States of Nature, Environing the Political: A Response to Timothy W. Luke

Timothy Luke's main argument in "International or Interenvironmental Relations: Reassessing Nations and Niches in Global Ecosystems?" (1) is that worldwide transformations of people, place, and product demand a new analytics. He suggests that international relations and environmental studies are too disciplined to cope with the degree to which their related objects of analysis are now, more than ever, conditioning subjects. Both impersonal market forces that were once more subject to state authority and the nonhuman environments upon which states and their national economies have been built are becoming increasingly autonomous actors in world politics. States, once considered the primary decision makers in the international sphere (international relations) are being augmented and surpassed by nature and capital's increasing, and increasingly indistinguishable, agencies (interenvironmental relations). Thus, for Luke, to be and know environmentally and internationally now requires deep and critical engagement with the "unbeing and "unknowing" environings of nature and global capital. Nature? Most environmental studies and IR scholars would agree that global capital is a primary agent in world politics. Most would also agree that nature has been historically denied even a pretense of agency in political thought and practice. Luke does not differ, but asks whether present delineations of nature and capital are useful for alleviating their unequal structuring. Naming nature is not taxing: A forest, ocean, soil, air, tree, fish, plant, wind. Conceptually, nature can be simply natural. Historically, the term nature and its referent are not so pure. Finding a forest, for example, that is not irrevocably altered by forest companies, development programs, park boundaries, acid rains, and global climate changes would be an impressive feat. With vast increases in human population, production, consumption, and movement over the past century, the nature of nature is increasingly tenuous. Naming global capital is telling in this regard. Common nominations are transnational corporations, trade, investment, and development organizations. Looking deeper, one finds these agents' movements in transgenic laboratory creatures, genetically modified foods, algae blooms, species extinctions, and soil erosions. Global capitalism is reworking Earth's ecologies in radical and often frightening ways. As it consumes, destroys, and alters nature, capitalism is (re) creating "natural" worlds. For Luke, the encoding of "capitalist commerce into what once was autochthonously evolving nature is most evident in the bioengineering of new plant and animal species." (2) With global capitalism's rise since 1500 "and its tremendous expansion after 1900, entirely new kinds of plant and animal populations are becoming globally distributed in new cyborganized clusters of life." (3) While Harvard University/Du Pont/Donna Haraway's OncoMouse[TM] is not one of Luke's specific examples, a brief discussion of it is illustrative in this regard. (4) Hawking the Mouse In a 1990 advertisement appearing in Science magazine, Du Pont sells OncoMouse[TM] as the first in vivo model to contain an activated oncogene. Each OncoMouse carries the ras oncogene in all germ and somatic cells. This transgenic model, available commercially for the first time, predictably undergoes carcinogenesis. OncoMouse reliably develops neoplasms within months and offers you a shorter path to new answers about cancer. Available to researchers only. from Du Pont, where better things for better living come to life. OncoMouse[TM] is thus not simply objectified life, but literally comes to life in commodity form. She/he is living, but her nature is patently dubious. "Above all," writes Donna Haraway, "OncoMouse[TM] is the first patented animal in the world [April 12, 1988]--s/he is an invention. …