ABSTRACT
The separation of nature from culture in the foundational history of contemporary social, legal, geographical and geopolitical order breathes logic into the uncanny practices of current laws and crises about land. This chapter explores the origins and power of this theoretical framework and its importance in the development of contemporary law and, specifically, how it came to dominate a particular understanding of property. In this continuing history, law constructs itself as a metaphysical discourse that simultaneously constitutes and is constituted by the absence of the physical. In property law, this ‘dephysicalisation’ of the world began by dividing the people-place relationship into the active agents of the property relation, ‘people’, and the passive objects of the property relation, ‘things’. However, the passive function of ‘things’ within this property equation means that those ‘things’ in the biosphere are not, in fact, irrelevant to property law – they are vital to it. This is because the ongoing practice of property law depends entirely on a very particular, instrumentalist value of the biosphere. This view or philosophy of the natural world or ‘nature’ legitimises current modes of the production, distribution and consumption of those ‘things’.
