What is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human

by Kate Soper

'This is an excellent book. It addresses what, in both conceptual and political terms, is arguably the most important source of tension and confusion in current arguments about the environment, namely the concept of nature; and it does so in a way that is both sensitive to, and critical of, the two antithetical ways of understanding this that dominate existing discussions.' Russell Keat, University of Edinburgh

Genres: Philosophy, Environment, Feminism, Cultural Studies, Politics, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Kate Soper is a British philosopher and the author of and contributor to over a dozen books on feminism and Continental Philosophy, addressing the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Marx and Simone de Beauvoir, among others. She has also been involved in several environmentalist and peace movements in both the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe and some of her work addresses ecological issues. She regularly contributes columns or editorial content to the journals Radical Philosophy, New Left Review and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. She is known to be a critic of post-structuralist feminism.

She has lectured on many of the above topics at University of North London (which became part of London Metropolitan University in 2002) since 1987. Previous to this she worked in the field of journalism and had studied at the University of Oxford.

Reviews

[Adrik · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent overview of the perceptions of Nature in western culture. Soper attempts to show how discourses surrounding nature have distanced us as a society from it. She also explores the complex divisions that we have constructed between nature and artifice, the human and the non-human, and nature versus culture. Throughout these discussions we see how there has been an attempt to create clear cut ideas about what is and what isn't. However, at the same time this compartmentalizing of concepts creates its own messy grey areas. This book is well worth it if you are looking for a better understanding of how we think of nature and all the complexities and tensions that are hidden in what are common ideas and assumptions.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nature as it is represented by society is dichotomous, yet we become reliant upon fixations on certain features of our relationship with the natural in argumentation/thinking philosophically and pragmatically about our future.

[Mari · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very readable philosophical investigation of our complex relationship with ‘nature’, and of the way in which environmental politics is shaped (and sometimes thwarted) by this complexity.