Nature and Social Theory

Adrian Franklin

`Written with clarity and sophistication, it is not just an original argument about relationships of nature and culture, but also a useful text? - Keith Tester, Professor of Sociology, University of Portsmouth

Is humanity and society separable from nature? Modern accounts emphasised the difference between humanity and nature and set up independent sciences for each domain, but was this separation ever properly achieved? This book contends that fabricated boundaries between nature and culture have been breached both in practice and in new theoretical accounts.

Throughout, Franklin develops upon his premise that nature and culture interpenetrate. The argument begins with a critical discussion of the Romantic idea of pure nature; of a nature unsullied by humanity, marginalized, fragile and in need of protection. The argument is developed by examining more recent discourses that identify nature with environment, and cast humans in the role of polluter and destroyer.

The author documents contemporary views about nature which suggest that humanity and nature have never been separate but have always co-existed. Humanity is not only more involved with non-human natures, but also seeks persistently to embed itself in the natural world through embodied, naturalised modes of engagement. This book reveals the staggering depth of this engagement in the ordinary spaces and everyday lives of contemporary societies.

Thorough and insightful, this book will be of use and interest to students of sociology, environmental studies and cultural studies.

1

Introduction

This new way of thinking will eventually sweep away the representation of society as an artificial order constituted in a breach with a disorderly and hostile nature, in which the anarchy of individuals must be reduced through the hierarchy of institutions. In this emerging vision, society will no longer be seen as functioning to shackle nature. Rather it will come into alliance with it, encouraging beliefs and practices which will tend to enrich the possibilities of the species and increase its prospects for survival.

(Moscovici 1990:8)

In recent years we have seen new and startling transformations in the relations between humanity and the natural world. In comparison with the mid-twentieth century decades, where scarcely anyone ventured an opinion on nature outside the institutional natural sciences, from the last quarter of the twentieth century onwards, the domain of nature is now highly contested and new lay knowledges, opinions and values are expressed freely and frequently. We have seen gardeners up in arms about genetically modified plants, about the scandalous removal (floracide?) of large numbers of plant varieties from the catalogues of the giant seed merchants (aided and abetted by equally large supermarket chains concerned only with shelf-life and profitability) and we have seen British gardens described by naturalists and zoologists as an important habitat for many rare species under threat in the countryside. Suburban gardeners and bird feeders have been fêted for providing refuge, food and a foothold for Britain’s rarest and most celebrated bird, the Red Kite. We have seen ordinary suburban people, the elderly and the retired, young schoolchildren and working-class families out on the streets protesting over nature issues. First, there was the enormous public reaction to the live export of animals from British ports. Journalists expected such events to be dominated by the usual suspects, Earth First campaigners, die-hard Greenpeace and animal rights groups, local RSPCA chapters. But these events were newsworthy simply because of the social diversity and range of protesters and also because of the expression of such passion by people world famous for their quiet, apolitical lives, their restraint and public decorum. According to McLeod (1998:348) for example, a survey of the live animal export protest at Brightlingsea showed that 82 percent of the protesters were women, 73 percent were aged between 41 and 70, 38 percent were retired, 71 percent lived in the immediate locality and 81 percent had never protested before. The local evening paper described them as ‘law abiding locals, Mr and Mrs Averages, pensioners, young mums and children’ (Evening Gazette, 17 May 95, quoted by McLeod 1998:348). According to Benton and Redfearn writing in the New Left Review (1996:44), the media coverage ‘remained far removed from the hegemonic hostility which has characterised media treatment of industrial action by workers, as well as other more obviously comparable forms of protest action’.

Again, in the USA and Australia the unthinkable has happened: ordinary people have expressed an historically unusual antipathy towards hunting and extensive and rapid legislations have banned many forms of hunting across both nations (Franklin 1996b). Much of this has been achieved on the basis of actions and votes in civil society with very little action from the big animal rights groups. All across the UK the new road building plans of the 1990s created a furore not so much at a national level, but as they affected small locales, old country haunts, picnic spots, favourite walks, leafy glades and the spaces of romantic and sexual memories. Often it would be revealed that these spaces contained rare communities of butterflies or rarely seen plants and it is perhaps the first time that British people have turned out in their droves in support of the rights of insects to continue unmolested in their localities.

