Companion to Environmental Studies

Noel Castree, Mike Hulme, James D. Proctor, Noel Castree, Mike Hulme, James D. Proctor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317275879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

Companion to Environmental Studies presents a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the key issues, debates, concepts, approaches and questions that together define environmental studies today. The intellectually wide-ranging volume covers approaches in environmental science all the way through to humanistic and post-natural perspectives on the biophysical world.

Though many academic disciplines have incorporated studying the environment as part of their curriculum, only in recent years has it become central to the social sciences and humanities rather than mainly the geosciences. 'The environment' is now a keyword in everything from fisheries science to international relations to philosophical ethics to cultural studies. The Companion brings these subject areas, and their distinctive perspectives and contributions, together in one accessible volume. Over150 short chapters written by leading international experts provide concise, authoritative and easy-to-use summaries of all the major and emerging topics dominating the field, while the seven part introductions situate and provide context for section entries. A gateway to deeper understanding is provided via further reading and links to online resources.

Companion to Environmental Studies offers an essential one-stop reference to university students, academics, policy makers and others keenly interested in 'the environmental question', the answer to which will define the coming century.

Part 1
Classic concepts

Part 1 Introduction

A broad yet related set of ideas informed the field of environmental studies from its inception dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. Though many of these ideas have deeper roots, we shall call them ‘classic concepts’ here to distinguish them from ideas whose origin is even more recent. Many of these classic concepts have been refashioned in response to contemporary trends, and thus persist today. For instance, the prominent notion of ‘sustainability’ derives not only from the classic concept of sustainable development dating from the mid-1980s, but arguably channels the classic notion of ‘limits to growth’ from the early 1970s, itself built on ideas of the ‘balance of nature’ dating back centuries in Western thought. Then there is the more recent mark of ‘neoliberalism’, which between the 1980s and today transformed sustainable development as an international-scale notion into sustainability – typically expressed at the devolutionary scale of a building, business, or college campus to be managed efficiently in order to minimise waste. No matter what sorts of intellectual developments have unfolded in environmental studies since the 1960s and 1970s, then, classic concepts often remain in circulation, albeit in slightly different form.

Environmental studies is a cross-disciplinary academic field that emerged during a post-1960 period of global political turbulence. It was (and remains) motivated as much by concern over real-world issues as by intellectual curiosity. Concerns over pollution, ecological degradation, and the impacts of demographic and economic growth led to a search for guiding concepts not only to describe and explain, but ultimately to solve, the most prominent environmental problems of the time. Thus, in this section, you will find chapters on topics such as conservation and desertification, on environmental catastrophe and environmental footprint, and on scarcity and stewardship. Concepts such as these must have appeared eminently practical in the days of classic environmental thought, even though today they may sound somewhat dated – a product of their time.

Yet perhaps because of our nominal familiarity with many of these concepts (e.g., who hasn’t heard the claim that ‘overpopulation’ will lead to major crisis?), they can as readily sound unarguable, as if classic concepts could continue to serve as solid ground for environmental studies today. But, in fact, many have been strongly contested in recent years – overpopulation for its neo-Malthusian logic, ‘environmental catastrophe’ for its overconfident apocalypticism, and so on. These contemporary challenges help us identify certain common traits among at least some classic concepts. First, the environment is largely understood as an entity under siege by humans. Second, the corrective actions humans should undertake are often understood as doing less – consuming less, polluting less, letting the natural world restore its balance rather than intervening in nature. Third, the near-impossibility of realistically imagining such corrective actions taking place on a widespread scale leads to gloomy future prognoses, perhaps nowhere more graphically conveyed than in the foreboding scenario of overshoot and collapse predicted under the (prototypically classic) banner of ‘limits to growth’.

In many ways, then, classic concepts can somehow be both out of date and ubiquitous, in particular among popular environmental movements, if not current environmental scholarship. The foundational role they played in giving form to environmental studies at its point of formal inception nearly a half century ago, is itself sufficient justification for including them in this volume, as well as the fact noted above that, sometimes in altered form, they persist and continue to shape the field of environmental studies. For better or worse, many classic environmental concepts are perennial ideas we will continue to extend, transform, and/or challenge in future.

1.1 Adaptation

Marcus Taylor

Over the past decade and a half the idea of adaptation has moved from the periphery of academic thinking to become a key concept in the literature on societal responses to climatic change. This resurgence is notable in the steadily increasing volume of academic work dedicated to the concept and its recurrent use as a normative goal within contemporary policymaking. Strikingly, adaptation now acts as an encompassing framework that orientates the activities of international agencies, governments, corporations, non-governmental organisations and social movements alike (Ireland, 2012). The imperative to adapt has therein become firmly embedded as part of a collective institutional discourse on climate change in particular and environmental change more generally. Such cohesion, however, obscures that adaptation remains a fundamentally contested concept. There remain sharply diverging viewpoints on how to conceptualise adaptation and mobilise it as political practice.

Evolutionary biology to cultural ecology

The concept of adaptation emerged within evolutionary biology in the nineteenth century where it was used to describe the process by which a species becomes better suited to its external environment from generation to generation. Individual members of a species that possess genetic traits most suited to their ecological niche will prosper and, through reproduction, pass these traits to the population at large. This process of natural selection will – over time – increase the overall fitness of the species. A change in the external environment, however, will require a species to adapt in new ways or potentially face extinction. Adaptation in evolutionary biology, therefore, refers to the process by which a species evolves gradually to better fit its environment. Notably, this adaptation occurs without purposeful design. It emerges through the random variations in genes occurring across a population in which more functional traits will slowly emerge, potentially taking many generations for a trait to become generalised.

