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The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-constructivist

Challenge to Environmental History

Article in History and Theory · December 2003

DOI: 10.1046/j.1468-2303.2003.00257.x

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History and Theory, Theme Issue 42 (December 2003), 60-74 © Wesleyan University 2003 ISSN: 0018-2656

II. THE NATURE OF “NATURE”

1.

THE PROBLEMATIC NATURE OF NATURE:

THE POST-CONSTRUCTIVIST CHALLENGE TO
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

KRISTIN ASDAL

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the program of environmental history within the larger discipline of
history and contrasts it with more recent contributions from post-constructivist science. It
explores the ways in which post-constructivism has the potential to productively address
many of the shortcomings of environmental history’s theories and models that environ-
mental historians themselves have begun to view with a critical eye. The post-construc-
tivist authors discussed in this article, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, both represent
challenges to the ways in which nature and the natural sciences tend to be conceptualized
as non-problematized entities within environmental history. They also challenge the ways
in which dichotomies of nature and culture tend to be reproduced within the program of
environmental history. It is argued that these post-constructivist contributions represent a
radical and arguably more truly historical way of introducing non-human actors into the
historical narrative, and thus represent a potential reinvigoration of environmental histo-
ry that would embrace a more radical historicity, greater diversity, and openness to dif-
ference.

Part of the task of the humanities is to know how to question what constitutes
good scientific practice, as well as how “others” should be represented. But the
question of how to scientifically represent “others” has usually been restricted to
research objects in the form of other people.
The criticism of positivism was a criticism of the unity of science, the belief
that all phenomena could be studied using the same—natural-scientific—
method. Studying human relationships is something fundamentally different
from studying nature, it has been argued. Science is not value-free and neutral,
and people are not just objects, but also subjects. One of the philosophers and
critics of positivism in what has since become the “Habermas tradition” put the
basis for the difference this way in 1957: “One of the most important differences
between people and animals is that people have language.”1 In this and similar

1. Hans Skjervheim, “Deltakar og tilskodar” [1957], in Positivisme, dialektikk og materialisme:

Den norske debatten om samfunnsvitenskapenes teori, ed. R. Slagstad (Oslo: Scandinavian
University Press, 1976), 204. Author’s translation. For a similar discussion, see Skjervheim’s article
in English, “Objectivism and the Study of Man,” Inquiry 17, no. 2 (1994), 213-238, reprinted in
Positivist Sociology and its Critics, Vol 1., ed. P. Halfpenny and Peter McMyler (Aldershot, Eng.: E.
Elgar Pub. Co., 1994), 421-447.
 THE PROBLEMATIC NATURE OF NATURE 61
ways, the very characteristic that distinguishes people from nature, animals, and
things became essential for rejecting the notion that people could be treated as
merely given—as could, well, things and nature. Thus, political science and the
humanities ought to contribute to creating a “separate space” for human agents
and their interaction. That language is an important difference between humans
and animals is true enough, and these forms of criticism have played an impor-
tant role. But the flip side of this coin is that nature was left to the natural sci-
ences and conceptualized in a dichotomous way: nature as positive given on the
one side—culture with its capacity for active agency on the other.
Of course this distinction has not been absolute, particularly not within the dis-
cipline of history. Here, understanding the shifting notions of and attitudes
toward nature has long been a matter of interest, and it has been studied through
various historical traditions. At the same time, the discipline has also examined
the meaning of climate, landscape, and resources for people’s actions and vari-
ous paths of social development.2
The environmental movement and the attention paid to environmental issues
from the 1970s to the present, however, represent a new challenge. Concepts and
questions connected to nature and environment have been given a particular rel-
evance and ingress, resulting in, among other things, the growth of “environ-
mental history.” Environmental history appears today as a sub-discipline within
history, and attempts to bring nature in as a co-creator of histories. This effort to
incorporate “the other”—nature—into our historical narrative and into history as
a discipline is an important correction for a discipline that has for too long
restricted its focus to assumed autonomous human actors in isolation from nature
and the material world. However, in all of this, environmental history has appar-
ently been oblivious to more recent philosophies and histories of science.
Feminist philosophy of science, for example, has posed fundamental questions
about what we at any given time perceive as science—and nature. The question
is thus which nature and which conceptions of science should be brought in. One
might also ask, which ethic?
In this article, I discuss the program of environmental history within the larg-
er discipline of history, and contrast it with more recent contributions from post-
constructivism within the history of science and anthropological studies of sci-
ence and technology.3 The latter represents a contribution that on first impression
may seem less relevant for “environmental challenges” and for history as a dis-
cipline. This has also led to the dismissal of constructivist contributions by envi-

2. Not least within economic history. See, e.g., Ivan T. Berend and G. Ránki, The European
Periphery & Industrialization (London: Cambridge University Press, 1982); S. Pollard, Typology of
Industrialization Processes in the Nineteenth Century (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic
Publishers, 1990); and also the French Annales school.
3. I have adopted the term “post-constructivism” from Joseph Rouse, “Vampires: Social Construc-
tivism, Realism, and Other Philosophical Undead,” History and Theory 41 (2002), 60-78. I also
include the works of Bruno Latour in this category. The term “post-constructivism” is primarily use-
ful for preventing the concept of constructivism from being confused with social constructivism (the
assumption that everything can be reduced to “the social”), but also for avoiding a fruitless discussion
of realism versus social constructivism. That the debate between realism and social constructivism has
become void of meaning is precisely one of the points that Rouse makes in his article.
62 KRISTIN ASDAL

ronmental historians because of constructivism’s supposed potential for pushing

historical analyses even further away from concerns for our physical world.4
Here, however, my attempt is to show that post-constructivism has the potential
to constructively address many of the shortcomings of environmental history’s
theories and models that environmental historians themselves have begun to
view with a critical eye. I argue that not until the challenges from this post-con-
structivist field are taken seriously will environmental history be able to repre-
sent any truly viable turn in the discipline of history.

