enormous influence on the Earth, but where control of these environments and their enormously complex ecologies is inevitably elusive.
Anthropocene A metaphoric term sometimes applied to our current era, when people exert enormous influence on environments all around the Earth, but where control of these environments and their enormously complex ecologies is inevitably elusive
Such a condition, however, raises more questions than it answers. If a “natural” condition is unavailable to adjudicate what a wild place should look like and what its use or purpose might be, then wild nature will inevitably be, in part, a product of human choices. Who should control such decisions? Lands long-ago taken from Indigenous communities, as in the case of the Platte River, might arguably be best managed or comanaged by Native communities. What criteria will be used for deciding the ecological arrangements that follow? Should it be for the utility of people or the benefit of non-human nature? And what systems should be put in place to enact decision-making? Should nature be governed by free markets or rather by local collective institutions, or something else entirely? In short, environmental decisions in the Anthropocene are inherently and inevitably social, political, economic, ethical, and cultural.
If decisions about what to do (and what not to do) are to be made, therefore, and the larger complex puzzle of living within nature is to be solved, we need tools with which to view the world as simultaneously social and natural. For example, viewed as a problem of ethics, the restoration of a wilderness in Lake Superior becomes one of sorting through competing claims and arguments about what is ethically best, weighing on whose behalf one might make such argument, that of people or that of the animals themselves. From the point of view of political economy, by contrast, one would be urged to examine what value is created and destroyed in the transformation of these muddy lands, whose specific species are selected and why, whose pockets are filled with money in the process, and how decisions are controlled and directed through circuits of expert power and conservation authority. Indeed, there is no shortage of ways to view this problem, with population-centered considerations competing with those that stress market logics, and arguments about public risk perception competing with those about equal access to the park. What “lenses” can and should we use to look at environmental issues?
What is This Book?
This book is designed to explain these varied interpretive tools and perspectives and show them in operation. Our strategy is first to present the dominant modes of thinking about environment–society relations and then to apply them to a few familiar objects of the world around us. By environment, we mean the whole of the aquatic, terrestrial, and atmospheric non-human world, including specific objects in their varying forms, like trees, carbon dioxide, or water, as well as the organic and inorganic systems and processes that link and transform them, like photosynthesis, predator–prey relationships, or soil erosion. Society, conversely, includes the humans of the Earth and the larger systems of culture, politics, and economic exchange that govern their interrelationships.
From the outset we must insist that these two categories are interlaced and impossible to separate. Humans are obviously environmental beings subject to organic processes. Equally problematically, environmental processes are also fundamentally social, in the sense that they link people and influence human relationships. Photosynthesis is the basis of agriculture, for example, and so is perhaps the most critical environmental process in the history of civilization. More complex: human transformation of carbon levels in the atmosphere may further alter global photosynthesis in a dramatic way, with implications for human food and social organization. Obviously, it is difficult to tell where the environment leaves off and society begins. On the other hand, there is not universal agreement on these relationships and linkages. The perspectives summarized in this text present very different views about which parts of society and environment are connected to which, under what conditions these change or can be altered, and what the best courses of action tend to be, with enormous implications for both thinking about our place in the ecosystem and solving very immediate problems like global warming, deforestation, or the decline in the world’s fisheries.
In Part I, we lay out some of the dominant ways of interpreting the environment–society relationship. We begin in Chapter 2 with a perspective that is foundational to the history of both the natural and social sciences: population. Here we describe how human population has been viewed as a growing threat to the non-human world, contrasting this with views of population growth as a process that not only consumes, but also potentially produces, resources in the world. In Chapter 3 we consider economic ways of thinking about the environment. These views stress the power of markets – a category in which we include systems of economic exchange – to respond to scarcity and drive inventive human responses. In Chapter 4 we stress institutions, which we define as the rules and norms governing our interactions with nature and resources. Institutional approaches address environmental problems largely as the product of “common property” problems that are amenable to creative rule-making, incentives, and self-regulation. Chapter 5 examines ethics-based approaches to the environment, with their often radical ways of rethinking the place of humans in a world filled with other living and non-living things. The view of the environment as a problem of risk and hazard is explored in Chapter 6, where we also consider the potentials and pitfalls of technologies that seek to address such challenges. This approach proposes a series of formal procedures for making the best choices possible, given that environments and environmental problems are inherently uncertain and highly variable. This is followed by a description of political economy approaches in Chapter 7, which are those that view the human relationship with nature as one rooted in the economy, but which insist that the economy is based in, and has fundamental implications for, power relationships: who gets what, who works for whom, and who pays. Contrary to market-based approaches, these point to the environmentally corrosive impacts of market economics. In Chapter 8 we describe approaches to environment and society that stress social construction, which we define as the tendency for people to understand and interpret environmental issues and processes through language, stories, and images that are often inherited or imposed through systems of media, government, education, or industry. These stories are not harmless, since they can encourage or overlook very real actions, impacts, and behaviors with serious environmental and social consequences. In Chapter 9, we introduce the critical contributions of feminist thought. This approach includes serious consideration of how the specific conditions of patriarchal society contribute to social and environmental challenges that continue to mark our world. It also provides a window on possible solutions and new ways of being in the environment. Chapter 10 closes this section of the book by engaging with critical theories of race and the environment, which locate many of the ecological dysfunctions and failures of our current world in long-standing and unresolved problems of structural racism and environmental injustice.
Within these several ways of seeing are many others, of course. Within questions of risk are deeper questions of progress, economic growth, ecomodern thinking, and its limits. We have nested many of these perspectives within larger categories of thought, though without pretending we can do more than introduce many important concepts. So too, many perspectives are threaded into one another. No critical look at population as an environmental question can set aside feminist critiques of this approach, for example, and the racial outcomes of environmental injustice have, within them, political economy as well. As such, many themes are interlaced throughout this part of the book.
Part II presents a set of nine critical objects and
