Contested Natures

Phil Macnaghten, John Urry

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780761953135, 9780761953128
• eBook ISBN: 9781446231739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Demonstrating that all notions of nature are inextricably entangled in different forms of social life, the text elaborates the many ways in which the apparently natural world has been produced from within particular social practices. These are analyzed in terms of different senses, different times and the production of distinct spaces, including the local, the national and the global.

The authors emphasize the importance of cultural understandings of the physical world, highlighting the ways in which these have been routinely misunderstood by academic and policy discourses. They show that popular conceptions of, and attitudes to, nature are often contradictory and that there are no simple ways of prevailing upon people to `save the environment?.

1

RETHINKING NATURE AND SOCIETY

In this book we seek to show that there is no singular ‘nature’ as such, only a diversity of contested natures; and that each such nature is constituted through a variety of socio-cultural processes from which such natures cannot be plausibly separated. We therefore argue against three doctrines which are widespread in current thinking about nature and the environment. We begin this introductory chapter by briefly outlining these before seeking to develop our own position.

The first, and most important for our subsequent argument, is the claim that the environment is essentially a ‘real entity’, which, in and of itself and substantially separate from social practices and human experience, has the power to produce unambiguous, observable and rectifiable outcomes. This doctrine will be termed that of ‘environmental realism’, one aspect of which is the way that the very notion of nature itself has been turned into a scientifically researchable ‘environment’. Modern rational science can and will provide the understanding of that environment and the assessment of those measures which are necessary to rectify environmental bads. Social practices play a minor role in any such analysis since the realities which derive from scientific inquiry are held to transcend the more superficial and transitory patterns of everyday life.

The second doctrine is that of ‘environmental idealism’, which has partly developed as a critique of the first. This doctrine holds that the way to analyse nature and the environment is through identifying, critiquing and realising various ‘values’ which underpin or relate to the character, sense and quality of nature. Such values held by people about nature and the environment are treated as underlying, stable and consistent. They are abstracted both from the sheer messiness of the ‘environment’ and the diverse species which happen to inhabit the globe, and from the practices of specific social groupings in the wider society who may or may not articulate or adopt such values. This doctrine can coexist with the first.

The third doctrine specifically concerns the responses of individuals and groups to nature and the environment. It is concerned to explain appropriate human motivation to engage in environmentally sustainable practices and hence the resulting environmental goods or bads. It seeks to do this in terms of straightforwardly determined calculations of individual and/or collective interest (such as cost-benefit analysis and contingent valuation schemes). This doctrine we will term ‘environmental instrumentalism’ and is importantly linked to a marketised naturalistic model of human behaviour, and its radical separation from non-human species.

Obviously all these three positions have something to contribute to the untangling of contemporary debates on the environment. But it will be our view that all three ignore/misrepresent/conceal aspects of contemporary environmental change and human engagement. Our approach will emphasise that it is specific social practices, especially of people’s dwellings, which produce, reproduce and transform different natures and different values. It is through such practices that people respond, cognitively, aesthetically and hermeneutically, to what have been constructed as the signs and characteristics of nature. Such social practices embody their own forms of knowledge and understanding and undermine a simple demarcation between objective science and lay knowledge. These practices structure the responses of people to what is deemed to be the ‘natural’. We thus seek to transcend the by now rather dull debate between ‘realists’ and ‘constructivists’ by emphasising the significance of embedded social practices.

Such social practices possess a number of constitutive principles. These practices are:

• discursively ordered (hence the importance of the analysis of everyday talk especially as it contrasts with official rhetorics and models such as sustainability);
• embodied (hence the significance of identifying the ways in which nature is differentially sensed by the body);
• spaced (hence the importance of the particular conflicting senses of the local, national and global dimensions of the environment);
• timed (hence the analysis of conflicting times in nature including the apparent efforts of states to plan for the uncertain future);
• and involve models of human activity, risk, agency and trust (which are often the opposite of or at a tangent to ‘official’ models of human action, and which may or may not be at odds with the interests of non-human animals).