II

Environmental history is a field of research that began to take shape in the 1970s.
It grew from and was informed by strong, value-laden public involvement, and
its goal was to understand how people shape and have been shaped by their nat-
ural environments. In short, it was presented as a field that would address the role
of nature and its role in people’s lives.5
Even though environmental history has been introduced and accepted within a
number of national communities of historians, it still is most strongly established
within the North American tradition. One of its most well-known and prominent
contributors is the historian Donald Worster, whose brand of environmental his-
tory is as strict as it is compelling.
Worster’s book, Nature’s Economy, first published in 1977, is a history of
ecology, with roots in the history of ideas, that strongly criticizes the develop-
ment of modern ecology.6 But with the essay “Ecological History” from 1993,
and an article in the Journal of American History three years earlier, the criticism
of ecology is no longer the focal point for Worster. He invokes the wildlife biol-
ogist and conservationist Aldo Leopold, who in 1949 called for an “ecological
interpretation of history.”7 Leopold believed that ideas and insights from the
growing field of ecology would help explain the past. Worster also ventures to
speak for an ecological interpretation of history. He introduces a separate pro-
gram for “environmental history,” and argues that it should comprise three lev-
els: the first is the most basic for Worster—nature itself; the second is under-
standing how technology has restructured human–ecological relationships; the
third refers to conceptions, ideologies, ethics, and regulations—a “purely mental
type of encounter.”8

4. Richard White, “Environmental History, Ecology and Meaning,” Journal of American History
76 (1990), 1111–1116. This is not necessarily a position that is representative for the field of envi-
ronmental history. Rouse points out that these directions potentially have much in common.
5. Donald Worster, “Ecological History,” in Major Problems in American Environmental History,
ed. Carolyn Merchant (Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath and Company, 1993), 4. Much of what he advo-
cates here was also presented some years earlier in Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth:
Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American History 76 (1990),
1087–1106. In my account of Worster’s program, I draw from both of these works.
6. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas [1977] (Cambridge,
Eng.:Cambridge University Press, 1994).
7. Worster, “Transformations of the Earth,” 1087.
8. Ibid.
 THE PROBLEMATIC NATURE OF NATURE 63
To write environmental history according to Worster’s program, one must first
understand nature itself. Nature as it has been, how it has worked and been
organized, is particularly important.9 Worster is the first to admit that this is a dif-
ficult task. He argues that the problem lies in the fact that nature, like culture, has
a story to tell, but that there are so few written sources of this story. The solution
is to turn to the natural sciences, which thus become Worster’s assisting theories,
and on the basis of them—not the least, the theory of the ecosystem—to build a
new knowledge-base for environmental history. In this way, the ecosystem
becomes the point of departure for further historical inquiries. An ecosystem is
defined as a subset of the global economy of nature—a local or regional system
of plants and animals that work together to create tools to survive. The historian
should thus ask how it is possible to use this definition of ecosystems to better
understand the history of human society. With the help of modern science in the
form of ecology, the historian will be able to discover new correlations regard-
ing people and the past. Thus history must proceed via ecology to get to nature.
As Worster writes, “Environmental history aims to bring back into our awareness
[the] significance of nature and, with the aid of modern science, to discover some
fresh truths about ourselves and our past.”10
However, such a program is problematic in a number of ways. Worster is
aware that ecology is not a unitary science; nevertheless, ecology ends up as a
kind of ultimate truth within his program. Moreover, ecology is hardly a pure sci-
ence that can without further ado form the basis of historical analysis. Ecology
is not synonymous with nature, nor is it the solid foundation that one can con-
trast with human activity.11 Neither “nature” nor “ecology” is an unambiguous
concept that can ground history; indeed ecology itself has a history.12
The actual term “ecosystem” came into play through the modern use of com-
puters and modeling, and the term captured mechanical engineering applied to
nature. To translate directly from ecology to nature is thus deeply problematic.
The concept of ecology originated in the second half of the 1800s, and was
intended to cover the study of the supposed equilibrium between organisms and
the external world.13 Ecology, however, did not become “big science” until after
World War II.14 Thus, it was the postwar North American urban industrial com-