It does not take a new sociology of nature to make this point; it is already extensively out there in popular culture. Among the most widely read novels, for example, are crime thrillers. Taking just a handful of the best-known authors in this genre, we find that the politics of nature and its highly democratic and popular social base have featured centrally in their recent novels. Examples include Antonia Fraser’s Your Royal Hostage (1987), Dick Francis’ Come to Grief (1995), Reginald Hill’s The Wood Beyond (1996) and Ruth Rendell’s Road Rage (1997). As White (2000:6) writes: ‘Emphases vary but in all four books, the common sense is that times have changed, that of course animals should be included in the moral universe.’ In Rendell’s Road Rage her Inspector Wexford finds himself in sympathy with the protest over the endangered Map Butterfly:

There were only two hundred of them [Map Butterflies] perhaps now not so many. When he was a child people had caught them with a net, gassed them in killing bottles, attached them to cards on pins. It seemed appalling now. Only a few years ago people who opposed bypasses were looked on as cranks, loony weirdos, hippy dropouts, and their activities on a par with anarchy, communism and mayhem. That too had changed.

(White 2000:6)

In the TV series Pie in the Sky, the writers pull the common stunt of having the police investigator’s wife, Maggie, as one of the protesters. This device, of course, underlines the truly moral, upstanding, respectable and mainstream character of the issue at hand. However, it is also worth mentioning that there are few dissenting voices against nature protesters. The developers, road builders and politicians comprise the bad guys, but even they are directed to express regrets; that they are only doing their jobs. The biggest ever protest gathering in London was not over ‘intra-human’ political issues but over the morality of human activities in the natural world. The Hyde Park rally of 1 March 1998 comprised a large number of rural and urban people affiliated to and organised by a number of traditional field sports organisations. Although they were ostensibly rallying to oppose proposed legislation to ban fox hunting, the issue was much wider, to do with protecting traditional hunting relationships with the natural world, preserving rural sports and leisures, with continuing to have an active, consumptive relationship with the natural world. They complained about an essentially urban set of sentiments and constituencies dictating to rural culture how they should behave with respect to the natural world. They emphasised also their custodial relationship with nature and the conservational basis of hunting activities. Meanwhile, the animal rights groups featured in what seemed like Pythonesque and surreal new frontiers for action. British newspapers showed frog-suited activist divers disrupting a line of bewildered pensioners fishing in their local canal.

However, it is not only in the political and protest spheres that one can detect change. One senses, from a number of diverse sources, that older relationships and the boundaries between humans and non-humans have been questioned and are now being rejected both in theory and in practice. Two recent major UK television productions, one a drama, the other a natural history documentary, illustrate this shifting terrain.

Nature Boy was a drama set in a northern British town featuring all the grime and grimness of a former industrial landscape and all the social pathologies of de-industrialisation, mass unemployment, community collapse, familial mayhem and neighbourhood chaos. Against this, the hero, David, finds beauty, friendship and order among the animals, birds, fish and flora in the nearby wastelands of the local estuary sandflats. Flashbacks establish that as a young boy he was first introduced to the techniques of fishing, snaring and to a nature aesthetic by his now estranged father and these continue into the present with his friend, a local hermit who lives on the estuary. David finds escape and solace in nature. His natural relation with non-humans descends directly from local rural culture via his father and it highlights the continuation of such links and the persistence of natures even on the edges of former industrial zones and inside urban cultures. Nature Boy challenges, therefore, the putative boundaries between urban and rural, nature and culture and true nature and sullied nature. David’s ‘nature’ is sullied, polluted and problematic, rather like his family and domestic circumstances, but this is all the more reason to maintain a moral connection with it and to cherish it. David’s search for his father and his persistence in trying to feed his hopeless heroin addict mother with fresh fish makes a powerful but seamless link between the human and the natural world. This story reminds us that imperfect natures of this kind are the backdrop to the lives of most people, that their closest and strongest dealing with the natural world are through their gardens and backyards, through allotments, pigeon lofts, dog walks, through the scraps and bits of nature along railway lines, roads, old industrial zones, canal banks and coastal wastes. It reminds us that it is only on rare occasions that we travel to the so-called ‘natural’ areas, wildernesses and places of outstanding natural beauty. It reminds us also that we are never properly at home in such places; their natures are unfamiliar to us, the land belongs to others, notably the rural gentry and the middle classes (who can afford the necessary dress codes for countryside leisures), the touristic pathways are restricted by rules and practices that discipline the body to keep to paths, not to touch, pick, take or otherwise disturb. It is a nature inaccessible in a fully sensed and dwelt-in manner.

