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UNDERSTANDING NATURE

INTRODUCTION: ECOTHERAPY IN THE DRAKENSBERG MOUNTAINS

‘Think like a mountain’, the early American conservationist Aldo Leopold said. In his view, mountains have the potential to change our thinking, to enlarge our view of the world and to ground it in a sense of perspective. The mountains of Yosemite moved the pioneer American environmentalist John Muir to write of their ‘spiritual power’ to make people realise that they are not separate from, but part of nature. As he expressed it: ‘You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature’ (Muir, 1996: 100). The Drakensberg mountains may not possess the grandeur of the mountains of Yosemite; however, for a group of ex-liberation struggle combatants from Soweto, scarred by their experience of South Africa’s long years of violent conflict, the challenge of surviving in the Drakensberg mountains for seven days deepened their self-reliance and their capacity to come to terms with the past, to respond to challenges, and to relate with empathy and sensitivity to others. Their experience included solitary meditations, as well as climbing and swimming through a rock tunnel that symbolised their rebirth as transformed individuals. These activities were part of a programme of ‘ecotherapy’, which is rooted in the notion of nature as a healer.

This notion is included in the ‘mapping exercise’ this chapter attempts. It is what Haraway has called ‘a travelogue through mindscapes and landscapes of what may count as nature’ (Haraway, 1992: 295). Nature, as Williams has suggested, is ‘perhaps the most complex word in the (English) language’ (Williams, 1980: 69). It is a dense social concept, a sort of keyword whose meanings are always unstable and contested. It is often invoked as a singular, undifferentiated entity: an entity with intrinsic powers that speaks with a single voice (Soper, 1995). But there is no consensus on how to understand and value nature. Different cultures, and individuals within them, have constructed different meanings and purposes for nature, which are embedded in a complex set of beliefs, practices and values. Nature is variously seen as a locus of resources; a site of biodiversity; a source of identity; a repository of spiritual values; an object of state regulation and control; a site of alternative visions of development; the embodiment of various institutions, practices and traditions; a social construct; a site of struggle; a means of healing and personal liberation; and so on. To make the point more concretely, the same stand of trees may be valued by conservationists as a store of biological diversity, by commercial foresters as a block of exportable tropical hardwood, by ornithologists as the habitat of a rare species, or by believers as a sacred grove containing great spiritual power. But in all these perspectives, nature exists ‘out there’, beyond human actions.

Nature is often understood as human experience of wilderness, an experience grounded in an activity such as hiking in a rural area, or staring out of the car window at animals in a national park, or jogging on the beach, or travelling to see the spring flowers in Namaqualand. The experience is limited in time to a few holiday days or hours; it is time apart in a place quite separate from ‘real’ life, grounded in an appreciation of the power of nature as a healing force.

NATURE AS A HEALING FORCE

For Rachel Carson, whose notion of a ‘web of life’, a matrix of soil, water, air and living creatures, is at the centre of this book, nature was a healing presence, a presence where people could find calmness, courage and reassurance. She wrote:

Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties or mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds, the ebb and flow of tides, the folded bud ready for spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after the night and spring after the winter (Carson, cited in Hynes, 1989: 59).

In a 1954 talk, Carson spoke of how ‘the pleasures, the values of contact with the natural world’ are ‘available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of a lonely mountain top — or the sea — or the stillness of a forest; or who will stop to think about so small a thing as the mystery of a growing seed’ (cited in Lear, 1998: 160).

This notion of nature as a healing force was explained to me by National Peace Accord Trust (NPAT) worker Maggie Seiler.¹ This force is harnessed in ecotherapy, a social programme which, as she puts it,

uses local wilderness experiences to increase psychological awareness and to bring about healing. Group processes, individual reflection, symbols and rituals are used in a wilderness setting in order to heighten people’s awareness of the connection between each other, themselves and the natural environment.

Over lunch in a Johannesburg coffee bar, she described how healing communities and building stability is the major focus of the NPAT. Its aim is ‘to aid transformation in South Africa and break the cycles of violence, trauma, apathy and despair’ through facilitating community-based networks and running ecotherapy programmes. Nature is used to set in motion a process that supports individuals’ attempts to confront their past experience and their current problems. Ecotherapy programmes take people out of their everyday environment and provide them with opportunities for psychological shifts and changes in behaviour. The therapy is designed to help people find balance, direction and healing in their lives by strengthening their relationship with nature.

One of the ways in which they try to achieve this is through the notion of ‘risk’:

The physical terrain along the journey into the wilderness presents a number of challenges and risks. To complete the journey trail participants have to negotiate steep mountain slopes, rivers or ravines. They have to face danger, confront their fears of heights, or snakes or simply intense physical exercise and simultaneously understand their own limitations in order to set appropriate boundaries (Abrahams, 2006: 5).

These and other experiences, such as solitary periods of reflection, are aimed at building insight, self-reliance, trust and compassion for others.

In 2006 the NPAT took 1 800 people through its programme. These were all people who had experienced the dehumanising effects of violence and trauma. According to Seiler, ‘rehabilitation required the restoration of community values and trust …. Healing starts with a personal healing journey. Ecotherapy wilderness trails aid the process.’ While the NPAT focused on the Drakensberg initially, it now uses a beautiful wilderness site in the Magaliesberg for militarised youth from Gauteng. Seiler described how a group of ex-combatants arrived at Matlapeng ‘full of hatred and anger’, with a ‘sense of abandonment’ and strong feeling that their sacrifices had ‘not been acknowledged’. She described them as ‘heavily involved in violent crime. These are the people who are undermining our democracy. They talk about “the coup” after 2010 and look to Jacob Zuma to give them what they want.’ The objective of the ecotherapy process was to

reduce blame of external factors and shift the locus of responsibility inwards. By doing this, the individual increases the personal sense of power and opens up other resolutions to the situation in which the individual takes responsibility for changing his/her situation, rather than waiting for something or someone external to save him/her.

Four days in the wilderness include powerful experiences such as a long climb up a mountain and a ‘solo fast process in which all distractions are removed from the individual: other people, food, familiar surroundings and daily conveniences.’ After the solo fast, the ex-combatants ‘cleanse themselves of all the toxic material that has surfaced’ through ‘the purificiation process of the sweat hut.’ Participants describe these as ‘a life changing process’: ‘I’m awake now, I see what I must do. I feel powerful, I can change my life and I’m not waiting anymore. It’s my responsibility to change things.’ Seiler speaks movingly of how this ‘connecting to nature’ results in ‘major personal transformation’. Long-term research into the effects of NPAT interventions over a three-year period confirm this view.

