WHOSE ‘NATURE’? Reflections on the Transcendental Signified of an Emerging Field

Abstract

Environmental thought and scholarship have recently been grappling with a series of questions opened up by poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonial forms of scholarship; by the emergence of Third World environmentalism and ‘environmental justice’ movements; and by recent developments in ecological science, developments which have questioned earlier concepts of ‘nature’ as balanced and harmonious in favour of a new view that sees nature as dynamic and unpredictable.