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AN EPIC CASE OF BAD HISTORICAL TIMING

In This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, Naomi Klein spots an ‘epic case of bad historical timing’: just as scientists awakened to the magnitude of global warming and called for a drastic change of course, governments, under neoliberal sway, surrendered the very idea of interfering with the self-driving market.¹ Another case can be added. Just as the biosphere began to catch fire, social theory retreated ever further from sooty matter, into the pure air of text. The introduction to an issue of Theory, Culture and Society devoted to climate change registers a late awakening: ‘The world of culture and virtuality has met its match; the material world apparently does matter and can “bite back”.’² Almost as disarmed as governments, a social theory sequestered in the cultural turn long faced climate change with an ingrained refusal to recognise – let alone intervene in – extra-discursive reality: no wonder it looked the other way.

As the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ climbed towards the 400 ppm mark, postmodernist philosophers advanced the view that what historians do is little more than invent images of the past. The real past, says Keith Jenkins, ‘doesn’t actually enter into historiography except rhetorically’: when the historian purports to relay events, what she is actually doing is giving a passionate speech embellished with cherry-picked data. All interpretations of the past are ‘fabricated’, ‘invented’, ‘metaphorical’, ‘self-referencing’ – having no basis outside of themselves – and hence equally valid; the sole ground for choosing one over the other is personal taste.³ In his already classic rebuttal of such historiography, In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans deploys Auschwitz as an overwhelming master-case; mutatis mutandis, we can expect global warming to be similarly used. To paraphrase Evans: global warming is not a discourse. It trivialises the suffering it generates to see it as a text. The excessive temperatures are not a piece of rhetoric. Global warming is indeed inherently a tragedy and cannot be seen either as a comedy or a farce. And if this is true of global warming, then it must be true at least to some degree of other past happenings, events, institutions, people as well.⁴

One premise of the postmodernist philosophy of history is incontrovertible: the past is gone forever and cannot be retrieved for sensory perception. Historians have access only to shards and fragments that happen to have survived the flames of time, and their representations of the past cannot be taken at face value. Consider the picture of the two British men in the rainforest of Labuan. Supposedly painting a scene that once took place in reality, how can we rely on it to correctly depict what happened? From this sceptical attitude – the stock and trade of historians, as so many have pointed out – postmodernists draw the eccentric conclusion that documents like this offer no peephole into the real past, for they are saturated by the power of discourse blocking the sight. And surely, the picture is overlaid with a set of discursive constructs: white men in virginal nature, picking out what belongs to them, finding the path to progress ‘savages’ have neglected, preparing to tame the raw. But it also appears to have a material substratum. We have reasons to believe that it refers not only to other images – of men, nature, progress, order – but likewise to an actual identification of the coal seams of Labuan by British imperial agents.⁵ Among those reasons is global warming itself. If the temperature on the earth is rising, it must be because myriad scenes such as in the Labuan forest have played out in the past: for ‘the causes of real effects cannot be unreal.’⁶ Present warming suggests that neither commanders of the Royal Navy nor latter-day historians can possibly have cooked up all these mountains of evidence for the consumption of fossil fuels in the past. To the contrary, the fossil economy must have been there for quite some time, before it became visible as a historical entity, existing independently of ideas about it – or else we would not be living on this warming planet. A generalised abnegation of the real past guarantees that the history of that economy cannot be written, or written only as free-wheeling fiction, which would scarcely be of any help.

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.

THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE?