Another agency, Educo, aims through encounters with wild nature to rekindle integrity and fundamental life values. Programmes are held in pristine wilderness areas, offering opportunities for both action learning and the enchancement of emotional and spiritual awareness. Solitary time in the wilderness, journal writing and personal storytelling are used to deepen self-understanding. In 1997 Educo Africa launched its Youth at Risk Programme reaching out specifically to youth who have been severely marginalised and disempowered by chronic familial and societal trauma and deprivation. It claims that wilderness encounters are a positive method of addressing these youths’ problems.

Educo programmes are based on what the organisation calls ‘the circle of courage’. Components are

the spirit of belonging (building a sense of community and creating a shared context for acceptable behaviour); the spirit of mastery (using challenging activities such as rock climbing, abseiling, wilderness survival skills); the spirit of independence (fostering self-reliance in a non-institutionalised setting, hiking and sleeping out in nature); and the spirit of generosity (looking out for one another’s well being, peer support and encouragement and involvement in a local service project) (Gamble and Roberts, 1998: 16).

According to Roberts, people can ‘learn sharing and co-operation through hiking in wild and beautiful country. ... In wilderness people get to know their own strengths and resilience. There is a sense of pride in having completed a hike or climb’ (Roberts, 2006).

One participant said that through this experience he discovered ‘the power of nature and my ancestors’: ‘Going up one steep slope my legs started shaking — I started having flashbacks, seeing people I had killed, blood. Nature played a big role in bringing power to my mind and heart. Even my mother said I changed’ (Smith, 2000). Another said that he was now able to sleep, although he still had nightmares, and had overcome much of his resentment towards whites. ‘Now I realise we are all just human’, he said.

These personal transformations seem to confirm an observation of people who had been into wilderness:

Somehow they emerge from the wilderness transformed, as if they were coming from a highly sacred atmosphere. Indeed wilderness is the original cathedral, the original temple, the original church of life in which they have been converted and healed and from which they have emerged transformed in a positive manner (Player, 1997: 287).

The pioneer South African conservationist Ian Player has often articulated this notion of nature as a healing, therapeutic force and has stressed the spiritual importance of wilderness. Player’s ideas, when articulated with his focused intensity around a camp fire deep in the Kgalagadi National Park, are especially compelling. According to him, wilderness is a ‘place for the human spirit to reconnect with its primaeval self’, ‘food for the soul’, and a place of ‘spiritual recreation’.²

For Player, a devout Christian, ‘wilderness and Christianity are part of the same thing.’ He emphasises the time Christ spent in the wilderness: ‘Wilderness and wild areas give man the opportunity of looking at himself/herself in a different way. Time in the wilderness is a different kind of food — it can sustain one for a long time’, he maintains.

NATURE AS A DIVINE PRESENCE

For many religious people, God is not separate from nature, but immanent within it. However, there are widely divergent views on the impact of Christianity on attitudes towards nature. In the Judaeo–Christian tradition, humankind’s place in the universe is regarded as separate from and above that of nature and all that is non-human. Consequently, one strand of thinking blames the Judaeo–Christian ethic for putting humans above nature, for emphasising domination, control and an exclusive concentration on human salvation in a world beyond the present. Others point to a ‘Green theology’ — the creation dimension of Jesus’ teaching, along with the holistic creation theology of Paul, Benedict, Hildgarde von Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas and especially St Francis of Assisi. The latter tried to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including humans, for the idea of humans’ limitless ‘rule of creation’. Early Celtic Christianity also advanced a view of the mystical intimacy of human, nature and the divine. A strong Christian ecology is now emerging from the writings of people like Matthew Fox, who argues that because of the ecological crisis, a new beginning is required centred on the sacredness of the planet (Cock, 1992; McDonagh, 1990).

But this sacredness has been central to many other religious traditions. For all of human history, nature and its forces have been personified as deities to be worshipped and revered. A reverence for nature deities is present in many different spiritual teachings. The interconnectedness of humans, animals, plants and all of nature is to be found in Jain, Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist thought and many indigenous traditions.

Buddhism stresses that everything is intrinsically connected, and that we ought to respect other living beings, including animals and plants. All living beings are objects of compassion and ‘loving kindness’. ‘From a Buddhist perspective, all beings are seen as interconnected with one another in a great web of interdependence rather than as isolated and independent entities’ (Payutto, 2000: 170). There are dangers in objectifying the ‘environment’, in thinking about it as something removed and separate from ourselves, because we are not separate from the rest of nature.

The notion of nature as a divine presence has even been discovered by copywriters. A recent advertisement for Mpumalanga is headlined, ‘Discover God within. Discover yourself.’ The smaller print goes on to read: ‘They say there’s a bit of the eternal inside all of us. Head for Blyde River Canyon, Kruger National Park, or Pilgrim’s Rest and if Mpumalanga will offer you a glimpse through God’s window … what else might you discover within’ (Endangered Wildlife, 2005).

NATURE AS A REPOSITORY OF INDIGENOUS TRADITION

For many indigenous people, nature is more than a source of food, more than a place to carry out subsistence activities, or even more than a place of beauty. Nature also involves a congregation of spiritually powerful beings. The enveloping landscape is the dwelling place of both the living and the dead; it is not only connected to one’s long-dead human ancestors, who are objects of ritual reverence, but each animal has its own kind of spirit, and there are rules that are intended to show courtesy and humility toward each of these beings.

The boundaries between nature and society are blurred. Although it is dangerous to generalise,

according to a number of African symbolic systems, the relationship between humans and the natural environment engages the entirety of social relations, including the connection to dead ancestors and the spirits who people the forests and sacred woods. The local universe is experienced as a continuous process that is conceived and organised as an integral whole. The precolonial African world integrates the use of plant and animal resources as part of a general relationship to the world (Ouedraogo, 2005: 16).

‘Many African societies have a pantheistic concept of nature, which is conceived and experienced as a living being, inhabited by supernatural beings and living creatures’ (Ouedraogo, 2005: 19).

