ABSTRACT
Reports of Nature’s death are greatly exaggerated.1 At the end of the twentieth century Nature is alive and well, permeating the experience of everyday life as a riotous profusion of heterotropic images, signs and discursive constructs. The wild, external nature mourned by McKibben and others may indeed be passing as the commodification of the natural environment pushes ever deeper, yet Nature is far from a redundant anachronism. Captured, corralled, and dismembered by the market, Nature is transfigured from the solidity of material substance to the fluid ether of signs and metaphors. In the contemporary moment disembodied fragments of Nature appear increasingly when and where we least expect, surging in irreverent liquidity through the pores of the economy, informing and transforming diverse and historically specific sets of social relations. This chapter discusses the significance of this “culture of Nature”2 in the context of the tensions and contradictions inherent to the production of commodities from the natural environment. It illustrates how the social construction of Nature is spatially differentiated, and suggests that place-specific discursive constructions on the environment emerge out of, and in turn may reproduce and regulate, the institutions and social practices which favor accumulation.
