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INTRODUCTION

The central argument of this book is that nature is a site of struggle, a struggle largely shaped by relations of power and different conceptions of justice. The argument is built through an analysis of different ways of relating to nature.

The starting point is that nature is a social construct in the sense that different people understand ‘the natural world’ in very different ways. For many people ‘nature’ means wilderness and wild animals, and it is experienced very indirectly through magazines and television programmes or through visiting the highly managed environments of national parks. Nature is understood as a place apart, a place to visit, to escape to wearing sunblock, mosquito repellant and protective clothing. But nature is not external, separate from the world of people. We live in nature and interact with it every day in the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe.

These interactions are described in ten chapters that emphasise how our current ways of relating to nature are not grounded in a recognition of the intricate and complex ways in which all living things are interconnected. Many of these interconnections are — like the stars at noon — largely unseen, hidden from our direct experience. Similarly, many threats to nature are invisible, and are threats to the survival of all forms of life, including our own species. Because these threats are largely due to human actions, there is the potential to change.

Realising this potential involves dissolving the present divisions between people or animals, economic growth or environmental protection, and ‘nature’ or ‘culture’. This implies overcoming the fragmentary nature of our politics and confronting questions of power and justice. In this sense, the book demonstrates the need for an inclusive politics that brings together peace, social and environmental justice activists who believe that another world is both possible and necessary.

This is a work of scholarship, but is aimed at general readers to stimulate them to ask some new questions about their encounters with nature in their daily lives. The scholarship draws on a number of sources, including informal conversations and more formal in-depth interviews with key informants, a survey of different understandings of ‘nature’ among a sample of young South Africans and a literature review of primary and secondary sources.

All the chapters draw on my personal experience describing some of the environmental activists I have been privileged to know, some of the struggles I have been part of and some of the wild places and creatures I have encountered. My experiences as an honorary nature conservation officer in the Eastern Cape in the 1970s gave me insights into the ‘victim blaming’ conservation discourse of the time, and my friends in the Group for Environmental Monitoring, Earthlife, the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance and the Environmental Justice Networking Forum (EJNF) helped me to understand the linkages between environmental and social justice.

I write as a sociologist, not a natural scientist. This may seem presumptuous, but I will argue in the concluding chapter that Environmental Sociology has a special capacity to address the current crisis of nature, by exposing its social causes and consequences.

Chapter 1: Ignoring Nature shows how our daily interactions with nature are hidden and easy to ignore. People are increasingly remote and disconnected from nature. Most of us do not know where our water comes from, or where our household rubbish goes, or whether the stars were out last night, or when the next full moon is, or where our food comes from, or what source of energy provides the electricity in our homes. We think of electricity as a switch in the wall, ignoring the coal-burning power stations that generate the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to the devastating process of global warming. This is one manifestation of nature in crisis, a crisis largely due to human agency, but often unseen and unrecognised.

Chapter 2: Understanding Nature shows how our relations with nature are complicated by different meanings and values. These generally reinforce the idea of nature as external to human beings. The chapter begins with a description of an ‘ecotherapy’ project in the Drakensberg in which young people swim through a rock tunnel and confront the challenge of surviving in a wild environment in ways that deepen their self-confidence and ability to relate empathetically to others. It explores some of the different values and understandings that various people attribute to nature. For some, nature is a spiritual source, a place of healing where people living in urban settings can reconnect, not only with the natural world, but with one another and with their own capacities. For others, nature is a fund of resources to be used for economic development, or a store of biodiversity or of scientific knowledge. It is shown that some of the worst instances of environmental destruction have been done in the name of controlling nature. Increasingly, nature is commodified and images of nature are used to market a range of consumer products.

Chapter 3: Enjoying Nature describes the different, largely remote, packaged and passive ways in which people experience ‘wild’ nature. It begins with a profile of one of South Africa’s best ornithologists, Warwick Tarboton, and discusses the growth of birdwatching, claimed to be the fastest growing hobby in the world. This involves increasing corporate sponsorship, often by the self-same corporations responsible for the destruction of habitats that is threatening many bird species. It is suggested that television documentaries on nature and ecotourism often provide a false, packaged experience that reduces nature to entertainment and deepens our alienation. At the same time, the capacity of ‘wild’ nature to intrigue and delight us is disappearing.

