ABSTRACT
Any consideration of possible futures must attend, not only to economic, social and political disruptions (as in the previous two volumes in this series), but also to the dramatic changes wrought by radically new developments in science, not only on our technologies but on our sense of being and our models for understanding the world. The hazards involved in confronting ‘science’ as a topic for a BLOCK conference proved unmanageable and we decided to approach these issues obliquely under the rubric of ‘The Future of Nature’ (Tate Gallery, London; November 1994). On one level ‘nature’ is like all concepts, a product of discourse, but its referent is also the subject of politics. There are real threats to whatever we conceive the ‘natural’ to be; the air, the land, the oceans, our bodies. The fragility of the concept ‘nature’ and the instability of its referent are strikingly demonstrated in the muddled vocabularies of environmental politics and in our struggles to come to terms both with the implications of new genetic and reproductive technologies and with the psychic consequences of the loss of ‘nature’ as a foundational concept, a ground of being, a stable otherness to the human condition.
