Lea Schick is the editor and moderator of this debate forum. During the RETHINK exhibition she will facilitate the RETHINK NATURE discussions here on her blog. We will very much encourage you to participate in the debate! 

The poor polar bear and the myth of the natural nature


“Why are we so frightened of a change in the climate?  Why do we want our climates to stay the same, to offer us the same old weather we have grown up with?  We welcome change and novelty in many other areas of our human experience: new technologies to captivate us, new places to visit, new people to love.” (Hulme)

In his article Learning to Accept Re-created Climates Mike Hulme argues, that the main reason we fear climate change is because climate has been made the symbol of the pure and natural, the innocent and fragile–- Eden, something we have to save and protect. The climate is the only thing left that we can call pure nature, untouched by humans, and we want it to stay that way! If we accept that even nature is co-created by humans, Eden and the wilderness of nature is forever lost. “We are concerned about anthropogenic climate change because our climate has come to symbolise the last stronghold of Nature, the final frontier resisting our encroachment.” (Hulme)

Is this really the reason we fear climate change? Do we really feel for the polar bear, or has the polar bear just become the symbol of climate change and is most of all poor, because it has to carry on its shoulder the entire weight of human nostalgia towards the lost nature, as Hulme describes it?

Hulme says that we have to stop being frightened by this idea of a not totally natural climate, because it keeps us paralyzed, instead “[we] need to ‘Rethink’ climate change. [… ] we must embrace the idea of novelty – in our climates as much as in other forms of cultural innovation and change.” (Hulme). We have to look at climate change from new perspectives to come up with ways to mitigate the problems.

Should we really accept these changes? Should we embrace them? And will this help us solve or mitigate the problems that arise from the changes?
 

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Contributions for RETHINK NATURE

 

ABOUT RETHINK NATURE

Discussions about climate change often seem to be centered around the concept of nature as ‘the Other’ – something that is outside of us. Sometimes lost, sometimes distant, often something we have left behind, and something to which we should perhaps return, in one form or another. But thus nature is also something, which we have been largely able to happily forget over the course of our industrial revolutions, and to omit almost entirely from consideration in conventional human planning and development.

But the reality of climate change – a force of Nature so all-pervasive and profound in the severity of its realized and projected effects that it is compelling us to rethink practically every aspect of life on our planet – makes this romanticization and idealization of ‘Mother Nature’ difficult to maintain, and demonstrates that our perception of any meaningful distance from nature is shockingly illusory. We have not returned to nature; nature is returning to us, forcing us as it did our ancestors to transform our methods of devising and executing every sphere of human existence. When we can (un)intentionally change the weather, when water and air are commodities that we can own, and when the very climate has become a subject of intense political debate at every level, then nature again becomes a complex and ambiguous phenomenon.

How does climate change force us to rethink our notions of nature? And how does our perception of nature affect how we deal with climate change? Through a number of articles approaching different aspects of what we call ‘nature’, we encourage you to share your opinions and thoughts with the writers and with other interested.

 

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