Evernden’s book can be called as a clear line of argument originating in the present day debate about the pollution/pollutant in nature/environment/ecology. Evernden starts by questioning why have these concerns stated since last century have had no discernible impact either on the environment they seem to address, or not even led to any consensus on what this pollution really is. He observes that we have different versions of this phenomenon in our society, person to person, social class to social class, culture to culture; there is simply no consensual position from which to form a shift of the general position that the debate often advocates. He argues from this lack of agreement that the construction of nature is "ambiguous," meaning, "Nature justifies nothing or anything." Nature can be made something to aspire to or something to transcend, an absolute moral standard or a pejorative connoting which is least specifically human. Nature is an abstract system of order and functionality or conversely nature is the material from which our everyday experiences are shaped, the building blocks of reality. Thus combining in a single word the normative "Nature" and the actual "nature," its authority on our social equations and affairs is tremendous. However as a socially constructed entity, its ambiguity of meaning is often used as a "safe house for social injustices." From this position, he goes on to deconstruct the concept’s historical origins in the Western Civilization.

Evernden goes back to the Enlightenment origins of Western scientific thought and even referring to Aristotle’s "categories" and Augustine’s "signs." He refers to medieval thinkers who believed that the natural world was "a record of the will of God [and] possessed a symbolic content that was far more significant than its material content." Reading nature’s hidden symbols thus required special insights. However from Enlightenment times, Western science has progressively garnered for humanity the will and vitality previously thought to be the province of Nature. Science removed Nature from human empathy. So much so that with recent advances in medical science, the human body, and even human mind has become the object of study and knowledge than the subject of experience as they once were. Moreover in contrast to the preoccupation of the meaning and the significance in the earlier times, science is now concerned with only the surfaces, appearances and manifestations. The wanton objectification of Nature by Science knows no bounds; this conception of Human as organic matter even breaks down the earlier dualism of Western thought, between the subject and the object. So we run a full circle from a pre-Renaissance monism to a modern dualism to the contemporary monism. Here he argues that the current ecological crisis is thus attached to this contemporary "material monism" where science has not only enervated Nature but Humanity as well and the solution lies in "re-imagining of things." Evernden’s contention is that as a social construction, nature is "naturally" given to a further reconstruction to have less damaging consequences. He identifies "creative discourses" as the medium of this reconstruction and proposes a concept of Nature as "Ultrahuman" which rediscovers the wonder and miracle in nature and allows it a space beyond abstraction.

Before I turn to the validity of his conclusion, there are some extremely interesting insights that Evenden offers us that are worthwhile to ponder on. He gives an example of interpreting human beings, as "global budworms" -that is, immensely destructive organisms that reproduce in fantastic numbers, thus enabling ecosystems to renew themselves and evolve on a global scale. From this perspective, humans are functional parts of an organic system, just as are most of the pests that human beings have tried to control, with unforeseen consequences, when redesigning ecosystems for human profit. Evernden concludes that it is equally "natural" for human beings to live in a stable, self-sustaining relationship with other species, to compete with other species for resources and space, or act as a global budworm and promote ecological change. Secondly, he argues that "One of the conditions of true [scientific] descriptions of nature" is " that they be visible to anyone, not confined to an intellectual elite…A fact is true because we can all see it. The great amorphous body of humanity becomes the new authority, and its perceptual voting power will override the testimony of individual genius." So science may have removed nature from human empathy, but it is also more democratic than earlier systems for interpreting the natural world. Hence criticism of science for reinforcing our alienation from non-human nature on ethical grounds has to confront this particular advantage of science over more artistic, literary but inherently individual approaches. Thus Science becomes a fundamentally social activity allowing individual human beings to verify each other’s perception and reinforce the bonds with each other.

