Home and the Nature of Reality

I posted these comments over at Cassandra Pages but felt they were important enough to have here too. I recommend going to see the original post and follow-up comments that inspired this.

(Finding my way here via Field Notes)
Dang, I should have been talking with you folks while wrestling with my research on these topics!

This question of whether there is any "there" there when we talk about amorphous things like "nature" is something that has been preoccupying me for several years. On the one hand, as a scholar I feel profoundly uncomfortable with the often careless and unrigorous ways writers in environmental ethics and environmental history use "nature" as an analytical category. For one thing, it is a changing category whose meanings shift across culture and across time -- so there is always the ever present danger of assuming that, say, Thoreau's nature is the same concept as the one bearing the label "nature" today. For another, it is terribly fuzzy -- where are the lines? What makes a tree "nature" in one context, but "unnatural" in another (as with GMOs, for example)? So the scholar in me wants something better, and in some ways is attracted to the notion of social constructionism -- the idea that when we speak of "nature" we really mean the concept, not the reality to which the concept is applied.

However, another side of me is made even more uncomfortable by the notion that the world is nothing but a mass of human constructions. A tree matters, I believe at a gut level, even if we disagree on what a tree "is" or (more contentiously) what it "means" or "is worth."

So how do we reconcile the two? How do we reject or reform "nature" without tossing out trees and mountains and bees and grasshoppers and slime molds too?

On a professional level I've come up with an alternate concept; it's one I develop in my book -- but I can't talk about too much yet (it's still in the review process by my future publisher). Instead, I will say a word about my personal approach to resolving this dilemma (at least, I see it as a dilemma). Dale's comment -- "The concept of "Nature" has been losing ground in my psyche, but the concept of "Tendrel," or "Interconnectedness", seems more than able to take up the slack." -- sent echoes along my psyche.

In an effort more conscious than not at this point (unlearning years of acculturation takes time!) I try to think of myself as one being among many, as one part of being and existing in a larger sense, and thus to maintain a sense of humility towards other creatures and the larger world we all inhabit. This also means paying attention to that world, and kindred beings -- and not floating along in a selfish bubble of oblivion.

I have a LONG way to go with all this -- I am far far from perfect -- but that's where I'm headed. So, back to the question of finding a "home" -- I think "home" is a human construct, not an essential quality of the wider world (or even of friendlier pockets of it) but I see less harm in thinking of shared ecosystems as home than in treating them as if we were spoiled guests who could leave when the party was over.