Much of the book is concerned with showing the character and significance of such social practices. Overall we seek to show that responses to and engagement with nature are highly diverse, ambivalent and embedded in daily life. Such responses necessarily involve work in order that they develop and are sustained. This work is not just economic and organisational, but also cultural in often complex and ill-understood ways. These social practices are structured by the flows within and across national boundaries of signs, images, information, money, people, as well as noxious substances. Such global flows can reinforce or can undermine notions of agency and trust.

Such social practices stem from and feed into tacit notions of the human agent, nature, the future, and so on. These notions are often opposed to, or contradicted by, official bureaucratic, scientific and managerial discourses, such discourses often becoming part of the problem rather than the solution. They may reinforce further manifestations of political alienation and estrangement. It also follows that these complex social practices need to be researched by ‘methodologies’ which are able to represent and capture some of these ambivalent and multiple characteristics. We will subject much of the research in the environmental area to methodological critique and develop alternative modes of investigation appropriate to such complexities.

We will also go on to examine how global–local changes transform what it is to be a subject/citizen/stakeholder within contemporary societies. We shall outline a revised politics of the environment which is not based on a simple interest model but one which recognises how arguments about nature provide new and embryonic spaces for political exploration and self-discovery. Further, we shall not argue for abstract values disembodied from the world of everyday experience, but we do recognise that nature and the environment are hugely bound up with certain valuations of desirable and/or appropriate ‘natures’. We thus examine the character and complexity of human responses to nature, of people’s hopes, fears, concerns and sense of engagement, and how current unease and anxiety about nature connects to new tensions associated with living in global times. And we shall not suggest that environmental activism automatically follows from environmental ‘damage’. It is mediated by signs, senses of agency and particular timings. But we do recognise that environments change, that such changes can in certain ways and via a variety of media be sensed, and that those sensings can crystallise at some defining moments into perceived threats to ‘the environment’ and hence to significant socio-political responses.

We will also consider what an appropriate politics of nature would be; one which stems from how people talk about, use and conceptualise nature and the environment in their day-to-day lives, in their localities and other ‘communities’. Such talk takes place in the context of official and public discourses and of the ideas, money, information, signs and substances flowing across national borders and which bring into being some often very extended ‘communities’. Moreover, people’s sense of their power or power-lessness in relation to such flows, as well as the impact of such flows upon the details of everyday life, will be identified as crucial for understanding how people make sense of nature, including the existential experience of living with environmental risks of unknown proportions and unknowable consequences.

In that sense we will try to provide some more specific sociological grounding for recent communitarian philosophy, which on the face of it would seem to have a lot to offer to the environmental movement. But we will endeavour to connect such possible communities to some of the unutterably modernist processes which appear to envelop nature and from which these philosophies and practices cannot escape, as Szerszynski argues (1996; see also Eder 1996). We do not think that the discovery of nature and the identification of ‘natural limits’ resolves the modernist dilemma. Nature does not simply provide an objective ethics which tells us what to do. It is too ambivalent, contested and culturally paradoxical for that. But we will argue that emergent ‘cultures of nature’ may on occasions facilitate the kind of communities and traditions that provide an enormously significant sense of meaning and value in societies struggling to break from the modern world; communities and traditions that are socially embedded and embodied, and temporally and spatially structured.

Finally, there are three important points of clarification. First, this book principally concentrates upon the relationship between society and nature within the ‘West’ or what we prefer to call the North Atlantic Rim societies. We will not consider the cultures of nature as these are shaping the development of environmental issues in the Pacific Rim, in the developing world, or in what was known as ‘Eastern Europe’. Second, the book deals mainly with what would normally be identified as ‘environmental’ rather than ‘biological’ issues (see on the biological issues, Benton 1993; Haraway 1991; Strathern 1992). However, even that distinction is difficult to justify or sustain since it in part derives from the very development of those specialised sciences through which nature has been tamed and transformed. Moreover, people’s responses to ‘nature’ and hence to particular ‘environments’ are in part derived from the kinds of human and non-human species which inhabit or have inhabited or might have inhabited particular locales. Third, this book is selective and makes no claim to be an exhaustive survey of even current environmental issues or debates. It will focus upon a limited number of ‘contested natures’ and has little to say about debates on shallow and deep ecology, Gaia, biocentrism, the ‘new age’, ecocentrism, technocentrism, and other conceptualisations of new and more ecologically ‘benign’ paradigms or worldviews (although see chapter 3 below for a critique of how some of these concepts embody variants of the doctrines set out above).

