The causes and consequences of environmental change are hotly debated by academics, development experts, policy makers, and the public at large. Yet, despite path-breaking research about local and global environmental change over the last decades, the conceptualization and analysis of environmental change remains rooted in a one-dimensional Nature-Culture dichotomy that depicts environmental change in unilinear, static, and monolithic terms that privileges the outcome of change over the process of change, obscuring agency, motivation, and the day-to-day mechanics involved as well as homogenizing the subjects and the objects of environmental change.
The Nature-Culture dichotomy defines human and non-human entities and their products exclusively as either part of Nature or of Culture. For example, plants and animals are wild (and part of Nature) or domesticated (and part of Culture). But many animals and plants do not fit neatly into this binary framework, including feral animals and “semi-domesticated” plants.
The concept of “environmental infrastructure” facilitates a focus on the twilight zone between Nature and Culture. The term “infrastructure” not only stresses the utilitarian value that humans ascribe to it (by humans), but also allows room for environmental agents to shape or re-shape it mentally as well as physically. The adjective “environmental” highlights that human control, use, and agency are neither absolute nor exclusive. Humans are “architects of Nature” because they are environmental actors. Humans, however, work with nature (which is at once an actor and a medium), rather than dominating nature or being dominated by nature.