At first glance, the nature-culture divide and the concept of intersectionality might seem to have little to do with each other. This impression quickly dissolves upon further analysis of their histories, attributes and especially their implications. The nature-culture divide is one of the biggest philosophical, anthropological, social, economic and ecological challenges facing life on earth today. Its implications and effects - ecological destruction being a prime example – threaten human and nonhuman ways of existing and flourishing intensely, and on a global scale. I argue that the nature-culture divide can be understood as an anti-intersectional concept and practice, and that critiquing it from an intersectional perspective can open up new possibilities to conceptualize and live human and nonhuman existence in ways that recognize and nurture the interconnection and interdependency between what is called ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. In the first section of this essay I will elaborate on the origins and meanings of the nature-culture divide and intersectionality. I will then argue my point that the nature-culture divide is anti-intersectional in two parts: first by listing and analyzing several key oppositions between the two concepts, and secondly by showing that the nature-culture divide in conservation policy serves the same practical purpose as explicitly anti-intersectional frameworks such as the single-axis antidiscrimination doctrine initially critiqued by Kimberle Crenshaw.
The nature-culture divide/dualism is historical concept that defines ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as two (in most cases metaphysically/essentially) separate and often oppositional forms of existence (Haila 2000). This conception is often traced back to the historically dominant Judeo-Christian ethic of nature being God’s gift to humanity, which was then called upon by God and the Bible to transform it in God’s (its own) image. This also includes certain forms of human responsibility for ‘nature’ as God’s creation, but combined with Enlightenment era ideas of nature as a machine with distinct and stable rules and parts (resources), which can be illuminated by science and then used by human industrialization to reach continuous progress, consumption and economic growth, it has mainly led to a conception of nature as a passive resource for human ‘development’ and use (Haila 2000; Uggla 2010). This has in turn played a key role in the instrumentalization and colonization of ‘natural’ territories and their inhabitants. This logic also underlies the origins and challenges of the current global ecological crisis, with climate change and biodiversity loss being two main examples. Viewing nature and culture from this perspective reduces human (esp. capitalist human) responsibility for nature to a minimum while maximizing possible short-term economic gain from the exploitation of natural resources. The narrative that nature and culture are two different concepts is still dominant in many environmentalist, social, political and legal discourses, but it has not advanced to that position without criticism (Uggla 2010; Gilbert et al. 2023). Movements such as romanticism criticized the effects of urbanization and industrialization on humans and nature, albeit still operating within the nature-culture divide framework. An important branch of critique to name here is ecofeminism, since it among other things incorporates intersectionality in its criticism. (Kings 2017).
Intersectionality as an explicit concept is a lot more recent than the nature-culture divide. Attributed to black feminist legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw and her 1989 Article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (Crenshaw 1989), intersectionality describes and conceptualizes the fact that multiple axes of identity such as race, gender, sexuality, age, geographic location etc. constitute a person’s identity. Subsequently, the multiple axes have to be considered together, not separately as in the single axis framework of U.S. anti-discrimination law of the 1980s and 90s, when the discrimination of a person or a group is analyzed. Crenshaw focused specifically on how anti-discrimination law, but also feminist and antiracist theory at the time failed to consider black women’s position at the intersection of race and gender as a unique identity, whose marginalization could not be explained through white femaleness or male blackness.
In the time after Crenshaw’s initial intervention, intersectionality has developed into a relevant and widely used framework in many feminist studies and has also found resonance in other disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. Ecofeminism is a branch of feminism that has been “doing” intersectionality before 1989 by having its locus being the analysis of the domination of women and of nature and their interconnectedness (Kings 2017). Especially relevant to a discussion of the nature-culture divide are ecofeminist conceptions of the (non)differences between nature and culture. A dominant figure in ecofeminism (but which is much older than ecofeminism itself) is that of “Mother Earth” as the origin of all life, which encompasses nature and culture, thereby removing the divide/dualism on a metaphysical level (Swanson 2015). This shift has important (ethical) implications, as without the distinction between the two, among other things the rights of culture (and humanity) to extract and transform resources from nature are questioned, since nature is no longer a passive entity which human culture is separate from*. In the following I will elaborate on the specific attributes of the nature-culture divide that make it an anti-intersectional concept and practice. This analysis is a meant to be a rebuttal of the nature-culture divide, rooted in the assertion and observation that all elements of nature and culture are connected, that indeed everything is connected and most importantly created by its connections, therefore a separation on the level of metaphysics/essence is not possible.
