![]() The Macy Conferences held in New York 1946-53, were a cross-disciplinary hotbed of the ‘first-order cybernetics’ (Capra, 1996: 64-5 Hayles, 1999: 50-83). What is of interest here is how the cybernetic binary of system―environment may be an alternative to the nature―culture binary, and what the promises and forfeits of this approach are. The erratic history of cybernetics is something of a doppelgänger to the development of ecology throughout the 20th century, as cybernetics has exerted significant influence on ecological thought. However even recently, Bill McKibben, a prominent figure in the movement, wrote that “we’re under attack from climate change” and we need to “mobilise” like in times of war (2016), thereby reasserting a certain discontinuity between humanity and environment. Since 2011, things have changed somewhat, and environmentalism has reinvigorated under the banner of climate change (see below). This is a move towards the edges or the borders of the ‘great outdoors’, not to cross the threshold into some ideal outside (of capitalism, of modernity, or so), but to deconstruct the mechanisms by which the borders are erected and reproduced. Swyngedouw proposes a reverse move, it “is not any longer about bringing environmental issues into the domain of politics … but rather how to bring the political into the environment” (ibid.: 254-5). ![]() In this analysis, environment as something ‘out there’ can be instrumentalised to externalise what is most intimately bound with human actions, especially operations of capitalist production. In this case, paradoxically, the environment becomes an enemy, a danger looming at the horizon, a constitutive mechanism of ‘risk society’. Erik Swyngedouw analysed how environmentalism contributed to a ‘post-political’ context, contributing to “consensualise climate change” through a projection of a common foe that “requires dealing with” (ibid.: 269). What Shellenberger and Nordhaus are referring to is the problematic ways in which the word has been put to use in public and political discourse. But if humans are part of the environment then the concept of the environment is meaningless. Defining humans as outside of the environment is scientifically specious and politically suicidal. The human animal is as much a part of the environment as a mahogany tree or a raindrop. What we include and exclude in the category of ‘the environment’ is utterly arbitrary. In a subsequent interview, they claimed that the notion of ‘environment’ is antithetical to the goals of the green movement: The notion of environmentalism at large was criticised by Michaell Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in their provocative article ‘The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World’ in 2004. This is no place to discuss the specifics of how ‘environment’ has been conceptualised through a history of the movement, but it is of interest to point out some recent developments. The word has been one of the preferred concepts of the environmental movement from the 1960s on. Understood in this sense, environment places the human at the centre, maintaining a ‘centralised geography’ like the pre-Copernican universe. This implies an inside that stands erect and an outside that surrounds this inside and turns around it” (2011: 11). As Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopolous argues, etymologically speaking, “ environment comes from the word environs, in its turn coming from the French words en (‘in’) and virer (‘to turn). (Connelly et al., 2012: 20)Įnvironment is often equated with nature, however, it carries with itself a number of specific causal and onto-epistemic presumptions. But we also frequently use the term … to refer to the whole of the natural world-from ecosystem to biosphere-within which human beings and all other parts of the plant and the animal world have their being. Here, an ‘environment’ is ‘environment’ for something. ![]() The term ‘environment’ in narrow sense implies an environment for some creature or collection of creatures, whether plant or animal. The distinction has been summarised in these terms: Environment is distinct from nature, it is a simultaneously narrower and broader concept. Centre / surroundingsĮnvironment is a common denominator for a number of nature―culture interfaces and protocols, for example, environmental law, environmental ethics, environmental art, and environmentalism as a social movement.
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