Nature and the Crisis of Modernity

Simon Dalby is an assistant professor of geography at Carleton
University in Ottawa.

The more radical thinkers about environmental matters often say that the
very popular term “sustainable development” is a dangerous oxymoron.
This book is in part about why that is so. It makes a philosophically
sophisticated argument about the failings of conventional thinking about
the environment and about assumptions that such an entity can be
“managed.” Rogers makes the case that development has made the
possibility of understanding “nature” very difficult, and that
“conservation” is little more than the further extension of the
proclivities of modernity to subsume everything into the category of
exploitable resources. Consequently, extending development thinking by
adding the theme of sustainability simply extends the ideological
rationales for further destruction.

This is not a book for the philosophically timid. Its references range
from Karl Polanyi and notions of universal equivalents present in modern
theories of money to philosophical issues in Shakespeare’s King Lear,
and from the historical writings of British social critics like Edward
Thompson and Raymond Williams to contemporary environmentalist writings
by John Livingston and Neil Evernden. The argument that modernity has
ruptured connections between human identity and “nature” is
powerfully made by drawing on this eclectic range of intellectual
sources. In particular it points clearly to the difficulties of
conceptualizing nature as social within contemporary thinking.

The book offers few “solutions” to the global environmental
predicament; rather, it explores the important theme of the failure of
conventional conservation and managerial approaches to “resources”
to adequately understand the scale or philosophical depth of the
contemporary crisis. It points to the necessity of reconceptualizing
human identity and rethinking the dominant assumptions about who
“we” as modern humans are. In doing these things in an innovative
way, this book has much to offer to those concerned enough to rethink
the global environmental crisis and in the process to better understand
the ideological infrastructures of modernity.