1. This paper was originally presented at Ecologies: Rethinking Nature/Culture, the 7th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference for Graduate Scholarship (at the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture), Rutgers University, November, 1996. It later appeared as part of Cultures and Environments: On Cultural Environmental Studies, an On-Line Conference hosted by the American Studies Program, Washington State University, June 20-22, 1997.
2. The attack begun by Gross' and Levitt's Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science [1994] was carried on at a series of conferences, including "The Flight from Science and Reason," held at the New York Academy of Sciences in 1995. The latter resulted in a further tome of forceful critiques and denunciations (some would say "rants" adding up to a "witchhunt") published under the auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences [Gross, Levitt, and Lewis, 1996]. Both the Gross-and-Levitt initiated "science wars" and the now (in)famous "Sokal affair" (or "hoax" as it is popularly called) continue to exercise the pens of editorialists and pundits as well as the scientific and academic communities. For critical analyses of the "critics of the 'critics' of science," see Ross [1996], Hart [1996] in the latter volume, and Nelkin [1996]; for more moderate assessments in a mainstream scientific journal, see Dickson [1997] and the Editorial in Nature 385 (30 January 1997).
3. A watershed moment [Di Chiro, 1995: 305] for this new movement was the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, held in Washington, D.C. in October, 1991, and its declaration of 17 "Principles of Environmental Justice." Articulating this critique of environmental preservationist discourse, Giovanna Di Chiro writes, "The discourse that opposes an Edenic or sublime nature to a fallen culture either categorizes people of color as identical with nature, as in the case of indigenous peoples or Third World natives [...], or classifies them as people who are anti-nature, impure, and even toxic, as in the case of poor communities of color living in contaminated and blighted inner cities or in the surrounding rural wastelands" [: 311]. In contrast, she writes, "Ideas of nature, for environmental justice groups, are [...] tied closely to ideas of community, history, ethnic identity, and cultural survival, which include relationships to the land that express particular ways of life" [:318].
4. To be fair, some of the contributors to Reinventing Nature? hold a more sophisticated view than Soule's and Lease's glib rejection of all things "postmodern" and "deconstructive." One contributor, Katherine Hayles, who is also included in Cronon's Uncommon Ground collection, argues for a modified constructivism "constrained" by the "elusive negativities" of a shared material world. This is much like the argument I would like to make here, except that the status of Hayles' "constraints" and "negativities" seems to me not very helpful. Hayles distinguishes between an "unmediated flux," "inherently unknowable and unreachable by any sentient being," and "the constructed concepts that for us comprise the world" [in Soule :50]. Reality, she writes, "originates at the interface where an organism capable of perception, at whatever level, encounters the unmediated flux" [in Cronon :418]; and she advocates "riding the cusp" -- keeping "in the foreground of consciousness both the active transformations through which we experience the world" and the "flux" itself [in Soule :50]. I would argue, however, that this "flux," instead of becoming another "ghost in the machine" which precedes the world of experience and representation [see Oyama 1985], is better thought of as always already mediated in manifold ways: the "constraints" are not merely some categorical realm of elusive negativities, but are rather more specific and multiple than that -- changeable, enabling and constraining conditions consisting of what ecological psychologist J. J. Gibson [1977, 1982] would call "affordances" (environmental features which are perceivable and appropriable to specifically embodied observer-subjects) and "effectivities" (bodily and perceptual capacities, etc.).
5. Murray Bookchin has recently written an entire book, Re-Enchanting Humanity [1995] defending humanity, humanism, and rationality from the many forces of "irrationalism," which, in his view, includes both Gaia-worshipping deep ecologists and postmodern deconstructionists and sociologists of science like Latour.
6. In what follows I will be mainly concerned with the deep ecologists' and biocentrists' perception of the social construction debate; as a result, though I will refer to (for instance) antiracist and feminist critiques of radical environmental discourse, these will be largely subsumed within such categories as "postmodern deconstructionism" and "the leftist social justice movement," as these are the categories constructed by the biocentrists. I recognize, however, that there is much plurality and divergence among the various social ecology, feminist, antiracist and environmental justice movements -- not to mention the "postmodernists," "deconstructionists," et al. -- and that such a collapsing of categories is greatly misleading. At the same time, not all "postmodern constructivists" share a critical political motivation for their work (of any sort); those most frequently mentioned both by the "defenders of nature" (e.g. Soule and Lease, Sessions) and the "defenders of science" (Gross and Levitt, Sokal), however, do tend to express political views of a generally leftist/social-justice/identity-politics orientation.
7. Cognitive biologists Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and their colleagues, for instance, have pursued the notion of "autopoiesis" or self-organization in nonhuman animals [Maturana and Varela 1980, 1987; Varela 1979; Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991]. The organismic process-philosophical tradition initiated by Alfred North Whitehead has also resulted in some biological accounts of nonhuman animals as centers of consciousness and subjective intentionality [Ingold 1988; Goodwin 1988; Birch and Cobb 1981 ].
8. The term "actant" is used by Latour, Michel Callon, and Haraway to refer to any entity that can be said to do things. This is meant to suspend the question of whether an "actant" is really a willful "agent" or not, and thus to blur the boundary that has conventionally, in the social sciences, separated the realm of humans from that of nonhumans.
9. See, for instance, Latour [1986, 1993]; Callon [1986]; Callon and Latour [1981, 1992]; Singleton and Michael [1993]; Lee and Brown [1994]; and Ashmore, et al. [1994]. Related attempts include the "constrained constructivism" of Katherine Hayles [1991, 1995a, 1995b] and the "heterogeneous constructionism" of Peter Taylor [1995]. Somewhat more materialist (as opposed to sociological) models of social-ecological interaction can be found in the work of dialectical biologists [e.g., Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin, 1984; Haila and Levins, 1992; see also Oyama, 1985, for a perceptive commentary], historical ecologists [Crumley, 1994], and "new human ecologists" [Steiner and Nauser, 1993], among others. Beck [1996] provides a useful perspective on some of this work.