Can we really say that the climate of planet Earth, as a major component of nature, is independent of human activity – not created by humans? Is it not precisely the other way around now? This would seem to be a case for the theory of ‘the production of nature’. Laid out by Neil Smith in Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, it says that nature is anything but independent; it might have been so in some distant pre-human mist but no longer. Nowadays, nature is produced to the core, from within, in its totality, as the forces of capital reshuffle and rework matter in accordance with their logic. When did primeval nature succumb to such awesome social power? Smith is unclear on this point. In some passages, he seems to argue that the production of nature is indeed a phenomenon specific to capitalism; in others, he hints at a much earlier date of human annexation. Unproduced nature ceases to exist wherever one species has set foot: ‘Human beings have produced whatever nature became accessible to them’ – not only over the past few centuries, but as long as they have cuddled in caves and foraged in forests.²⁰ Here, the purpose of the theory seems to be not so much to track a historical shift as to collapse the natural into the social altogether, irrespective of dates and epochs, a priori as it were. Indeed, Smith posits ‘a social priority of nature; nature is nothing if it is not social.’²¹ One geographer who has often stood up for his theory, Noel Castree, states that it ‘is intended to oppose the idea of an independent, non-social nature’, postulating a fusion ‘from the very start’.²²

What are the analytical gains of this move? In the first edition of his classic from 1984, Smith precociously mentions anthropogenic climate change as one instance of the production of nature, but in the afterword to the third edition from 2008, he has something else to say: we cannot know to what extent the climate is changing due to human activities.²³ Even trying would presuppose the false separation.

The attempt to distinguish social vis-à-vis natural contributions to climate change is not only a fool’s debate but a fool’s philosophy: it leaves sacrosanct the chasm between nature and society – nature in one corner, society in the other – which is precisely the shibboleth of modern western thought that ‘the production of nature’ thesis sought to corrode.²⁴

This sounds like an admission that the theory would not, after all, be very relevant for the study of global warming. If we must refrain from saying that it is caused by social and not by natural factors – distinguishing the two: singling out one, ruling out the other – how could we acknowledge its existence, let alone investigate it as a result of history?

In Alienation and Nature in Environmental Philosophy, the most illuminating piece of work to emerge from that subdiscipline since Soper, Simon Hailwood underscores that the very notion of anthropogenic causation requires one of independent nature. ‘If it is important to say that humans made this, caused that, are responsible for such and such, then we need to run the idea of at least some occurrences as not of our doing’ – as that which, in our case, preceded the fossil economy and would have continued without it: the typical Holocene climate.²⁵ As Smith himself admits, one cannot catch sight of global warming if one has removed the background of non-social nature (hence, in his logic, only a fool would try).²⁶ It seems to follow that some sort of distinction between ‘society’ and ‘nature’ remains indispensable, both for research on the history of the fossil economy and for climate science as such; in the field of event attribution, incidentally, simulation of recent storms is contrasted to models of what the weather would have been like in the absence of human influence.²⁷ That is how the historical imprint is detected.

But still: is not the climate of today precisely produced? Retaining a nature without human influence in counterfactual computer models is certainly not a way to prove its continued existence. Might the theory be useful if restricted to the past two centuries? To explore this possibility, we must turn to some other attempts to pursue the intuition that nature is now social all the way down.

THE END OF NATURE?

In 1990, one year after Jameson’s Postmodernism was published, Bill McKibben proclaimed ‘the end of nature’ in a book of the same name, today regarded as the first popular book on climate change. Before almost everyone else, he sensed that the altered composition of the atmosphere turns everything inside out: the meaning of the weather, to begin with. A sudden downpour can no longer be shrugged off or an Indian summer enjoyed as a caprice of nature. All weather must now be distrusted as an artefact of ‘our ways of life’, including on a Svalbard mountaintop or an Atacama sand dune, in areas that pass as remote wilderness: with CO₂, the human fingerprint is everywhere. ‘We have produced the carbon dioxide – we have ended nature’ – or: ‘By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.’²⁸

Under what definition has nature disappeared? It might seem, at first glance, that McKibben is operating with a definition akin to Soper’s – ‘independence’ being the key term – but he pushes it one crucial notch further. He is not referring to nature as a set of material structures and processes with causal powers of their own, not to the end of photosynthesis or respiration or cloud formation; all such things, he affirms, are here to stay. Rather, ‘we have ended the thing that has, at least in modern times, defined nature for us – its separation from human society’, meaning its purity, its condition of being perfectly pristine, untouched, unaffected by people.²⁹ Only under this definition can nature possibly be said to have ended. But is it a reasonable one?

