ABSTRACT
In considering the future of nature, it is difficult not to be struck by the conjuncture at the present time of two influential critiques of modernity whose political prescriptions and agendas are in some ways complementary and overlapping, but which are talking to us about nature in very different ways. I am speaking here of ecology on the one hand and what might broadly be termed ‘postmodernist’ cultural theory and criticism on the other. Both have denounced the technocratic Prometheanism of the Enlightenment project, and inveighed against its ‘humanist’ conceptions: ecology on the grounds that this has encouraged an ‘anthropocentric’ privileging of our own species which has been distorting of the truth of our relations with nature and resulted in cruel and destructive forms of dominion over it; postmodernist theory on the grounds that it has been the vehicle of an ethnocentric and ‘imperializing’ suppression of cultural difference. Both, moreover, have emphasized the links between the dominion of ‘instrumental rationality’ and the protraction of various forms of gender and racial discrimination.
