Two classical concepts of nature revisited.

The articles in this theme issue on managerial ecology were written by graduate students who, in line with the theme, offer critiques of the theoretical and managerial approaches to ecology that have enjoyed prominence over the last few decades. The authors argue that the scientific thinking that has informed management of resources has, instead of protecting and conserving them, led to the current environmental problems and degradation that we face today. While some of the authors trace the history of the thinking behind ecological management practices (for example, scientific rationality as developed from the Enlightenment, including Taylorism), others focus more specifically on alternative models linked to critically informed paradigms (these, of course, like Marxism, can also be traced to the philosophies that arose from the era of the Enlightenment). It is heartening to see new scholars digging more deeply behind received truths and recovering traditions that are currently out of favour, in our neo-liber al political climate that favours business and individualism.

My remarks focus on two critical traditions that are explored in a number of the papers, Marxism and the philosophical thought of Hannah Arendt. While I enjoyed reading the interpretations and applications offered in the papers, I also felt that the authors could have gone further. Here I offer avenues for further reflection on the meaning of "nature," which tends to be used somewhat uncritically in some of the papers. Both Marx, especially in his early writings, and Arendt, had ideas about how humans were situated in nature. My reading of Marx's earlier writings (and much has been written on his concept of nature that cannot be addressed in so short a space) is that his concept of objectification situated humans in their material environment in a very direct fashion.

Marx's famous analogy about the difference between a bee and an architect can be invoked here. While a bee will fashion a perfectly geometrical hive instinctually an architect will have more trouble in perfecting and imitating the bee's geometrical form. (1) However, the key difference that Marx noted was that the architect can alter the plans in a very different fashion, compared to the bee because the architect has an image in mind that can be altered before the execution of the design. Braverman (1974) showed how this distinction between manual and mental labour was separated out over the course of the twentieth century. He traced the "degradation" of manual labour as workers were hired to perform the manual functions designed by others. This principle of separating mental from manual labour was also applied to white collar workers and has applications for ecological management practices as well.

Marx's concept of objectification relates to this idea of how humans can develop an idea of what they will do before they actually execute their plan. However, they can never form these ideas in a void (his critique of Hegel is pertinent in this regard). Rather ideas are always materially situated in the life histories of those who develop them. The history of capitalism has involved a perceived mastery of nature - the appropriation of resources in the pursuit of capital accumulation. Thus our practices do not reflect some grand cosmic master plan (a point raised in the papers) but rather are always materially situated in the ideas developed by those who hold power. Ecological management practices can thus be subjected to such a critique in terms of who holds power within the organizations that have sprung up purportedly to "protect" and conserve resources. Marx and Engels were insistent on conducting such histories to trace the process by which the "ruling ideas" become taken for granted. "The ideas of the r uling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." (Marx and Engels 1988 11846]: 64, emphasis in original) In particular, they insisted that we not only look at the surface practices but that we also probe more deeply behind them to see whose interests are actually served. For example, do management companies in the business of environmental conservation actually protect the environment or are they engaged in making a profit? What are the contradictions involved here between the ideology of environmental protection and the practices that must be cost effective? Again some of the authors here point to these anomalies.

The other concept that came to mind in reading the papers was Marx's idea of species being. His argument was that, because we are social beings who fashion our ideas of who we are and the nature of the world around us through our interactions with one another and with our material environment, social change is a complex process that involves all of these intersecting levels of existence. It is thus very difficult for us to "think outside of the box" as it were because our thinking is part and parcel of the world we have fashioned and that has, in turn, fashioned us. Marx invoked Vico who noted that while humans are responsible for change, changes do not always occur according to our plans, or, we could add, our hopes and desires. Sociologists have long used the term "unintended consequences" to refer to the same idea.

Thus, how we envision a future for ourselves and for future generations is tied to our current situations and our current ways of thinking about our problems. How to get from here to there is already in many ways short-circuited by our present embodied and thought-constrained patterns of acting. Social change is both inevitable and problematic in the ways that we humans can undertake action that would make our world, material and social, a better place. The papers contained in this issue invite us to reflect on how we might be able to create such a world in terms of a more responsible set of ecological practices.

