by Julie Sze
about Julie Sze
Julie Sze is Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of three books, most recently, Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger.
Nature
In everyday speech, the meaning of the term nature may seem self-evident. Nature is the opposite of culture: the outdoors, the untamed, the wild, the timeless. It is what lies before and beyond society and civilization. Toddlers use the term in this way when they say that they “collect nature” when gathering sticks and leaves in the backyard or park. Yet as Raymond Williams says, “nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language” and any effort to fix or define its meaning is a fraught venture (1983, 219). This danger arises because definitions of nature are historically specific and culturally embedded in ideological systems. The _nature of nature_ under Western modernity was (and remains) marked by violent and racializing processes of European colonialism and global capitalism, just as contestation over the _nature of nature_ is central to efforts to dismantle that legacy today. In Europe, Enlightenment uses of the term nature built on an older system of hierarchical classification known as the Great Chain of Being. This system consigned nonhuman nature (such as animals and plants) to the lowest rungs of “a fixed and vertical hierarchy stretching from God down to the lowliest sentient beings” (Schiebeinger 1993, 145)....
Scale
If there is any phrase that represents both environmental problems and the call to action in the last three decades, it’s the injunction to “Think Global–Act Local.” On the most basic level, this approach connects thinking and acting. For many, this slogan effectively connects individual action with collective impacts or change. Less obvious, but no less important, thinking globally and acting locally also demands that people more fully comprehend the relationship between the local and the global or, in other words, that they consider _scale_. Scale “maps” onto the fundamental political, environmental, and social problems that have preoccupied environmental activists and scholars over the last three decades. These are primarily as follows: the intersection of the local and the global spheres; intensifying urbanization and pollution around the world, but particularly in the Global South and Asia; and the increasing awareness of environmental pollution on individuals and communities in many locales. Significant environmental problems, from biodiversity conservation to air and water pollution and habitat degradation, require interdisciplinary analysis and methods with which to analyze complex processes at multiple temporal and spatial scales (Sayre 2005, 277). “Scale” is a—or possibly _the_—key term in geography. Scale is first a _technical_ measurement of the...