If I mix my coffee with sugar, I do not thereby come to believe that the coffee has ended. I believe it has shed one condition and assumed another: it is no longer black coffee, but sweet. Normally, in our daily lives and languages, we do not hold that when A comes into contact with B it ceases to exist – a private company remains a private company as it parleys with the state; a lake stays a lake even if tons of sediment pour into it. This should be an idea particularly commonplace to anyone familiar with Marxist dialectics: capitalist property relations do not vanish the moment they become entangled with feudal or socialist ones; capital can only expand by constantly relating to its arch-foe labour, and so on, throughout a world in which a unity of opposites is an unsurprising state of affairs. Should we proceed differently with nature? Is there any reason to build a certain condition – namely, absence of social influence – into the definition of this particular thing, as a touchstone of its very existence?

We might call this the purist definition. McKibben presents no justification for it; he simply takes it for granted. But if we consider nature on a slightly smaller scale, it does seem difficult to uphold. Take the oceans. They are now marred by plastic waste swirling around in giant gyres, acidification, overfishing and other human impacts that extend into the deepest, darkest recesses – so can we say that they ipso facto are no more? Hardly. The oceans are in a different state, but they are with us as much as ever – and if this applies to the oceans, which form a fairly significant component of what we know as ‘nature’, why not also to that majestic totality? There seem to be two possible solutions here. Either one injects sacredness, some form of (ironically) supernatural value into the definition of nature, or one holds on to an extreme form of dualism, which would allow for the belief that the essence of nature is its absolute segregation from human society.³⁰

Now, if we conclude, as we should, that the purist definition is analytically untenable, it does not follow that McKibben is wrong to lament the end of a certain condition of nature.³¹ I might have reason to cry out in distaste when someone pours sugar in my coffee; there might be a good deal more compelling reasons to mourn the loss of every pristine place on earth. The point here, however, is that McKibben’s sad tidings are analytically unhelpful for our purposes. On the purist definition, the coal the British uncovered on faraway shores belonged to nature prior to their arrival, but as they (or rather their workers) began to dig and heave it, the material somehow fell out of nature, into the sphere of humans. But if the coal had already exited nature, how could the CO₂ then possibly have a lethal impact on it? The antinomies of dualism would reappear at every stage of such a history.

IS ALL ENVIRONMENT BUILT ENVIRONMENT?

If climate change signifies the end of nature, we would be forced to conclude that it sets the postmodern condition in stone. In another sign of the times, McKibben published his book the year after Francis Fukuyama wrote his essay ‘The End of History?’; while the latter thesis has since become the laughing stock of theory, the former is held in the highest regard. McKibben himself has moved on to more productive pursuits, as perhaps the single most important leader of the global climate movement, but his obituary of nature has stuck in the intellectual climate despite the reasoning behind it being, as we have seen and shall see more of, questionable. It serves as the point of departure for Wapner’s discussions of the dilemmas of environmentalism, as well as for the most recent instalment of the most philosophically advanced attempt at defending constructionism about nature: that of Steven Vogel.

