Colonizing Nature

We adore nature. We need it and use it to understand ourselves. But the use of the land by nature artists is akin to our violent use of the land in our insatiable resource extraction and pollution dumping. Nature writing has been around for centuries and so has human plundering of the land. The two are complicit.  In postcolonial studies, one of things we’ve noticed is how often the colonizer romanticizes the colonized (the 19^th Century African, for example) and how that romanticization becomes a tool in the colonizing process. In this way, the colonized is easily understood in certain safe terms and, so, controlled. In this way art becomes complicit with economic and military agendas, akin to Marx’s ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’.

Are we doing the same when we invoke aesthetically pleasing, idealized, or stylized images of nature? This mediated representation denies the land something--its own agency or needs--for our own pleasure or needs. We colonize the land and its creatures.

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Much like colonial contact with othered cultures, the contemporary contact zone with the nonhuman has its similar formation of hegemony and control. A true recognition of the land and non-human ecology as culture might be the first step in a decolonization of the non-human globe.