Society, nature and sociology: Society, nature and sociology

Society, nature and sociology Bob Carter and Nickie Charles The social sciences have been faced with a series of challenges to their relevance since the beginning of the 21st century. In particular, the growing urgency of environmental crises and the remarkable increase in knowledge of genomics have raised questions about sociology’s ability to analyse the contemporary world and, especially, its ability to understand the relationship between the natural world and human societies. The argument of this volume is that sociology has a significant contribution to make to this understanding and that it is imperative that sociologists become involved in what are often seen as purely scientific and technical discussions. In this opening chapter we contribute to this engagement by considering the question of how sociology understands the natural and the social and why many sociologists are re-thinking this relationship. We argue that this rethinking is due, on the one hand, to political and theoretical developments within and without sociology and, on the other hand, to the challenge of climate change and recent scientific interventions in, and transformations of, ‘nature’. First, however, we discuss the relationship between nature and society that underpinned the development of sociology as a discipline. The natural and the social in sociology Debates about the relation between the natural and the social have been central to the development of sociology in the USA and Europe. There are various reasons for this, but two in particular are significant for the present chapter: the manner in which the efforts of classical sociologists1 to demarcate a realm of the social entailed a contrast with a realm of the natural; and the profound intertwining of social thought and the natural sciences in 19th and early 20th century thinking, especially in various forms of social Darwinism. Early efforts to establish a coherent object of study for social science pressed in a dualist direction, seeking to establish the social as a discrete entity separate from the natural and requiring its own methods of empirical enquiry, whilst simultaneously stressing its commonalities with the established project of natural science. This tension is captured in the very term ‘social science’ and in the epistemological claim that the social world can be known in ways similar to the natural © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review. Published by Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA Bob Carter and Nickie Charles world. This claim in turn rests upon ontological presumptions about reality and about the ways in which social and natural reality may be said to be distinct. Nature as an object of study distinct from the social world is the product of a relatively recent world view, developing from the mid 18th century onwards, one broadly associated with the rise of industrial capitalism, and the establishment of a system of nation-states globally interconnected through colonialism and imperialism (Hobsbawm, 1992; Bayly, 2004). The powerful emphasis placed on technological development, especially military technology, sharply accelerated the global emergence of scientific thought. During this process, the meaning and social significance of concepts such as science, reason, and empirical verification were greatly modified, often blending with preexisting ideas in still vigorous indigenous systems of thought. These modern concepts often came to carry unintended new meanings for people, whether within or outside Europe and North America. (Bayly, 2004: 307) From the very outset of industrial capitalism, which was always a global process, as Bayly (2004) has forcefully argued, ideas about science and ideas about the social were inextricably commingled. Nevertheless, the notion that they could somehow be separated, and that one could be used to assess, correct and improve the other, became a key feature of certain forms of modernist thought. This was especially so where natural scientific ideas could be used to explain social inequalities or handily account for elite privileges and political projects (Malik, 1996). Eugenics and other ideas about race, for example, were important features of much 19th century thought, especially, but not exclusively, in Europe and the USA. As several writers have pointed out (Pichot, 2009; Bayly, 2004; Kevles, 1985), ideologies of race war and racial fitness could be applied as a set of practices in rapidly growing cities because they appealed to a diverse range of cross-class interests: ruling elites who saw in them a ready justification for imperial expansion, the middle classes for whom they expressed their conviction in their own social superiority, and the (mainly white) industrial working classes, the glow of whose own immiseration dimmed when set into the larger space of national pride and xenophobia. The strength of such ideas was also a product of their scientific status, of the widespread belief that social, racial and gender hierarchies were grounded in a natural order whose workings had been revealed by the application of scientific thought to the natural world. The rise of industrial capitalism relentlessly drove the extensive application of technologies to production; in so doing it encouraged the view, familiar to contemporary environmentalists, that the planet is a ‘garden’ made for the delights of humankind, capable of limitlessly sustaining human production and consumption. From this perspective, common in 19th and early 20th century Western thought, the interdependence between the social and the natural was entirely one way: nature was passive, there to be taken, a provider of resources (the gendered nature of this way of