Nature and sociology

We have argued that nature and the environment have been inappropriately analysed within the three doctrines outlined. In particular the ‘social’ dimensions of nature have been significantly under-examined. In this section we turn to the discipline which on the face of it should have engaged with such an agenda, namely, sociology. However, we suggest that the neglect of the ‘social’ in the environmental literature has partly stemmed from sociology’s own trajectory of development. This trajectory has been based upon drawing a strong and undesirable distinction between ‘society’ and ‘nature’.

The discursive development of sociology was the product of a particular historical moment, of industrial capitalism in Western Europe and North America. Sociology’s key concept has been that of society, as opposed to those of capitalism or the division of labour which are central to historical materialism (see Dickens 1996). Sociology accepted certain a priori assumptions about the consequent relationship between nature and society. Taking for granted the success of such modern societies in their spectacular overcoming of nature, sociology has concentrated and specialised on what it has been good at, namely, describing and explaining the very character of modern societies. As such, sociology has generally accepted a presumed division of academic labour which partly stemmed from the Durkheimian desire to carve out a separate realm or sphere of the social which could be investigated and explained autonomously. In a way sociology employed the strategy of modelling itself on biology and arguing for a specific and autonomous realm of facts, in this case pertaining to the social or society. Such a realm of social facts presupposed its separation from, and antithesis to, nature (Dickens 1996: 47; Dunlap and Catton 1994; Durkheim 1952; Macnaghten and Urry 1995).

As a discipline sociology has until recently been that social science least concerned with the natural, in either its biological or environmental form. The dichotomy between the social and the natural has been most pronounced in the case of sociology. The other social sciences have enjoyed a more messy and confused relationship with the facts of nature. In sociology this academic division between a world of social facts and one of natural facts has been regarded as largely uncontentious. Inter alia it was reflected in the conceptualisation of time, where it was presumed that the times of nature and of society are quite distinct (see Adam 1990; Lash and Urry 1994: chap. 9). Moreover, this account made good sense as a strategy of professionalisation for sociology since it provided a clear and bounded sphere of investigation, a sphere parallel to but not challenging or confronting those physical sciences that unambiguously dealt with an apparently distinct and analysable nature. The competition between the different nascent disciplines, including sociology, led to new forms of scientific authority and elitism, with a striking disparagement of lay, implicit, tacit forms of knowledge. What people ‘know’ in their ‘social practices’ was devalued and marginalised (Dickens 1996: chap. 1).

An interesting exception to such sociological orthodoxy was that posed by the American sub-discipline of environmental sociology in the United States (Catton and Dunlap 1978; Dunlap and Catton 1979). Dunlap and Catton (1994) defined the field as ‘the study of interaction between environment and society’, and sought to highlight the inextricable relationship between the development of human societies and their use and exploitation of finite resources and life support systems. By highlighting these links, environmental sociologists have advocated a reorientation of sociology towards ‘a more holistic perspective that would contextualise social processes within the context of the biosphere’ (Buttel 1987: 466). Yet even such a sociology employs a division of labour between the natural sciences, which provide the hard and factual base of the state of nature, and the more subservient social sciences, which identify the impacts of physical nature upon society, and the impacts of society upon nature.

