Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 145Plate 3 Clayoquot as wild nature. This photograph by Adrian Dorst depictsClayoquot as an ancient natural landscape of majestic trees and intricateecological relationships among plants, mosses and fauna (© Adrian Dorst)in On the Wild Side it is displayed as a pristine wilderness. Both representationsappear to represent a mute nature (trees) that cannot represent itself.Following Derrida, Braun argues that this appearance is achieved by virtueof the semantic oppositions of nature–culture and traditional–modern.The framing of Clayoquot as a natural space lightly peopled by nativeswho respect the environment is, he argues, an effect of a culturally specificdiscourse that goes back to the arrival of the British in the 1850s.This discourse claims to represent nature as it is, but in fact gains its meaningonly from a set of dualisms internal to the discourse itself. Each side of thesedualisms refers ‘sideways’ to its antinomy rather than arising ‘vertically’from its real-world referent. Over a century after the British colonisedthe province and decades after Canada ceased to be a British dominion,Braun argues that colonialism lives on – in this case in struggles overthe environment.The British placed indigenous peoples in ‘reserves’, constrainingtheir occupancy of forests, valleys and mountains in British