Foreword

Nature and Nation in a "Little Known District amid the Wilds of Canada" by graeme wynn S ome thirty years ago, after reflecting critically and historically on such concepts as culture, society, individual, and class, the novelist, critic, and cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams famously suggested that "nature" might be the most complex word in the English language. 1 Despite the nominal continuity of its use through many centuries, the term is richly freighted with intricate and quite diverse meanings. Does "nature" refer to the "essential constitution of the world" or to the inherent and immutable laws that govern (or describe) its physical processes? Is it "red in tooth and claw" or an "extraordinary interlocking system of mutual advantage"? Do references to "nature" include or exclude people? What of the common idea that "nature" betokens the "essence," the "ultimate, irreducible character or quality of something," as in the "nature of things," the "nature of existence," or in the way that we explain human characteristics or athletic gifts as "natural"? Little wonder that the American cultural historian Leo Marx concluded, toward the end of a career devoted to studying such matters, that "the word nature is a notorious semantic and metaphysical trap." 2 The lean and "proper" definitions found in dictionaries provide neither escape nor intellectual comfort for those alert to these contradictions and fascinated, as Williams was, by the ways in which the shifting and contrasting connotations of certain words expressed "radically different and often at first unnoticed changes in experience and history." 3 Much ink has been spent, since Williams wrote, pondering the nature of Nature (so to speak). Indeed, the Australian environmental historian George Seddon used this very phrase in 1991 as the title of a lively essay x Foreword devoted to understanding how various meanings have been ascribed to nature. After exploring some of the antonyms to "Nature" and "natural" -including Supernatural, unnatural, human, and artificial -Seddon concluded that the contrasts between human and "not-man" and natural and unnatural underwrote "most current discourse using the word 'Nature'" and that the use of "unnatural" often carries "specifically moral overtones." To illustrate the latter claim, he recalled the once common assertion that "sodomy is an unnatural practice" to remind his readers that although "not many people use that expression today [this] does not mean that the concept of the 'unnatural' has disappeared, but rather that its range of application has changed. Some will now say, for example, that celibacy is unnatural, or that it is not natural for a young girl to lock herself away in her room reading books all day, or whatever." The larger point, of course, is that the societal consensus about what is natural and unnatural changes through time and that "our concept of Nature is a cultural product." As the geographer David Demeritt noted a decade or so ago, much writing in this vein "has challenged the apparent self-evidence and ontological fixity of nature," to the point of insisting that unmediated knowledge of the material world is impossible. 5 These are complicated matters. Following the philosopher Ian Hacking, Demeritt has usefully sought to categorize and clarify the various forms of constructionism by distinguishing between two broad types -social construction-as-refutation (which usually evinces strong political commitments) and the "more metaphysically inclined" sense of social construction-as-philosophical-critique. The latter is further subdivided, according to the primary intellectual wellsprings from which differing approaches derive, into phenomenological and discursive constructionisms, approaches associated with the reflexive stance of those interested in the sociology of scientific knowledge, and ideas of embodied practice as reflected, for example, in actor-network theory. The intricacies of these distinctions are of little concern here, except to note, as Demeritt does, that "construction-as-refutation" generally maintains the "conventional distinctions between culture/nature, subject/object, and representation/ reality" upon which divisions between true and false conceptions of nature rest, whereas "construction-as-philosophical-critique" generally challenges these dualisms. Beyond this, all these approaches share a commitment to the notion that things are not what they are generally taken to be and insist that "what we had once accepted as self-evidently pre-ordained and

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