Just as global warming is only one additional, particularly urgent reason to break with the neoliberal political paradigm, so it is but another nail in the coffin of anti-realism. But postmodernist disavowal dies hard. Much social theory continues to dispute the actuality not only of the past, but of nature. In Making Sense of Nature: Representation, Politics and Democracy, summing up decades of research, Noel Castree first subscribes to a common-sense definition of nature as that which antedates human agency and endures, even if in altered form, when human agents have worked on it.7 Then he builds an elaborate case for rejecting its existence. Since there are so many ways of thinking about nature, so many variegated meanings attached to it, so many powerful ‘epistemic communities’ – including geographers such as Castree himself – earning a living from representing it, so long a tradition of governing people through spurious reference to it, nature really ‘doesn’t exist “out there” (or “in here”, within us) waiting to be understood’, independent of mind, available for experience. ‘I thus regard “nature” as a particularly powerful fiction.’ Or: ‘nature exists only so long as we collectively believe it to exist’ – it ‘is an illusion’, ‘just what we think it is’ – or simply: ‘there’s no such thing as nature’.8 Its only reality pertains to its power as a figment of discourse.
In one of his extended case studies, Castree reads pamphlets from a timber company and the environmentalists fighting its plans to cut down the British Columbia forest of Clayoquot Sound in the 1980s. The former portrayed the forest as a resource to be harvested, the latter as a wildlife sanctuary to be protected for its own sake. Did either side represent it more accurately than the other? Impossible to say. There was no ‘pre-existing entity ontologically available to be re-presented in different ways’, no ‘“external nature”’, no forest as such prior to its being described; asking if Clayoquot Sound is a rare ecosystem is to pose a meaningless question.9 All natures are constructed within the social world; the one storyline is as fabricated as the other. One cannot reach beyond the filter of ideas, affects, projects to touch or smell the trunks and the moss as they really are.
What could this mean for global warming? Castree is consistent. ‘Global climate change is an idea’ – emphasis in original – ‘rather than simply a set of “real biophysical processes” occurring regardless of our representations of it.’10 The ontological status of global warming is that of an idea. So when the villages in a valley in Pakistan are swept away by a flood, or a monarch butterfly population collapses, or cities in Colombia run out of water due to extreme drought, it is not a real biophysical process but an idea that strikes them. The way to stop climate change would then be to give up that idea. Perhaps we can exchange it for global cooling. If we take Castree at his word – climate change is not a process in biophysical reality that occurs regardless of our representations of it, but an invention of the human mind: for such is all nature – these corollaries follow by necessity. It is unlikely that he would endorse them, which suggests that his argument about nature makes rather little sense of it, drawn as he is into the most banal form of the epistemic fallacy: just because we come to know about global warming through measurements and comparisons and concepts and deductions, it is in itself made up of those things.11 We seem to be at a serious methodological disadvantage if we cannot reject that fallacy and affirm that there was in fact nature on Labuan – not in the sense of an idea, but of some objective, extra-discursive reality – in which the British found coal to burn, likewise in nature, with equally real consequences down the road. Understanding the historical phenomenon appears to require realism about the past and about nature.
Now Castree is far from the first to express the view that nature is fiction. Back in 1992, in the heyday of postmodernism, Donna Haraway pronounced that nature is ‘a powerful discursive construction’: it is ‘a trope. It is figure, construction, artefact, movement, displacement. Nature cannot pre-exist its construction’, and neither can organisms or bodies, which emerge out of discourse.12 This was a staple of postmodernism, and it remains a popular notion – among certain academics, that is – until this day. In Living through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism, Paul Wapner asserts that nature is ‘not a self-subsisting entity’ but ‘a contextualized idea’, ‘an ideational canvas’, ‘a projection of cultural understandings’, ‘a social construction’ – a view he finds both ‘solipsistic’ and ‘compelling’.13 We shall come across plenty of other cases.
That such a cloistered doctrine survives in the age of global warming must be deemed remarkable. It is even more so for the devastating refutations the doctrine has suffered.14 The fact that all sorts of ideas about nature whirl in and around human minds does not justify the conclusion that these cannot be distinguished from that which they are about: as a matter of course, conceptions of nature are culturally determined, but the referent is not thereby similarly constituted. Ten herders can draw very different portraits of the same goat, but that does not mean that the goat is a painting. If three hikers come down from a mountain with discrepant impressions – the first found it an easy trip; the second is heavily pregnant and could barely make it; the third is mostly struck by the novelty of snow – we do not thereby infer that they must have climbed three different mountains. We believe that the mountain is one, and that it has certain features, such as height, gradient, and extent of the snowpack, that exist in themselves regardless of how the hikers have perceived them. As humans, we cannot say what a storm is like without deploying language, but that does not mean that the storm is a linguistic entity or consists of speech acts.15
In fact, it is a trivial observation that ideas about nature are products of social life – so are all ideas – and a mysterious proposition that nature equals these ideas and change as they do. That would mean, for instance, that the sun once rotated around the earth and then swapped place with it. Either the actually existing forest contains a rich wildlife or it does not; either the biosphere is warming up or it is not – and how we come to regard the wildlife and the warming is another matter entirely. What Castree espouses, and others with him, is a form of constructionism about nature; although it might depart from the innocent insight that we think and talk when we think and talk about nature, it slides into the proposition that nature is thereby constructed, coming into the world through our ideas, and that no other nature exists.16 It is a constructionism of the idealist, neo-Kantian, distinctly postmodernist brand.17
It seems unable to inspire the kind of theory we need. Temperatures are not rising because people have thought about coal or made mental images of highways: that is not how environmental degradation happens. ‘In short’, in Kate Soper’s famous formulation, ‘it is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer’, not a text that is heating up, ‘and the “real” thing continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level of the signifier’ – what some social theory, even when it professes to deal with nature, continues to obsess about.18 What would an alternative view of nature look like? In What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, surely the most incisive inquiry into that question ever written, Soper defends the following answer: nature is ‘those material structures and processes that are independent of human activity (in the sense that they are not a humanly created product), and whose forces and causal powers are the necessary conditions of every human practice, and determine the possible forms it can take.’19 That definition deserves to be read again and memorised. Many others have been proposed – we shall inspect some of them below – but we shall treat this realist definition as capturing the essence of the realm we know as nature. The very existence of that realm thus defined, however, is hotly disputed.