When we reflect on Nature Boy we must surely conclude that the academic accounts of the relations between the human and natural world are lacking this anthropological depth, this ethnographic sense of practices on the ground or its variable and contested nature in complex nations such as the USA and Britain. Certainly there has been little focused research on everyday relations, beliefs and practices. To begin with, for obvious reasons to do with the dramatic impact of the green movement in the 1980s, many recent books conflate nature and environment. The outstanding political and scientific issues have driven sociological interest here, so that the natures of sociological interest are not, paradoxically, those of the discipline’s primary focus, modern urban cultures, but those of the scientists, the political economists and geographers. So sociologists have embraced the global changes in the environment both in terms of their social construction in the media and through science and in their impact on civil society through such enquiries as Inglehart’s (1977) postmaterialism thesis. Sociologists have also paused to consider very fully Beck’s (1992) concept of the risk society and the range of environmental issues and environmental changes that allegedly create such a phenomenon. Finally, in Macnaghten and Urry (1998) we see a more complete sociological treatment of the relationship between nature leisures and the environment.

Conflating nature with the environment also means that the agenda for research becomes driven by what environmentalists decide is important and what scientists deem is of environmental consequence (see Wynne 1996). Increasingly, the science–environmentalist discourse on nature has taken on a very unified content and agenda, with environmentalism itself very strongly directed by science and scientists. Hence we have witnessed an endless interest in the actions and activities of environmentalists and environmentalism and, although this is important, the unintended consequence is to skew the research and publication effort in favour of a highly selected subset of natures. Environmentalists are much like romantic writers in the nineteenth century in that they tend to identify, promote and defend areas of pristine wilderness and of other pure natures such as forests, areas of sea, wetlands etc. against destruction rather than the already spoiled areas closer to human habitation, including urban areas (see Williams 1972). Theirs are the truly scandalous coalfaces on the human–nature boundary. Urban cultures are of interest only in their capacity as a danger to these fragile marginal natures through tourism and leisure. Even here the practices, beliefs and conceptions of people come a poor second to what is deemed to be their impact, usually adverse, on the natures they insist on visiting. Hence the social issues tend to be the demographics of ecotourism, the impact of ecotourism and especially questions to do with management and control of visitors. Urban cultures are also of interest, again, not for their actual relationships with the natural world but for their expressed values in relation to extant environmental issues. These are significant only in the sense that they are the most powerful electoral force in most nations and such studies drive, as Macnaghten and Urry (1998) argue, a very one-sided and abstract knowledge of nature and modern cultures.

Cities themselves are also of interest but the extent to which it is a social interest is also very limited. Thus one of the most staggering nature–human interfaces, gardening, has been ignored almost completely. Of more scandalous importance are issues to do with pollution, cities as sources of environmental problems or the brown environmental agenda: car usage; heating and pollution; emission of CFC gases from domestic appliances; suburban sprawl and invasion of bush and countryside; pollution of waterways by dog and other pet faeces; water usage and conservation; introduced pest species (pets, plants etc.) escaping into the bush and threatening native species; gardeners poisoning the environment; metropolitan effects on weather patterns. Again, people tend to be cast as the cause of the problem for nature with research tending to focus more on management and control issues such as the collection of dog faeces, recycling behaviour, environmental action groups, changing uses of domestic cleaning agents and so on (Baldassare and Katz 1992; Berger 1996; Derksen and Gartrell 1993; Ungar 1998). As such, a misanthropic gloom pervades the entire research enterprise on nature; Schama’s (1995) reassurance, wrought from his long historical overview, that nature will be ultimately looked after because it is central to all western cultures’ sense of selfhood seems somehow lost on these authors. By contrast Schama’s optimism provides one of the conceptual starting points for this book.

