Environmental education presupposes some notion of the environment. And in many contexts, this notion is either conflated with, or derived from, some notion of ‘nature’.

But what is nature?

The cultural historian Raymond Williams distinguishes between three meanings of the term:‘(i)the essential quality and character of something; (ii) the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both; (iii) the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings’ (1).

Williams’ definition hints at two interrelated issues that haunt all those who use the word ‘nature’. First, it is easy to conflate meanings (i), (ii) and/or (iii), such that, for example, a statement is produced that implies that the nature of something is purely natural. For example, not too long ago it was argued that it was natural for women to prefer to engage in domestic chores... that was ‘the nature of things’.

Second, a key issue in regard to nature—the nature of nature—is the extent to which it can be said to include, or to be fundamentally separate from, human beings. If it is true that invocations of nature have been used all too often to legitimize certain social orders, it is also true that one of the discursive requirements for the domination of ‘nature itself’ --and indeed of some social groups--is to represent nature, or whatever the category is taken to refer to, as being fundamentally different from (human) culture. These two points begin to explain how and why the use of the term can entail an exceptionally slippery politics—a politics that must always be scrutinized and elucidated.

From the middle of the 20th century onwards (if not earlier), new understandings of the notion of the environment have apparently moved the debate on by invoking not a nature apart, but a bio-social context shared by all forms of life. But the legacy of the ‘old’—in fact, quite modern—understandings of nature continues to linger in the practices of many environmental educators and activists.

For example, the WWF, whose acronym once stood for the World Wildlife Fund, changed its name for ‘World Wide Fund for Nature’ (it has maintained the old name in the US).  The WWF suggested that this change was meant to reflect its concern with conserving what it described as ‘the environment as a whole’. But aside from maintaining the word ‘nature’ in its name, in 2009 the WWF’s US ‘who we are’ web page still spoke of a mission ‘To stop the degradation of the planet's natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature’(2).

The problem is not so much to abandon the explicit or tacit use of a notion of nature—something easier said than done—but to find a discourse, and a concomitant form of educational practice that avoids two equally erroneous stances:

1) a tendency to reduce everything to a nature that completely transcends human cultural input (what Nils Lindahl Elliot describes as biologism), and which leads some researchers to deny, incorrectly diminish, or entirely overlook humans' capacity to transform their immediate and long term environments (for an example of this tendency, see for example 'Romantic Red and the Claims of Evolutionary Psychologists';

2) the obverse tendency to reduce everything to human culture (what Nils Lindahl Elliot describes as culturalism), and which leads researchers to deny, incorrectly diminish, or entirely overlook the extent to which a more-than-human nature plays a role in both enabling, and limiting human cultural practice. An example of this tendency may be found in the opening paragraph of a classic cultural geography book about landscape: in the introduction to The Iconography of Landscape, Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove say that 'A landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings. This is not to say that landscapes are immaterial. They may be represented in a variety of materials and on many surfaces--in paint, on canvas, in writing on paper, in earth, stone, water and vegetation on the ground. A landscape park is more palpable but no more real, no less imaginary, than a landscape painting or poem' (3).

Part of the difficulty of avoiding both of these tendencies involves the relatively unselfconscious character of what Nils Lindahl Elliot describes as the circuit of anthropomorphism and cosmomorphism. Simplifying somewhat, human cultures tend to project their cultural values onto nature (or what passes for nature) even as they project back onto their own cultural practices the meanings of an anthropomorphicised nature. If we 'humanise' animals, then we use the resulting images to 'animalise' ourselves.

To learn more about this problem and its relation to the mass media, you may wish to read Nils Lindahl Elliot's Mediating Nature.

See also

References
1) Williams, R. (1983) ‘Nature’, in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. edit. London: Fontana, p. 219.

2) http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/who_we_are/index.cfm, accessed February 4, 2009.

3) Daniels, S. & Cosgrove, D. (1988) 'Introduction' in Cosgrove & Daniels (eds.) The Iconography of Landscape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 1.

In the picture: a living sculpture in the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, England.