Notwithstanding its foundation within the natural sciences, during the twentieth century a few social science frameworks drew explicitly upon the concept of adaptation. A branch of anthropology known as cultural ecology, for example, used the concept to explain the evolution of human cultural practices within traditional societies dependent upon the direct usage of natural resources. For cultural ecologists, human adaptation described not genetic shifts across a species but rather the emergence of belief systems and associated practices that enabled a social group to better fit the ecological niches that they inhabited (Rappaport, 1979). Their key argument was that cultural traditions helped regulate human–environment relationships in a manner that promoted social stability and enabled societies to better cope with persistent environmental change and uncertainty (Sponsel, 1986). This perspective, however, was critiqued sharply by political ecologists who accused it of advocating a form of environmental determinism that obscured the globalised drivers of cultural change including commercialisation, market penetration and (neo)colonialism (Watts, 1983).

Climate change and the rebirth of adaptation

With the decline of cultural ecology in the 1970s the concept of adaptation lay dormant within the social sciences for several decades. It was a growing recognition in the 2000s that climate change posed new and challenging questions about society–nature relations that led to a swift resurrection of the concept (Head, 2010). As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) asserted in 2007, some form of societal adjustment to climate shocks and stresses would be necessary to address impacts resulting from warming caused by past emissions (IPCC, 2007). Adaptation became the lynchpin concept under which to conceptualise and plan these social transformations. As the IPCC described it, adaptation is the adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects that moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities (IPCC, 2007). The goal of adaptation was therein presented as a social imperative. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), for example, claimed that a failure to adapt is likely to consign the poorest 40 percent of the world’s population to a future of sharply diminished opportunity (UNDP, 2007).

While the usage of adaptation unifies the literature, different frameworks build from diverging ideas about the normative goals of adaptation, its appropriate sites and scales, the rights and responsibilities of affected and contributor groups, and the necessary mechanisms of adjustment. Consequently, distinct approaches to adaptation legitimate contrasting policy responses. Three broad ways in which adaptation is conceptualised within the literature are particularly notable (Pelling, 2011).

Adaptation as risk management

The mainstream of adaptation thinking represents adaptation as a process of risk management in which potential shocks and stresses are identified and adaptation measures are taken to reduce vulnerability. This typically involves three elements: (1) identifying and reducing exposure to shocks and stresses; (2) limiting the impact of any unavoidable shocks and stresses; and (3) building capacity to respond and recover in the medium term. Reducing exposure in a coastal region, for example, could take the form of building stronger flood defences while limiting impacts might involve improving existing drainage infrastructure. Improving capacity to respond to shocks typically involves improved emergency planning, educating populations to climate risks, and greater resources for disaster management.

This reactive approach to adaptation often adopts a strongly technocratic and managerial perspective wherein potential climate threats are seen as a series of identifiable risks that require a variety of institutional and technological solutions to preserve the status quo in the face of climatic change. As Bassett and Fogelman demonstrated in their extensive survey of the adaptation literature, over 70 percent of academic publications on the subject presented adaptation as a technical process of planned social engineering to guard against proximate climatic threats (Bassett and Fogelman, 2013). Rarely, however, do such approaches consider how present social inequalities shape how different social groups are unequally exposed to climate threats while also making them unevenly positioned to take advantage of any benefits provided by adaptation processes (Taylor, 2013). A key concern is that adaptation projects of this nature may come at the expense of marginalised groups, who may be ignored or even displaced in the name of fighting climate change. Such an outcome represents a case of ‘maladaptation’ wherein, for marginalised groups, the ‘cure’ of adaptation may well prove to be worse than the curse of climate change exposure (Marino and Ribot, 2012).

Adaptation as building resilience

If the risk management approach sees adaptation as a process of planned adjustment led by centralised government actions, the resilience approach emphasises the need to foster autonomous and spontaneous adaptations at a more decentralised level. As developed by authors such as Carl Folke, the idea of resilience projects that coupled socio-ecological systems tend to move between multiple equilibrium states, and therefore display dynamic qualities in which a system is constantly changing through a process of perpetual re-organisation (Folke, 2006). Certain types of socio-ecological systems, however, are more able to cope with external shocks and stresses without losing core form and functions. Resilience thinking seeks to identify those key characteristics so as to facilitate appropriate governance strategies that can promote persistence within socio-ecological systems.

For some, resilience represents a profoundly neoliberal vision of society that is composed of self-adjusting individuals and communities able to ‘bounce back’ from shocks and stresses. It therefore can become a surrogate for imposing individual responsibility to collectively determined challenges, and therein blaming the victims for being insufficiently resilient (MacKinnon and Driscoll Derickson, 2013). While such politically reactionary renditions certainly exist, others have sought a recover a more radical essence within resilience (Leach et al., 2011; Brown, 2015). In this tradition, the incredible complexity of environmental change means that appropriate governance for ecosystem management must be decentralised, participatory and adaptable. It must be open to learning from diverse knowledge and practices about how humans interact with their environments (Biggs et al., 2015). These norms pose a significant challenge to adaptation as risk management because they profess a deep suspicion of top-down, managerial and technocratic approaches to organising society–nature relations. That said, whether such perspectiv...