ABSTRACT
In the first section of this book, I focused upon what Romantic notions of nature do – and in particular, what they do when conflated with childhood. Tracing the emblematic Romantic Nature’s Child figure, I showed how idealized nature does the work of purifying childhood – how it renders childhood innocent and originary and associates it with other key collateral nature figurations (Castree, 2005), such as that of the noble savage. I also noted that the ‘moral authority’ (Daston and Vidal, 2004) carried by idealized nature is projected onto this Nature’s Child figure, making it a very seductive proposition. From this point, I considered how idealized nature has been variously interpreted as the best teacher of young children – and has served as a pedagogical guide and muse for early childhood educators. I noted that idealized nature is still being cast as the prerequisite for healthy childhoods and, correspondingly, as the remedy and salvation for endangered (denaturalized) childhoods. And last, I reflected upon the rather paradoxical ways in which the science of human development (internal nature) is increasingly deployed as evidence of children’s special relationship with idealized external nature. Donna Haraway prompts us to ask the questions: ‘What counts as nature, by whom, and at what cost?’ (1997: 104). When I apply such questions to the idealized natures that featured in the previous section, and extend them to think about what these particular natures have done, I can identify a number of unintended consequences. For while on the surface these nature ‘doings’ may seem well-intentioned, life-affirming and benign, the ‘good work’ of idealized
nature is inevitably done at the expense of what Val Plumwood (1993, 2002) refers to as the ‘hyper-separation’ of humans from nature. It becomes even more complicated when childhood is conflated with idealized nature, and effectively handed over from the human to the nature side of the ‘either/or’ equation. This idealized union of childhood and Nature is intended to protect Nature’s Child from the ‘corrupting’ influence of adult society and technologies, but it effectively separates children off, at least semiotically, from the rest of humanity. As I have constantly reminded, the Romantic idealization of nature, and hence childhood, depends upon the binary logic of the nature/culture divide. For nature and childhood can only be idealized through being separated off, valorized as exotic others, and counterposed or set against degenerative (adult) society. Along with the transfer of cultural understandings about nature and childhood into real life experience, this has the unfortunate flow-on effect of denying real children’s real world relationships and it positions them in the paradoxical situation of needing protection from the world in which they actually reside. Another unintended and paradoxical effect is the potential displacement of the actual material world and real embodied child that are being eulogized and mythologized as perfect Nature and Nature’s Child respectively. To borrow Haraway’s (2004b: 90) turn of phrase, ‘the [real] world is precisely what gets lost’ when childhood is represented as a manifestation of idealized nature and partitioned off within a heterotopic imaginary realm. This, to me, is the biggest cost of all. In this section I follow through on the argument that the real potential of the child-nature relationship lies not in returning childhood to some valorized notion of nature that does not actually exist, but in moving the relationship ‘elsewhere’ (Haraway, 2004b: 90) – beyond the wistful imaginings of Romanticism and the entrapments of its constitutive nature/culture divide. Tapping into this potential involves some major gear shifts and a completely different set of articulations of real world natures and childhoods. It entails bringing childhood back to earth – grounding it within the imperfect common worlds that we share with all manner of others – living and inert, human and more-than-human. These are not sanctified, pure and innocent separated worlds, but worlds that are always already full of inherited messy connections. Common worlds are worlds full of entangled and uneven historical and geographical relations, political tensions, ethical dilemmas and unending possibilities. I now turn to the task of reclaiming nature and childhood from the Romantics and rearticulating or reconfiguring them in the ‘elsewhere’ of these complex but down-to-earth common worlds.