The nature-culture divide is a dualism, and while claiming that all dualisms are reductionist would be an over-generalization, the specific example of the nature-culture dualism can be labelled as such. For the dualism to be functional, the definitions and existences of both components must be reduced in scope in order to be able to delimit one from the other. In the case of the nature-culture dualism, this operation is a problematic attempt to limit and contain the complexity of the interconnections between what is designated as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Which is done mainly for the purpose of reducing human (currently capitalist) culture’s responsibility for or perceived dependency on nature. Both dualism and reductionism are clearly anti-intersectional concepts. One of the key impulses of feminism in general was and still is the criticism and deconstruction of dualisms such as man-woman, black-white, human-animal, etc.. Intersectionality especially emphasizes this point shifting the focus to how interlocking systems of oppression affect political subjects whose positions are at best estimated as an ‘in-between’ in dualistic frameworks. But even this estimation fails, not only because the reality of these systems can’t be sufficiently understood through dualism, but because dualism itself also plays a key role in creating discrimination. This is done through the above-mentioned reductionism, for example.
By reducing nature to nonhuman entities and their creations and culture to humans and their creations, the nature-culture divide ignores and invisibilizes intersections and connections that exist between the two sides of the dualism which would threaten the stability of the separation and the ontological privilege given to culture over nature. This is a reason why the focus on irreducibility is seen as a main benefit of intersectionality frameworks (Carastathis 2016). Maintaining that no aspect of reality can be reduced solely to culture or nature is a prerequisite for understanding the current ecological crisis and why ecological always also means social, economic and political, analogous to how e.g. capitalist always also means racist, sexist, queerphobic, ableist etc.. This is equivalent to Mari J. Matsudas’ “asking the other question” (Matsuda 1991: 1189) while also working towards a reality where “the other” (e.g. nonhuman entities) is immediately recognized as a relevant part of any analysis and eventually not “the other” as in external at all. To do this it is also vital to be able to see how the intersections between human and nonhuman entities (such as plants, landscapes etc.) create our decisively more-than-human reality. Matsutake mushrooms for example, aspects of reality thoroughly part of nature according to the nature-culture divide, enable and co-create ideas of human freedom, relationships and identity as a key part of economic relations between Japanese traders and a variety of immigrants and settlers in the human disturbed forests of North America (Tsing 2015). The growing conditions of the mushrooms, favorable to recovering and disturbed forests previously made into ruins by capitalist logging and the various economic and military crises that caused large amounts of especially southeast Asian people to immigrate to the U.S. American Northwest have interlocking causes in among other things global imperialist and extractivist capitalism. The reality of this example cannot be understood without paying attention to the ways in which human and nonhuman entities interact and connect over time and space within multiple systems of oppression that affect them both in unique ways.
A final and highly relevant aspect of how I think the nature-culture divide is harmful and how intersectional critique is useful to illuminate and counter that harm is their oppositional positions regarding essentialism. I argue that the most relevant forms of the nature-culture divide are fundamentally essentialist and that the most relevant forms of intersectionality are anti-essentialist. The essentialism of the nature-culture divide is connected to its reductionism: to be able to reduce the connections between the two, their differences must be and are essentialized. This method is in contrast to the anti-essentialist impulse of intersectionality, which depends on the assertion that differences between categories (and categories themselves) are not essential qualities of reality. An essentialization of categories and their differences would once again lead to single axis frameworks for dealing with reality and discrimination within it. Furthermore there is the no more important but maybe more fundamental point that essentialism presupposes that categories and all the attributes, associations and value-judgments attached to them are stable, given and do not change over time and space. This presupposition is an illusion without sound historical, scientific, philosophical or social basis that can only be kept convincing by the oppressive exertion of power over the ways people think. Intersectional frameworks are especially useful in this context also due to their emphasis on the relational qualities of oppressive categories and the fact that are mutually constitutive, in other words interconnected and created by their connections. In my opinion, if one wanted to still hold on to essentialism as a relevant concept to understand and live in reality, the only phenomena that should be viewed as essential would be interconnection, interdependency, their changes over time and space and the resulting complexity from all of this.
