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! 

What is a post-environmentalist?

The modern idea of separating the real from the mere subjective, facts from values, nature from culture hides, according to Bruno Latour, an opposite truth: that man and nature are getting more and more entangled. In relation to the environmental debate, Latour argues that this entanglement must be the starting point for future action – a retreat to the nostalgic idea of untouched nature will not truly encounter the problem. In Latour’s attempt to localize and describe what this entanglement of future action might possibly be and contain, he makes a division between environmentalists and post-environmentalists:

"Environmentalists say: “From now on we should limit ourselves,” postenvironmentalists exclaim: “From now on, we should stop flagellating ourselves and take up explicitly and seriously what we have been doing all along at an ever increasing scale, namely, intervening, acting, wanting, caring.” (Latour)

Read Latour’s article “It´s development, stupid!” or: How to Modernize Modernization and explore and discuss his view on nature, which he suggests as the only possible starting point for us in order to truly encounter the problems of climate change.
 

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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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Debate the RETHINK NATURE contributions on the blog to the left.