This direct connection between the human and animal and plant world has practical implications. For example, adultery on the part of a hunter’s wife can directly influence the availability of game, and the religious function inscribed in nature protects it against degradation (Ouedraogo, 2005: 19).

This kind of thinking is displayed by Nokwethemba Biyela, a driving force behind the Royal Zulu Reserve and Biosphere project, who says:

Animals like leopards and lions are signs from God. When the animals were gone there were no more signs. Hunting the animals was a mistake. Traditionally hunting took place for rare ceremonies and it was done properly. A lion is like a godfather, you can’t just let anybody kill it (cited in Macleod, 2001).

Biyela wants not only to breed endangered species for their survival and to attract tourists, but to revive respect for the traditional cultural and spiritual values attached to natural resources. But, as a local Zulu chief said, ‘animals and nature is a business now’ (CNN, 2001).

It is good business with rates at the Thula Thula Private Game Reserve, which traces its origins to the private hunting grounds of Shaka, founder of the Zulu empire, of ZAR 1 400 per person per night. The Zulu reserve will not allow hunting, unlike the Makulekes, who use the money from hunting to establish clinics and schools in the three villages that make up the 11 000 strong Makuleke community. But both the Zulu and the Makuleke elders emphasise the importance of nature in indigenous traditions:

Like the Zulus, the elders of the Makuleke community ask how their children will grow to love and protect the wild animals if they never get the chance to see them and live among them. They may eat the meat from the hunts, they may benefit from the building of schools and clinics, but they will always be at one remove from the animals without the knowledge of living with them (Macleod, 2001).

In traditional Zulu society, nature was not seen as separate, and cattle play an important role in Zulu culture. The intimate and appreciative links between humans and animals are most dramatically illustrated in the naming of Nguni cattle. The colour and pattern of a hide or the shape of a pair of horns is linked to images in nature of birds, animals and plants (Poland and Hammond-Tooke, 2003). Nguni cattle were a central element of social organisation. In similar terms, Xhosa society showed an intimate and sophisticated knowledge of the natural world. In the traditional Xhosa view, humans are part of nature, part of one community bound together through principles of respect and restraint, a very different view from the Western conceit of separation from and dominion over nature. Traditionally a ‘conservation ethic’ determined which land could be cultivated; when to plant, plough and harvest; what water could be drunk; which trees could be cut; and which animals could be hunted. Their subsistence traditions have given indigenous peoples an intimate knowledge of local plants and animals, and their dependence has generated practices of conservation.

This traditional conservation by indigenous peoples has not always been appreciated by outsiders. For example, a missionary wrote about the Ndebele: ‘The eyes of a heathen tribe … see no beauty or variety in earth or sky. The book of Nature is shut up and sealed: there is no music in the moaning of the wind. Nor loveliness in the golden-tinted sunsets’ (cited in Ranger, 1999: 16). The Jesuit missionaries in the area saw their evangelical task as bringing Christian culture into unredeemed and primeval nature, thus freeing Africans from their dependence on it.

Many other indigenous peoples did not distinguish between nature and culture, but saw themselves as one with plants and animals, rivers and forests, as part of a larger, all-encompassing whole. For example, the Matopos, the site of the Mwali shrines, now part of the Zimbabwe National Park, are much more than ‘wild nature’: they are also a cultural landscape. The historian Terence Ranger has described how the colonial appropriation of the Matopos has been countered by an African ideology of the land, which involves a quite different relationship between nature and culture. He writes:

the shrines represent a quintessential natural source of culture; the two are inseparable, so that human society bears no meaning without the rocks and pools and caves and they in turn are given meaning only by the residence among them of human beings (Ranger, 1999: 6).

In contrast to the notion that humans exist apart from nature and must dominate and control it, the indigenous vision is of a seamless unity, a fusion of nature and culture in a specific landscape.

For this reason, southern Africa’s indigenous people have been the custodians of much of our biodiversity. They have frequently established careful regulation of common resources, such as arable land and water. All traditionally had a strong identification with the land, the animals and the plants. Traditional healers such as Credo Mutwa have urged humankind to rekindle its links with nature:

Lakes and water control the life forces of every bird, fish and tiny creature, as well as man. [Nature] is a living entity. For centuries Africans had treated water with reverence, severely punishing anyone who polluted it. Our African forefathers have always known that you are not allowed to murder nature (cited in Carnie, 1999).

Recalling his initiation into traditional healing as a young boy back in 1937, Mutwa said his aunt had filled a pot with water and instructed him to look inside and tell her what he saw. She said to me: ‘You are in this water. Until you know that you are part of this water, you should not even try to drink it.’

I have often been slandered and ridiculed as a superstitious heathen for my beliefs since then. But I was only preaching the message that water is the lifeblood of our great Earth Mother. Let us conserve the beautiful song of nature. ... We must really feel the water and accept that the Earth is a living entity in which everything is joined ... We have to realise that when we pollute a stream or river, we start a chain of events which destroys life many kilometres away ... It is useless to preserve the trees and water if you have severed your connection with nature. You cannot conserve something which is not part of you (cited in Carnie, 1999).

For people like Mutwa, nature is a powerful source of ethnic identity.

NATURE AS A SOURCE OF IDENTITY

The designation of specific animals as totems is a strong marker of identity in Xhosa society. The great nineteenth century Xhosa chief Mhala, son of Ndlambe, was known as ‘Mbodla, the thing that walks at night’, which is an apt description of the nocturnal genet. Ethnic identity is often marked by relations with particular landscapes, plants, animals and foods. Culinary customs defining what and how one eats are important in all cultures.

The Zulu emphasis on a ‘sense of place’ was crucial in saving the St Lucia area from the threat of titanium mining. The Makuleke long emphasised their relationship with the particular piece of land that was appropriated for incorporation into the Kruger National Park. And the Kruger National Park itself played a crucial role in South Africa’s history in helping to forge an exclusive, Afrikaner identity. There is a good deal of mythology surrounding the park, symbolised by the (ironic) portrayal of Paul Kruger as a visionary who championed wildlife protection (Carruthers, 1995). The myth was appropriated by the emergent Afrikaner nationalism when it helped to unite opposed factions and classes in Afrikaner society in the post-World War I period. After 1948 the apartheid regime revived the Kruger wildlife protectionist myth in an attempt not only to rouse patriotism, but also to gain international respectability for the pariah state among its critics overseas. One of the difficulties of transformation after 1994 was changing the widespread image of the Kruger National Park as a white, Afrikaner playground, so as to make it attractive and accessible to all South Africans.

