Aug. 27: Ways of Thinking about Environment and Society

Without getting too far into the philosophy of thought or science, it is valuable to recognize at least two types of "models" or statements of the relationship between society and nature:

So, an environmentalist might argue that industrial society has come to dominate nature (description) but that society should seek more of a "balance with nature" or make itself more subject to the limits of nature (prescription).

Academic analysts have applied several basic models to describe the relationship between cultures and their environments. One, "environmental determinism" saw the environment as determining the structure of society---that people and cultures developed in certain environments and those environments influenced, or even determined, many of the characteristics of those cultures. This idea was taken a bit far around the turn of the last century (e.g., early 1900s) into theories that postulated that forms of government, production/consumption systems, and even personal traits were determined by the climate and ecosystem in which cultures or nation states developed. This was patently illogical, especially when any historian will tell you that pretty much all cultures traded between regions, and that different types of regimes arose in physically-similar areas.

Academics in anthropology, sociology, geography and other fields have developed sub-fields of "cultural ecology: and "political ecology" as more nuanced conceptualizations that stress the interaction of nature and culture, recognizing that yes, indeed, people are influenced by their surroundings, but that human processes of organizing (labor differentiation), governing, and innovation are fluid and not fixed by environmental factors. Perhaps more importantly, social systems influence environment, and as societies develop their ability and tendency to transform nature grows.

Neo-environmental determinism: this term has been used to describe the re-emergence of a strong sense that nature does place limits on social development. I witnessed this myself in the first "Earth Days" and oil shortages of the early 1970s. A series of events eroded the post-World War II sense of well-being among the industrialized countries. After a couple of decades of rapid growth in production, consumption, and wealth, there suddenly seemed to be problems caused by limits on natural resources. We saw famines on TV (Biafra, Bangladesh, Ethiopia), and had tow ait in lines at gas stations because it seemed the world was running out of oil (though we all knew that this was mostly the effect of a political/economic struggle between the consumer states and the producer state, namely the Organization of Oil producing Countries (OPEC).

A series of books and arguments also raised the concern that we had run into fixed "environmental limits" on our economy. Biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote, in 1968, the Population Bomb , a book predicting that rapid population growth was already running into fixed limits on food and other natural resources and that we would outstrip the world’s carrying capacity for human population in the next decade or two. (that is, by about 1990) . We’ll return to these arguments later, but the point here is that the "limits" school of thought argued that the relationship between nature and society was not as amenable to growth and development of modern society as our post-WWII industrial success (and, in a sense, the agricultural and industrial revolutions themselves) seemed to indicate. We were living on borrowed time!

How any analysts sees the relationship that we address in this class also depends on institutionalized models and concepts. Someone trained as a forester sees the forests differently than others, and probably has accepted a "productionist" model: the forest are like tree factories and, indeed, human intervention can increase their production (we put out forest fires and manage the forest for greater productivity). Groups also adopt notions of nature that may be informed by prescriptive or normative theory: e.g., that nature tends toward "balance," that nature is "efficient," etc. or maybe just by their hopes of dreams of how things should be.

Finally, our own environmental perceptions and our economic, political and religious beliefs also affect how we see the relationship between people and nature. A rancher who loses calves to wolves is less likely to see them as a "keystone" predator that are vital to ecosystem health (in the same way that a forester or a homeowner in the woods is not likely to see wildfire as an ecologically healthy process). There is dissonance in believing that your actions, you way of life, are "good" and also accepting that the natural processes that hurt you or cost are also somehow good or "right." In this manner you (we) as critical thinkers and consumers of information must recognize that some of the arguments we hear (e.g., "wolves kill for the fun of it"; "wildfires ‘destroy’ forests"), have economic and political roots (while they may also have some science behind them), and are aimed at reducing this dissonance, as well at persuading us to accept a certain view.