Throughout history, conceptions of nature justified political hierarchies and racism.

Evidence

Fukuoka’s stance is an example of something that Jedediah Purdy suggests in his book After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. In each subsequent chapter, Purdy shows how the different views of nature throughout history have each corresponded to a set of political beliefs about value and subjecthood, being used to justify everything from hierarchical social orders and racism (“everything in its place”) to an obsession with the productivity of industry. In each case, people and their governments conceived of nature as entirely separate from the human world, whether it was the idea of “natural capital” or the pristine “backpacker’s nature.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 653

Categorization

• XREF: Purdy’s view-of-nature→politics link parallels the ADDENDUM article on trees as infrastructure and the reader’s interest in how attention constructs worlds. — connects to: Racism logically depends on the prior belief that animals and nature are inferior. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1110; Nature, women, blacks, and laborers became resources legitimized as rationality. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 1064
• SEED: Possible essay angle: every ecology is a politics — tracing how ‘natural capital’ and ‘backpacker’s nature’ map to distinct political program.