In his first book Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory, Steven Vogel spins a constructionist programme out of an idiosyncratic reading of the Frankfurt School canon. Here, he points to four senses in which ‘nature is a social category’: one can never step into a nature outside of human preconceptions; the nature scientists claim to study is a product of their own practices – postmodernist stock-in-trade, so far – natural objects are integrated into social life; and they are built by labour.³² Only the last sense, the most original of the four, is retained in Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature. Although he backtracks on his earlier idealism, Vogel here takes constructionism farther than ever before. He sets out from the assertion that McKibben was right: nature has indeed ended, most obviously because of the rising temperatures. Accepting the purist definition, however, Vogel takes McKibben’s thesis to the next step and claims that if nature expires the moment humans touch it, then it must have been dead and gone long before any CO₂ plumed from chimneys.³³ Not linked specifically to global warming, ‘the end of nature might be something that, in the Heideggerian phrase that seems relevant here, has always already happened’; by axiomatic necessity, nature ‘ceased to exist at the moment the first human appeared on the scene’ – ‘so long ago that we cannot even fix the date’.³⁴

So what is it that seems to surround us now? Not discourses or the ooze from epistemic communities; this is not what Vogel is getting at any longer. We are surrounded by a solidly real environment, but it is a built environment, one that humans have literally, physically constructed from the ground up. Since there is no way humans can ‘encounter a landscape at all without transforming it’, every landscape humans have encountered must be classified as built, far-flung islands as much as conurbations, the deserts as much as the highways, the atmosphere every bit as much as – this is the gist of the book – the shopping mall.³⁵ Not quite the deduction McKibben had in mind, it does follow a quirky but inexorable logic. Paraphrasing Aldo Leopold’s classic injunction to ‘think like a mountain’ so as to get closer to the land, Vogel advises environmentalists to rather think like a shopping mall, for a mall is just as much a piece of the environment as the mountain and no less deserving of protection and awe.³⁶

The variety of constructionism fleshed out here is different from the idealist type: as Vogel stresses repeatedly, he is using the word ‘construction’ in the literal sense, exactly as he would in front of the pyramids. We may thus distinguish between idealist and literalist constructionism about nature; Vogel and Smith have both moved to the latter, while Castree has drifted from the latter to the former.³⁷ Neither, it is important to note, is a straw man. Vogel really means what he says. ‘There is nothing in our environment that we have not, in some sense or other, had a hand in producing’, nothing physical or chemical around us originating outside labour, ‘no raw materials, no “natural resources,” that have not themselves already been the object of prior practices of construction’ – statements on repeat throughout the latest opus.³⁸ All indications are that Vogel wants us to take them seriously. Let us do so. They are not true. Coal is disproof enough: we know that it formed when vegetation slumped into bogs, whose water protected it from oxidation; as the dead plants sank deeper, temperatures and pressure rose; slowly, gradually, the matter solidified into coal, mostly during the Carboniferous era some 286–360 million years ago, when no humans could possibly have assisted in the process. Finding coal in a Borneo jungle is to open a culvert to that past and draw in what no humans had a hand in producing, and the same holds for the extraction of any bit of fossil fuel from the bowels of this planet.³⁹

Very easily – so easily as to court ridicule, but such is now the state of this theory – literalist constructionism can be shown to be empirically false. Fossil fuels are no trifling matters in our environment; neither are the sun, the earth’s crust, oxygen, the element of fire … One would have to go to extraordinary lengths of sophistry to present a case for these as in any sense ‘constructed’ or ‘built’ by humans, and yet they constitute the mise en scène and the sine qua non and whatnot of a warming world. The only way to buttress constructionism against them would be to insist on an extreme version of the purist definition: by any contact whatsoever with humans – be it falling on them or carrying them or passing through their lungs – solar radiation and sedimentary rocks and the air and everything else magically become their products. And when Vogel talks about ‘buildings’ and ‘construction’, he does seem to presuppose something like this metamorphosis. To affect something is to build it. ‘There is nothing we do that does not change, and therefore build, the environment’, Vogel spells out his generous extension of the term.⁴⁰ With this usage, I could make a rightful claim to have built a pyramid in Giza merely by scaling and throwing black paint on it.

