The Nature of Natures and the Cultures of Natures

When advertisers for an enclave estate in Perth, Western Australia, use a photograph showing a Norfolk Island pine (whose native soil is 5000 kilometres away) behind a house under construction and caption it with 'nature and home building in harmony', one cannot help agreeing with Raymond Williams (1976: 184; see also 1972: 146–164), the 'father' of both cultural studies and ecocriticism, that 'nature' is perhaps the most complex word in the English language. One cannot also help acknowledging with David Arnold (1996) the problem of nature and wondering with Kate Soper (1995) what is nature? Perhaps no other word in the English language has had to bear so much cultural, political and downright ideological baggage; perhaps no other word in the language has had to serve so many purposes from marketing mass-produced beer as 'naturally brewed' to referring to packaged honey as natural, one of which is obviously agricultural and industrial rather than natural, and the other of which is seemingly so obviously natural that it seems highly redundant to refer to 'natural honey'. The concept of 'natural honey' raises the question of what would be unnatural or synthetic honey? Honey produced by exotic bees rather than indigenous ones? Both beer and honey have been processed, and therefore human agency has been brought to bear on ingredients that may or may not be considered to be natural. Wheat, barley and honeybees are not indigenous or native to Australia – nor Norfolk Island pines for that matter to Western Australia.

Second Nature

These exotic species are what Cicero in the first century, before the common era, called 'second nature'. By this he meant nature worked over and manipulated by humans, especially, in these cases, transported. For Cicero, second nature involved cultivation and agriculture, settlements and cities, weaving and sewing, mining and metallurgy. Agriculture is nature made over into second nature which occurs not only 'in the cultivation of the soil', as Cicero (1972: 184–185) put it, but also 'in the building of houses, in the weaving and sewing of our clothes and in the working of bronze and iron', all the means by which 'we seek with our human hands to create a second nature in the natural world'. They are also the means by which 'we' create a second culture in the natural world. Second nature (and culture) involves permanent dwellings, agriculture, mining of minerals and forging them into metals. These are all cultural activities that involve working over the natural world in what I call the 'cultures of natures', following and extending Wilson (1992). Second nature (and culture) is nature worked over, not simply worked like first nature (and culture), though for Cicero first nature is unworked. Second nature is a kind of living machine.

Cicero's distinction smacks of the doctrine of terra nullius applied most famously to Australia by Captain James Cook that denies the work of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers and nomads in working nature and in producing first nature. By placing second nature in the natural world, and by not making a distinction between nature and first nature, he equates hunter-gatherers and nomads with nature and so denies their work in shaping and using the land. There is a pre-human natural world to acknowledge and respect but there is also a first nature (and culture, the culture of first peoples) that is and was worked by Aboriginal people that also needs to be acknowledged and respected.

The means by which 'we' create a human world in the natural world are also the means by which 'we' create second nature (and culture) on first nature and culture. Second nature is nature worked over by patriarchal culture and made into second culture. Rather than the opposition between culture and nature (which is arguably patriarchal, colonialist and capitalist as I will try to show in Chapter 2), the crucial distinction for understanding the relationship between human beings and the earth, and achieving earthly mutuality between them, is that between the cultures of first, or worked, nature and the cultures of second, or worked-over, nature.

Yet, increasingly, human beings are living in a world dominated by communication technologies, a development that took place a long time after Cicero and that was not envisaged by him. To account for the role of communication technologies in today's world McKenzie Wark has developed the idea of 'third nature'. He argues that:

[...] from the telegraph to telecommunications, a new geography has been overlayed on top of naure and second nature. The development of third nature overlaps the development of second nature [...] Second nature [...] is progressively overlayed with a third nature of information flows, creating an information landscape which almost totally covers the old territories. (1994: 120)

To do so, third nature (and culture) has exploited the resources of nature in, and extended the boundaries of the earth-household into, the electromagnetic spectrum and orbital extraterrestrial space. But it has done so in precisely the same terms of domination and mastery that characterized second nature (and culture), a topic I discuss in Sublime Communication Technologies (Giblett 2008b). First, nature (and culture) works nature; second, nature (and culture) works over nature; and third, nature (and culture) overworks nature. The development of third nature (and culture) from second nature (and culture) is one of degree rather than kind. Each of these natures and cultures entail a distinct 'culture of nature', so rather than just one 'culture of nature' there is a number of competing 'cultures of natures'.

History of Nature

Yet the rise of modernity is equally, if not more, crucial for plotting the history of nature than the development of communication technologies. Indeed, the latter is largely the product and development of the former as I argue in Sublime Communication Technologies, rather than a complete break. Instead of third nature (and culture) being...