Moreover, it is this model of sociology and more generally of the social sciences which is most visible in current investigations of so-called ‘global environmental change’. Roughly speaking, the role of the social scientist is seen as that of addressing the social causes, impacts and responses to environmental problems which have been initially and accurately described by the natural scientist – a kind of ‘Biology and Science First’ model (also see Grove-White and Szerszynski 1992). Such emphases can be identified in most major international research programmes on global environmental change (see Newby 1993; Wynne 1994). For example, in early formulations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, environmental change is conceived of as a set of scientific problems essentially requiring technological solutions. A linear model was outlined with working panels established on the scientific evidence (WG1), the environmental and socio-economic impacts (WG2), and the appropriate response strategies described in explicitly technical terms (WG3) (although see Shackley 1997 for recent reformulations).

A similar process can be located in the UK research framework on global environmental change. Following a number of significant events, including a wave of environmental public consciousness in the late 1980s and Margaret Thatcher’s landmark speech to the Royal Society in 1988 (see chapter 2 below), a new research culture emerged in which to study environmental processes. Following international models, the focus of this research was largely global and natural science-oriented (see Grove-White 1996a). Thus, when the UK Inter-Agency Committee on Global Environment Change was formed in 1990 to link all UK environmental research, the first report in April 1991 was unmistakably natural science in orientation. Moreover, when social science research became more prominent, propelled by the Government funding of a Global Environmental Change programme started in 1990, it operated in a political climate where considerable expectations and policy commitments became invested in the role of the social sciences as secondary, as formulating appropriate responses to the problems embodied in mounting natural scientific evidence (ESRC 1990).

Thus the role of the social scientist in the analysis of global environmental change has been largely seen as that of a social engineer, as someone who manipulates and ‘fixes’ society so as to facilitate the implementation of a sustainable society specified in essentially technical terms (based on variations of doctrines 1 and 3 outlined above). In such an analysis instrumentalist social science disciplines such as economics and geography have been particularly significant in forming and addressing an environmental agenda.

However, in the last few years there has been the development of some alternative thinking and research about nature and the environment. Such new wave thinking has been found within various disciplines, including anthropology (see Douglas 1992; Milton 1993a, 1996), archaeology (Bender 1993), cultural history (Arnold 1996; Robertson et al. 1996; Ross 1994; Schama 1995; Wilson 1992; Wright 1996), geography (Barnes and Duncan 1992; Cloke et al. 1994; Fitzsimmons 1989), literary studies (Wheeler 1995), the analyses of modernity and post-modernity (Lash et al. 1996), philosophy (O’Neill 1993), politics (Dobson 1990; McCormick 1991a, 1995), sociology (Beck 1992b, 1996b; Benton 1993; Dickens 1992, 1996; Eder 1996; Martell 1994; Redclift and Benton 1994), the sociology of science (Yearley 1991, 1996), and women’s studies (Haraway 1991; Merchant 1982; Shiva 1988, 1991, 199.4). These have begun to resonate with each other and to have begun the development of what we will loosely take to be a more socio-culturally embedded analysis of nature. In this book we seek to reflect these interlinking developments and to develop them further within the context of particular environmental topics. And by connecting such developments to those social practices through which nature becomes produced and consumed, we shall in a sense seek to repopulate environmental issues as they are lived, sensed and encoded in contemporary societies.

We turn now to a brief account of the history of the relationship between nature and society, in order to understand better how historically the social and the natural were torn apart and some of the different forms taken by this dichotomisation. This is not to provide anything more than a brief schematic account of certain moments in the changing relationship of ‘nature’ and ‘society’.

Nature and society - historical context

In historical terms the juxtaposition of society and nature reached its fullest development in the nineteenth century in the ‘West’. Nature came to be degraded into a realm of unfreedom and hostility that needed to be subdued and controlled. Modernity involved the belief that human progress should be measured and evaluated in terms of the domination of nature, rather than through any attempt to transform the relationship between humans and nature. This view that nature should be dominated p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Rethinking Nature And Society
• 2 Inventing Nature
• 3 Humans And Nature
• 4 Sensing Nature
• 5 Nature And Time
• 6 Nature As Countryside
• 7 Sustaining Nature
• 8 Governing Nature
• Bibliography
• Index