questions and challenges that are theological, cosmological, existential, and always inescapably political. There is arguably no term more closely associated with the earliest development of Western philosophy than phusis, the Greek word for nature. The first written philosophical treatises were titled “peri phuseo,” “On Nature.” Etymologists tell us that the term phusis rose in the first millennium BCE from an obscure term associated with the growth of living things to become a central cosmological concept with myriad meanings. One classicist catalogued over 60 distinct senses of the term physis discernible in classical texts, from denoting the inborn essence of the soul, to referring to the totality of the cosmos. Many of these meanings have persisted in the western concept of nature.

Such a diffuse and abstract concept would seem, then, to be far removed from the everyday, practical world. The premise of this book, however, is that even very abstract concepts have practical lives, and that following the practical, material lives of philosophical concepts is as important a critical project as following their literary and discursive genealogies. If nature is a concept demanding critical attention, it should be attended to not only as a discursive construction, but also as an embodied performance, or rather a set of various embodied performances.

Attending to the practical lives of philosophical concepts necessarily raises questions about the broader relationship between philosophy and praxis. Philosophy can certainly be something one “does,” but doing philosophy is usually thought of as only a hair’s breadth away from doing nothing. In Ancient Greece, the philosopher was already seen as the obverse of the practical man. Greek philosophers, being of the leisured class, were exempted from the practical world of work. But philosophers like Socrates took their leisure a step further, not only eschewing work (and purportedly neglecting their household affairs), but largely avoiding politics as well. The philosopher in Aristophones' comedy, The Birds, was so absorbed in other-worldly thought he walked headlong into a well. Philosophy thinks; it does not do. 

And yet philosophy has its own peculiar preoccupation with praxis. Nietzsche, in The Genealogy of Morals, showed how philosophy in the ancient world shared with religious mysticism a general tendency toward ascetic practices such as dwelling in solitude, making long journeys on foot, abstaining from food and water, and even rituals of self-injury. Ancient cynics, for example, were a school of philosophy recognized by their peculiar lifestyle of intentional vagabondage and penury. Michel Foucault has traced the histories of similar “techniques of the self” associated with both ancient and modern philosophy. 

Modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, hardened the philosophical distinction between mind and body, thereby seeming to categorically dispense with any subsequent philosophical interest in praxis. However, while this new philosophical chasm between the the spiritual and the material is often seen as a harbinger of modern alienation from nature, Cartesian dualism also created a certain pathos of distance that would eventually lead philosophers like Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the American Transcendentalists to an intensified fascination with the material world of nature, bodies, and praxis. The image that rises from the opening pages of Descartes’ Meditations, of the philosopher sitting before his fire in his dressing gown rolling a ball of wax between his fingers, signals the beginning of both a profound dismissal of materiality and a specifically modern fascination with it, as a kind of philosophically forbidden realm.

Philosophy’s stubborn attachments to the practical, material world is partly owed to its fundamentally critical mission. From its earliest beginnings, philosophy (which would not be distinguished from science for two millennia) existed to challenge prevailing wisdom—especially religious and political wisdom. Philosophy has its roots in critique and has never strayed far from those beginnings. “Nature,” therefore, as a philosophical concept, is also, as has often been pointed out, a fundamentally critical and normative concept. An appeal to nature in support of one’s position is an appeal to an absolute external authority, and to show that something is against nature is perhaps the most frequently used mode of political critique. 

But how does one do this? In a certain sense, the task is to “naturalize” oneself—to establish oneself as having some manner of privileged access or particular proximity to nature as a fount of truth, and therefore as having the right to speak for nature. Scientists, mystics, politicians, and eco-warriors all have strategies accomplishing this. Often the strategies entail putting some kind of distance between oneself and the social/political/human world. Establishing a critical subjectivity in this way is not a merely rhetorical activity, much less a solely mental one; it is also necessarily a performative, embodied task. No political activist, and certainly no environmental activist, would find it controversial to claim that critique is embodied and material, or that critique can be a way of life. And yet this insight has implications that can be easily overlooked in philosophical debates. Many have pointed out that “nature” as a normative, critical concept, is impossible to define, doesn’t stand up under scrutiny, is analytically useless, etc. However, even philosophical concepts do not rise and fall on definitional rigor. They persist in part because they are bound up with specific modes of life, with specific practices and the salience we accord to them. We have the concept of nature not only because we recite the poetry of Byron, watch the Discovery Channel, or read the latest IPCC report, but also because we get out of town on weekends to unwind. Because we study aquatic ecology to better appreciate our impact on local wetlands. Because we dig in the garden to relax, or to connect with our food chain, we climb mountains to feel cosmic humility, or visit foreign biomes as eco-tourists, or even chain ourselves to trees in protest of deforestation.

That the environmentalist’s “nature” is practiced or performed in this sense, as well as discursively constructed, is attested by the numerous ecocritics and nature writers who advocate, theorize, and celebrate various concrete “techniques” for restoring one-ness with nature and becoming harmonized with or at home in “the environment,” or otherwise coming to a deep understanding of the ecological world—walking in the woods, studying predator-prey dynamics, living simply on Tinker Creek or at Walden Pond, and so on. Through the careful imbrication of thought and practice, these testimonies tell us, one can actually become or work toward becoming un-alienated from physical nature. This book dwells on these practices and their peculiar imbrication with the search for truth. The premise of Performing Nature is that it is ultimately from such eco-critical practices that “nature” and the related concepts that undergird environmental consciousness take their shifting meanings and their moral and affective force. Therefore, an effective self-critique of environmentalism requires not just re-thinking and re-wording the Western environmental movement, but also re-enacting it. 

Performing Nature, therefore, is a book about practices, bodies, and matter. It writes and thinks about practice. And it writes about writings and thoughts about practices. Like other books in the post-natural naturalism genre, Performing Nature is metacritical. It critiques environmentalism’s critiques, but it does so with the recognition that critiques are always enacted and embodied. Performing Nature, therefore, unapologetically tries to jump over its own shadow. It tries to become more than text, as all texts try to do. Performing Nature aims to perform and re-perform nature, if only through textual evocation. Its thoughts, in any case, want to be thought by bodies. It tries in vain to become material, knowing anyway that it could never not be.