Production of Nature Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The production of Nature perspective examines the material transformation of nature by human societies, insisting that labor rests at the heart of the social relation with nature. It rejects the notion that nature is external to human societies, but rather stresses the role that human societies have in giving shape to nature through the activities of production, consumption, and the social relations governing these activities-especially under advanced capitalism. By rejecting a dualistic view of society versus nature, it provides an alternative to visualize and understand the relationship between society and nature.

Central to the approach is the idea that the labor process is a social act that transforms both humans and nature, and thereby dissolves the intellectual dualism between nature and society. Building on the work of Karl Marx, it looks to labor-or more generally, production-as a process involving both people and nature, in which people initiate and manage the material interactions with nature resulting in finished goods and infrastructure. Production takes place in nature and involves changes in the form of matter using both human labor and natural forces. People work in nature as a kind of natural force, using muscle, machines, and knowledge to shape nature according to human desires. Production includes far more than an individual’s fabrication of an object. It encompasses imaginative work, economic and cultural creation, collective endeavors, and also consumption. As people shape the external world through production, moreover, they also transform their own nature and their own societies.

The Production of Nature does not imply that every atom in an endangered species, cloned sheep, genetically modified salmon, or university building is literally created by people. Instead, the view holds that people’s actions affect the location and protected status of the wild animal, the process that led to the birth of the clone, the gene-splicing technology and patents of the salmon, and the location, style, materials, and social purposes of the university building. To differing degrees, all seemingly natural systems have a social framing and context while all seemingly social systems have a natural substrate, much modified by historic processes of producing nature. Meanwhile, environmental problems such as global warming, desertification, and mercury poisoning show that the materiality of produced nature can have unexpected and damaging consequences.

Under capitalism, the process of buying materials, transforming them with added labor, and selling them at a profit is central to the production of nature. Sometimes nature seems to pose certain barriers, however, to this cycle. Seeds, for example, were long a self-reproducing good. Unlike tractors, they were at one time difficult for capitalist firms to own, produce, and sell. In the past 100 years, however, science broke down the barriers to capitalist ownership of seeds through the selective breeding of hybrid, high-yielding varieties and the creation of a legal framework of patents to such seeds. More recently, biotechnology and patent law has extended to the modification and patenting of entire organisms with novel combinations of characteristics. The Production of Nature approach shows how these processes are driven by the dynamics of capitalism, which have promoted narrow and shortterm interests at the expense of the precautionary principle, social considerations, or any interest in cultural or biological diversity.

The Production of Nature approach contrasts with more common views that conceptualize nature as separate and external to society. Proponents argue that this is a false abstraction because it is impossible to know nature as external to social structures, belief systems, and social values. There is no pristine, prehuman nature, and the view that nature is external to society is a false ideology usually mobilized to justify social oppression and/or short-sighted environmental domination. In contrast to dualistic views of nature and society, the Production of Nature moves environmental debates beyond the rhetoric of either protecting nature or dominating it. In particular, Production of Nature proponents reject a back-to-nature attitude in environmental debates. It is impossible to stop producing nature, but it is possible to produce nature (and society) along more socially and ecologically progressive lines.

At one extreme, a Marxist politics of nature accepts the proven and potential benefits of scientific and technical transformations of nature and recognizes that nature and society are tightly woven together. In contrast with approaches that advocate better nature management, or a hands-off nature protection, it seeks a revolutionary transformation of capitalism in favor of an economic system that is not driven by the narrow drive to accumulate profits. It advocates a social system in which science and technology is uncoupled from capitalist imperatives in order to serve more socially and environmentally progressive ends.

A more reformist interpretation, in contrast, contributes to debates about genetically modified organisms in agriculture by identifying the corporate control of biotechnology research and development and by promoting a stronger role for publicly-funded, democratically accountable universities in the research development of biotechnology, including more careful assessments of the long-term implications for human health and agro-ecosystem functions.

For critics, the Production of Nature approach overemphasizes production at the expense of cultural processes that also socialize nature, and in which productive processes are always embedded. They also point out that the approach shows much greater interest in how capitalism produces nature and much less in how produced nature affects capitalism; it does not encompass the agency of nature. Furthermore, it portrays nature as nothing more than a means to human happiness, and seems to silence a consideration of nature and natural processes in their own right.

Bibliography:

Castree, “Marxism, Capitalism, and the Production of Nature,” in N. Castree and B. Braun, eds., Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics (Blackwell, 2001);
Smith, “Nature at the Millenium: Production and Re-Enchantment,” in B. Braun and N. Castree, eds., Remaking Reality (Routledge, 1998);
N. Smith and P. O’Keefe, “Geography, Marx and the Concept of Nature,” Antipode (v.12, 1989).