When we eventually look back at the intellectual shibboleths of the high capitalist period—say the last three centuries—few ingrained assumptions will look so wrongheaded or so globally destructive as the common-sense separation of society and nature. Historically and geographically, most societies have avoided such a stark presumption as hubristic folly, but from physicists to sociologists, physicians to poets, the brains of the ascendant capitalist “west” not only embraced but made a virtue of society’s separation from nature (and vice versa). Scientists studied a natural world, conceptually ripped from any social context except that human bodies, like “natural” ones, were just as subject to the laws of gravity or.