Most new sociological publications on nature and environment tend to conflate nature with environment. Wilson’s (1992) book examining the cultures of nature in the USA is a good example of the tendency to reduce a sociology of modern nature to that of the environmental agenda. Hence the notes describing the book claim that ‘the current environmental crisis has reached far beyond the land; it is a crisis of culture as well. It penetrates our leisure time, our thinking, our art and gardens’. In other words, the environmental crisis must be the framework around which we think of a sociology of nature. Such a view penetrates his analysis of the American suburban garden as an impoverished, standardised, polluting and unnatural phenomenon. As we will see this is a travesty of the true picture of the condition of American gardening cultures, but the environmentalist concerns require that environmental and human problems be found.

Although Eder’s excellent Social Construction of Nature (1996) is not explicitly framed by environmentalism and contains some useful analyses of food and nature, it too is ultimately drawn into the gravity of risk, pollution and environmentalism. The realist tradition, that includes the recent work of Peter Dicken, Ted Benton, Kate Soper and Luke Martell for example, is driven mainly by environmentalist and ecological concerns/anxieties. Indeed, they are notable mainly for their passionate and heated debates with social constructivist accounts of the human–nature relation because in identifying a social as opposed to an environmental content to the science and practice of environmentalism, social constructivists are accused of confusing or even denying the real issue which is quite clearly in their view, the inescapable reality of an environmental crisis (see Burningham and Cooper 1999 for a complete history of these skirmishes). While realist sociologists wish to attend to and practice an environmental ethics and to avoid investigations of society as if it were limited only by social relations, they have tended to stifle rather than encourage the sort of research that sociology can usefully conduct. In this regard, the sociology of scientific knowledge has a better track record in attempting to break down the epistemological boundaries of modernity that have so far trapped sociology inside a circularity of the social. Far from taking the lead from Latour (1993) and Braun and Castree (1998) who deny the modern insistence on the proper separation of nature from culture, realists find themselves vulnerable to criticism because they want to uphold and defend a pure and unsullied nature against a disordered (and sick) humanity. One senses here the crystallisation of a purity–danger scenario and the whiff of a moral/religious rather than a natural crisis and it was not long before Alexander and Smith (1996) provided the rather obvious (but well-flighted) Durkheimian arrow into the heart of the environmentalism/risk argument.

Clearly, however some sociology could be accused of a focus on ideational analyses, reducing the performativity of human cultures and relationships to their social and mental logics/ideas. Although some sociology continues to exist in this disembodied form, between them the sociologies of the body, scientific knowledge, dwelling, space and performance have established a formidable agenda and it is from these that some of the more promising work on nature has derived in recent years.

Notable among these recent works is Macnaghten and Urry’s Contested Natures (1998) and in this the authors have broken free of the need to conflate nature with environment. They eschewed the unproductive tension between constructivist and realist debates arguing instead that nature is always and everywhere socially constructed but it also a performed as well as a lived or dwelt experience. By taking an historical perspective on the notion and developments of nature[s], as ‘environment’ and ‘countryside’ (Raymond Williams’ ‘ideas of nature’) for example, they are revealed as cultural constructs with very precise timed and spaced aetiologies. However Macnaghten and Urry have produced a fully sociological account of the human–nature interface and analyse the socially embedded, sensed and contested character of these natures. As such this is a return to the sanity and clarity of writers such as Williams (1972) and K. Thomas (1983) who had the advantage of writing in an earlier period when environment was not an all-encompassing and urgent project.

If anything Macnaghten and Urry commit another folly, which is to conflate a sociology of nature with a sociology of nature leisures and tourism and perhaps also to confine relevance/interest to so-called natural leisure areas or spaces. As Demeritt (1999:372) argues, ‘their account is focused on the consumption of rural nature as spectacle’. This is more, one suspects, an artefact of the research projects that informed this book than a clear intention. Here is another very significant set of practices that relate historically to many threads of modernisation and the production of a civil society. In this version, nature in its guise as countryside and environment is made to be an other to the metropolitan centre and constructed to be the disciplined and ordered playground for politically benign but denatured metropolitan cultures. Muscular leisures, combined with contemplative sensual technologies of the body and aesthetic appreciation, in league with improving recreations such as field naturalism, botany, ornithology, beach combing, flower pressing and butterfly collecting provided a sober and useful stock of human social capital. Nature was to teach us all not how to escape from an industrial capitalist society but how to cope with it, recoup from it, acquire the skills and techniques consistent with it. In so doing it created at the same time a sense of belonging and identity that frames the possibility for political alignments over nature issues in specifically created ‘natur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• References
• Index