Of course, the larger challenge of transformation is to create a common society, to build institutions that unite us, and national parks could contribute to the creation of a shared national identity and a coherent national consciousness. It has been suggested that wilderness, understood as ‘virgin’ landscapes assumed to be untouched by humans, played an important role in the shaping of nationalism in North America. According to Nash, Americans embraced nature in a burst of nationalism around the middle of the last century. President Jefferson had hailed the new country as ‘Nature’s nation’ when it was founded in 1776, but it was the creation of the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, in 1872 that linked much of America’s identity to the wild. Nash has argued that ‘through the idea of wilderness they [Americans] sought to give their civilization identity and meaning’ (Nash, 2001: xiii).

The idea of wilderness was new in that, for the indigenous peoples, ‘wilderness’ had no meaning as a separate space:

Everything natural was simply habitat and people understood themselves to be part of a seamless, living community …. Civilization severed the web of life as humans distanced themselves from the rest of nature. Behind fenced pasture, village walls and later, gated condominiums, it was hard to imagine other living things as sacred (Nash, 2001: xiii).

For poor South Africans incarcerated in urban ghettos, or for the affluent who have retreated to gated communities, it is especially difficult.

NATURE AS A VEHICLE OF LIBERATION

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society (Thoreau, 1991: 71).

Visiting Walden pond, where Thoreau wrote these words, involved many distractions. The pond is still ‘remarkable for its depth and purity’, constituting ‘a clear and deep green well, half a mile long’, and the water very transparent, ‘like molten glass cooled’. But, on the day I visited it in a spirit of pilgrimage, the car park was full and the banks crowded with people from Boston and Concord. Thoreau’s message to live simply was drowned by the smell of car exhausts and the noise of radios. But it is an important message — especially in view of the waste and over-consumption that create so many environmental problems.

Thoreau also argued that living simply in tune with nature is a means of personal liberation, of becoming more self-aware and freeing oneself from prescribed identities and conventional scripts of appropriate behaviour. Nature was the means by which he tried ‘to recreate [him]self’. Thoreau was opposed to social and political conformity; the identity that he aspired to was that of a ‘sojourner’. This is an unconventional identity that values individuality and a self-reflective life above all else. For him, conformity is fatal to an intensely experienced life that is one’s own and none other. So he writes: ‘We need the tonic of wildness — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and meadow-hen lurk ... To smell the whispering sedge where … the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground’ (Thoreau, 1854: 317).

But this perspective perpetuates a dualistic notion of ‘nature’ and ‘society’ as separate rather than interconnected. A more integrated perspective comes from the contemporary American environmental activist and poet Gary Snyder. He has also emphasised developing self-awareness of ourselves in nature:

We must find our way to seeing the mineral cycles, the water cycles, air cycles, nutrient cycles as sacramental ... the expression of it is simple: feeling gratitude to it all; taking responsibility for your own acts; keeping contact with the sources of energy that flow into your own life (namely dirt, water, flesh) (Snyder, 1995: 188).

The way to achieve this may be to cultivate a ‘sense of place’, a sense exemplified by Thoreau’s attachment to Walden pond. Many spiritual teachers speak of the importance of ‘place’ to maintain one’s spiritual connections to the earth. The contemporary American environmental writer Barry Lopez advises us to ‘reintegrate ourselves in specific geographic places’ emotionally and intellectually. He believes that

by cutting ourselves off from Nature, by turning Nature into scenery and commodities, we may cut ourselves off from something vital. To repair this damage we can’t any longer take what we call ‘Nature’ for an object. We must merge it again with our own nature (Lopez, 1998: 6).

For others, this place should involve contact with wild nature if we are to be whole people. A South African doctor maintains that wilderness is ‘the finest antidepressant’ he knows. Nabham laments that

wild landscapes survive only as enclaves in a matrix of human domination. It may be that we need something else as much as we need these postage-stamp enclaves of so called pristine nature ... We need something more than rigorously protected forests and parklands to keep us whole (Nabham, 1993: 207).

To be whole, we need contact with ‘rough country’ and ‘wild creatures whose otherness is inviolate’, because ‘there is something wild within each of us which needs this’ (Nabham, 1993: 210).

This would imply that respecting the value of nature is part of human self-realisation. The English philosopher Kate Soper points out that Arne Naess, the founder of ‘deep ecology’, defends his perspective in these terms, i.e. in terms of human self-realisation (Soper, 1995). Naess justifies his call for the development of deep identification of individuals with all life forms precisely in terms of its significance for the individual.

But others reject this instrumental view of nature. For example, Fowles writes:

The subtlest of our alienations from it (nature), the most difficult to comprehend, is our need to use it in some way, to derive some personal yield. We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves) and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability — however innocent and harmless the use (Fowles, 2001: 133).

NATURE AS A STORE OF BIODIVERSITY

For others, ‘nature’ is a store of biodiversity. Biodiversity, like ‘nature’, is a contested concept, broadly referring to a complex of interactions — not only species, but their surroundings and relationships. According to the American biologist Edward Wilson, it means

the totality of hereditary variation in life forms, across all levels of biological organisation, from genes and chromosomes within individual species to the array of species themselves and finally, at the highest level, the living communities of ecosystems such as forests and lakes (Wilson, 1994: 359).

Wilson stresses that there is much we do not know, and it is disappearing through the reduction of habitat and other human activities. This threat of extinction is especially worrying to those who ground the notion of biodiversity in a conception of rights, which is sometimes called the ‘Noah Principle’, which maintain that every species has an inalienable right to exist. A different view is that other species have no rights or fewer rights than humans, and no or little value apart from their ability to fulfill human needs.

In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson (1962) presented the most powerful ecological argument for preserving biodiversity in her notion of a web of life that binds together all organisms. The implication of this interconnectedness is that even small change in one area or species will reverberate throughout the ecosystem. It is a web of life or death.

Even looking from a superficial or surface level, from what is sometimes termed ‘a shallow ecology’, a case can be made for preserving biodiversity. The argument is that the world’s diversity of plant and animal species should be protected so that it may be tapped for human benefit, because the extinction of species will deprive future generations of new medicines and new strains of food crops. Such shallow ecology views nature as a collection of natural resources.

