Koert van Mensvoort, Hendrik Jan Grievink, Next Nature: Nature Changes along with Us, Actar, Barcelona 2011 (pp. 472, $49.95)
Exhibit A in Case No. CV11-10322, currently being
heard in the US District Court in Los Angeles,
consists of advertisements for the vast range
of Tostitos and Sun Chips products. A quick
scan reveals that this cornucopia of fried corn
variations is marketed with an equally diverse set
of promises, ranging from the optimistic "Hello
healthier living" to the liberating "Trans Fat-,
Gluten-, Additive-, Casein-, Lactose-, msg-, Onion-,
and Pig (Porcine)-Free". All of them, however,
claim to be made with 100 per cent all-natural
ingredients. "But," argues plaintiff Julie Gengo, a
consumer residing in Richmond, California, in her
summary of allegations, "Tostitos and Sun Chips
products are not made of 'all-natural' ingredients."
The corn and vegetable oils of which they consist
are made from genetically modified plants, and "a
recognised defining characteristic of genetically
modified foods is that they are not natural." The
plaintiff was thus damaged, in an amount to be
determined at trial, because she did not get the
"all-natural" products that were advertised and
for which she had paid. Unfortunately for Gengo,
"natural" is a term for which the US Food and Drug
Administration (among others) does not possess a
working definition. Should a product made from a
plant in whose DNA naturally occurring organisms (humans) have inserted naturally occurring
genes from another naturally occurring species
be called artificial? More succinctly: what is
nature? And does the nature caused by people still
qualify?
Nature in the future
A thorough analysis of new perspectives on the relation between man and nature in the near future.
View Article details
- Nicola Twilley
- 16 March 2012
This is the uncertain territory explored
by a recent book, Next Nature: Nature Changes
along with Us. The volume has evolved
from its own natural format — a blog —, offering a compendium of valuable
new perspectives on the relationship between
humans and their environment. Packaged in
seven National Geographic-mimicking sections,
Next Nature collects its online observations of
strange technologies and provocative experiments
alongside new short essays by Bruce Sterling,
Rachel Armstrong and other assorted seers and
imagineers of our techno-future.
While the physical book serves to amplify the
website's existing faults (glib and stiff writing,
combined with overexposed examples), it offers
its own benefits: at nearly 500 densely packed
pages, the sheer volume of this catalogue of
next nature is exhilarating.
The book places human activity already and always within the framework of nature — and yet, at the same time, it argues that our current condition of nature has evolved from some original version, to become "next" or "altered". Yet, if Next Nature demonstrates anything, it is the fantastic hubris embedded in such clear-cut divisions between nature and culture. Instead, the book is better read as a new Ark — an encyclopaedia or curiosity cabinet of intensely thought-provoking, often visually stunning specimens from which to develop a more nuanced understanding of the human relationship with nature. Certainly, in an era of anthropogenic climate change, geo-engineering, assisted migration and all-natural genetically modified corn snacks, this kind of new perceptual framework is desperately needed. Nicola Twilley (@nicolatwilley)
Certainly, in an era of anthropogenic climate change, geo-engineering, assisted migration and all-natural genetically modified corn snacks, this kind of new perceptual framework is desperately needed