Can we humans save ourselves from self-destruction? | Letters
Eduardo Brondizio's observation - "We have been displacing our impact around the planet from frontier to frontier. But we are running out of frontiers" - is crucial (Humanity facing 'urgent threat' from loss of Earth's natural life, 7 May). This frontier-based structure of thought, in which there is always a beyond, an outside, a domain of otherness, underpins the dichotomies of class and hence of economics (capital and labour); of race, religion and migration; of gender and sexuality; as well as that of ecology. In every sphere, the uncivilised, untamed, more "natural" partner is positioned for exploitation and subordination. This is the basic structure underlying capitalism, but probably goes back much further to the beginnings of agriculture, when the land was first "tamed".
Its time is up. We have reached the final frontier and there is no longer any outside. The very concept of "nature" is misleading, since it positions human beings over and against something different called the natural world, and which therefore can be conceptualised as providing us with "services". The concept should be junked.
Richard Middleton
Crossmichael, Dumfries and Galloway