Natural Resource Use and Global Change

New Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Social Ecology

K. Bruckmeier

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349336340, 9780230300606
• eBook ISBN: 9781137303158
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Building on recent developments in social ecology, this book advances a new critical theory of society and nature, exploring social metabolism and global resource flows in contemporary society. Barriers to global sustainability are identified and conditions for transforming industrial economies towards new sustainable resource use are described.

1

Interdisciplinary Research in Society and Nature in the 20th Century

The cognitive interests of social ecology in a historical perspective

Social ecology as the science of the interaction of society and nature is part of the interdisciplinary environmental research that developed in the 20th century under such names as human, cultural, social or political ecology. The term “social ecology” was used in several discourses in science and policy.

1. Scientific social ecology was at first a multidisciplinary approach for studying how humans were affected by their physical and social environments (Moos and Insel 1974). In this early form it remained a diffuse and broad area of research differing from older approaches of human ecology (sometimes also called social ecology: Alihan 1938) through its focus on the social environment, using mainly sociological and psychological knowledge to study the context of human behaviour changes. It included the physical environment as affecting human behaviour, but did not focus on environmental or global problems. Social ecology in this broad sense still exists today. The recent publication by Wright et al. (2011) shows again the idea of applying ecological thinking to every aspect of human life by studying the relations between individual, social, spiritual and ecological components of the human condition. This research, with an abstract conceptual framework, collects a mass of empirical data that is difficult to transform into coherent theoretical and integrated knowledge about the human condition. Parts of that research are relevant for the analysis of global environmental problems. But the narrow framework and the microscopic perspective, with a focus on individual and small group social interaction, limit the analysis of complex societal and ecological systems and interactions. Bronfenbrenner (1979) also uses the term “social ecology” for his psychology. It can be seen as part of the above approach, but is more specific with regard to the study of individual human development as personality development through socialisation and the problems emerging in that process. A similar understanding of social ecology as the study of people–environment relations in community-based psychological studies is found in the work of Binder (1972) and Stokols (1992). The country-specific tradition of social ecology in India (Guha 1994) is limited to sociological research into natural resource use, especially agriculture.

2. In the political discourse and as part of environmental movements, social ecology is connected with two names. The North American social ecology movement inspired by Bookchin cultivates an “eco-anarchist” political philosophy in which the older idea of a society free of domination and repression is extended to an emancipatory idea for the reconciliation of society and nature. Another movement under the name of social ecology in Germany is linked with Bahro, showing its normative profile in a combination of ideas from European environmental movements with the cosmological ideas of Sri Aurobindo. Both of these movements, with their political and cosmological visions, are less oriented towards research, although members of the German movement participate in the national social-ecological research programme (Hosang et al. 2005). These authors argue for a theoretical integration of social-ecological approaches in a “trichotomic” theory of nature, man, culture/society, although strong differences between socio-ecological concepts and theories are seen. Clark follows a similar understanding of social ecology as holistic philosophical reflection about man, although he explicitly connects it with the empirical investigation of global political, economic and technical systems (Clark 1997: 32). A blending of sociological, philosophical and normative approaches is also found in the history of social ecology (e.g., Burch 1984).

The variants of social ecology mentioned above will not be analysed in this book. They did not significantly influence the new social ecology of global resource use emerging in the mid-1980s with the guiding ideas of “colonisation of nature”, “societal metabolism” and “societal relations to nature”. Its cognitive interests are described as follows (ISOE 1999: 13): (1) to reconstruct with empirical knowledge the relations between people and their social and natural environments; (2) to develop the concept of “societal action” to allow improved agency in the environmental crisis; (3) to analyse the conditions for the reproduction and further development of societies; and (4) to analyse the natural conditions of life that need to be maintained for further development of nature and society (see also, Becker and Jahn 2003). The empirical research includes the themes of human use of natural resources and its consequences and limits, with a focus on late modern society, in which overuse of resources and destruction of the environment reached global dimensions.

