© 2014. Environmental Philosophy 11:2 pp. 333–358 All rights reserved. ISSN: 1718-0918 doi: 10.5840/envirophil2014101317 Bryan E. Bannon, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Environmental Studies and Sustainability, Merrimack College, 107 Sullivan Hall 315 Turnpike St. North Andover, MA 01845. E-mail: bannonb@merrimack.edu Resisting the Domination of Nature: Regarding Time as an Ethical Concept Bryan E. Bannon This essay uses Foucault’s views on time and ethics in order to reconcep- tualize the domination of nature in terms of the imposition of an inflexible order upon a place rather than in the more conventional sense in envi- ronmental studies of reducing nature to a use object for humanity. I then propose a means of resisting that domination by examining how friendship might be employed as an ethical ideal in our relationship to nature. INTRODUCTION T he phrases “the domination of nature” and the “mastery of nature” have been deployed for centuries in order to describe the project of securing human beings from the uncertainty of the external world. While much has recently been written concerning the undesirability of such a project due to its role in creating the ecological situation in which we currently find ourselves, much less attention has been paid to the means by which such domination and mastery takes place. Since Michel Foucault’s philosophy has been so useful in other arenas in refining our understanding of domination within human communities, the intent of this paper is to argue that the Foucaultian analysis of how domination functions in our contemporary social organizations also applies to the natural world. Coming to terms with how the mechanisms of domination have changed since the conceptions of the mastery of nature in modern philosophy aids us both in understanding how proposals that are ori- ented toward liberating nature might yet remain complicit with those forms of domination and in proposing possible responses to that domination.