Futurenatural: Nature, Science, Culture

by George Robertson (Editor), Lisa Tickner (Editor), Jon Bird (Editor)

We are living in an age when nature seems to be on the brink of extinction yet, at the same time, nature is becoming increasingly ubiquitous and unstable as a category for representation and debate. This work brings together leading theorists of culture and science to discuss the concept of nature - its past, present and future. Contributors discuss the impact on our daily life of recent developments in biotechnologies, electronic media and ecological politics. Increasingly, scientific theories and models have been taken up as cultural metaphors that have material effects in transforming ways of seeing and structures of feeling. This text addresses the issue of whether political and cultural debates about the body and the environment can take place without reference to nature or the natural. It also considers how we might think a future developing from emergent scientific theories and discourses. What cultural forms may be produced when new knowledges challenge and undermine traditional ways of conceiving the natural?.

328 pages, Paperback

First published March 21, 1996

About the author

1790-1874

Reviews

[Steve Dewey · Rating 2 out of 5]

An "okay" kind of a book. I found it a bit heavy going, and a little formless. The introduction laid out areas of interest, but the essays (and stories) seemed to ramble around the houses rather. And I can't really work out the target audience. In the end, most of the essays seemed overly academic, and in that general area of academia that might be labelled cultural studies of a post-modern or post-structuralist bent. This means that, for me at least, who has only tentatively touched my toes in those murky waters, many of the essays became hard to follow through their technical (obscurantist?) jargon, which is not easily understood by those not already denizens of those waters. That this was not a book for a general audience (either that, or the editors have forgotten what a general but interested audience might understand) was evidenced by the number of times such phrases as "of course" or "as we now know" preceded statements only a cultural studies academic would, in general, know.

Still, there were a few things in the essays that intrigued me. So, a not entirely unproductive read.