Culture may be viewed as an agent that actively strives for domination over nature, or as a malicious tumor that tends to grow and exceed the limits set by nature. Nature may be regarded as a source of hardships and catastrophs that needs to be mastered by human rational action or, alternatively, as benign providence that offers advice. The common denominator of all these varieties is that culture and nature are opposite sides in a dualism. (Haila, 2000, p. 155)
On the level of cultural identity, nature is such an “other”. The relationship to the “other” is asymmetric and implies domination; Plumwood (1993) elaborates on this point. For instance, in oppositions such as male-female, city-country, and reason-emotion the second term is the “other” for the first one which is the dominant term. Similarly, culture, by being the sphere in which human historical identity is formed, is dominant to its “other”, nature; culture becomes a “something” in opposition to “something else” which is nature… (Haila, 2000, p. 157).
Haila points to Descartes and cartesian thinking:
Subject-object relationships and the ensuing dualisms become elevated to a metaphysical postulate that the subject-object dichotomy is an essential determinant of human existence. We owe this move largely to Descartes who drew a strict distinction between res cogitas and res extensa; the apparent necessity as well as the inadequacy of the Cartesian dualism have been recognized and analyzed by a number of authors (Haila, 2000, p. 157).
Haila is concerned with the effects of the dualism on Environmentalism:
The form particularly relevant in ecological thinking in the era of the ecological crisis is as follows: We want to know what nature allows us. To reach an ultimate certainty we would like to distinguish between “nature by herself as a standard” and “nature modified and polluted by humans”. This, however, cannot be done. Humans are creatures of nature; consequently, discriminating between phenomena of nature as “natural” and phenomena of culture as “unnatural” does not make sense at all. Furthermore, as nature changes continuously due to natural processes, the fact that human actions change nature cannot be a diagnostic feature of their “unnaturalness” (Haila, 2000, p. 157).
Haila’s argument that we want to standardise nature, reminds me of Monbiot’s arguments against idealistic conservation:
… the conservation movement, while well intentioned, sought to freeze living systems in time. It attempts to prevent animals and plants from either leaving or–if they do not live there already–entering. It seeks to manage nature as if tending a garden (Monbiot, 2014, p. 8)
Haila points to the models of first and second nature to deconstruct the dualism:
First nature and second nature form historically unique combinations in different situations and cannot be separated from each other: where, then, is the nature-culture dualism? (Haila, 2000, p. 168).
Haila concludes that the boundary caused by the dualism should be thought of as complex interactions, breaking down the individual and the collective systems:
… the dualism may not be one but many , constructed in every instantiation anew albeit from common materials … the composition and structure of the materials have varied enormously through history. It is not quite obvious whether “nature” has been the same in different cultures except in the abstract sense of being outside each culture, and in the even more abstract sense of being part of the same physical reality (Haila, 2000, pp. 163–164).
...instead of assuming at the outset that humanity and nature form two distinct realms of reality, we ought to view them as merging into situated, historically and contextually specified complexes. Then, the assumed fixed boundary between “I” and “the world” looses meaning (Haila, 2000, p. 171).
Haila, Y. (2000) ‘Beyond the Nature-Culture Dualism’, Biology & Philosophy, pp. 155–175. doi: 10.1023/a:1006625830102.
Monbiot, G. (2014) Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life. University of Chicago Press.