Ethnicity and Nature

Nationalism and Nature

Despite the criticisms that have been levied against environmental determinism for several decades, the power of the assumptions embedded in the relationship between ethnicity and nature remains enduring. Modern nationalist movements, for example, from those of 19th-century Europe to the anticolonial struggles worldwide in the 20th century, have drawn consistently on the idea of inherent and essential connections between people and place as a way of imagining new political communities. We often find in Romanticism, the cultural and intellectual movement that under-girds many of these emerging nationalist visions, an explicit link between an ethnic and a physical nature—pastoral landscapes and an English character or perhaps dark forests and an essentially martial German subject. Similarly, the anticolonial nationalism of the past two centuries has often drawn on the idea that an indigenous population is somehow more legitimately connected to the local landscape than is a “foreign” ruler. Such claims have often been made not only on the basis of justice and equity but also on the assumed authenticity of one group rather than another, an authenticity predicated once again on an essentialized notion of ethnicity and nature. The British, in this view, were not welcome in India, the French in Algeria, or the Dutch in Indonesia, not only because of their repressive behavior as imperial masters but also because the stain of their unfamiliarity with the natural landscape of each place could not be erased through colonialism. The British retreat to hill stations in the summer, the French attempt to re-create metropoles, and the Dutch rejection of the traditional longhouses were all therefore seen as an inability to connect to local landscapes.

In the contemporary period, ethnicity remains a potent fount for articulating “authentic” connections between specific people and places. Indeed, many of the major political conflicts that have arisen throughout the 20th century have been characterized by struggles to define the “natural ethnicity” of a region. Israel and Palestine, for example, are seen from this perspective as being quintessentially Jewish and Arab, with these ethnicities defining the land and vice versa. So-called ethnic cleansing has also been used in conflicts, from the former Yugoslavia to Rwanda, and many others besides, to remove apparently offending bodies and communities from lands to which it is claimed they do not belong. An essentialized understanding of ethnicity and nature lies once again at the heart of such political categorizations.

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