Everything Is Nature: Deconstructing the Nature/Culture Divide on Ecological Grounds

Since the antiessentialist critique in the social sciences questioned the boundary between nature and culture, the view of nature as an independent reality has often given way to the idea that nature itself is a socially constructed category. This reading called into question the very enterprise of environmental ethics, understood as caring for nature as an objective reality: the imperative to protect wild nature from anthropogenic damage presupposes the nature–culture divide, even as some environmentalists insist that humans are part of nature, producing an apparent contradiction within environmental discourse. In this paper, I take the opposite route. I question the boundary between culture and nature not to arrive at socially constructed natures, but to show that humanity is as natural as any other living being. Drawing on ecological evidence at large temporal and spatial scales, I challenge the assumptions that underpin the nature–culture divide and human exceptionalism: equilibrium and harmony in nature, unchanging ecosystems, pristine or reference ecosystems, and the geographical essentialism that distinguishes native from exotic species. On this basis, I argue that the contemporary ecological paradigm supports a natural monism—a processual, realist and non-essentialist view of nature as a single immanent totality that includes humans as one of its many expressions—rather than dissolving nature into social construction. Human novelty then represents continuity rather than discontinuity with natural processes, and the exceptional character of humanity, whether construed negatively or positively, proves unfounded. Environmental ethics, in turn, may be understood not as the enterprise of caring for nature as something other, but as caring for humanity and other-than-human nature alike, as coinhabitants within shared ecological assemblages.