When humans come into contact with a landscape, they necessarily change it; by changing it, they build it; therefore humans have built all landscapes on earth (and logically this should extend to the moon and Mars and other celestial bodies as well). The conspicuous Achilles heel of this syllogism, propping up the whole argument, is the use of ‘build’ as a synonym for ‘affect’ or ‘change’. Vogel defends the conflation by averring that ‘to build something is to “affect” some material and thereby transform it into something new – wood into a bookcase, clay into a pot, silicon into a memory chip.’⁴¹ Sure, but this is not what is at stake here. If I cut and mould wood into a bookcase, I have undoubtedly built that bookcase – but if I cut a branch off a tree, have I also built that tree? This is what Vogel’s argument amounts to: not that to build is to affect matter, but that to affect matter is to build it. In the common idiom, this is not what the word refers to. The consequences would be enormous if we were to subscribe to Vogel’s proposed redefinition: look at the marks I have left in my apartment – see, it is I who have built this condominium. Or, as Val Plumwood has pointed out: I affect the persons close to me, indeed change their lives quite thoroughly; hence I could make a claim to have built or produced or constructed them.⁴² Verily, constructionism runs wild here.

So what does it mean to have built or produced – literally constructed – something? Kate Soper again provides the most convincing answer: the crucial criterion is ‘to inaugurate a product which previously did not exist.’⁴³ When we say that pharaoh Khufu built the great pyramid of Giza, we mean that it did not exist at first, but then this man set in motion a process of construction some 4,600 years ago that brought the structure into being and there it has stood ever since. The human constructor gives rise to an entity. Something like a watch or a computer is indeed built or produced, for it owes its existence to human actions – by affecting select matters in specific ways, humans have created them de novo – but coal and oceans and the carbon cycle fall into another category. So, it seems, does the climate. Earth had it before it had humans.

WHAT IS CONSTRUCTED AND WHAT IS NOT

The metaphor of construction should indeed be taken quite literally: when building something, you do not merely change or affect it but call the structure into existence.⁴⁴ Ironically, building is the human praxis around which Vogel builds his argument, while entirely missing the quick of it. One could turn instead to William H. Sewell, who delineates the real utility of the metaphor with precision in his Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. In contradistinction to synchronic thinking so typical for postmodernity,

the construction metaphor implies a very different, thoroughly diachronic, temporality. Construction is a noun formed from a verb; it signifies a process of building, carried out by human actors and stretched out over time. (Rome, as the proverb puts it, was not built in a day.) The social or cultural construction of meaning is also, by implication, a temporally extended process that requires the sustained labor of human actors. Social construction also implies that when a meaning has been built it has a strong tendency to remain in place: socially constructed gender relations or scientific truths often become naturalized, accepted, and enduring features of the world, just as buildings, once built, continue to remain as an enduring feature of the physical environment.⁴⁵

In none of these senses would the climate be a good fit for the metaphor. But in every one of them, the fossil economy would.⁴⁶

If the term ‘social construction’ is to be meaningful, it must refer to some X that has come about ‘in consequence of a sequence of social events’, to follow Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? A constructionist typically believes that the X in question ‘need not have existed’ had it not been for those events.⁴⁷ Applied to the realm of nature, such a belief has something absurd about it. Three storylines have the potential to turn literalist constructionism into intelligible propositions: 1.) Human beings were beamed onto an empty planet (or universe) and then constructed nature from scratch, starring in the role of divine non-produced producers. Here it would indeed seem that the X came about through social events. (The question of where the raw materials came from would, of course, remain unanswered.) 2.) Human beings emerged from pre-existing nature, but the moment they did so and started to roam the planet, they annulled it. Fresh from that feat, they then proceeded to build all environments on earth. This is Vogel’s logic, which begs a few questions, including how humans could be at once the direct offspring and the instant annullers of nature (a storyline only conceivable on the basis of the purist definition). 3.) Humans lived for a very long time among pre-existing nature, but in recent years, they have come to wield such detrimental and pervasive influence over it that it no longer is what it was. This seems to be an activity rather different from construction – more like destruction – but the storyline does at least render the earth and everything on it as outcomes of social events. Other questions then arise. If nature ended with late human influence – read: anthropogenic climate change – what forces and causal powers now determine the possible forms that influence can take? Where do they come from? Were the channels into which CO₂ emissions run built by humans just now?