NATURE AS A SOURCE OF NATURAL RESOURCES

In this mainstream perspective favoured by planners and economists nature is reduced to a store of ‘raw materials’ to be exploited to satisfy human needs. This is the discourse of sustainable development, where the stress is on promoting the thrifty use of resources without diminishing their quality or endangering their supply. As Sachs writes: ‘A resource is something that has no value until it has been made into something else’ (Sachs, 1999: 50). Landscapes are seen as real estate for ‘development’, forests as timber for logging and so on. Nature is regarded as perhaps an object of beauty, but it is separate from human beings and has no intrinsic value. Similarly, the discourse of ‘ecological modernisation’ emphasises an instrumental view and a reliance on technology to solve environmental problems.

This orientation to nature means that nature is a depository of resources to be exploited instrumentally through what Luke calls ‘eco-managerialism’ (cited in Fisher and Hajer, 1999). This position is all about the management, prediction and control of nature. Some naturalists, such as F. W. Fitzsimons, author of The Natural History of South Africa (1932), presented our relationship with nature as a war. He wrote: ‘There is much spade work and great battles yet to be fought by the human race against the adverse forces of Nature which retard the spread of the human race over earth’s fair surface’ (cited in Carruthers, 2005: 17). Some of the worst environmental abuses — such as the destruction of the Florida everglades — have been done in the name of dominating and controlling nature. It is in projects like this that many environmental studies graduates end up, and it perpetuates our alienation from nature. Environmental management realises in practice the ideological commitments of the Enlightenment — that nature is simply use-value, subject to rational control, matter without spirit and representing ‘control over nature raised to the level of human mastery’ (Schoolman, 1994: xv).

As Luke writes:

While students may enter schools of environmental studies and colleges of natural resources in search of wisdom from Aldo Leopold or John Muir, they mostly leave as eco-managerialists, or adept practioners of ecosystem management/analysis, ecological risk analysis, and recreation resource administration (Luke, 1999: 118).

Nature is stripped of spiritual qualities and is reduced to a cluster of exploitable natural resources. Richard Nelson was one such student. He has written of his love of animals as a boy and how he ‘tried expressing this love through studies of zoology’, but found that ‘this only seemed to put another kind of barrier between humanity and nature — the detachment of science and abstraction’ (Nelson, 2001: 107). But consumerism constructs an even stronger barrier than this kind of instrumental rationality in its use of nature as a commodity or marketing tool.

NATURE AS A COMMODITY OR MARKETING TOOL

Increasingly in urban–industrial society, people relate to nature as consumers, a relation that indicates the extent of our alienation and estrangement from it. In the United States, The Nature Company’s stated mission is to ‘connect us to nature’. It markets products that sustain American middle-class ideas of nature at the same time as it promotes the consumption of natural resources that underpins the American middle-class life. Consuming one of the company’s 12 000 products, such as a plastic whale or an inflatable penguin, does not only signal alienation; it also means ‘consuming natural resources like oil, wood, minerals and energy’ (Price, 1995: 199).

A process of marketing a romanticised wild nature is not only evident in the commodities such as wildlife calendars and T-shirts sold by corporations like The Nature Company, but in the increasing use of imagery from nature in advertising to enhance corporate profits. An appeal to nature is used to promote the consumption of many different foodstuffs, which are marketed as ‘nature’s foods’, and consumer goods such as baby care products, e.g. ‘Trust nature to look after your baby, she’s a mother too.’ Some banks offer ‘affinity’ credit cards, so that consumer purchases can help finance the conservation of endangered species. Increasingly the marketing potential of nature is being exploited to promote consumerism, as Soper writes: ‘Margarine comes to us from dew-bedecked pastures, cider from the age-old orchards of country hamlets, whiskey out of Scottish burns (or Irish mists), mineral water direct from a Samuel Palmer landscape’ (Soper, 1995: 194).

This pastoral imagery is used to hide the actual conditions of production and ‘protect the consumer from a too direct confrontation with the facts of modern industrial processes’ (Soper, 1995: 210). The ‘facts’ include such cruel practices as battery farming of chickens, while the Rainbow Chicken advertisement on South African television depicts healthy birds trying to gain access to Rainbow farms.

Not only factory farming, but much food production involves both cruelty to animals and exploitation of workers. For example, in the case of Ceres liquifruit, the idyllic pastoral scene on the container distracts us from the living conditions of the Western Cape seasonal fruit pickers employed in its production. The people living in this lush, sun-drenched valley experience desperate poverty. Half the households in Ceres surveyed recently earned low wages, and about 70 per cent of respondents indicated that their households had experienced a food shortage at some time during the previous 12 months. About a quarter of children exhibited a degree of stunting (Du Toit, 2005).

Appeals to a ‘closeness to nature’ are a frequent theme in the promotional literature of estate agents. The new Edens of golf estates and gated communities generally involve the destruction of the indigenous vegetation, and sometimes even of wetlands. The manicured parklike landscapes of country clubs and golf courses involve massive consumption of water. Wild nature is destroyed at the same time that it is reduced to a set of symbolic meanings.

But according to golf course designer Sabine Sabring-Gould, ‘a golf course is man interacting successfully with nature’ (cited in Mail and Guardian, 2006). Zimbali Coastal Resort, north of Durban, describes itself as ‘one part golf, two parts paradise’ and claims that the Zimbali ethos is ‘living in harmony with nature’. The marketisation of nature is clear in its advertisement, which reads:

Start living your dreams. Imagine waking up every morning to a view over the Indian Ocean with schools of dolphins surfing among the breakers. Imagine having two championship golf courses to choose from, any time you feel like playing a round. Imagine living among indigenous coastal forest with natural lakes, bushbuck and blue duiker, sea with pristine golden beaches (Zimbali Coastal Resort, 2006).

For those indifferent to the environmental impact and with millions to spend on a house (one sold in December 2006 for ZAR 19 million), this could be a reality.

