Nature’s Revenge? a Third Nature in the Anthropocene

This paper aims to discuss a new quality of nature in the Anthropocene. The consequences of which call for an understanding of the alteration, maybe even othering, of nature which is processed by that anthropogenic influence on the Earth’s condition. Not only the relation between man and nature needs to be reflected, the question also is what kind of nature it is precisely with which the world is today confronted, and that now impacts on the human-nature interaction. The contemporary type of nature that emerges from processes of human-based interference, alteration, and transformation, forms a significant threat to the existing forms of life, their structures, shapings, ontologies, interactions, and interdependencies. Today a “Third Nature” is established that has, one the one hand, become radically anthropogenic when it, on the other hand, consequently, detaches from the influence of human agency. It is a nature that has been produced and formed by human procedure, most of all in the wake of modernity. Modern ways of a domination of nature have decisively changed its existing forms. These ways of a domination over nature have resulted in the shaping of a new state of nature that escapes such modes of control and leashes back on the agents of its domination. This Third Nature is a hybrid form of nature whose anthropogenic ratio is enormous, but at the same time detached from its originators—human society and its actors. Today, Third Nature unfolds as climate change, flash floods, cyclones, El Nino phenomenon, poisoned soils, plastic enriched flora and fauna, shifts of seasons, etc. None of the existing concepts for a definition of and dealing with nature is capturing these new forms of nature that, after they had been colonized and domesticated for a long time by human agency, are now out of control.