Olivia Strittmatter - What is Nature

 Blog Post 10 - Outside Readings 3

Week 10

    This blog post is about an article that I found is a summary discussing a book called What is Nature by Kate Soper. This article of the book mixes together what we talked about in class: what is nature? What is the definition of nature? As well as one of the topics for the research paper: Ecofeminism.

The article first talks about how nature both means the wild that is “out there” and also the nature that is within us, such as human nature. It then moves on to talk about how the meaning itself isn’t what’s extremely important, but rather the politics that follow nature, such as the tension between environmental “nature” and postmodern “nature”. The next section brings in the ecofeminism topic; she talks about how people deem nature as “other” and as oppositional to humanity, this is a problem connected to feminism though because people often describe nature as “she” and humanity as “he”. Nature is seen as an “other” and it hides within many cultures. She talks about how our definition and concept of nature really matter when “nature” is under attack. What form of nature is being attacked?

I don’t think that the word “nature” has one clear meaning, and that’s because of how multifaceted it is. The word is used rhetorically in multiple ways. I agree with Soper though that defining the concepts of nature are crucial in political conversations. You can’t be talking about environmentalism and calling it “nature” because some people may take it to mean “human nature” rather than wilderness nature. I also liked how she discussed the need for humanity to start listening to both the people who are destroying nature via culture and also the people who are warning others of the impending environmental destruction. I thought that was an interesting take on the subject because we do need to protect the environment and reverse the damage we’ve done, but we shouldn’t do that at the expense of culture.