9. Worster, “Ecological History,” 5.

10. Worster, “Transformations of the Earth,” 1106.
11. See William Cronon, “Ecological Prophecies,” in Merchant, ed. Major Problems; William
Cronon, “Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History,” Journal of American
History 76 (1990), 1123; and White, “Environmental History, Ecology and Meaning.” See also David
Demeritt: “Ecology, Objectivity and Critique in Writings of Nature and Human Societies,” Journal of
Historical Geography 20 (1994), 22–37, for a critique of Donald Worster’s works.
12. See, e.g., Michael G. Barbour: “Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties,” in Uncommon
Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York and London: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1995); Peter J. Bowler, The Environmental Sciences (London: Fontana Press, 1992);
Demeritt, “Ecology, Objectivity and Critique”; Frank Benjamin Golley, A History of the Ecosystem
Concept in Ecology (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993).
13. Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: Verlag von Georg Reimer,
1866) as discussed in Peder Anker, Tre human-økologiske tradisjoner, TMV, Arbeidsnotat no. 92
(1995). According to Bowler, Haeckel intended for his readers to imagine a kind of global organic
economy where all species played a part (Bowler, The Environmental Sciences, 365).
14. Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept, 8.
64 KRISTIN ASDAL

plex that enabled the large-scale development of ecological knowledge.15 The

most important source of research funding on ecosystems was the American
Atomic Energy Commission, which aimed to discover how organisms would
react to radioactive radiation, and how radioactive material moved through the
food chain.16 Therefore, one might say, ecological research is based as much in
modern management theory as in a pure desire to understand nature in equilibri-
um.17
One of the all-too-familiar reactions in light of this kind of criticism—not least
when it comes to the humanities—is to reject the notion of ecology as pure ide-
ology and instead seek refuge in culture and what we as humans have created:
civilization and progress. Anna Bramwell is an influential historian who repre-
sents such a position.18 Bramwell writes environmental history, but does not
define herself as part of the tradition I have described above. Instead, she adopts
a critically distant stance to expose the environmental movements with which
Worster and the other environmental historians sympathize.
Bramwell’s point of departure in her 1989 book Ecology in the 20th Century is
that nature and ecology are problematic concepts. But rather than digging into
the development of ecology as a discipline, Bramwell is interested in how ecol-
ogy has been “polluted” by political ideology.19 Her book moves within what
Worster calls his third level of environmental history: the field of ideologies,
conceptions, and ideas. In brief, it is about scientifically-based ecological ideas
from the late 1800s up to today’s radical leftist “green” movements. It is ecolo-
gy’s connection to the so-called green movements that particularly arouses her
interest.
She concludes her book by describing what she sees as one of the paradoxes
of the environmental movement—namely, that its invitation to moral and indi-
vidual truth has ended in a global religion. Indeed, it is a religion that is pro-
foundly negative and anti-human:
Despite its rejection of organized and traditional Christianity, the ecological movement
still carries the burden of its heritage, the legacy of the crucifixion, symbol of death, suf-
15. Here I base my argument on Golley. This is a point that is made repeatedly throughout his
book. See page 3 for a concrete example.
16. Both Golley and Donna Haraway’s Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan
©_Meets_OncoMouseTM, Feminism and Technoscience (New York and London: Routledge, 1997),
13, touch on this.
17. Several others have pointed out to what extent the 1960s–1970s belief in ecology as a unitary
science has disintegrated. See, e.g., Demeritt, “Ecology, Objectivity and Critique,” 23. Under the sub-
head “The Challenge of Revision in Ecological Science,” he writes: “At the moment, ecologists are
busy rethinking their discipline. There is now a hollow ring to bold claims of the 1960s and 1970s that
information theory, system analysis or mathematical modelling would provide the unifying metathe-
ory to transform ecology into a mature, nomothetic science like physics.” As an aside, Golley leans
toward arguing that the shortcomings of ecology in the 1950s and 1960s are related to ecology being
an immature science, but one that would mature; Demeritt, on the other hand, uses this to bolster his
position, which is connected to questioning the authority of science and its exclusive access to truth
in general. This corresponds to my position, as well as the more general point made by the post-con-
structivists.
18. The French philosopher Luc Ferry is another prominent representative of a similar position.
Luc Ferry, Le nouvel ordre écologique: L’arbre, l’animal et l’homme (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1992).
19. Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century: A History (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1989).
 THE PROBLEMATIC NATURE OF NATURE 65
fering and self-surrender. What after all today’s ecological movement is advocating is a
return to isolation. . . . For today’s ecologists, their hope of regeneration presupposes a
return to primitivism, and thus, whether they wish to enunciate it or not, concomitant anar-
chy, the burning before the replanting, the cutting down of the dead tree. The father of the
movement is an utter rejection of all that is, and for at least three millennia all that was.20

For Bramwell, the ecological movement thus poses a threat to Western ration-
ality, enlightenment, and progress. It represents an appeal to “go native,” to
return to how humans once were and how nature still is. To disarm this threat,
she attempts to expose the ecology movement, to document that it is about an
illegitimate political project. Her plan of attack is to reduce the movement’s
motives to the individual actor’s self-interests and to show that what the move-
ment represents is not science, but rather hidden motives in the form of person-
al values. Her explanation for the newly awakened interest in the environment in
the 1970s is in this way characteristic. According to Bramwell, the “scientific”
background was an effective merging of biology and economic ecology. But
those who adopted the latter approach had hidden motives. They did it because
of their personal values: love for the earth and animals. But these values were
legitimized in ecological economics. According to Bramwell, however, this was
simply a cover-up for middle-class interests.
Worster and Bramwell represent two opposing strategies and positions in envi-
ronmental or ecological history. While Worster seeks refuge in nature, Bramwell
wishes to rescue culture from nature and an assumed anti-human ecology. While
Worster positions himself in nature to find powerful tools to criticize a fallen cul-
ture, Bramwell stakes her claim in culture and wishes to defend it against attacks
from an uncivilized nature. But both contribute in their own ways to reifying the
division between nature and culture. Indeed, the environmental history program
has, with its distinction between nature itself on the one hand, and conceptions
of nature in the study of politics and culture on the other, helped exacerbate this
type of division. Despite the differences between Worster and Bramwell, they are
both searching for knowledge that is both certain and that can provide guidelines
for visions of the future. Worster looks to nature, and in particular to the concept
of the “ecosystem.” Through the ecosystem, nature can be presented and repre-
sented, and the environmental historian can speak on its behalf. Bramwell’s proj-
ect appears to be more of a cleansing process where science is to be rescued from
political ideology. Values must be separated from science; only in that way can
it become objective, pure, and the continued indisputable foundation for ration-
ality, certain knowledge, progress, and culture.

