Environment and culture

Nature is fate, culture is destiny. Nature is the condition of our material existence, culture is our only means of encountering and re-forming nature. At the outset of a new millennium, we are beginning to understand that the collective fate of humankind is in our own hands but if we continue to ignore our natural limits we shall experience the consequences in ways beyond existing cultural capacities. Once upon a time, plastic trees were planted along a freeway in LA then uprooted by

protesting citizens. But it might be asked: “What’s wrong with plastic trees?” (Krieger 1973). We live after the “end of nature” (McKibben 1989). It is we moderns who first learned to privilege artifice over nature and now imagine post-nature. No part of the planet remains untouched by humans. All landscapes are enculturated, which is to say we see, reflect, inscribe, and act upon the natural worlds that surround us (which we call environment or that which environs us) (Hogan 2003; Seddon 1997). We experience nature but our senses are mediated by our own languages, social imaginaries, and technologies. For humans, nature is cultural and not only in ways of our choosing. It can be said that it is in our human nature to be cultural. We have the material resources to mass produce the simulacra of natural things. In mimicking the ways and forms of nature we also change our meanings and values of nature, and of our own appropriations, significations, imaginaries, and interventions. We not only mimic nature, we consume it (Flannery 1995). Yet, we are still embo-

died, material beings that depend upon, and use, our “environment” for survival. Being near the top of the food chain we are beginning to face the consequences of centuries of homo sapiens’ domination of other species, a domination that has led to the extinction of many other species of flora and fauna. Some of the animals under threat of extinction compete with human populations for resources. Not only do we have these problems with untamed animals, we have also made a massive imprint on the earth’s surface with domestication programs-of livestock through to pets. Animals used for food production have radically reshaped nature, turning parts of all continents from wilderness areas into landscapes. But the process of enculturation is never one way; human societies that work

with animals are shaped by this close alliance that is at once cooperative and exploitative (with the power heavily weighted in favor of the homo sapiens masters). Pastoralist, agricultural, and industrial-urban societies alike have for many centuries worked with animals in taming nature for productive purposes. These relationships in turn have reshaped collective social imaginaries, institutions, and cultures-to name but three examples, the Olympic Games, circuses, and horse-racing industries. In each of these areas of human endeavor and play, homo sapiens is deploying animals that reflect our collective identities as homo faber even as we exhibit our own capacities and characters as homo ludens. So too our everyday conversation and jokes remind us of our codependencies and taboos (e.g. sheep jokes in pastoralist societies). If thinking human culture vis-à-vis our environment were not complex enough in

relation to animals, our domination of nature in food production extends the challenge to vegetarians, omnivores, and carnivores alike. This is especially the case since the industrialization of the countryside from at least the eighteenth century in England, exported to the world by the beginning of the twentieth century, not least in the mass production of food. It is another sign of our times: once mighty rivers dammed and reduced to streams and mass storage lakes to irrigate thousands of hectares of monocultures for mass consumption elsewhere, e.g. the tomato, the potato (for chips), maize (for corn syrup) are but three famous examples in the US. These foods are genetically modified, processed, and then distributed and consumed in contexts and settings very different from their original points of production. But the story of our use and dependency on nature is not only about production. Even the most humble of foodstuffs, such as cereals and “root” vegetables, are highly enculturated objects that go to the very center of human significatory practices and social imaginaries (see Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000). A plethora of recipe books, celebrity chefs, global food histories, and genealogies of particular food types (the curry leaf, the tomato, the potato, and the coffee bean) in recent decades underscores this critical insight. In this essay, we address this dialectic of nature and culture by first defining the key

terms “nature” and “environment.” Because the elemental forces of nature are the absolute conditions of our material being, becoming, and dying (individually and collectively), it is a common-sense view to presuppose that nature is underlying and impervious to human being and action upon it. “Nature is natural: it just is!” Over the past century, social theory and the social sciences more generally have gone a long way to shifting this common sense to a critical sense of nature: these days it is relatively uncontroversial to assert the enculturation of nature. We affirm this achievement but add the rider that we are in danger of creating a new common sense that loses purchase on the radical otherness of nature that both forms and informs our very existence and destiny. The nature-culture dialectic demands that we read our own culture in and through nature, and that we understand nature as that which is not ultimately subordinate to human action. Having first restored our critical appreciation of nature/ environment, we then seek to rethink “culture” in the active present tense of human being and becoming. Our essay then shifts register to put our discussions of key concepts to work on two

regional case studies involving a key element-water-in order to display the differing and changing meanings, stories, institutions, and actions that shape human engagement with ecological settings. We hope that these examples not only illustrate the value of what Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith (2001) have called “a strong program of cultural sociology,” but promote a cultural sociology that places the nature-culture dialectic at

the forefront of a rethinking of culture as performative, autonomous, creative, and in continuous movement.