Finally, I present the argument that the nature-culture divide can and does serve an almost identical purpose as the antidiscrimination doctrine Kimberle Crenshaw originally criticized with the concept of intersectionality. That purpose being the ontological separation of categories (here people/culture from nature) as a means to prevent new social, legal and financial responsibilities for the environment and peoples living in it. This oftentimes successful prevention especially applies to people living in the environment in non-normative ways, such as indigenous peoples on all continents (Colchester 2004). In the first case Crenshaw elaborates on in her 1989 Article, five black women brought a lawsuit against General Motors, claiming that they were not hired because they were black and female (Crenshaw 1989). The court sided with General Motors due to the fact that the plaintiffs tried to claim discrimination not because they were women or black, but because they were specifically black women. The court rejected that the black women were both black and female at the same time and that their multiple identity was uniquely discriminated against. It explicitly warned against the ‘combining’ of forms of discriminations as “[raising] the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box” (Crenshaw 1989: 142).
The same logic of separation of categories leading to unjust treatment of people can be said to have been and still be active in national ‘colonial conservation’ policies. The origins of ‘colonial conservation’ can be traced back to the first national parks, which were established in the USA. The core of colonial conservation is an intense form of the nature-culture divide leading to the conclusion that nature can only be preserved as ‘wilderness’ if it remains uninhabited by humans (Colchester 2004). This logic was the basis for a war leading to the extermination of the majority of the Miwok people who lived on the lands of Yosemite, the lands that were established as the first national park in 1864. Alongside the direct killing of indigenous peoples to remove them of their ancestral lands, forced evictions and relocations stayed common practices for conservation for more than a century after the founding of the first national park. This conception of conservation, based on the nature-culture divide, was exported globally by U.S. American and European colonialism and stayed in effect after the formal decolonization of African and Asian countries (Colchester 2004). Colchester (2004) summarizes the effects of this kind of conservation as follows: “Denial of right to land, denial of use of and access to natural resources, denial of political rights and the validity of customary institutions, kinship systems disrupted, settlement patterns disorganized, informal social networks, fundamental to the local economy lost, poverty, […], symbolic ties to environment broken, cultural identity weakened, intensified pressure on natural resources outside the protected areas, popular unrest, resistance, ‘incendiarism’, social conflict and ensuing repression.” (Colchester 2004: 147).
As already stated, the justification for the murder and forced displacement of indigenous peoples from their lands is to a large extent the nature-culture divide. To preserve nature it must be devoid of culture (i.e. humans) and since indigenous peoples are seen to represent culture, they must be removed from conservation areas. This logic shows how the nature-culture divide intersects with racial and colonial hierarchies, since ‘culture’ is implicitly assumed to be white, therefore a danger to the purity of an also white conception of nature. The fact that indigenous peoples’ concept and practice of culture (if they use the term culture at all) and its relation to nature is considerably different from white settlers views is not seen as relevant to colonial conservation policy decisions. Also because it would make them impossible. On the other side of the divide, viewing indigenous peoples as part of nature would make such conservation efforts equally impossible, since it would give them the same rights to not be exploited as nature is (legally) given on conservation areas. Furthermore, viewing all people (and not just indigenous people) and the lands they inhabit as part of nature - which they can be without a nature-culture divide - that would then have access to those same rights would cause the current economic, political and social order based on extractivist capitalism to crumble at the seams. It would be “opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box”. The distinction between nature and culture then serves the same purpose as the distinctions between white woman, black man and black woman.