III

Are there no alternatives to a version of history in which nature either appears as

a positive given or as a pure ideology? The French anthropologist and historian
of science Bruno Latour, and the American feminist biologist and historian of
science Donna Haraway, both attempt to challenge these two traditions—at the

20. Ibid., 248.

66 KRISTIN ASDAL

same time. Neither of them sees “nature” as a pure, unadulterated category, but
they do not reject “nature” as pure ideology for that reason. In Latour’s interpre-
tation, the tradition Bramwell represents may be said to be “obsessed with liber-
ty,” whereas that represented by Worster sees nature as a given and something to
which policy must conform.21 According to Haraway and Latour, both of these
perspectives are equally problematic and inhibit the possibility of writing histo-
ries of nature and culture together.
The point is not summarily to put Haraway and Latour under the same umbrel-
la. They are very different as authors, and they arrive at their positions from dif-
ferent backgrounds. Haraway draws heavily from feminist philosophy of sci-
ence, and feminism and social movements in general, and identifies herself as a
participant in these movements of social reform. Latour is no less conceptually
political, but at the same time makes a point of not being himself involved in the
same type of movements.22 But the works of both, however, attempt to break
away from established dichotomies between nature and culture, science and pol-
itics, and the way these dichotomies have influenced the telling of histories.
It is not only the conceptualization of science that distinguishes the environ-
mental historical program from these post-constructivist accounts of science.
Other important distinctions may also be understood in the light of the traditions
on which Latour and Haraway draw. Post-constructivism must be seen in relation
to established criticisms of hegemonic traditions within the philosophy of sci-
ence. Indeed, it is appropriate to connect the French Bruno Latour to American
pragmatism and the works of John Dewey.23 Both put far more emphasis on
experimentation, “the new,” and nature and society being constantly “in the mak-
ing.” It is the ongoing reform process—where both human and non-human actors
take part—that post-constructivists’ and Deweyans’ contributions attempt to cap-
ture. Both Haraway and Latour argue that we have never been fully modern in
the sense that nature and culture, people and things, human and non-human, and
science and politics have each been kept in their own spheres.24 It is only our the-
ories that tell us this; in practice, we do not know how our nature-cultures are or
should be composed.25 As Latour writes: “To force us to move slowly, we must

21. Bruno Latour, Politiques de la nature: Comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie (Paris:
La Découverte, 1999).
22. See the first chapter in ibid. My juxtaposition of Latour and Haraway does not mean that they
have an identical perspective. Haraway has previously—and on several occasions—criticized Latour.
Her criticisms include charges that his world is not lively enough, and that it is still based far too much
on human (and often masculine) agency. See Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A
Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies, ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson,
and P. Treichler (New York: Routledge 1992); and Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.
23. But also of course—and in varying degrees for the two of them—to the French tradition of
Foucault, Canguilhem, and Bachelard. There is, however, no room for placing them within these tra-
ditions here. Foucault’s way of merging in his writing the mental and the material levels, the body and
ideas, can be seen as a common point that is radically different from that which is found in environ-
mental history. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol I. An Introduction [1984] (London:
Penguin Books, 1990), 150-153. For Latour, pragmatism is perhaps just as important a reference. See
John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1954).
24. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern [1991] (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993);
Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters.”
25. Donna Haraway’s story about “OncoMouseTM,” for example, must be understood in this way.
Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.
 THE PROBLEMATIC NATURE OF NATURE 67
discuss nature, politics, and science at the same time.”26 This is a strategy that
may be compared to the strategy of Haraway. But what she also does is to con-
stantly bring in questions of gender and race. Her interpretations of representa-
tions of nature instill a far more radical skepticism toward “Nature” than what is
allowed for within the program of environmental history.
The feminist criticism of science causes Haraway to radically question “sci-
ence as usual,” including environmental history, and thus also representations of
nature.27 In her historical study of the development of primatology and the way
women scientists’ primate studies have been represented to the public, she makes
a point of how women are often assumed to be closer to nature, or more natural,
than men. On the one hand, women have been elevated as Nature in the form of
Mother Earth. At the same time, women have been reduced to their sex, to their
biology. Women have been the Other, the passive nature, the object of others’
critical gaze. Haraway’s point is that that which has historically been defined as
nature has very often turned out to be “someone” else. What we have perceived
as nature or as merely passive objects have turned out to be of a highly social
nature. Or as Latour puts it, “Feminists have shown how the process of identify-
ing women with nature played a key role in creating a context that legitimized
their lack of political rights.”28
These are issues that have informed Haraway’s study of the histories of the pri-
matologists in the form of white, middle-class women who studied apes “alone”
in African “nature.”29 One of the most well-known of these women is Jane
Goodall, who in the 1960s studied chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in
Tanzania. According to Haraway, the images and histories of nature that resulted
from these dramatic field studies are highly significant—both for herself and for
other middle-class women in the United States and Great Britain. Haraway’s
argument is that a special type of love is passed down through these stories, best
known to the American public through National Geographic articles and televi-
sion documentaries. These programs are some of the most watched in the histo-
ry of television.30 For many years, the programs were sponsored by Gulf Oil,
which was pointed out by the oil company in a large-scale ad campaign in 1984.
“How are love, power, and science intertwined in the constructions of nature in
the late twentieth century?” Haraway asks.31 One of the many tools that Haraway
uses to explore this question is to scrutinize the ad with the headline
“Understanding is everything.”
What immediately grabs the viewer’s attention in the Gulf Oil ad is the picture
of one hand holding another: the leathery hand of a chimpanzee folding around

