What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human

Addressed to an idea of central concern at the present time, this book explores the "politics of nature", the demarcations drawn through the concept and its currently contested status. This cultural and historical survey stages an encounter between "nature-endorsing" and "nature-sceptical" perspectives; the one associated with ecological advocacy of nature and the request to respect and conserve it, the other with critiques of its conceptual role in policing social and sexual norms and with the "post-structuralist" focus on its "cultural construction". The book seeks to pose the question of nature anew, in ways that allow for a resolution of the tensions between these contrary impulses. In a study which engages with metaphysics, anthropology, sexual theory, environmental ethics and aesthetics of nature, it reveals both the reactionary tendencies of a Green politics which ignores the historic and cultural dimensions of "nature", and the incoherence of cultural politics which denies its extra-discursive reality.