No, I kid. She’s much more knowledgeable about her chosen subject than Foer was. But just one last thing before I go to bed. This is from her interview, through e-mail, with Grist:
KS: In your essay, you take a shot at Bill McKibben for his book The End of Nature, saying this idea “makes as much sense as declaring an end to rocks or air or water …” But although literally you’re correct, in his 1989 book, McKibben argues that nature as an idea apart from us is now much less important than it was in the 19th century, and may actually be extinct. The central example he cites is global warming. He’s talking about how humanity now dominates wild nature; you’re talking about how nature persists in our lives, even when it’s not the wild nature of the 19th century. Aren’t you really looking at two sides of the same coin?
I’ll admit that I admire and agree with much of what Bill McKibben has to say in his books/articles/etc., and look forward to his next book (Deep Economy). I thought The End of Nature was very compelling. (My brother probably thought it was ‘convoluted bullshit’.) Price again uses a straw man argument here — McKibben’ s argument has nothing to do with the ‘end of rocks, etc.’. It has everything to do with the industrial globalized economy and its impact on the global climate. McKibben basically argues that because we have so radically altered weather patterns and trends, ‘nature’ can no longer be imagined as something that we (as humans) didn’t massively impact on every level. It’s not about domination at all–in fact, his point is precisely that we can not dominate something as complex as nature, but disruption and dislocation–we have made irreversible changes to the fundamental systems of this planet that will persist for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
JP: Well, let’s say we’re concerned about many of the same problems. I admire McKibben deeply; he’s been such an amazing advocate. But in End of Nature, he mourns for the idea of nature as a separate realm, and that’s exactly the idea I’ve been arguing should go extinct!
It is strange that Price argues the idea of nature as a separate realm ’should go extinct’ (I’m very wary of all her ’shoulds’), but at the same time isn’t even interested in the question of what ‘nature’ is.
I’d like to see us define nature not as something people destroy, but as something we inhabit poorly or well.
This may be the key sentence in the issues I have with Price. As far as I’m concerned, we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. Which is exactly what Price wrote in the previous sentence. But the idea of ‘inhabiting’ something makes that something (i.e., ‘nature’) a separate realm. Price seems to be putting forth a Cartesian duality between human and nature, sort of like how the soul ‘inhabits’ the body. Yet the question is not how poorly or well we inhabit nature (though that is also an important question), but how poorly or well we fulfill the promise of our own nature. It is a subtle, but important difference. If Price is completely disinterested in our evolutionary prehistory (and it seems she is, given her focus on pink plastic flamingos), she abandons any pretense for anything other than manufactured–and imagined–benchmarks by which to judge ‘human habitation of nature’ as appropriate or inappropriate.
So “what is nature?” and “where is nature?” and “is there any nature left?” just aren’t the right questions. The truly useful questions are “what nature is it, exactly?” And how do we use nature? How do we change nature? How does nature react? How do we react back? How do we imagine nature? Who uses and changes and imagines nature? And most important: how sustainably, how fairly, and how well?
I simply ask readers to read the above in light of her earlier statement: The idea of nature as a separate realm is..exactly the idea I’ve been arguing should go extinct! So if nature is not a separate realm, how can it react to us? How can we change it? How can we ‘use’ it? Why would we want to ‘use’ it? If we’re going to talk in ’shoulds’, shouldn’t we be massing all our energies towards living more in harmony with our own nature, and by extension the nature of those ecosystems in the bioregions we actually ‘inhabit’? I actually hope that Price will read this and not be too offended, because I really don’t get her argument, and would like to.
One last note: this review of her book at Salon.com makes me feel a whole lot better. I’m not alone.
