Understanding Cultural Geography by Jon Anderson

Author:Jon Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Groups
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

Marxist geographers would consider this reconstitution as the destruction of ‘first nature’ – the fall of a pristine, wild, and unsullied natural world, and the gradual transformation of this world into a resource for the capitalist system. ‘First nature’ is thus transformed into ‘second nature’ – commodified as an input to the industrial system (e.g. coal as fuel, trees as timber, cows as meat, milk or leather producers), or into ‘third nature’, where humans manipulate the very genetic coding of non-human flora and fauna in order to gain more profitable or patentable commodities.

Such material reconstitution of nature has led many to suggest that nature in its ‘traditional’ form – as something outside of culture – no longer exists. McKibben, for example, heralds humans’ transformation of the natural world as the ‘end of nature’ (1989). He states,

We have changed the atmosphere and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial… We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.

McKibben, cited in White, 1995: 182, my emphasis

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