The Changing Nature of Nature: Environmental Politics in the Anthropocene

Environmentalism has long seen its job as protecting nature from human exploitation. Over the past few decades, it has become clear that this effort no longer makes sense. In the Anthropocene, humans exert global impact on the earth’s ecosystems and thus erase the divide between themselves and nature. Furthermore, contemporary thinkers recognize that nature is not a self-subsisting entity but a social construction, and thus cannot naively be defended. What kind of environmental politics is appropriate for the Anthropocene? What type of politics corresponds to a world indelibly inflected with a human signature and overlaid so thickly with human interpretation? This article depicts the emergence of a post-nature environmental politics and offers conceptual clarity on how it might evolve. It shows that decreasing numbers of environmentalists continue to subscribe to a romantic notion of pristine nature independent of humans but that an alternative understanding eludes conceptual clarity. This is because many environmentalists see the Anthropocene and social constructivism as calling simply for a strategy of enhancing both human and nonhuman welfare—as if the two are complementary spheres each deserving protection. This article emphasizes the co-constitutive character of the earth—where humans are part of a tightly coupled biogeochemical earth system that defies untangling—and explains how environmentalists must search for and align their actions according to patterns within such hybridity. This involves looking neither to nature nor to humans for cues on how to live, but instead finding a middle path through the urge to master or harmonize with the nonhuman world. The article explains the idea of a post-nature politics in the abstract and illustrates what it looks like in practice with regard to wilderness protection and climate change.