But this process of the marketisation of nature has reached its zenith in the enclosed shopping mall, what the American eco-feminist Caroline Merchant terms, ‘the modern version of the Garden of Eden’ (Merchant, 2004). Surrounded by concrete parking lots and garages, these climate-controlled malls often feature life-sized trees, goldfish ponds, waterfalls and fountains in ways that ‘simulate nature as a cultivated benign garden ... Within manicured spaces of trees, flowers and foundations, we can shop for nature at the Nature Company, purchase “natural” clothing at Esprit, sample organic foods and “rainforest crunch”’ (Merchant, 2004: 168). Merchant describes how this process is exemplified in the West Edmonton Mall, ‘in a palm-lined beach, an artificial lagoon, an underwater seascape, performing dolphins, caged birds and tame Siberian tigers. Sunlit gardens, tree-lined paths, meandering streams, and tropical flowers adorn courtyard restaurants’ (Merchant, 2004: 169). Artificial nature has replaced what she terms ‘natural nature’. A sad irony is obscured in this process: the consumer culture that the shopping mall represents is destroying much of wild nature.

This appropriation of wild nature is also found in corporate headquarters, as well as shopping malls and entertainment centres. Local versions are the plastic ducks and star-studded sky at Montecasino in Johannesburg, Sun City or ABSA’s Johannesburg head office. Bounded by Commissioner, Marshall, Troye and Mooi Streets, the latter’s three linked office towers contain indoor atriums housing an art gallery, a clinic, mobile sculpture, ponds, bridges, palm trees and a miniature rainforest.

The rainforest theme is prioritised by the Arabella hotel group in its marketing campaign to attract the world’s wealthiest tourists and be the most pampering and popular five star hotel and golf resort in South Africa. The hotel and spa near Hermanus is planning a rainforest experience involving different forms of humidity, from steam and mud to walking through scented mist (Arabella Sheraton Group, 2006a). This luxury hotel and spa frequently appeals to ‘nature’ in its advertising. For example, an advertisement quotes Paul Cezanne: ‘Art is in harmony parallel with nature’ (Arabella Sheraton Group, 2006b).

The marketisation of nature is also clear in Disneyland’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida with a Kilimanjaro safari, an oasis and a rainforest. These all package nature as an exotic and entertaining experience. The anthropomorphism of Disney films such as The Wild and Madagascar distort wild creatures into caricatures of human beings.

Theme parks illustrate this marketisation of nature and sometimes associate indigenous peoples with an exotic nature, e.g. ‘African people were settled into a theme village at an Austrian zoo … their huts placed next to monkey cages’ (Bond, 2006: xi). The reader will assume that this practice dates back to colonial times, but in fact it occurred in June 2005.

‘Nothing like the wilderness to calm your soul’, the brochure tells us. Nature tourism packages and sells nature as a product. While experiences such as river rafting, jungle safaris and mountain climbing feed appetites for adventure, for the exotic and the ‘different’, they don’t necessarily involve any appreciation of wild nature. And the multiplicity of these experiences involves the purchase of expensive hiking, climbing, camping and outdoor gear from stores like Cape Union Mart.

The most ironic marketisation of nature in my experience is the wheelcover on a new model Toyota Prado, which states, ‘society should reflect on the fragility of the earth’s environment’ or the Suzuki wheel cover claiming ‘Suzuki loves nature’. The irony lies in the fact that such 4x4s, often named in heroic terms such as ‘Defender’ and ‘Explorer’, contribute massively to global warming and use 22 litres of fuel per 100 km, compared to smaller, cheaper vehicles that would use up to 6 litres of petrol for that distance. Drivers of such 4x4s are often accused of causing soil erosion in game reserves, river beds and even on beaches.

All of this reinforces the notion of nature as a place apart, and is part of what Zerner has named ‘market truimphalism’, a trend whereby thought and action are dominated by economic models and nature becomes increasingly commodified, inscribed with the logic of consumption. As Zerner writes, ‘nature has become an emporium ... a commercial warehouse awaiting its brokers’ (Zerner, 1999: 12).

So while many people cherish nature and ‘the natural’ as a counterpoint to modernity and materialism, in relating to nature as consumers we help to destroy and debase it, a process that the iconic animal images on South African currency illustrate.

This commodification involves an ‘ecological alienation’, the rupturing of ties between the human and natural worlds. Whereas in the past these ties ‘were based on immediacy and close proximity, commodity logic enforces distance and imposes the use of money as an essential condition for accessing the elements of nature’, the environment is now reduced to ‘a collection of merchandise offered for sale’ (Ouedraogo, 2005: 28).

NATURE AS A SUBJECT OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION AND MANIPULATION

The natural sciences have much to offer in deepening our knowledge of nature. At the same time, scientific knowledge has increased human domination and control over nature, and this is generally understood as a marker of human progress. As Fowles writes, ‘it sometimes seems now as if it [nature] is principally there not for itself but to provide material for labeling, classifying, analysing’ (Fowles 2001: 135). This has reached a peak in nuclear technology and genetic modification.

Although ‘biotechnology’ and ‘genetic modification’ (GM) commonly are used interchangeably, GM is a special set of technologies that alter the genetic makeup of such living organisms as animals, plants or bacteria. Biotechnology, a more general term, refers to using living organisms or their components, such as enzymes, to make products that include wine, cheese, beer and yogurt. Combining genes from different organisms is known as recombinant DNA technology, and the resulting organism is said to be ‘genetically modified’, ‘genetically engineered’ or ‘transgenic’. Genetically modified (GM) products include medicines and vaccines, foods and food ingredients, feeds and fibres. Many million acres of farmland have been planted with GM crops that have been engineered either to produce their own pesticide or to withstand herbicides. South Africa is one of the world’s largest producers of GM crops.

The conquest and commodification of nature is dramatically illustrated by this process of genetic engineering. Certainly it means a massive increase in the human control of nature and a reordering of nature. Yet that achievement — human power over nature — comes at a price, namely in the case of agriculture, a dependence on expensive seed, chemical fertilisers, pesticides, machinery and fuel, often controlled by the multinational corporations. GM crops are patented, and by law the seeds cannot be saved and planted the following year, meaning farmers have to purchase new seed each season. Many of Africa’s subsistence farmers who rely on saved seed are too poor to do this. Controversies surrounding GM foods and crops commonly focus on human and environmental safety, labelling and consumer choice, intellectual property rights, ethics, food security, poverty reduction and environmental conservation (Keller, 2000).

These are the priority issues for Vandana Shiva, who argues that small biodiverse farms produce more than chemically and genetically engineered monoculture. According to her, despite much talk about the control and regulation of the corporation, ten years after the Earth Summit at Rio, the emphasis is on the market and ‘profit is the only god’. Shiva calls genetic engineering, life patenting and free trade, ‘the unholy alliance’. She points to a ‘new colonialism’: people are being turned into slaves, not by governments, but by the corporations that control the seeds and the food supply. There is a ‘marketisation of the very sources we need to survive’ (Shiva, 2002: 6).

