Concluding
workshop of the research project:
Nature, Ideas of Nature, Politicization of Nature
Tampere, 1 – 2 December, 2003.
Monday, 1 December –
10-12, Pinni B5078; 12-5 pm,
Pinni B3112
10 am
opening of the workshop, goal-setting
Ville Lähde (Tampere): What is ”nature” in Rousseau’s state of
nature?
Bronislaw Szerszynski (Lancaster): The Sacred Politics of Nature
Lunch
2 pm
Ville Haukkala (Tampere):
Symbolic meanings and the politics of the environment
Yrjö Haila (Tampere): The
cosmology of environmentalism:
pervasive bifurcations
Dinner
Tuesday, 2 December – 10 am- 2 pm Pinni A1078; 2-5
Pinni A3111
10 am
Kalevi Kull (Tartu): The idea
of semi-natural
Kaie Kotov (Tartu): Biosphere, Noosphere, Semiosphere: Ecologies
of Human Semiosis
Lunch
1 pm
Jouni Häkli (Tampere): Nature
in the constitution of nation
Concluding discussion
Dinner
Bron’s
abstract (14 October)
In a kind of archaeology of the present,
I look at the contemporary politics of nature as involving a particular
ordering of the sacred and nature, one conditioned by the 'long arc' of
transcendental dualism that defines Western religious history. In particular, I
want to explore environmental politics as having a particular relationship with
the Reformation transformations in the sacred, in nature and in the
understanding of human community. The Reformation cleared away medieval
symbolic ordering of nature, rendering it available for new symbolic orderings,
such as those offered by modern science. But at the same time the Reformation
made possible a new, purposive form of politics. Instead of politics being
understood as the mere reproduction of communal life, the sect form - an
elective sociation whose members are motivated by a belief that they alone are
living according to the demands of a transcendent, counterfactual moral truth -
introduced the possibility of a politics predicated on the transformation of
society according to an external standard.
It was from the late 1960s onwards that
environmental politics started to adopt this insurgent form of the sacred, yet
this was the product of a long cultural trajectory. The stripping away of
pre-reformation symbolic meanings and the rise of urban life had made nature
available for moral orderings - to become the object not of symbolic
interpretation, or even of technical management but of moral judgement. Here
nature serves as both object and source of ethicisation. Nature became increasingly seen as morally
considerable, as evidenced by the rise of animal welfare and preservationist
movements in the nineteenth century. But rather than nature being judged in
terms of a transcendent moral standards, it was increasingly seen as providing
its own standards. Enlightenment thought had established an idea of nature as a
sublime modern standard, based on abstract equivalence and transcendent values.
But nineteenth century evolutionary biology had also offered ideas of
fittedness and function, offering a more materialist basis for the judgement of
and by nature. Contemporary environmental politics fuses both of these readings
of nature as moral.
This paper interprets contemporary
environmental activism as a 'calling', as an attempt to live a life of
this-worldly asceticism in service to a supreme moral claim - in this case to
respect nature' immanent moral demand. But at the same time as this purposive
politics of nature depends on a post-Reformation form of sacrality, it also
relied on its own forms of ritual activity, symbolic labour which is used: to
generalise beyond particular cases and link them to universal or cosmic
meanings and values; to set up particular relationships between what is and
what could (or ought to) be the case; to employ the communicative effects of
operating through symbol, association and connotation; to mark out the protest
community and its actions from its wider social milieu; and to carve out a
particular segment of space and time made suitable for particular kinds of
action and experience.