Unprotected Nature
David Přílučík’s chapter Unprotected Nature focuses on the formation and still changing discourse on how we understand the concept of nature and what it entails, especially when we talk about its protection. The chapter is divided into three parts - a three-part podcast, four text interviews interspersed with artworks, and an art video.
These different parts of the media are based on the assumption (strange as it may sound) that modern conceptions and thinking about nature can hinder adequate responses to environmental problems. Nature has long been seen as a neutral category that confirms the status quo, so thinking about it has been - from certain angles - overlooked.
What is the role of nature? Some say that nature has always been there. Others say that it was not discovered but gradually invented. This perspective implies that there is no one nature in thinking about nature, but a variety of contested natures that arise through more-than-human coexistence. Any understanding of what nature means thus necessarily involves an understanding of the society in which (or by which) it is shaped. The Unprotected Nature project seeks ways in which we can consciously participate in processes of understanding beyond established ideas.
Racism, slavery, extractivism and reproductive labour are just some of the effects that the surviving natural/non-natural divide has had on everyday life. Its modern conception of nature seems to have the enduring power to legitimize often contradictory tendencies. It juxtaposes proponents and opponents of the traditional family, hunters and animal protectors, science lovers and conspiracy theorists.
Although the division between human and non-human is proving outdated, recent events remind us that we are still living in the grip of this idea. The more we are confronted with the events that the dualistic positioning of humans as superior to their environment has brought us in the form of climate change, pandemics, genocides or energy crises, the more we need to continue to critique this issue in a broader context.
How then to update or move beyond an outdated notion? The possible explanations that modernity has offered (and that still persist today) have become rather complicit in the problem, without providing any solutions. The chapter Unprotected Nature offers a persistence in this ambiguous constellation. It does not attempt to define, but rather to reflect on the ambiguity and problematize the universal status that surrounds nature. As we come to know nature, we also unravel our own, human, story. A story made up of spindles of dreams, needs and practices. Along with questions about nature, its conservation and history, we thus come to know our own limits and possibilities.
Through the contributions of researchers, theorists, artists and scientists, we seek to understand, through podcasts, publications and experimental film, how the discourse around nature is shaped, who and how is involved in its management, and which practices and voices are not heard. In doing so, we create a space where the conventional perspective of nature ceases to be protected by the traditional framework and opens it up to new interspecies meanings and alliances.