The degree of control that life patents grant their owners is deeply worrying. Patents on food crops and cloned animals have a growing potential to cede control of the world’s food supply to biotech patent holders. More than 20 per cent of human genes have already been patented, and most of those patents are owned by corporations.

Some warn that the new genetics could lead to a discriminatory new eugenic movement that compromises black and poor people. As one writer expresses it, the new human genetic technologies could facilitate a new kind of consumer eugenics that

for the first time offers parents the opportunity to ‘design’ a baby, with certain properties, turning nature into an artefact. In the USA advertising has already begun to claim that ‘designer babies’ can be created, by selecting sex and other traits, on demand (Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2006: 41).

Sometimes this manipulation of life forms seems grotesque in the ways it violates the boundaries between species to produce what anti-GM foods activist Jeffrey Smith terms ‘frankenfoods’. For example, Pollan points out that ‘plant breeders have developed a luminescent tobacco plant by inserting a gene from a firefly’ (Pollan, 2001: 198). But it is difficult to overestimate the revolutionary nature of current research. Scientists warn of unanticipated consequences from bioengineering and from introducing new organisms into nature. The cloning of ‘Dolly’ the ewe in 1997 raises the stakes in the manipulation of animals and plants. The process of cloning, which could be called a breakthrough technology of biblical proportions, took an adult cell from the ewe’s mammary gland and created an embryo, reversing the process of ageing to one of birth. Scottish scientist Ian Wilmut was compared to God by Time magazine: ‘Not since God took Adam’s rib and fashioned a helpmate for him has anything so fantastic occurred’ (cited in Merchant, 2004: 175).

Ironically, for many people reproductive cloning is ‘going against nature’. The most worrying aspect is that

genetic manipulation is a concerted effort by biotech corporations to eliminate the randomness that is inherent to nature — whether the natural growth of plants and animals or the natural process of ... reproduction — and to reconfigure it as an industrial process (Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2006: 8).

These industrial processes are driven by market forces. According to Keller,

the new partnerships between science and commerce that are daily being forged by the promises of genomics bind genetics to the market with a strength and intimacy that is unprecedented in the annals of basic research in the life sciences (Keller, 2000: 143).

The new genetic technologies are mostly owned by multinational corporations, and much of this manipulation of nature involves increasing corporate profits. For example, dairy cows produce more milk with less fat when cows are injected with a bovine growth hormone such as Posilac, marketed by Monsanto Chemicals. More milk per cow means more profit for the dairy farmer and for Monsanto. Every cow not treated with Posilac is considered by Monsanto a ‘lost income opportunity’ (cited in Merchant, 2004: 173).

These industrial processes are part of the increasing neo-liberal commodification of nature. This involves not only converting seeds into commodities to be bought and sold, but also water, electricity and land. The burden of these costs is borne by the poor and the powerless.

While the commodification of land goes back to the enclosure movement in eighteenth century Europe, the ‘newness’ of many of these practices has led some writers to focus on nature as a marker of social change. Our relationship to nature has been ‘socialised’: nature has been ‘denatured’; it has come to an end in what is variously conceptualised as ‘the risk society’ or ‘the network society’ or ‘post-modernity’.

NATURE AS A MARKER OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Most of the great social theorists were concerned with human relations with nature. For example, Karl Marx asserted that man is a ‘part of nature’, defined communism as ‘the unity of being of man with nature’, and ‘repeatedly emphasized the imperative for post-capitalist society to manage its use of natural resources responsibly’ (Burkett, 2005: 46). In his classic, The Great Transformation, Polanyi warned that the market threatened both land and the human species, using ‘land’ as ‘another name for nature’ (Polanyi, 1957: 72). Several social theorists, including Ulrich Beck, Manuel Castells, Fredric Jameson and Anthony Giddens, use our relationship to nature as a kind of marker of social change. Giddens, a British sociologist, maintains that the ‘major revolutions of our time are globalization, transformation in personal life and our relationship to nature’ (Giddens, 1990: 64). Giddens conceptualises this contemporary relationship as marked by the ‘socialization’ or ‘humanization of nature’. He points out that the protection of nature is routinely confused with the preservation — or reinvention — of social or cultural traditions:

A ‘return to nature’ is assumed to provide a justification for preserving tradition ... yet there is no intrinsic relation between one and the other. ... It is assumed that those who live ‘close to nature’ are intrinsically more in harmony with it than are moderns — hence the admiration often expressed for hunting and gathering ... However … nature often only becomes a beneficent force once it has been largely subjected to human control; for many who live close to it, nature may be hostile and feared ... Mastery over nature means destroying it in the sense that socialised nature is by definition no longer natural ... Nature has come to an end in a parallel way to tradition. The point at which the denaturing of nature effectively ended our ‘natural environment’ cannot be fixed in an exact way; but somewhere over the last century or so the age-old relation between human beings and nature was broken through the reverse. Instead of being concerned above all with what nature could do to us, we have now to worry about what we have done to nature. To confront the problem of the humanization of nature means beginning from the existence of ‘plastic nature’ — nature as incorporated within a post-traditional order (Giddens, 1994: 234).

In similar terms, Castells discusses historical transformations in terms of the changing pattern of relationships between ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’. Using this criterion, we are in a new era, what he calls ‘a globalised network society’. The first model of relationship between nature and culture, these

two fundamental poles of human existence, was characterised for millennia by the domination of Nature over Culture. The codes of social organisation almost directly expressed the struggle for survival under the uncontrolled harshness of nature ... The second pattern of the relationship established at the origins of the Modern age, and associated with the Industrial Revolution and with the triumph of Reason, saw the domination of Nature by Culture ... We are just entering a new state in which Culture refers to Culture, having superseded Nature to the point that Nature is artificially revived (‘preserved’) as a cultural form ... we have entered a purely cultural pattern of social interaction and social organisation ... [we now] live in a predominantly social world (Castells, 1997: 477).

