Postmodern social construction of nature

The Postmodern social constructionist of nature is a theorem of postmodernist continental philosophy that poses an alternative critique of previous mainstream, prometheun dialogue about environmental sustainability and ecopolitics. Whereas traditional criticisms of environmentalism come from the more conservative "right" of politics, leftist critiques of nature pioneered by postmodernist constructionism highlights the need to recognise "the other". The Implicit assumption made by theorists like Wapner [cite web | url = http://www.questia.com/library/book/environmental-activism-and-world-civic-politics-by-paul-wapner.jsp| title = Environmental Activism and World Politics | date = 1996| work = Paul Wapner| accessdate = 2007-06-16 ] [cite web | url = http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/global_environmental_politics/v003/3.1wapner.html| title = World summit on sustainable development | date = 2003| work = Paul Wapner| accessdate = 2007-06-16 ] refer to it as a new "response to eco-criticism would require critics to acknowledge the ways in which they themselves silence nature and then to respect the sheer otherness of the nonhuman world."

This is because postmodernism prides itself on criticizing the urge toward mastery that characterizes modernity. But yet mastery exactly is what postmodernism is exerting as it captures the nonhuman world within its own conceptual domain. That in turn implies postmodern cultural criticism can deepen the modernist urge toward mastery by eliminating the ontological weight of the nonhuman world. "What else could it mean to assert that there is no such thing as nature?" [cite web | url = http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=539| title = Leftist Criticism of Nature | date = Fall 2003| work = Dissent Magazine| accessdate = 2007-06-16 ] . Thus, the issue becomes an existentialist query about whether nature can exist in a humanist critique, and whether we can discern the "others" views in relation to our actions on their behalf. This is referred to as the Wapner Paradox.

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