Curious Minds Social Sciences Digest: Are Humans Separate From Nature?
Since the 18th century we have seen ourselves as separate from nature. But as human activity threatens the very climate system we need to survive, is it time to reconsider? In this Curious Minds digest, 1st Class Cambridge Human, Social and Political Sciences graduate, Keira, traces the development of the human-nature relationship from its encapsulation in Enlightenment thinking, to today’s warming world. This digest is particularly relevant to students thinking of Social Sciences degrees. If you are applying for a course such as Cambridge HSPS, Oxford Geography or Human Sciences, it is important to explore beyond the syllabus ahead of personal statement writing and interviews. This topic area crosses a number of disciplines e.g. politics, history, sociology, social anthropology, and broaches some key questions, all of which could be approached as example Oxbridge interview questions. Try to map out an answer to each once you have had a go at the further reading.
Since the 18th century, much of Western political thought has drawn a sharp conceptual line between humans and nature. These philosophies see humans as active agents and nature as an unruly but ultimately inert force.
It is now clear that the economic system built around this idea has begun to degrade the climatic conditions needed to sustain human life. Scientists are calling it the sixth mass extinction event, comparable with the event that killed the dinosaurs. Is it time for an update to how we think about our relationship with nature?
How did the Enlightenment conceptualise “nature”?
The Enlightenment was a period in the 17th and 18th centuries in western Europe during which scientific discovery and political-economic upheaval birthed radically new ideas about the nature of the universe. Leading thinkers of this movement include John Locke, Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We still live in the shadow of these ideas today.
Enlightenment thinking posited clear distinctions between the categories of 'nature' and ‘humanity’, and then used this distinction to analyse the relationship between the two. Nature is largely seen a resource to be exploited. This idea led European states and nobility to put a lot of effort into understanding and classify nature, such as the Latin nomenclature system you’ll use in a biology class today.
What caused this shift?
Ideas do not simply fall from nowhere. They are born in a particular economic and political context. The context of the Enlightenment was the birth of imperial capitalism; for the first time, fossil fuels were dredged up from beneath the earth and set aflame, allowing people to harness incredible and never-seen-before power.
This power gave the upper classes of countries like the UK and France the ability to colonise distant lands and plunder them for both labour and resources. In this context, it makes a lot of sense to see nature as something one takes power from, and humans as the takers. Enlightenment thinking sprang from this context and in turn equipped political agents with the intellectual tools to understand and justify what they were doing.
There have been a number of intellectual movements since the Enlightenment, such as Romanticism and Modernism. None have usurped the broad framework that the Enlightenment set out - largely because the economic and political systems have not changed a great deal since then either.
Nature-human distinctions in a warming world
The burning of fossil fuels that began during the Enlightenment period has now warmed the world by about 1°C. This has begun to disrupt ecosystems, leading to climate breakdown. Unless we stop burning fossil fuels and begin pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, scientists warn that we will destroy the conditions needed for human life on this planet.
In this context, people have been trying to restructure the relationship between humans and nature. Here are the most important ones:
Postmodern hybridisation
Postmodernism is an intellectual movement that arose in the late 20th century. The postmodern movement is characterised by relativism, suspicion of reason, and scepticism of broad-ranging ideology. It attempts to break with Enlightenment binaries between categories, including the nature-humanity distinction.
Postmodern thinkers on this topic include Donna Haraway, who argues that we should think in ‘hybrid’ categories, like cyborgs, as nature and humans are all interconnected. This movement has not led to many concrete solutions for implementing this vision, perhaps due to its suspicion of big political ideas and tendency towards extremely complicated expressions.
Indigenous knowledge
During the Enlightenment, indigenous people were often categorised as ‘natural’, i.e as animals. During this period, genocide was committed against indigenous people in Northern Europe, Australasia and the American continents.
Indigenous people, along with many western people before the Enlightenment, have long had a vast array of different ways of categorising nature-human distinctions. These often posit humans and animals in a gift-giving relationship, as opposed to in a hierarchical one, which relates to the sustainable economies within which such societies usually operate.
Ecofeminism
Ecofeminists analyse the nature/society distinction from a different perspective. They look at how the domination of women is linked to the domination of nature. Women are often associated with nature and the natural, and in turn, nature is described as feminine.
Ecofeminist ideas are often born out of women’s political struggles, particularly indigenous and otherwise colonised women. This idea is behind the sustainable commune systems of Rojava in North-East Syria, for example, and the Zapatistas in Mexico.
Ideas for further reading and research:
1) Human Ecologist, Andreas Malm, works on fossil fuel economy and climate breakdown. His book, The Progress of This Storm, is a searing defence of the necessity of retaining analytical tools that distinguish between the human and nonhuman, against postmodern hybridisation. You'll find the introduction to be an interesting exploration of these ideas (as well as their critique). The book puts this into the context of a warming world fantastically.
Malm’s historical analysis of the fossil fuel industry, Fossil Capital, is also a fantastic place to start if you want to find out more about the birth of our current global economic system, and find lessons for the future.
2) Carolyn Merchant is an American eco-feminist whose 1980 work, The Death of Nature, was highly influential in the movement. She argues that it is possible to replace patriarchal domination of nature, women and colonised people with cooperative co-existence. This work, or the impressive array of videos on Youtube exploring the movement, is a good place to start.
3) There are a lot of political and social movements around the world putting these ideas into practice. Consider choosing a movement such as;
- Rojava
And analyse how it is that they describe the relationship between humans and nature:
Are you considering a Social Sciences degree at Oxbridge or another top UK university?
Check out our range of "beyond the syllabus" 1-1 masterclasses and research projects on Minds Underground
E.g. A Project on the UK’s Carbon Emissions Footprint in the Global South with a Data Science Consultant and Cambridge PhD in Forest Ecology and Conservation
Looking for an Oxbridge-educated application tutor?
Our on-curriculum division, U2 Tuition, offers application support for all components of entry including personal statement, admissions test and interview preparation. Book a free consultation to discuss with the team!
Also check out our articles on applications in the Free Resource Library, as well as our Oxbridge Interview preparation guides