26. “pour nous forcer à ralentir,” Latour, Politiques de la nature, 12. Author’s translation.
27. This is a common theme throughout Haraway’s works, but in the following I draw primarily
from Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science
(New York and London: Routledge, 1989) chapter 7, and Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters.”
28. Latour, Politiques de la nature, 51. Author’s translation.
29. This is discussed in her major work, Primate Visions, but also in the 1992 article “The Promises
of Monsters.”
30. It is precisely the development of primatology that she examines in the comprehensive book I
refer to: Haraway, Primate Visions.
31. Ibid., 1.
68 KRISTIN ASDAL

the hand of a white woman. This friendly touch between the ape and Jane, the
young white woman who was represented in the ad through this specific
encounter, initially appears to say just what the ad text expresses, writes
Haraway. It is about communication, trust, responsibility, and understanding—
transcending nature and culture.32 Through scientific practice (referred to in the
ad as “years of patience”), and through a spontaneous gesture of trust in which
the animal itself took the initiative, Jane Goodall is transformed from one single
woman to Dr. Goodall. The white hand thus symbolizes the natural sciences—
and not just any branch of it.
Gulf Oil’s message was that the tool for building a bridge over the distance
that had been created to nature out there in Africa’s jungle was boundary-break-
ing scientific knowledge. The company sent signals that this was a bridge-build-
ing effort that received its full support. But in Haraway’s interpretation, the ad
also sends a message about something that the company would like the reader to
forget: its status as one of the seven sisters in the global oil industry, its connec-
tion with OPEC, the energy crisis, and environmental scandals. It was among
these financial and political crises that occurred in the early 1970s that the scan-
dal-ridden oil companies developed ad campaigns depicting themselves as the
world’s leading environmentalists—almost as the true mothers of eco-feminism.
Asks Haraway rhetorically: Who was more suited than Jane Goodall and the
chimpanzees to reflect the mythic connection between nature and society, a
blessed story of uniting—or reuniting?
Her interpretation is that this way of telling the story glosses over an underly-
ing set of codes, namely, race and imperialism. Both here and in National
Geographic’s coverage, Jane entered the African garden alone in 1960—to
search for humankind’s closest relative. At stake was the natural family. The tel-
evision reports could document family therapy that transcended the boundaries
of species. By holding hands with the ape, Jane was accepted as the human rep-
resentative back in the Garden of Eden. Society and nature had made peace with
one another. Modern science and nature could cooperate, live side by side.
But in this story, argues Haraway, where the actors are apes and a young
British white woman, the people who lived in Tanzania while this drama played
itself out vanished. What does not come across in the oil company’s and National
Geographic’s version is that the mutual understanding that occurred between
Jane/Dr. Goodall and the spontaneously trusting chimpanzee occurred at the
same time that a number of African states achieved national independence. In
1960 alone, the year that Goodall set course for Gombe, there were about fifteen
of these countries. But the people in Tanzania were left out of the family
romance. It is the white hand that becomes the instrument of nature’s salvation.
The bridge-building over a large chasm, caused by the transgressions of nature
and society, comes together in a symbolic figure of warmly clasping hands from
two worlds, where “the other world,” the Third World—where the drama is in
fact taking place—is not present.
The invisible bodies of people of color have never been allowed to represent
humanity in Western accounts, argues Haraway. Her chimpanzees and primatol-
32. Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” 306-309.
 THE PROBLEMATIC NATURE OF NATURE 69
ogists are thus woven into larger stories about danger and salvation. Within the
postwar era during which this drama unfolded, the apes faced the threat of
extinction, the planet was threatened by nuclear and ecological destruction, and
the West was being forced to let go of its colonial possessions. A family romance
across species gave hope that the overhanging destruction could be avoided. If
we could only understand nature, could establish contact with it, learn from it,
the problems could be avoided.
Within this interpretive framework, environmental history, with its ambition
“with the aid of modern science, to discover . . . fresh truths about ourselves and
our past,” appears naive.33 Haraway’s interpretation says that it is impossible to
consider the hands of the white woman and the African ape without evoking
postwar racist accounts in biology and popular culture. In her interpretation, the
animal hand symbolizes the individual chimpanzee, the threatened species, the
Third World, people of color, Africa, the ecologically threatened planet Earth—
all strictly within the framework of Nature. Everything other than “white civi-
lization” is represented through the leathery hand that grasps the white woman’s
hand.
In this way, Haraway’s concern with gender is expanded to include studies of
nature in general. Defining something as “nature” is highly problematic because
in doing so we risk not capturing our co-actor’s power of agency. This dismissal
of agency is reinforced by the way these stories raise the question of the role of
science and expertise. If we define something as nature, we simultaneously also
create a space for the expert, the spokesperson, who can speak on nature’s behalf.
We thereby obstruct others as subjects with agency. Thus a great deal is at stake
in historical studies of nature: What are we doing when we define something as
nature? Who speaks on behalf of nature, exotic ecosystems, or threatened
species?34
This particular critique can perhaps also provide insight into what Haraway
does not do: attempt to reduce ecology and biology to ideology, as Bramwell
does. It is co-actors we are talking about, not a threatening, transcendent
Nature.35 Organisms occur in a discursive process in which material and semiotic
resources go together, and the whole point of discursive construction has been
that it is not about ideology, argues Haraway. It is about real constructions. At the
same time, however, she claims that people are not the only actors in what con-
stitutes a scientific discourse. Thus she radically expands the positivist criticism
to apply to “the others.” The goal is to open up to what is different, “something
else” than “us.”36
While Worster argues that nostalgia is our best hope, Haraway sees returning
to nature (either as the untarnished and holy, or as deeply abhorrent) as an illu-

