Beyond the Culture of Nature: Introduction

Is it time to move beyond the culture of nature? This question lay at the centre of a conference held at the University of British Columbia in 2012, and both question and conference animate this theme issue. For decades, the phrase "culture of nature" has been deployed in Canadian and environmental studies to examine the cultural mediation of the rest of nature or tropes of nature and nation. Just what constitutes a culture or nature, or various proxy terms with their own complex histories like wilderness or environment, is neither agreed upon nor fixed. For some, the culture of nature is fundamentally a problem of cultural analysis to be approached through studies of representation and discourse. For others, the very phrase "the culture of nature" risks reproducing a false dichotomy constructed from a binary ontology. In a perceptive and sweeping consideration of the subject, Bruce Braun (2004) reviews diverse efforts to overcome nature/culture dichotomies in recent social and cultural theory, from the integrative practices of political ecology to the non-modern ontologies inspired by Bruno Latour's actor-network theory. A host of neologisms have entered the fray, such as socionatures, assemblages, and hybrids, each of which raises its own possibilities and problems for thinking differently about causality, nature, and human action. In a sympathetic critique of these diverse efforts, Juanita Sundberg (2014) notes the dominance of Anglo-European terms and references in posthumanist theory and the absence of serious engagement with non-Western ontologies. What all of this means for the investigation of the culture of nature in Canada and how we might best address common concerns in Canadian and environmental studies is open for debate.

Cultural analyses of nature in Canada long predate use of the phrase "culture of nature." Some of the earliest contributions to Canadian scholarship identified the centrality of natural resources to national development and analyzed how staple products were wrested from beaver, trees, cod, and wheat (e.g., Innis 1930). The Laurentian interpretation of Canadian history cast the St. Lawrence River as a critical entry point to the continent and described it as an almost animate actor in a narrative of national origins (Creighton 1937). Canadians were fundamentally possessed, Northrop Frye argued in The Bush Garden, of a "garrison mentality" at siege from a hostile environment (1971, 225). While such touchstones remind us of the long-held and enduring connections between nature and culture in Canada, our point of departure is more recent and seeks not to deploy nature as an explanation of or justification for nation.

The title of this theme issue alludes to two books that set the terms of our discussion and illustrate shifts in thinking about the culture of nature in Canada: Alexander Wilson's The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (1991) and John O'Brian and Peter White's Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art (2007). It is of no small interest that Wilson's book remains one of the most influential titles in the international literature dealing with the culture of nature. Search for "culture of nature" in Google Scholar and his book comes out as the top hit, widely cited and reviewed across the humanities and social sciences. Written by a Toronto-based, private scholar, The Culture of Nature is idiosyncratic and original in its choice of subjects and juxtapositions, dealing at once with nature tourism, zoos, and nuclear power plants. The book's title highlights Wilson's intention to analyze how nature and landscapes are culturally produced and imagined; he begins from the assumption that nature does not stand apart from humanity—he calls this notion "a lie" (1991, 13)—but is deeply enmeshed in human culture. From Disney World to gardens to oil spills, the play of human culture in representations and fabrications of nature draws his eye. Wilson not only identifies how human representations frame and enter into the rest of nature, but also argues passionately for a new approach to the culture of nature, an approach that acknowledges a human presence in the landscape and seeks to...