Before the development of social ecology, empirical research on natural resource use was carried out in different disciplines – for example, in resource economics, cultural anthropology and ecology. In the second half of the 20th century, when the public, scientific and political discourses about environmental problems unfolded and environmental movements emerged in Western countries, global environmental problems of climate change, biodiversity reduction and land use change appeared on the agendas of research and policy. Ostrom (2007a) diagnosed a deficit of environmental research in addressing problems in large-scale and complex social-ecological systems. However, her research is focused on local problems of common pool resource use and management. The concept of social-ecological systems to which she refers indicates the intention to address complex and global problems, but methodologies for that purpose develop slowly. The idea of coupled social and ecological systems has spread in studies of human resource use during the past decade, but the theoretical contours and the implications of this conceptual innovation are not yet clear, as the discussion on resilience research shows (see Chapter 3). The interpretation of nature and society as closely coupled spheres in modern industrial societies is found in human and social ecological research and in the theory of the anthropocene. According to this theory (Steffen et al. 2007), the human impact on global ecosystems through industrialisation has reached dimensions that justify a new geological term for the short period of industrial society. The concept of the anthropocene remains contested, among other reasons because of the difficulty of conceptualising and measuring the coupling of the systems.

Global systems and environmental problems are described as complex, but there are methodological problems and limits to understanding the complexity of the system. Whether the formal term of complexity is sufficient to study societal and environmental problems is rarely questioned. In social ecology, specific theoretical terms are used to study the interaction of society and nature – for example, societal relations with nature. In the critical theory of society, this relational term marked less an area of empirical research and more a philosophical discourse connected in Marxist theory with the themes of human alienation, society as “second nature” and nature as the “inorganic body” of man. In classical political economy in the 19th century, the big topic of nature–society relations was investigated only unsystematically, to the extent that it came up in the economic analyses of the capitalist mode of production, asking how nature and human labour together generate the doubling of value as value of use and value of exchange. In social ecology the older political-economic controversy about the labour theory of value is not continued and the analysis of society–nature interaction is detached from the framework of political economy. In a new theoretical and empirical research programme, societyrelated analysis is performed under the guiding concepts of socio-ecological regulation and colonisation of nature, and nature-related analysis under the guiding concepts of societal metabolism and societal relations with nature.

Social ecology uses theoretical concepts inherited from the natural and social sciences to decode the interactions between society and nature in historically specific analyses. Global environmental change as it is studied in environmental research does not sufficiently take into account societal action and agency. Although anthropogenic causation is seen in the current climate change and reduction of biodiversity, it is insufficiently understood how human societies affect, modify and socialise nature to produce global environmental change. Much less is known about how this change can be influenced through the strengthening of agency to control, correct or reverse the negative impacts of human resource use. Further questions regarding the interface of science, policy and resource management come up in the discourses of societal adaptation to global change and sustainable development. Knowledge from social ecology (its empirical and theoretical results are discussed in detail in chapters 4–6) shows advances in social ecology as seeing more because others have already done preparatory research. Social ecology opens new possibilities of knowledge generation through the integration of various disciplines and through its methodological developments (material and energy flow accounting, analysis of human appropriation of net primary production) for researching linkages between natural resource flows in the global economy and the resulting social inequality at country level (ecologically unequal exchange).

The new social ecology discussed here works with interdisciplinary studies of interactions between society and nature in a specific sense: analysing societal systems, global environmental problems and natural resource use practices in a systemic context that includes societal and ecological systems at different scales. This thematic scope of social ecology is sometimes abbreviated in the formula “biophysical analysis of socioeconomic systems and dynamics” (Haberl 2006), or, from a theoretical perspective, as a reflection of environmental consequences of societal action (Fischer-Kowalski 2004: 323). The three concepts already mentioned – societal relations to nature, societal metabolism and colonisation of nature – will be described and discussed in detail as constituents of the knowledge profile of social ecology in the following chapters. The new social ecology appears from this description as a European discourse developing in German language countries. The institutional location in these countries, however, does not adequately reflect the international discourse and global research themes. Furthermore, the discourse of the new social ecology includes a number of individual scientists in different countries who do not always use this label (e.g., Ostrom, Haila, Martinez-Alier). In the new social ecology large and multi-scale environmental problems of modern societies are analysed in theoretical and empirical studies across several spatial and temporal scales. Several attempts at an interdisciplinary social-ecological theory have been found (Becker and Jahn 2003, 2006, Fischer-Kowalski 2004, Hosang et al. 2005).