33. Worster, “Transformations of the Earth,” 1106.

34. Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” 295-328.
35. This is not a question of co-actors in a human sense; status as human subjects is the last thing
“they” need, according to Haraway. See Donna Haraway, “Otherwordly Conversations, Terran Topics,
Local Terms,” Science as Culture 14 (1992), {au: p. nos.?}; note also the subtitle “A Regenerative
Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.”
36. Ibid., 298.
70 KRISTIN ASDAL

sion. Holism and unity as guidelines for the study of history is not what Haraway
is after. Latour—not least in his more recent works, under the heading of politics
of nature—similarly takes his point of departure from the idea that both nature
and science have been defined to constrain politics through their spokespeople,
the experts. The green movement has defined its program or formulated its crit-
icism in similar ways. But, argues Latour, this perspective is doomed to a posi-
tion on the political fringes. In principle, a parallel argument could be applied to
environmental history. For, asks Latour, who would choose to have their fate
determined by someone who speaks on behalf of GAIA, the planet, at the
expense of the individual person?37 In this way he can be read in direct contrast
to one of the questions that provided the motive for both 1970s environmental-
ism and environmental history—and continues to characterize the environmental
debate: “How many humans can the biosphere support without collapse under
the impact of their pollution and consumption?”38 The issue here, relevant to
environmental history, and more in line with both Haraway and Latour, is how
the question could have been posed in that way in the first place—as if environ-
mentalism and environmental history were about a limit, about collapse, about
the biosphere versus humanity.