The same idea is expressed by Beck when he talks about the ‘societalization of nature’, and writes:

At the end of the twentieth century nature is society and society is also ‘nature’. Anyone who continues to speak of nature as non-society is speaking in terms from a different century, which no longer capture our reality. In nature, we are concerned today with a highly synthetic product everywhere, an artificial ‘nature’. Not a hair or a crumb of it is still ‘natural’ if ‘natural’ means nature being left to itself (Beck, 2005: 81).

Furthermore, Beck writes:

Nature is not nature, but rather a concept, norm, memory, utopia, counter-image. Today more than ever, now that it no longer exists, nature is being rediscovered, pampered. The ecology movement has fallen prey to a naturalistic misapprehension of itself. ‘Nature’ is a kind of anchor by whose means the ship of civilization, sailing over the open seas, conjures up, cultivates, its contrary: dry land, the harbour, the approaching reef (cited in Giddens, 1994: 212).

These and other theorists are pointing us to the ‘end’ or ‘death’ of a nature that exists independently of human action. The distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ blurs. The postmodernist theorist Fredric Jameson argues that the disappearance of nature was a necessary precondition for the emergence of the postmodern mentality. ‘Postmodernism is what you have’, he asserts, ‘when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good’ (Jameson, 1991: ix). The best known of the obituaries for the idea of nature is Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature. He suggests that nature is at an end both as a discrete biophysical entity and as a meaningful concept: ‘We have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society’ (McKibben, 1990: 64).

CONCLUSION: THE NEED FOR CHANGE

In all of these various formulations, different ideas of nature co-exist and collide with each other. The result is that our attitudes to nature are complex, changing and contradictory. Attempting to address this complexity, Macnaghten and Urry maintain that there are two key ways in which nature has been represented in recent times:

First, there is the notion of nature as ‘threatened’. This sense can be seen in the panics over rare and endangered species, especially those which are spectacular and aesthetically pleasing; in the perception of nature as a source of exhaustible resources which should be stewarded for future generations; the sense of nature as a collection of rights-bearing subjects; and in the notion of nature as a healthy and pure body under threat from pollution; a nature which according to Rachel Carson is fast becoming a ‘sea of carcinogens’. The second set of representations of nature construct it as a realm of purity and moral power. Here nature is characterised as an object of spectacle, beauty or the sublime; as a recreational space to be roamed across; as a state of presocial abundance and goodness in the notion of natural healing; as representing a return from alienating modern society to an organic commodity; and as a holistic ecosystem which should be preserved in its diversity and interdependence (Macnaghten and Urry, 1995: 224).

Generally, our understandings of nature are marked by an ambivalence — nature as home, as resource, as threat, as refuge and inspiration, as playground, as laboratory, as profit-based. All these ideas flourish. But whether conceptualised as threatened or valued, all these perspectives externalise nature: they reinforce the understanding that we are separate from nature, rather than part of it.

The crucial question is the place of human beings in the natural world. Williams argues that humans were included in the Western European medieval concept of nature, ‘man’ occupying the top of the hierarchy in God’s creation. But, according to him, this inclusion changed over time, and by the eighteenth century ‘nature is decisively seen as separate from men’ (Williams, 1980: 79). This dualism between ‘nature’ and ‘society’, the notion that nature is a place apart, is deeply rooted in modern thinking. Nature is ‘the other’.

Another idea with deep roots is that only human beings have value. As Wilson expresses it: ‘Part of our cultural heritage in the West is a deep belief that humans are the source of all value and meaning in the world’ (Wilson, 1997: 128). As Soper wryly puts it, we define nature as ‘the idea through which we conceptualise what is “other” to ourselves ... nature is “that which we are not, which we are external to”’ (Soper, 1995: 16). ‘As a metaphysical concept ... “nature” is the concept through which humanity thinks its difference and specificity. It is the concept of the non-human’ (Soper, 1995: 155).

The idea of nature as a place apart, separate from human experience is a distortion. The only way out of the present crisis involves alternative ways of thinking, talking and feeling about nature that recognise our inclusion. Such an inclusive conceptualisation was suggested by Leopold’s notion of a ‘land ethic’, which implies an expansive notion of community.

While hunting in Arizona in the early decades of this century, Leopold shot a female wolf with a pup. He reached her in time to watch ‘a fierce green fire dying in her eyes’. His perspective on the natural world was utterly changed by this experience, and he formulated his ‘land ethic’. This involves the extension of our human ethics to include the other species with which we share the land. It ‘changes the role of Homo sapiens from conquerer of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such’ (Leopold, 1949, 1968: 240). In this perspective ‘all ethics … rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community with interdependent parts’ and ‘the land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively: the land’ (Leopold 1949, 1968: 204). ‘A thing is right’, Leopold says, ‘when it tends to preserve the integrity, beauty and stability of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’

Leopold formulated this notion in the 1940s, and it has been elaborated as ‘ecocentric’ or ‘biocentric’ ethics by different philosophers over the past decades, who assert that we are all part of a biotic community. In the ecocentric perspective, all living things have intrinsic worth — value in and of themselves — not just instrumental or utilitarian value. So,

biodiversity is necessary not only for utilitarian and humanitarian reasons (for maintaining the present and future health of the entire biosphere, for enhancing the quality of life, and for aesthetic enjoyment), but for its own sake. Ecocentrism expands the good of the human community to embrace and include within it the good of the biotic community (Merchant, 2004: 211).

This emphasis on a shared, biotic community confronts the false dualism implied by Soper when she is sceptical about nature having an intrinsic value. She writes:

Generalized accusations of ‘human speciesism’ invite us to overlook oppressions and divisions within the human community and are ethically irresponsible if they imply that the cause of nature should be promoted at the cost of a concern with social justice and equity in the distribution of resources (Soper, 1995: 13).

This is a common critique of the ‘biocentric’ or ‘ecocentric’ vision associated with the perspective labelled ‘deep ecology’. Bookchin emphasises that this perspective neglects the roots of ecological problems, which, in his view, lie in the social structure, in inequalities in access to power and resources. This is at the core of his conception of ‘social ecology’. In his view, deep ecology is misanthropic: it ‘reduces humanity to a parasitic swarm of mosquitos in a mystified swamp called nature’ (Bookchin, 1980: 133). From the standpoint of social ecology, resolving the crisis in nature means that social relations based on dominance and hierarchy must be replaced by egalitarian and democratic values and practices. This is close to the reworked notion of ‘community’ that the environmental justice movement is promoting, as the following chapters will argue.