thinking seems obvious now). This is an illustration of what Pichot (2009) has termed the ‘scientization 2 © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Society, nature and sociology of the natural’, the subordination of nature to human purposes with its anthropocentric privileging of human needs and wants and an unshakable commitment to the beneficent effects of technological applications and fixes. There was, however, another contradictory moment contained in the rise of industrial capitalism. This is the other arm of Pichot’s depiction, namely the ‘naturalization of the social’. One form of this has already been alluded to, namely the efforts of eugenics and racism to ground social hierarchies as natural orders, thereby removing their political content and rendering them impervious to reform. Another form, again familiar to contemporary environmentalists, is to use nature normatively, as a basis for a critique of the artefactual and the unnatural, of the urban and the industrial. This Romantic revolt has a long pedigree in European thought (Berlin, 1990) and appeals to an authentic, often originary, idea of human nature rediscoverable only on the basis of an unconstrained, purer mode of living purged of the shallow distractions of polite culture and the superfluous needs of consumerism. Nature was a powerful source, for the German Romantics in particular, of the unkempt, the wild and the disordered; from the poems of Wordsworth to the paintings of David Friedrich Caspar, Nature was seen as a source of spiritual renewal in an age of desiccating materialism and rationalist order. Sociology, newly emerging towards the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, was not altogether immune to these influences: Durkheim’s fond glances towards the medieval guilds as a possible model for the new forms of organic solidarity are an example. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the only one of the founding triumvirate of classical sociology whose work has had a lasting impact on the debates about the social and the natural, particularly in its environmentalist and political forms, is Marx. At the core of Marx’s social theory is the concept of practice, the embodied capacity of human beings to transform themselves and their world through labour. Human emancipation, for Marx, is realizable only, and precisely, because human labour changes our relation to nature; this, in turn, alters the possibilities for human fulfilment. Marx’s scorn of Utopian socialists, for example, was founded on his view that without the development of productive forces – that is, a changed relationship to nature – the abolition of want and poverty was not practically possible and so, neither, was human emancipation. As Benton (1993) has argued, Marx’s position is not without tension. Marx’s view, particularly in his earlier work such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, seems to encourage an instrumental or anthropocentric approach to the natural world: it is something to be subordinated to, and used for, the purposes of human fulfilment. ‘Nature, it seems,’ notes Benton, ‘is an acceptable partner for humanity only in so far as it has been divested of all that constitutes its otherness, in so far, in other words, as it has become, itself, human’ (Benton, 1993: 31). As we have already suggested, this position is a common one in Western social theory and has frequently justified rapacious and exploitative policies by governments towards natural resources. Elsewhere, though, Marx takes a different perspective. In later work, especially that fol© 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 3 Bob Carter and Nickie Charles lowing the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, he took a more consistently materialist approach, regarding nature as ‘a complex causal order, independent of human activity, forever setting the condition and limits within which human beings, as natural beings, may shape and direct their activities’ (Benton, 1993: 31). There is a strong insistence here on the ineluctable necessity of a different sort of relationship between the social and the natural worlds, one that gives a proper place to the specificity and distinctiveness of the human species without undermining the recognition that, as part of nature, human beings are critically dependent on the natural environment as a condition of survival. Indeed, as Burkett (1999) has persuasively argued, Marx places great emphasis on the natural basis of labour productivity: the human capacity to work (labour power) is itself a natural property of being human. Moreover, an inherent component of human labour is its appropriation of materials produced spontaneously by nature, without human assistance. Marx’s materialist emphasis on the natural basis of labour productivity means that use value necessarily contains a natural element and therefore the productivity of labour must be conceptualized in terms of definite natural conditions (Burkett, 1999: 33). Marx’s materialism from this perspective rests on an ontological distinction between social relations and nature, a distinction that allows for an examination of their interplay and the development of a materialist environmental politics: [Marx’s] vision of a more concordant co-evolution of society and nature depends on the distinction between human production conditions, as formed by non-exploitative social relations, and nature as such. (Burkett, 1999: 31) This dualist account, we would suggest, is central to Marx’s great achievement, namely the development of a political analysis of the relation between the natural and the social. Thus far we have argued, along with many others, that sociology as a discipline was founded on an ontological distinction between society and