The absurdity extends to both varieties of constructionism about nature.⁴⁸ Perhaps this is why their proponents, who are no fools, cannot avoid slips of the tongue. All of a sudden, Castree mentions ‘a biophysical world that at some level exists’ and ‘knows nothing of the values and goals according to which we discuss, respond to and intervene in it.’⁴⁹ Smith gives away just the distinction he seeks to corrode: ‘unlike gravity, there is nothing natural about the law of value; no society has lived without experiencing the operation of gravity, but many have lived without the law of value’ – nature in one corner, society in the other.⁵⁰ Vogel, for his part, posing as the sternest enemy to any use of the term, says things like ‘we human beings are ourselves natural.’ In fact, halfway into his book he spends a whole chapter reflecting on the fate of artefacts at the hands of nature. Every edifice is subject to precipitation and oxidation and entropy and heat and other ‘processes whose fundamental character – whose nature, I might even be willing to say – is not and cannot be fully known to us’, since they ‘are currently [sic] operating independently of humans’, not ‘something we produce’.⁵¹ Claims such as these might be intended to provide nuance to arguments sorely lacking in that quality, but the effect is rather to betray some damning inconsistencies.⁵² Sometimes constructionists appear to insert them as caveats of common sense, allowing them to wash their hands of the implications of their argument – but of course we do not believe that the earth is a fairy-tale! Who could be so crazy? Before and after such brief parentheses, whether composed deliberately or by accident, however, they continue to bracket, relegate, dismiss and exclude nature in their actual accounts of the ways of the world.⁵³ Until inevitably, at some point, they step out into that world and have to repeat the admission. Not even its most militant detractors can dispense with the category of nature, and that must be because no one can.

Similarly for those who grieve its end: McKibben cannot help talking about a ‘new’ nature that behaves differently, but is still, so it seems, that which was supposed to have ended.⁵⁴ In After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, Jedediah Purdy offers yet another variation on McKibben’s necrology, declares that nature is gone for good – ‘in every respect, the world we inhabit will henceforth be the world we have made’ (in every respect!) – and adds, for good measure, that nature ‘is not the sort of thing that has a meaning’.⁵⁵ And then, without even noticing it, he spends page after page making statements like ‘our control over nature seems a precarious fantasy’, ‘there is no separating human beings from ecological nature’, ‘we are less distinct from the rest of nature than we often imagine’, ‘trying to build a peaceful and humane world means finding a way to live peacefully with nature’.⁵⁶ After nature? It does not sound like it. Not even its necrologists can write about the corpse without mentioning its movements, and that must be because it is still quite alive.⁵⁷

The category cannot be stamped out from human vocabularies. It refers to the part of the inhabited world that humans encounter but have not constructed, created, built or conjured up in their imagination, and that part is very prevalent indeed.⁵⁸ It preceded us, surrounds us and will succeed us; it was, is and will be spontaneously generated without us; it may be under all sorts of influence, but that does not put an end to it, any more than a continent ceases to be because it has skyscrapers standing on it. When the British made their way through the jungle of Labuan, they did not produce but precisely encountered nature. The moment captured on the lithograph is not the moment when they made the sunlight and the water and the plants and the coal: all these things were there before them, belonging to the part of the world in whose absence they could not have been present. What they resolved to do with that nature was, however, up to them. Here supervened the moment of construction: they began to map, test, sell and buy the coal as material for their fossil economy, their Rome, built not in a day but over the course of the nineteenth century. We should reserve talk about ‘construction’ for that entity and demarcate it from the climate – throw constructionism back into society, as it were, and accept nature as a category sui generis. But that presupposes, of course, that the two can be distinguished from one another.