Death of Nature

The death of nature is an evocative metaphor that has been deployed by a number of writers and political activists in order to capture the form of modern social relations with the natural world. In his celebrated book, The End of Nature: Humanity, Climate Change and the Natural World (1989), Bill McKibben implicitly suggested this process of death in his argument that nature has somehow ceased to exist.

Of course, when McKibben talks about the end of nature, he is actually referring to the end of a specific way of understanding nature. This mode of understanding depicts nature as a pristine realm that is somehow separate from society and cut off from human control and intervention. According to McKibben, in the modern industrial era—an era of ...