Obviously there will never be sufficient knowledge to understand and solve the global problems that are studied in social ecology. Only a gradual improvement in understanding and problem-solving can be attained through research and knowledge synthesis. At some point in the future, when larger changes in society and human resource use may already have happened, either catastrophic changes or ones that demonstrate successful co-evolutionary development of nature and society, research into the global interaction of society and nature may no longer be as relevant as it is today and the topic may lose priority. The significance given to it today is a consequence of growing concern about the crisis in societal relations to nature. This environmental crisis has happened in parallel with changes in science, paradigm changes, epistemic turns and ruptures, indicating a crisis of knowledge production that has finally initiated a debate about the limits of science. Theoretical innovations of the past decades (chaos theory, complexity theory, resilience theory and more social-scientific discourses such as post-structuralism, postmodernism, ecofeminism, transdisciplinarity and post-normal science) were among the attempts to renew social and environmental research. They did not always open new long-lasting perspectives for research, but remained as critical comments on prior discourses of modernity or sometimes short-lived attempts at “scientific innovation”. Reducing cognitive aspirations and showing the limits of scientific knowledge, as in several of these discourses, converges with attitudes such as that of the “sceptical environmentalist” (Lomborg 2001), with doubts that environmental action is meaningful. Social ecology develops from epistemic controversies, despite being part of or profiting from several of these epistemic innovations (such as transdisciplinarity, by opening environmental research to include the local knowledge of resource users). This social ecology combines continuity and renewal in its development. It develops through the critique of earlier studies of nature–society interaction, formulating ideas for a renewal of critical social and environmental research after the fading away of grand and critical theory traditions and the innovative ambitions of prior human and cultural ecology.

Interdisciplinary trends in environmental and anthropological research

Interdisciplinarity developed after the Second World War outside academic institutions. But the crossing of knowledge boundaries in various forms, transferring concepts, theories, methods, data, ideas and knowledge between disciplines, is an older phenomenon found throughout modern sciences since the 16th century. The topic of environment and natural resources is not new, but became more important in research and policy during the 20th century. The older interdisciplinary discourse of political economy analysed natural resource use for problems of scarcity, overuse and pollution of the environment, and distribution of resources between humans, including questions similar to those found today in environmental research. The interaction of society and nature during the first half of the 20th century brought new approaches in sociology (human ecology in the Chicago School of Sociology of Park, Burgess and MacKenzie) and anthropology (cultural anthropology and cultural ecology of Steward; European philosophical anthropology of Scheler, Gehlen, Plessner), in biology (holistic biology, Uexküll) and in interdisciplinary philosophical theories of the biosphere (Teilhard de Chardin, Vernadsky). These approaches paved the way for current interdisciplinary environmental research, although most of the researchers were influential in mainstream science for a short time, if at all. In the second half of the 20th century, environmental research unfolded in worldwide interdisciplinary trends emerging from environmental sociology, ecological economics, environmental policy research and systems ecology, and in “hybrid ecologies” (human, cultural, social, political ecology).

All these earlier scientific discourses can be seen as providing ideas and knowledge for the new social-ecological discourse. A direct source is industrial ecology, which was broadened and systematised by social ecology in its development from the 1980s. That development included a critical reflection and discontinuation of older traditions without denying their achievements. A reformulation of the global environmental crisis in a more theoretically nuanced diagnosis as “crisis of the societal relations with nature in the globalising industrial system” became the starting point of a social-ecological research programme. From the 1970s the international and global networking of movements, policies and environmental action advanced after the alarm bell of the “Limits to Growth” report (Meadows et al. 1972). A breakthrough of global movements and action happened with the Brundtland report in 1987, which opened the new discourse of sustainable development, in which many movements could participate. It created a thematic focus for such scientific movements as social ecology, with their interdisciplinary research on global social and environmental problems.