IV

One can nevertheless argue, as I have already hinted at, that environmental his-
torical studies cannot just be about “de-masking” and disclosure, about demon-
strating that the façade is not what we believed it to be, that special interests and
values other than the “purely” scientific were behind it all. Both Haraway and
Latour attempt, in a way that environmental historical studies should emulate, to
find other ways to capture the relationships between nature and culture. Jospeh
Rouse puts it this way: Post-constructivists share a stance that “denies that there
is any role for ‘unreconstructed nature’ in our understanding of science”; but this
“is not because we are unable to get ‘outside’ of a relatively self-enclosed social
world, but because we have never been ‘inside’ one in the first place.”39 Thus
humans do not stand above nature, as implied by contrasting humanity and the
biosphere, but in relation with nature. Haraway and Latour use different concepts
to build from this perspective: articulation and partial connections on Haraway’s
part, and attachment—which replaces his earlier, most well-known actor–net-
work concept—on the part of Latour.40
Using these concepts, they each criticize their own disciplines for reducing
everything to “the social.” What is interesting is that within this perspective it is
37. Bruno Latour, “To Modernize or Ecologise? That Is the Question,” in Remaking Reality, ed.
Bruce Braun and Noel Castree (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 227.
38. Worster, “Transformations of the Earth,” 1088.
39. Rouse, “Vampires: Social Constructivism, Realism, and Other Philosophical Undead,” 69.
40. This concept of attachment is a theme throughout Haraway’s “The Promises of Monsters.”
Latour addresses the concept of attachment in the article “Factures/fractures. De la notion de réseau
á celle d’attachment,” in Ce qui nous relie,” ed. A. Michoud and M. Peronie (La Tour-d’Aigues:
Editions de l’Aube, 2000), 189-208. He also uses the notion of attachment as a contrast to the notion
of “liberation”—or in French: arrachment. See “Arrachment ou attachment,” Ecologie politique 15
(1993), 15-26.
 THE PROBLEMATIC NATURE OF NATURE 71
not only “nature” that is questioned, but also what it means to be human. A per-
son cannot be understood as a free, autonomous being as we have been taught by
the philosophical tradition. We become and are persons only as we enter into
relationships with things and nature—and more. As Bruno Latour puts it, “What
would a human be without elephants, plants, lions, cereals, ozone or plankton? A
human alone, much more alone even than Robinson Crusoe on his island. Less
than a human. Certainly not a human.”41 Latour’s stance thus implies a con-
frontation with humanism, but not, and this is the key, to be replaced by Nature.
Again, this is connected to a criticism of science, most explicitly formulated by
Haraway, who argues that the political practice we call science cannot be
changed to a better and more benign activity unless we address humanism, where
we humans put ourselves in the center as the only ones with agency. Haraway’s
point is not that we need new representations, but rather new forms of practice,
other life forms that bring humans and non-humans together again.42
This orientation towards practices is what Latour draws from when he, partic-
ularly in his more recent works, approaches the field of political ecology. It is in
the practices of political ecology—not in its theories—that he finds the potential
for a new collective life. If there is one characteristic that the ecological move-
ment is forced to accept, it is that it has never had anything to do with Nature in
its singular, definitive form, claims Latour. Those who talk about the death of
Nature do not know how right they are.43 It is not about Nature, but rather a web
of connections, he argues. Ironically, it is political ecology itself that has finally
detached us from nature.
The analysis of science has long shown us that we do not have direct access to
nature, but Latour argues that even social constructivism operates with the
implicit assumption that nature has not changed in the least. The more we insist
on the social-constructivist argument with respect to nature, the more we avoid
dealing with what has actually happened with the nature given to us by science
and scientists. Latour wants to bring nature back to collective, political life—and
one might say, bring nature back to history as a genuine historical and empirical
category. Nature is here not grasped as something given, something lying in wait
“behind” the representations. It is not a nature we can access directly—not even
through rich access to sources. This is a nature, or natures, mediated through sci-
entific networks, grasped as asbestos, or CO2, prions, plankton, the ozone layer,
and so on.
Perhaps there are two requirements that must be fulfilled before we can rec-
ognize the potential relevance of Latour’s contributions to a committed environ-
mental history: the acknowledgment of the extremely problematic nature of the
ruling dichotomies within the field of the environment (humans versus Nature);
and the acknowledgment that the goal of environmental history cannot be to bind
politics by referring to Nature (since Nature does not exist for humans except as
mediated by their science). Human and non-human actors: How do they co-
exist? This question must be asked, concretely, in every single case dealing with
41. Latour, “To Modernize or Ecologise?,” 235.
42. Haraway, “Otherworldly Conversations.”
43. Latour, Politiques de la nature, 42.
72 KRISTIN ASDAL

a web of human and non-human interconnections. The actor–network theory

with which Latour has been primarily associated was a strategy to reveal how
humans and non-humans are connected to one another through a network where
they develop together. Science, society, and technology are thought of as a field
for human and non-human agency. The human subject is no longer in the center
with its power to create worlds. The non-humans are also drawn in as co-pro-
ducers.
These conceptions, which have been heavily discussed within studies of sci-
entific practice, are crucially important for the ongoing and already long-term
environmental program of environmental history.44 Because if giving nature
agency has been, and in some ways still is, foreign to sociologists of science, it
is a conceptualization immediately associated with one of several established
positions in environmental debates and environmental histories. The image of a
“superactor,” a superorganism, GAIA or Mother Earth, that is superior to the
individual person, and the idea that the survival of the species is more important
than individuality, is for many people a scare tactic used by political ecology. It
is this “super-political” or “supernatural” Nature with a capital N that Latour also
wishes to confront. His argument is that, first, it does not exist. And second—
even if it did exist—our ability to understand it would depend on various exper-
tises of the particular sciences and their specific networks of human and non-
human agency. Latour’s contribution to “environmental history” is to introduce
natures, in the plural, at the expense of Nature, but for the good of politics. This
is a challenge that the field of environmental history should also be willing to
take up—precisely to avoid the problematic positions I have discussed above.
Latour thus claims that political ecology has nothing to do with Nature as
such. Political ecology has never been about a Nature untarnished by humans.
Instead, it is about infinite nodes or connections that always involve one form of
human participation or another. Political ecology has never talked about Nature,
but rather about complicated relationships among things: regulations, equipment,
users, institutions, habits, calves, and cows. This has been the practice within
political ecology, but it has not been captured in its theories about itself. But it is
precisely this practice that for Latour makes “political ecology” an interesting
site and practice. It is not Nature that political ecology defends: it is always this
insect, this part of the river, this garbage dump, or this zoning plan that is the
object of concern, conservation, criticism, or demonstration.
One objection that can be, and indeed has been, raised against Latour’s post-
constructivism is his continued insistence that the only way to approach nature is
through scientific mediations. Paradoxically, he thus tends at one level to end up
in the same problematic place as the environmental historian—namely, that the
scientific practices are compared with nature. Nothing exists outside the scien-
tific mediations or networks.45 However, Latour insists that it is never a single
44. For this discussion see Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992).
45. Haraway to a greater extent is explicit about non-human agency and resistance, something that is
different from the human. She, more than Latour, is also willing to assign agency to concepts of nature.
A concept of nature is active, as I have touched on above, for Haraway—including the way in which it
has helped create our identity as nature-loving humans. Haraway, “Otherwordly Conversations.”
 THE PROBLEMATIC NATURE OF NATURE 73
scientific practice that sets the standard. Indeed, he attempts to show that there is
no agreement—not even among experts—about Nature as such. This does not
lead him to conclude that these productions are not real or active. His argument
is that through its nature-productions, scientific practices bring together the nat-
ural, the scientific, the technical, and the political in one complex network.46 By
pointing out the existence and agency of these networks, Latour contributes to a
practice that is neither anthropocentric nor nature-centric. In contrast to those
theories that confine agency to human beings, human life is far more complexly
constructed than the individual composition of autonomous human actors.
Both Latour and Haraway open up the possibility of a more radical approach
to writing history than what environmental history sets out to achieve. First,
these post-constructivists do not take our concepts of nature and ecology as
given, but rather place them in both a historical and philosophical context; and
second, unlike Worster’s environmental historical program, which is defined as
a mental or humanistic project, their notion of history is not considered
untouched by nature. They argue that politics, our bodies of law, our ideas and
beliefs about nature, and our regulating mechanisms all exist in relation to vari-
ous forms of nature as a real, active presence. This should be incorporated in our
environmental histories of politics and culture.
In addition there is the basis of post-constructivism: the idea that scientific
knowledge is not an a priori source of explanatory power, but is also something
that in itself demands explanation. Thus, the French, Foucault-inspired author
Paul Veyne also sheds light on Latour’s perspective. “Just keep doing what you
have always done—but watch out. If you look closely, you will discover more to
explain than you had originally thought,” writes Veyne.47 Thus the post-con-
structivist contributions represent an encouragement to tell a more radical ver-
sion of history than is implied by environmental history—a version in which
both nature and the sciences have a history. As Veyne writes, it may seem that
objects determine our practices, but it is our practices that determine our objects
in the first place.48 Using this perspective as a point of departure may make it
possible to avoid making the same mistake as the program of environmental his-
tory: presupposing what should be explained—namely nature, mediated through
ecology.
It is easy to be inspired by Haraway’s work, but it is not a program in the style
of Worster that can be carried out without further ado. This is perhaps both its
advantage and disadvantage. Of course, Haraway’s concepts can be used within
a framework of other historical narratives. But one of her most important contri-
butions might be to inspire greater caution when we construct a historical
account. To whom are we giving voice and agency, and at whose expense? Her
caution is not based on introspective self-reflection, but rather a greater (and

46. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
1988).
47. Paul Veyne, “Foucault révolutionne l’histoire,” in Comment on écrit l’histoire (Paris: Seuil,
1971), 358. See also Jacques le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
48. “Les objets semblent déterminer notre conduite, mais notre pratique détermine d’abord ses
objets.” Veyne, “Foucault révolutionne l’histoire,” 356.
 74 KRISTIN ASDAL

more radical) openness to difference, that which is not “us.” Her feminist clas-
sic, the essay “Situated Knowledges,” can be read in precisely this way.49
When it comes to Bruno Latour, one can almost say that the problem is the
opposite. Latour has criticized his own actor–network concept because it did not
do the job it was meant to do: overcome the structure–agent, nature–culture
divide.50 Perhaps there was something wrong with the concept; perhaps the
attachment concept that Latour currently supports is a better one. As a historian,
it is tempting to say that perhaps the problem has also been the way his concept
has been practiced: Actor–network theory might have been too easy to interpret
as an applicable method.51
The capacity of these post-constructivist contributions for being a fruitful tool
for re-exploring and undoing dichotomies in the writing of new environmental
histories in which nature and society are more radically brought together has not
been sufficiently appreciated. So that the challenge originally taken up by envi-
ronmental history in the 1970s does not fade into oblivion or become marginal-
ized, environmental historians would do well to look into an alliance with the
post-constructivists. This, I hope to have shown, should not be seen as a strategy
for pushing historical analyses even further away from concerns for our physical
world, but rather as a reinvigoration of environmental history that would
embrace a more radical historicity, greater diversity, and openness to difference.
And not the least important: post-constructivism poses a needed challenge—par-
adoxically enough—to the idea and program of a strong division between, on the
one hand, a “material” natural history and, on the other, an idea- or mental-driv-
en historical project when it comes to political history. Post-constructivism
shows environmental historians how to avoid this pernicious dualism, and to
bring its elements into a constructive harmony.52

University of Oslo

49. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free
Association Books, 1991). For a discussion of the relevance of such a reading, see Kristin Asdal and
Brita Brenna, “Samtaler over tid” [Conversations over time], in Kristin Asdal, Anne-Jorunn Berg,
Brita Brenna, Ingunn Moser, Linda Rustad, and Betatt av viten, Bruksanvisninger til Donna Haraway
[Introductions to Donna Haraway] (Oslo: Spartacus Forlag, 1988).
50. Bruno Latour, “On recalling ANT,” in Actor Network Theory and After, ed. John Law and John
Hassard (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 15-26.
51. Steve Fuller criticizes actor–network theory for helping to reproduce the same histories in end-
less variations. My suggestion is that if this is indeed a problem, it could just as well be related to the
interpretation of actor–network theory as a theory that can be easily applied to one’s own material—
thus virtually the opposite of radical empirical-dynamic or historically-oriented study. Another objec-
tion to Fuller’s criticism might be that he seldom seems to include feminist contributions as part of
the tradition he criticizes. Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
52. I would like to thank Brita Brenna, Einar Lie, Ingunn Moser, and Lynn P. Nygaard for com-
ments and support.

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