The Right to Nature最新文献_第2页

Natures, rights and political movements 自然，权利和政治运动

The Right to Nature Pub Date : 2018-12-07 DOI: 10.4324/9780429427145-18

L. Lohmann

{"title":"Natures, rights and political movements","authors":"L. Lohmann","doi":"10.4324/9780429427145-18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429427145-18","url":null,"abstract":"Natures are partly composed of rights and rights are partly composed of natures. Every history of natures is a history of rights, and vice versa. Thus, private property rights in land tend to come with a particular nature associated with hedges, fences and cadastral surveys. Similarly, the rights to global carbon-cycling capacity that are today parcelled out to industrialized countries under international agreements are tied to a novel, partly computer-engendered nature called “the global climate”. Emerging political movements for “rights of nature” aimed at countering evolving capitalist movements for “rights to nature” need to be aware that such contrasting regimes of rights/natures are constantly in play, and are being used by all sides, on the “middle ground” that defines this conflict. Natures fit for capital The word nature has a lot of meanings, and they are always changing. For Raymond Williams (1983, p. 219), it was “perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language”. Distinguishing nature from what is not nature is an unending struggle. When we grow crops, are we dealing with nature or something that is not nature? Maize, rice and potatoes have been with us for millennia, we influencing (creating) them and they influencing (creating) us. When we look at a forest, we are almost always looking at something that has been shaped by millennia of human burning, planting, sharing, cultivating and gathering. Are we looking at nature or at something that is not nature? Or at both? In what circumstances do we even want to ask such questions? I think about what it is for me to remember my way home. My eyes fall on that familiar rock, I lift my head and there is that old tree in the distance, and after that there will be two more streets, the bend in the road and then the building with the butcher shop. Is my memory something that I have inside me that is separate from nature, or is my memory also in nature – in the pathway, the rock, the tree and the streets? No need to travel to Melanesia (Strathern, 1980) or the Amazon (Viveiros de Castro, 1998) to find places or circumstances in which nature/culture bifurcations to which we may have grown accustomed suddenly look odd. Nevertheless, our schoolteachers told us that behind all the different things human beings do there is an unchanging background consisting of things like atoms and energy. Human societies are like characters in a cartoon. Captain America walks around in the foreground, but the background often stays pretty much the same from frame to frame. This background, our schoolteachers said, is called “nature”. So, we’re surprised when we learn that for many Amazonian societies, it is, roughly speaking, the background that is culture, and what move around in the foreground are natures (Viveiros de Castro, 1998; Kohn, 2013). Which raises the question: what are the reasons for dividing nature from society in the peculiar way that our schoolteachers advocated, and to say that this is the","PeriodicalId":358512,"journal":{"name":"The Right to Nature","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123762407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}