The work of Hannah Arendt is also invoked in the papers. Arendt had a very different way of thinking about nature that was partially a result of her disagreement with Marx. She explicitly situated the political space of the polls outside of nature. She also established political "man" as distinct from both animal laborans -- humans involved in the activity of satisfying basic needs of survival, assigned to women and slaves in classical Athens -- and homo faber -- the activity of using materials from nature to craft articles of both utility and beauty. "'The labour of our body and the work of our hands,' are clearly distinguished" (Arendt 1958: 85).

She privileged the faculty of thought in humans as needing to be separated from the world that nourished the body -- the famous mind/body distinction applied to political thought. She was in agreement with Marx's analysis of the rise of capitalism and with the application of scientific logic to industrial development. However, she focussed on the political implications of such development as opposed to its effects on the economy or society. Her argument (as I understand and interpret it here) is that with capitalism private consumption and economic development come to predominate in a way that was unheard of in previous centuries -- precisely through the unintended consequences involved in separating mind from body through the application of rational scientific thought on nature. Animal-laborans comes to assume the position previously held by animal rationale (Arendt 1958: 85). Humans come to identify who they are through what they consume, rather than through what they create with their hands (the vita activ a) or through contemplation (the vita contempliva).

Political institutions, far from serving a community of strangers who come together to form special bonds and who act together in a thoughtful manner, are subsumed within both society and economy to serve interests that are not political as such but rather derive from the other two spheres. What is involved here above all else is "process," since capitalism mimics the cycles of ever-recurring natural forces rather than humans attempting to add something new over and beyond natural cyclical forces. "The modem concept of process pervading history and nature alike separates the modem age from the past more profoundly than any other single idea." (Arendt 1987, 63) Arendt's prediction was that in privileging process and the economy of constant accumulation, we would end by destroying our natural environment. A cyclical process of the capitalist type can never end until it has completely exhausted itself.

The modem age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially manmade.... In the situation of radical world-alienation, neither history' nor nature is at all conceivable. This twofold loss of the world -- the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history' -- has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them (Arendt 1987: 89-90)

Arendt is in agreement with Marx here that the defining quality of a capitalist economy is that it can never stop. If firms -- one can include environmental firms here as well -- stop accumulating capital they will cease operation. And since capital accumulation involves private property, it also must of necessity act on the environment, on nature, which was seen in the early days of capital accumulation as an endless series of resources to be harnessed in the service of "man." Thus, in Arendt's analysis, nature is itself destroyed the more humans situate themselves within it; that is, see their own well-being as a constant striving to have more "things." Our current environmental problems are an eloquent testimony to the truth of both Marx's and Arendt's conceptualizations of how humans have come to situate themselves in their understandings of nature and human society. However, what was left out of both accounts is how the pursuit of an alternative way of being in the world could be made inclusive of all pe oples. Arendt's classical polls was restricted to the male citizen whose needs were met in the family household whose occupants he owned, including wives, children and other slaves. Marx, in focussing on class struggle, ignored the plight of women as well as racially and ethnically based discrimination (Engels 1981, O'Brien 1981, Salleh 1997).

The ideas laid out here are necessarily a very short summary. However, I was struck in reading the papers that we would all be well advised to revisit this problematic concept "nature" in terms of what it represents to us and how it has been used to bring us to our current state of affairs. The concept of "nature" is a societal construct that is part and parcel of the ecological crisis. In articulating alternative practices we must at the same time develop a new way of thinking about ourselves as situated beings in time and space. These essays represent an important contribution to such thought.

(1.) We should add a qualification here -- unless the bee's anatomy has been changed by environmental pollutants so that it, in a sense, "forgets" the blueprint wired into its brain.

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1987. Between Past and Present: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Engels, Frederick. 1981. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. 1988 [1846]. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers.

O'Brien, Mary. 1981. The Politics of Reproduction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Salleh, Ariel. 1997. Eco feminism as Politics: nature, Marx and the postmodem. London: Zed Books.

Alicja Muszynski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Waterloo.

Her research interests include rural communities and farm families, social movements, and women's grassroots organizations.