Our contemporary environmental crises have given rise to a fundamental question: will civilization survive? Maybe, maybe not, but we argue that our prospects for survival are significantly influenced by how that question is actually raised: what assumptions and worldviews are reflected in our questioning, and even more crucially, our answers. Those assumptions and worldviews tend to remain hidden within concepts, that is, more or less abstract ideas that are often treated as facts. Critical scrutiny of those concepts is needed both for understanding and for changing the world. Applying a critical gaze to the concepts that dominate discussions of environment-society relations allows for deeper reflection, leading to more fruitful communication and action. Through concepts, knowledge about a problem is formed and solutions are implicated. This book is not a call for new concepts. Rather, this book is written with a conviction that more reflexivity is needed regarding existing conceptualizations of environment-society relations, because these are currently shaping responses to environmental crises in fundamental ways. This reflexivity includes scrutiny of which concepts are used and how, and what assumptions and premises underpin them. Importantly, such reflexivity is needed in all spheres of society, including academia, policy and practice.
All too often, however, contemporary environmental politics and practice are guided by the opposite of knowledge and reflection; that is, ignorance , hyper-relativism, anti-reflexivity , alternative facts and denial. Nowhere are these trends more clear than in climate change politics. After decades of arm waving by climate scientists, climate change today features regularly in public and policy discourse. Some climate scientists might well be regretting this promotion to the front pages, however, as the politicization of science can be simultaneously good, bad and ugly: greater levels of awareness are a pre-requisite to collective action; on the other hand, scientific inquiry, and indeed many scientists themselves, have been subject to vehement attacks, spearheaded primarily by conservative think tanks linked to fossil fuel industries. This dance is, moreover, taking place onstage today in a tumultuous drama infected by alt-right inspired xenophobia, #alternativefacts, and massive and at times violent social unrest. What comes to the fore in this dance is the importance of words: is climate change a hoax? A catastrophe? A CO2 management problem? Is it a risk or an opportunity? Who is to blame?
The choreography may be new, but the dance is not: our attention to environmental problems has always emerged through the concepts we embrace to comprehend society’s relationship with the natural world. This observation would be of purely academic interest if it weren’t for the fact that decisions are made on the basis of those concepts; decisions that have bearing on the well-being, and even survival, of present and future generations. Because these decisions are made less on the basis of ‘facts,’ and more on the basis of dominant and at times competing interpretations and meanings created and adopted by different societal actors , it behooves all scholars, decision makers, and citizens with an interest in environmental wellbeing to closely scrutinize these interpretations and meanings and those who produce them.
The purpose of this book is to scrutinize existing core conceptualizations of environment-society relations, to reveal the underlying worldviews and assumptions, and the means by which those assumptions and worldviews may (mis)guide our responses to environmental challenges. Through such scrutiny, we hope to create openings for advances in conceptualization that can inform dialogues, policies and practices in the environmental arena. The power to shape knowledge , interpretations and dominate public debate through the form of concepts or paradigms—is and has always been a core weapon in the battle for a more ecologically sustainable world. Scholars, decision-makers and citizens perceive, understand, explain, and solve environmental problems with the knowledge and discourses we have at our disposal. Raymond Murphy, in the foreword of this book, reminds us about the invisible nature of several of the most serious contemporary environmental problems and risks . This accentuates the need for knowledge , because we often cannot immediately perceive environmental problems by our senses. Even in cases when we actually can see, hear, or smell an environmental problem, knowledge is nevertheless necessary for the interpretations and inferences we make. Once upon a time, knowledge , particularly scientific knowledge , was held in high esteem. In today’s (sometimes called ‘post-truth ’) world, however, ‘truth’ is seemingly up for grabs. Large numbers of actors , both elite and not, have a tendency to believe whichever set of facts—or alternative facts—supports their worldviews. This seeming disregard for supportive evidence in the public sphere, and among elected officials, is certainly worrying. But it is also, we argue, an invitation for those of us who are concerned about environmental well-being to take a good look at the selectivity and partiality of our own analyses. The effective use of clearly defined concepts is an essential, and inevitable component of research in all disciplines, as well as among environmental experts outside academia, and we certainly do not ascribe to the naïve goal of objectivity. Rather, we argue that the employment of any concept must be done so consciously, coinciding with a critical understanding of the underlying implications of that paradigm or concept: which causal mechanisms are brought to the fore, and which are hidden? What does that concept imply about the relationship of society with the natural world?
Then again, some might ask, why bother? In a world of seeming chaos, where record-breaking world average temperatures, melting ice sheets, biodiversity loss and chemical pollution coincide with mounting military violence, famine, and the disintegration of stability in Western democracies, why write a book about concepts and knowledge at all? Hasn’t humanity already passed the tipping point? The answer is, what do you mean by ‘tipping point’? Regardless of the state of the planet and societies today, where we go from here has as much to do with the concepts we use to convey knowledge as has ever been the case before. To wit, given the current state of the planet, it behooves us to understand how concepts matter more than ever before. Which concepts are likely to support mobilization in favour of low-carbon transitions? Which concepts are likely to support further empowering corporations to govern themselves? Which concepts are likely to support dictatorship, and which democracy? Scholars, decision makers, environmental experts and citizen-consumers need concepts to understand the infinite and complex phenomena that make up the world around us, and how these phenomena link to the cause, distribution, and resolution of socio-ecological problems.
Science, policy and practice share the same concepts to a significant extent, presenting both an opportunity and a challenge in efforts to solve social-ecological problems. For instance, environmental scientists use theoretical concepts (e.g. resilience ) to study environment-society relations, but the same or similar concepts appear as pragmatic concepts in the empirical world that environmental scientists study. A particular strength of the sociology of knowledge, and this is true of environmental sociology as well, is its thorough theorizing and acknowledgement of this dual character. Social scientists study concepts through concepts. What complicates the fact even more is that the subjects those social scientists study (people, communities , organizations, institutions ) sometimes use the same or similar concepts that social scientists use when they study them. To give examples, the people who scholars study are themselves talking about social capital, social sustainability , culture , power , participation, institutions , the commons , externalities , resilience , the Anthropocene , and so on. Concepts not only represent our world, but are part of the shaping of that world (Rau and Fahy 2013). Institutions such as Bretton Woods, UN, IMO, WTO , UNEP, IPCC have been shaped by theories and concepts such as Keynesianism, Human Rights, Neo-classical economics, Sustainable Development and many more (White et al. 2016). Lidskog and Waterton (2016a, p. 308) explain: “Concepts do something with the world. They are navigational (directing our attention), normative (shaping our priorities) and performative (guiding our action).” To further complicate the matter, the environmental scientist is also him- or herself part of what (s)he studies—a situation social scientists call ‘double hermeneutic’ (Giddens 1984)—although this is not always acknowledged or appropriately understood in environmental science in general.
Concepts used to understand society’s relationship with the natural world have been featured in academic discourses for over a Century. But these have taken some notable shifts over the past decades, with the introduction of new concepts, and the discard of others. The conceptual treatment of the environment across the academy has been especially dynamic in the past decades. Some reflections are warranted on what those conceptualizations tell us about how we are thinking about and treating the environment in the twenty first Century. The 1960s saw the emergence of concepts such as Ecology and The Tragedy of the Commons , and powerful metaphors like Silent Spring and Population Bomb. In the 1970s came Limits to Growth, subsequently subjected to heated criticism and debate. These debates focused attention on population growth, pollution, scarcity of natural resources and the role...