On Harvey's Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference

In aggregate, the environmental issue “encompasses quite literally everything there is.” (Harvey 1996: 117). I am naive or all too ambitious for wanting to write about our natureculture(s). But nature is the phenomenological terrain; I feel it; we feel it. To treat the environment in a disembodied way, as abstract and lifeless – to make of our world “one vast gasoline station,” as Heidegger said – without a view to the future of our dwelling in this land, is unsustainable.

David Harvey began his dialectical treatment of nature where systematic, (nonnative) American thinking about being-in-the-land began: Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac (1949). He quoted:

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. (Leopold)

Contra Marx:

Where money is not itself the community, it must dissolve the community. ... It is the elementary precondition of bourgeois society that labour should directly produce exchange value, i.e., money; and similarly that money should directly purchase labour, and therefore the labourer, but only insofar as he alienates his activity in exchange. ... Money thereby directly and simultaneously becomes the real community, since it is the general substance for the survival of all, and at the same time the social product of all. (Marx, *Grundrisse*, pp.224-6)

Weber and Sombart held that Judeo-Christian values led to capitalism, and thence, the domination of reason.[^1] Reason assumes that nature is there to be bound up by laws of production and conservation and motion. Today, scientific authority unbinds us. “Religion” comes perhaps from latin religare (to bind fast), which is also the etymological root of reliance – perhaps because gathering and relying on one another is our greatest virtue. Is not the strongest ideological defense of the free market that it binds together a society of producers in trade relations?

The hubris of it all is attractive. But market thinking leads to technical considerations of resource scarcity and optimizing welfare. It begs the Malthusian question, while it simultaneously justifies hoarding under the guise of free enterprise. Once we are in that mode of being-in-the-world, the question of how we should dwell within the land is an afterthought. We simply must, because we are in hock to rationers.

Marx had it that we make ourselves by transforming the world through labor, into exchange value, i.e., money. Keith Basso, in Wisdom Sits in Places (1996), instead suggested that we (really Western Apache tribespeople) make human nature by naming the moral landscape, by telling stories about it, and by being within it. Is naming the same thing as mastery? Adorno and the Frankfurt school made a problematic out of the mastery of nature, which is also the mastery of humankind. This led to a dialectic of internal drives and desires that we seem unable to escape. But Adorno tended to think about nature in terms of master and servant, and even in cultural aesthetics, he thought there should be an elite producing the art. Compare this with the dialectic of living in moral community that Basso constructed on behalf of his Apache fellows, whereby the stories they inscribe upon the land share wisdom across generations, helping wayward individuals to inwardly cultivate ethics of resilience and mental “smoothness.”
(TBC)