Chapter 4: Imitating Nature describes relating to nature as a source of ideas about appropriate social relations and behaviour, as a model of social arrangements. It begins by describing the first gay rights march in South Africa, an event that some described as celebrating ‘unnatural’ behaviour. The gay rights struggle has emphasised how appeals to ‘nature’ or to ‘the natural’ are often made to legitimate a particular normative order; the claim is that patterns of social behaviour such as heterosexual sex, marriage, jealousy, competitiveness, social inequality and war, for example, are ‘natural’.

Chapter 5: Privatising Nature describes relating to nature as a source of profit and the struggles this generates. The process of turning natural resources into commodities to be bought and sold is happening around the world and is deepening both social and environmental injustice. The main culprits are the multinational corporations that have been termed ‘ecological destroyers’. The chapter is set in Orange Farm, a large informal settlement in South Africa, and uses this to introduce a discussion of privatising a ‘natural resource’ that is also a crucial human need, water. It is shown that the introduction of pre-paid water meters in Orange Farm has had devastating health and social impacts on poor households, who are organising through the Coalition Against Water Privatisation.

Chapter 6: Polluting Nature describes the cost of disregarding nature in the production process, what is sometimes called ‘externalising costs’. It begins by profiling Strike Matsepo, who has been involved in a struggle against South Africa’s largest steel manufacturer’s pollution of the groundwater in Steel Valley, the area around Vanderbijlpark. It describes the efforts of Matsepo and groupings such as the Steel Valley Crisis Committee and the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance to stop this pollution of nature and obtain compensation for the thousands of people who have lost their health and livelihoods. The chapter shows that in Steel Valley, as in the case of Love Canal in New York State (the scandal that acted as a catalyst to the American environmental movement), the pollution was neither cataclysmic nor dramatic. There was no sudden moment when the physical surroundings changed suddenly. The pollution of the groundwater from invisible chemicals was slow, insidious and often denied by state officials and even the residents themselves.

Chapter 7: Abusing Nature describes relations with nature that are grounded in the notion that nature exists for the benefit of humans, and that human beings are the source of all value and meaning in the world. As in the other chapters, it begins with a story as a spotlight, a way of focusing on a set of issues. It describes a visit to a ‘hidden abode’ of production, the abattoir, and discusses difficult questions raised by struggles for animal rights about our treatment of other animals and their intellectual and emotional capacities.

Chapter 8: Protecting Nature describes relations aimed at protecting nature as a store of biodiversity. It begins by describing the ruins of the fifteenth century settlement of Thulamela in the north of the Kruger National Park and reports on our efforts to protect wild nature in national parks and game reserves. We need such protected areas, but they promote the dangerous idea that nature is separate from civilisation and that people can put nature in a specific, bounded place and live outside of it. Travelling in an air-conditioned car through a national park provides a very tame and domesticated experience of wild nature: it is reduced to a purely visual experience emptied of any discomfort involving heat or dust or physical exertion or danger. Furthermore, up to four-fifths of South Africa’s biodiversity lies outside its protected areas. An important theme explored in this chapter is the social impact of conserving ‘wild nature’. Over a million people visit the Kruger National Park each year and some even feel reverential about the ruins at Thulamela, but ignore the living real-world people who are economically and politically marginalised around the edges of the park and who are struggling to obtain material benefits from conservation.

Chapter 9: Organising for Nature profiles individuals like Thabo Madihlaba, Bobby Peek and Mandla Mentoor, who describes himself as ‘organising for nature’. It reports on the efforts of increasing numbers of people who relate to nature as a site of struggle to achieve sustainable development or environmental justice. Based on interviews with various key environmentalists, this chapter records their very different understandings of nature, their routes into activism, and the different organisations and struggles with which they are involved.

Chapter 10: Rethinking Nature returns to the theme of nature as a site of struggle. It is suggested that at this time of deepening crisis in nature, it is well to remember Rachel Carson’s warnings about how we are poisoning the planet and ourselves. In her book Silent Spring she argued that the methods employed for insect control were such that ‘they will destroy us as well’. Since she wrote world pesticide production has increased dramatically. The reason has to do with issues that Carson neglected — issues such as power, justice, social inequality, globalisation and war. These are issues that may seem remote from a concern with nature, but are deeply implicated in the current crisis.