Environmentalism and social sciences appear to be in a period of
disorientation and perhaps transition. In this innovative collection,
leading international thinkers explore the notion that one explanation
for the current malaise of the "politics of ecology" is that we
increasingly find ourselves negotiating "technonatural" space/times.
International contributors map the political ecologies of our
technonatural present and indicate possible paths for technonatural
futures.
The term "technonatures" is in debt to a long line of environmental
cultural theory from Raymond Williams onwards, problematizing the idea
that a politics of the environment can be usefully grounded in terms of
the rhetoric of defending the pure, the authentic, or an idealized past
solely in terms of the ecological or the natural. In using the term
"technonatures" as an organizing myth and metaphor for thinking about
the politics of nature in contemporary times, this collection seeks to
explore one increasingly pronounced dimension of the social natures
discussion. Technonatures highlights a growing range of voices
considering the claim that we are not only inhabiting diverse social
natures but that within such natures our knowledge of our worlds is ever
more technologically mediated, produced, enacted, and contested.