Social ecology, learning from the failures and achievements of environmental research, reacted critically to the development of environmental science and its application, with the following reflections:

1. Interdisciplinary environmental research is epistemologically and methodologically insufficiently prepared to cross the boundaries between social and natural sciences. Knowledge synthesis remains methodologically difficult.

2. Deficits of environmental research are a consequence of disciplinary knowledge practices, and of a strict separation of research and decision-making (which dissolves with transdisciplinary research and other forms of cooperation between scientists and decision-makers).

3. Interdisciplinary environmental research has tended to downplay theoretical analysis and reflection in favour of empirical research. The critique of panaceas and standardised managerial solutions (Ostrom et al.) does not imply an integration of theoretical and empirical knowledge.

4. Selective and eclectic knowledge practices by decision-makers and by environmental movements in environmental policy showed that no systematic transfer of scientific knowledge for environmental decisions happened.

With these reflections, social ecology reacts indirectly to further problems that undermined the continuity and success of environmental problem-solving efforts:

1. Many of the social movements that brought environmental problems onto policy agendas cultivated an idealism of environmental thinking that allowed them to ignore the social complexity of environmental action. Movement activists were less interested in understanding how modern societies work, and more interested in seeking knowledge and orientation from outside science (from native people, traditional lifestyles, rural simplicity, esoteric philosophies and religions, charismatic persons), supported by ecological or ecocentric worldviews (such as deep ecology).

2. Neglect of politics and power dimensions of environmental action were camouflaged as another way of changing society, through cultural change, in “value revolutions”, and in lifeworld-centred individual behaviour changes that characterised the orientations of many social and environmental movements. This orientation towards individuals and individual action seems to be an involuntary imitation of the institutionalised individualism in Western culture, and does not take into account social structures that enhance collective or societal action and agency in the environmental crisis.

3. A lack of knowledge about global environmental change kept the resulting problems off research and political agendas for some time, although their potential significance and possible consequences (e.g., climate change) had been known for considerable periods of time. After some successful agenda-setting in early global climate policy, the policy process has collapsed de facto in recent years under the obstructive power of some governments and economic institutions, which renders attainment of its goals doubtful.

The new environmental movements and their scientific supporters in the 20th century followed a normative understanding of ecology and society to criticise the neglect of nature in social practices of resource use. In the early years of new environmentalism, ecology became a variant of critical normative thinking about modernity. More than the development of ecology as science, the movements have adopted knowledge for orientation (in Scheler’s term). This resulted in the rediscovering of older views of man as part of nature for a criticism of modernisation. In the scientific discourses other developments could be observed. Ecology as a scientific discipline went through a paradigm change, in the sense of Kuhn, from the 1980s, with a transition from the guiding idea of “balance of nature” towards non-equilibrium ecology and a view of an interdisciplinary science adopting social scientific knowledge and drifting away from its biological origins (Scoones 1999). These changes date back to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction – The Development of Social Ecology
• 1. Interdisciplinary Research in Society and Nature in the 20th Century
• 2. Sources of Social Ecology – Discourses on Society and Nature in Sociology
• 3. Sources of Social Ecology – Ecosystems and Natural Resources in Ecological Discourses
• 4. Thematic Profiles of Social Ecology – The Research on Resource Flows and the Physical Economy in a Global Context
• 5. Thematic Profiles of Social Ecology – The Research on Human Land Use, Food and Biomass Production in European and Global Contexts
• 6. Thematic Profiles of Social Ecology – Knowledge Synthesis in a Theory of Interaction of Society and Nature
• 7. Social Ecology – A Science in Development
• 8. Social Ecology and Practice – The Policy Process and the Social-Ecological Discourse
• Bibliography
• Index