Fourth Nature: A New Perspective for an Entangled World

• In Event: Repair, Resistance, Renewal: Sociological Solutions to Wicked Problems

Abstract

What is nature? Raymond Williams famously stated that “Nature is the most complex word in the [English] language,” and the history of the concept bears his assertion out. We offer here a brief lineage of the idea of nature as it has evolved across time and context, and then present our own sociologically and ecologically informed articulation of nature, one we feel better reflects the entangled, co-created qualities of the natural and the social, and that appears to be emerging in contemporary thought. Specifically, we outline the ideas of first, second, and third natures (nature as the essential substance, inherent qualities, or firstness of a thing; nature as a source of moral good, as a nonhuman and therefore apolitical basis from which to derive ethics and behavior; and nature as a source of moral bad, as an origin for material desires that need to be overcome). All three views of nature are with us today, in various ways that confuse and contradict, leading many scholars, with reason, to contend that we need to question the notion of nature entirely. However, we see coming out of the current debates a new conception of nature, the first major new conceptualization of it in two millennia, yet one still rooted in understandings of nature that predate even first nature: what we here term fourth nature. In such a view, nature is an interactive complex, a context that cannot be escaped and must be taken into account, and is never static and unchanging in a first nature sense, and is neither good in a second nature sense nor bad in a third nature sense. We applaud this development, one which resolves the main issues with first, second, and third nature, and which has major implications for both scholarly and lay interactions with nature.

Authors

• Taimur Ahmad, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Michael M. Bell, University of Wisconsin-Madison