types in which they are trying to knock Nature.’’ His anger is driven by the
view that:
[t]he attacks on Nature and wilderness from the ivory towers come at the right time
to bolster the global developers, the resurgent timber companies, and those who
would trash the Endangered Species Act. (Snyder 1998 )
Conservation biologist Michael Soule ́makes a similar claim, arguing that a
constructivist view represents a ‘‘social siege of nature’’ that has served to
justify a ‘‘physical siege’’ upon the land itself (Soule ́ 1995 , 146 ). The vehemence
of such attacks represents a belief that only a ‘‘realist’’ conception of Nature
provides the basis for identifying or imposinglimitsupon the public, without
which environmental arguments for social or political change are leftXoating
as mere preferences in a sea of pluralistic interests. Thus the danger of calling
‘‘nature’’ into question, from this vantage point, is that it serves to undermine
its truth-value, where this truth-value is seen as a necessary bulwark holding
relativism, developers,andthe demands of a democratic public at bay.
By contrast, a socially constructed view of nature is argued to be politically
salient to the extent that it may allow for a more inclusive set of environ-
mentally concerned constituencies, once the concern with ‘‘nature’’ is under-
stood to include ‘‘home’’ as well as ‘‘wilderness;’’ urban as well as rural places;
and working as well as pristine landscapes (Cronon 1995 ; Chaloupka 2000 ;
Braun 2002 ). Here, it is argued that a danger of failing to recognize ‘‘nature’’
as a social construction is that it can reify it as a source from which to justify
illegitimate exercises of political authority. A second argument is that it
excludes the prominent environmental concerns of less privileged classes of
people and those in more densely populated regions, while privileging a
conception that is particular to Western cultures (Guha 1989 ).
To take a stance in this debate is to articulate a position regarding the role
of truth claims in circumscribing or motivating democratic political partici-
pation, a position regarding one’s level of faith in ‘‘the people’’ to express
‘‘environmentally responsible’’ sentiments and values, and regarding the
relative importance of building environmental movements that cross cul-
tural, class, race, and gender boundaries. Among an increasing number of
environmental political theorists, there seems to be a developing consensus
that democratic practice is the only way to mediate between an external
nature and our socially constructed understandings of it. 9
9 Thanks to David Schlosberg for this observation.784 john m. meyer