When we examine Evernden’s line of argument critically, one thing that come to mind is that Society in this book appears as an amorphous collection of individuals, an egalitarian collection of persons each equally able to construct and disseminate ideas about Nature. He doesn’t take forward his own observation about nature being used as a tool for furthering competing ideologies. Perhaps this view of nature as an interstitial result of various forces can tell us more about its construction in the first place and the change in its definition with time. In The social creation of Nature history seems to evolve on its own accord, through some sort of autonomous evolution of culture, rise of science and objective knowledge, shaped by geniuses like Aristotle or Leonardo. The material interests, the strategies of economic and political elites in legitimizing discrimination, exploitation, and marginalization by reference to nature are not explored. It is not possible to understand why the differing groups of the society which he mentions as trying to appropriate nature were earlier (early Industrial Revolution times) class based, later became stratified by state/nation, industry and in recent times, some sort of transnational elitism, First World/Third World or Developed/Developing countries. As we have seen in recent times from the episodes of Antarctica, Deep Sea Exploration and Rio Summit, attempt to "save nature" takes a different connotation if we don’t take into account these factors. Thus when he proposes "re-imagining things", "speaking differently" and discovering the "divine chaos," his strategy of resistance becomes individualistic rather than collective/psychological/political, an intellectual exercise rather than any worthwhile pragmatic or ideal program. His arguments do not seem to address any tangible audience, the real fight for change is fought between both productive and consumptive aspects of society, the "environmental activists" and "industry and employment" both subscribing to a profusion of Nature themes. His stress on mystery and wonder in Nature is fraught with dangerous consequences as this is very easily and rapidly colonized as we see from the global tourism industry. Nature has a distinct spatial expression: it is confined to the location of its extreme forms, and our attention is drawn away from what Baudrillard calls as the vast spaces of "utter monotony," without consideration for question of ecological integrity. Nature as Ultrahuman may serve as a convenient distraction to obfuscate the link between institutional formations such as market or state and continuous degradation of nature. Emphasizing representation, mystery and wonder over norms, values and materiality and The Social Creation of Nature is unable to capture the complexity of the contemporary period. Evernden supports what Thoreau called "wildness", the philosophy that has been transformed to "green chaos" or "ecofascism" of today. At this juncture than any other time, the critical need is for ethics/integrity over aesthetics/representation but we do have to struggle with what Evernden shows clearly, the first terms are fraught with controversies and fundamental disagreements.

Philosophically this work can be thought of as a part of the Post-modern critical discourse on the Modernist thinking. Here an important contribution has been offered by the phenomenological tradition as advanced by Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer et al. Phenomenological thinking explains how the ‘rational’ and ‘reductive’ basis of the environmental disciplines has failed to give mankind a harmonious and enriching relationship with its spatial domain, the place and how a conception of place as experienced and ‘lived’ offers an antidote to this malaise. This proceeds from an acceptance both of wholeness and indivisibility of human experience, and from the fact that meaning defined by human intentions is central to our existence. The lived-world and its geography are thus taken as being irrefutably and profoundly human and meaningful. Place can be approached with as few presuppositions as possible concerning its character or form, for it is recognized from the outset that place has a range of significances and identities that is as wide as the range of human consciousness of place. Subjectivity and Consciousness are given prime philosophical authority. Scientific rationality is viewed as an inappropriate worldview, its validity restricted to a method for technical exercises.

Now I would refer to an entirely different, perhaps fundamentally contrasting approach by Bill Hillier in an attempt to correlate Society and Place. But here what we find that Place has been reduced to an abstract "Space" which is assumed to be entirely quantifiable, dissectable and thus approachable as some sort of object/rule which determines how we see the world as we do. The argument is that Individual subjectivity of space has to take into account sociological factors; every experience of place and world is influenced by who else is there and what else is happening. Making of a ‘place’, hardly is a direct result of an individual subject, rather ‘place’ is continuously and simultaneously made at every stage by its users, by their own ‘experience’ as well as by their presence and by their acts. So rather than a viewpoint of ‘subject at the center of space’, we come to another understanding, how changing spaces can point and direct our subjectivity, an analogue to Levi-Strauss’s remark ‘space is what we think with, not what we think of’.