Nature is an interesting term that, according to a constructivist philosophy, does not have an essential or consistent meaning across societies. Rather, ‘nature’ seems to be a term with incorporated culturally processed significance. This understanding of nature, led Escobar (1999) to posit an ‘antiessential’ understanding of the term. This understanding sees ‘nature’ as lacking essential qualities or characteristics, acknowledging the constructivist viewpoint of applied cultural influence over time, while also recognizing the bio-physical substance of the term. However, even the ‘biophysical reality is constituted as experience’ (Escobar, 1999, p.27).

Escobar (1999) notes that “nature is a specifically modern category, and many non-modern societies have been shown to lack such a category as we understand it”. This assessment is in unison with the work of Berkes (2004) who acknowledges the Systems-Based thinking present in many indigenous cultures in which the human-nature dichotomy is absent. This is not difficult to appreciate when one analyzes the history of societies that have been engulfed in post-industrialism and thus have lost connection to a biologically dependent lifestyle in favor of urban sedentariness. This disconnect has bred generations that mythicize the idea of nature as something beyond human society, an idealic untouched ‘nature’ (Fletcher, 2014). Yet to many pastoralist and agriculturalist communities, this idealized form of ‘nature’ does not exist as humans are seen as a necessary characteristic of the biological surroundings.

With shrinking spatial scales between societies, due to technological advances and globalization, this has brought together competing understandings of ‘nature’. Political ecology, a historical analysis of cultural articulations of biology (Escobar, 1999), allows one to recognize competing articulations as evolved understandings containing multi-faceted cultural influences that perhaps share certain histories while maintaining distinctness manifested in differing cognitive understandings.

Berkes, F. (2004). Rethinking Community-Based Conservation. Conservation Biology, 18(3), 621-630.

Escobar, A. (1999). After Nature: Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology. Current Anthropology, 40(1), 1-30.

Fletcher, R. (2014). Romancing the Wild: Cultural Dimensions of Ecotourism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.