Whose Nature?

Debate about the meaning of “nature” can become almost as heated as battles over clear-cut logging practices or endangered species protection. On the one hand, many scholars in political theory, geography, history, anthropology, and cultural studies — likely including most readers of this online journal — confidently assert that nature is a social construction. Self-evident though this position may seem to some, it is anathema to many environmentalist thinkers. The latter insist that to claim nature as a construction is a conceit of those unable or unwilling to temper their egos long enough to experience the reality of the non-human, natural world. More urgently, they insist, constructivist claims bolster the agenda of developers and industrialists who profit from the exploitation of this non-human world. Renowned poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder, for instance, confesses (in an essay entitled “Is Nature Real?”) to “getting a bit grumpy about the dumb arguments being put forth by high-paid intellectual types in which they are trying to knock Nature, knock the people who value Nature, and still come out smelling smart and progressive”.¹

At first, The Intemperate Rainforest and Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference both appear to be the sort of books at which Snyder aims his criticisms. Both, after all, highlight and explore diverse claims to know nature, while seeking to “come out smelling smart and progressive.” Yet at the same time, both books do aspire to take nature seriously. To the extent that they succeed in drawing these concerns together, then, they might offer a breakthrough in the standoff between constructivist and so-called realist conceptions of nature.

Geographer Bruce Braun, in The Intemperate Rainforest, is especially effective in developing constructivist insights without diminishing the centrality or importance of the biophysical world. He carefully examines the highly charged and internationally prominent battle over logging and deforestation in Clayoquot Sound of western British Columbia, as grounds for an extended meditation on the inevitable entanglements of “nature” and “culture.” Braun uses the lens of what he terms “social nature” to understand and appreciate these entanglements. He responds to the fear of Snyder and others who believe that a socially constructed view of nature will threaten environmentalist objectives by arguing that “seeing the world in terms of nature-culture ‘hybrids’ . . . presents the best way to understand and interrogate present-day social and environmental conditions and to imagine steps toward ecologically sustainable and socially just futures” (p.10). The point here is not, as the critics would have it, to deny the existence or relevance of an external, non-human world, but instead to recognize and explore the significance of the contested character of this world. While not wholly original, Braun’s theoretical discussion here is especially well-articulated and, as I hope to make clear, put to good use later in the book.

Braun is particularly successful in using “social nature” to understand and allow us to rethink the “ambivalent place of indigenous peoples within environmental discourse” (p.71). The contemporary debate over land use in Clayoquot Sound has typically been framed as one between “environmentalists” and “industry.” Yet Braun argues that this frame necessarily marginalizes the place and the role of indigenous peoples in the Sound. Reading the nineteenth century journals of George Mercer Dawson, who traveled the west coast with the Canadian Geological Survey, for example, he explores the roots of this contemporary marginalization in a colonial history of viewing Indians as wholly separate from the “natural” landscape. Only by inheriting a practice of seeing the landscape in this way, Braun argues, could one regard the contemporary Sound as both pristine nature and sovereign Canadian territory. While advancing this critique, Braun is not seeking to resurrect its mirror image, in which First Nations are romanticized as inherently “ecological,” living in harmony with nature (p.32). This, too, serves to marginalize, as it measures contemporary Indian peoples by the standards of a supposedly...