Protect Our Mother Nature
PROTECT OUR MOTHER NATURE
Repeatedly in history, conceptions of nature have served as ideological justifications for political theory. The most obvious example is the Hobbesian state of nature against which even the most oppressive government appears perfectly legitimate. Whereas in most cases of political theory, nature looks like an incompetent savage or unreliable tramp, some anarchist lines of argument instead offer versions of nature as infinite, loving, or otherwise better than the artifices to which it is implicitly opposed. Whether for or against nature, depictions of the natural world in political theory consider it in cultural units of meaning, a combination of icons and stereotypes that change not only our understanding of nature, but also of the units of meaning being referenced. In the early twentieth century journal Mother Earth, a construction of nature comes together, in a publication interested mostly in anarchist and feminist goals, that worshipped nature as a huge, consuming, feminine super being. Certain traits in the construction of nature in this journal form an account of nature as a particular type of femininity to be admired, a move laden both with direct strategic value and creeping implications for the idealizations of womanhood.
In order to establish the desirability of the journal’s goal of a world without artificial systems of control, the opposition of nature and artifice is a crucial first step. While it may seem tempting to define these terms, this neglects the primary function of both as catchalls with nebulous referents and amorphous structure defined only by their opposition to one another. The process of dividing the categories begins in the very first issue of the publication, in the foundational article ”Mother Earth”. The article mythologizes that “Man issued from the womb of Mother Earth … out of his efforts there arose the dreary doctrine that he was not related to the Earth, that she was but a temporary resting place
Repeatedly in history, conceptions of nature have served as ideological justifications for political theory. The most obvious example is the Hobbesian state of nature against which even the most oppressive government appears perfectly legitimate. Whereas in most cases of political theory, nature looks like an incompetent savage or unreliable tramp, some anarchist lines of argument instead offer versions of nature as infinite, loving, or otherwise better than the artifices to which it is implicitly opposed. Whether for or against nature, depictions of the natural world in political theory consider it in cultural units of meaning, a combination of icons and stereotypes that change not only our understanding of nature, but also of the units of meaning being referenced. In the early twentieth century journal Mother Earth, a construction of nature comes together, in a publication interested mostly in anarchist and feminist goals, that worshipped nature as a huge, consuming, feminine super being. Certain traits in the construction of nature in this journal form an account of nature as a particular type of femininity to be admired, a move laden both with direct strategic value and creeping implications for the idealizations of womanhood.
In order to establish the desirability of the journal’s goal of a world without artificial systems of control, the opposition of nature and artifice is a crucial first step. While it may seem tempting to define these terms, this neglects the primary function of both as catchalls with nebulous referents and amorphous structure defined only by their opposition to one another. The process of dividing the categories begins in the very first issue of the publication, in the foundational article ”Mother Earth”. The article mythologizes that “Man issued from the womb of Mother Earth … out of his efforts there arose the dreary doctrine that he was not related to the Earth, that she was but a temporary resting place