Writing Natures Magazine

(Re)Writing Natures 

Ravi Agarwal, Series Editor

The question of Nature as the ‘other’ has been in play for a long time,  possibly ever since humans emerged as self-aware, conscious beings. This alienation, is a separation of the self from its extended ‘body,’ such as in Marx’s evocation of the fish and its larger body as the water it swims  in. However, of late, since the Great Acceleration of the mid-20th century the question has become existentialist for the human species. The scientific universalisation of Nature as a cosmic order, has only deepened the divide. Nature appears alien as never before, its value reduced to one of ‘use.’  Not surprisingly the only proposals to recover from a nature-crisis ––as is evident today–– suggest  acting through the foregrounding of science and technology, rather than question the basic assumption about nature’s homogeneity.

Infact, nature constantly appears to us as an everyday immersive and experiential space.  It is both the unsaid and the unspoken, a collective unconscious and everything in-between, which  breath, touch, feel, smell and other senses make apparent. It is an extended ecology of the self.

Nature should then be nature-s. Not singular, but plural, heterogeneous, and with multiplicity. It needs to recover from an universalising vocabulary, which has only served the purposes of extractivist capital. The colonisation of nature is now complete, neatly merged with histories of power and capital. While the cosmos may be governed by universal laws, for us humans, it is a cultural and political relationship with the more-than-human world. Doing justice to it is also to recover its multivalent values from mere economic ones. Nature needs to be redefined as a multitude of everyday connections with the more-than-human world, mediated through social hierarchies and power relationships, which manifest through the intersections of gender, caste, race, etc, as a lived experience.

‘Writing Natures’ is an invitation to think and write about these entanglements, what nature means to us, and how it appears in our lives in different ways.

In this endeavour, we will periodically invite written pieces, along with an appointed issue editor, and through an open call. The commissioned essays will be published on this website, and hopefully soon to be published in print.

Issues

Issue 1: Nature and its Speculations

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