nature; sociology and the social sciences were concerned with uncovering the laws governing the workings of society, while the natural sciences dealt with those underpinning the natural world. The picture is, of course, more complicated than this and biology – particularly eugenics and theories of evolution – remained influential well into the 20th century (see Osborne and Rose, 2008; Goldman, 2007; Fuller, 2007; Carter, 2007). Nikolas Rose (this volume) reminds us of the close connections between sociology and biology at that time and of the links between British sociologists and the Eugenics Society. Also influential were human ecological approaches such as those of Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford whose ‘regional approach to social development’ sought to ‘link natural and social knowledges into a coherent whole’ (Jamison, 2001: 80; Studholme, 2007). The influence of biological thinking – and especially eugenics – on sociological theorizing partly explains the attempts of sociologists, feminists and anti-racists to demarcate ‘the social’ and culture as something distinct from ‘the natural’ that could be studied and explained without recourse 4 © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Society, nature and sociology to biology. The distinction between society and nature was used as a basis for differentiating sociology and the social sciences from the natural sciences and became increasingly important in the light of attempts to naturalize and scientize all social inequalities and differences. Indeed, it is one of the dualisms which characterizes Western philosophical thought and enables society, culture and the individual to be defined in relation to each other and in opposition to their ‘other’ – nature (Strathern, 1992). Challenging ‘society’ and ‘nature’ The social movements that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s challenged these dualisms and developed a critique of what has been termed ‘big’ science and the ‘scientific-technological state’ (Jamison, 2001: 66); in the process they produced new knowledges, redefined reality, and translated ‘scientific ideas into social and political beliefs’ (Eyerman and Jamison, 1991: 92; Touraine, 1985). According to Jamison, the ‘new movements of feminism and environmentalism articulated an alternative approach to science and technology’ and ‘involved a rejection of modern science’s exploitative attitude to nature’ (Jamison, 2001: 68). They also developed an extensive critique of dualistic conceptualizations of society and nature and the way in which social and political thinkers have used ‘nature’ as a justification for social inequalities; in other words they challenged ‘established thought in the social sciences’ (Benton, 1991: 2). The civil rights movement and challenges to eugenics Prior to the emergence of second wave feminism and environmentalism, however, a key challenge to an uncritical belief in a beneficent science and its ability to explain the social world came with the emergence of the Civil Rights movement in the USA. Eugenics had played a central role in the maintenance of social hierarchies of race in the USA (as well as in Europe, and through colonialism, much of the rest of the world: see, for example, Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991; Bayly, 2004; Dikotter, 1992). Tucker (1994) has pointed to the ‘enormous influence’ exerted by ‘the racist wing of the eugenics movement’; one of its leading figures, Charles Davenport, was publicly praised by President Roosevelt on the publication of Davenport’s magnum opus The Passing of the Great Race (Tucker, 1994: 92). From the late 1950s, the Civil Rights movement began to challenge eugenics and the biological explanations it advanced for racism and discrimination. In doing so, the movement drew on anthropological and sociological research to demonstrate that social differences were environmental and cultural. (There are obvious parallels here with the women’s movement and feminism, where a similar rejection of biological reductionist accounts of sex inequalities and discrimination was taking shape; see, for example, Charles, 1993). This strategy was undeniably effective, and may even have been a necessary stage in the development of an anti-racist politics in the USA, but signifi© 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 5 Bob Carter and Nickie Charles cantly it left unchallenged the concept of race as biologically based, thereby failing to critique the role of science in politics. It is not possible, we would contend, to use the notion of race without implicating some notion of biological determinism and mobilizing a muddled ontology of the natural and the social, one that was unable to challenge the conviction that ‘science’ can provide solutions to a wide range of social anxieties, including those arising from the prospect of ecological catastrophe. The civil rights movement, nevertheless, mounted a significant challenge to conventional understandings of the natural and the social, something that was taken further by the environmental movement. The environmental movement The emergence of the most recent wave of the environmental movement is often linked to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, which exposed the potentially disastrous consequences of exploitative scientific practices for the environment and popularized the idea of ‘systems ecology’ (Jamison, 2001: 69), and to the 1970 Earth Summit (Hannigan, 2006; Castells, 2009). These different starting points reflect the fact that the environmental movement emerged earlier in the USA than in Britain and Europe. Be that as it may, there are three elements of the movement which are significant for our discussion: its relationship with science, its critique of dominant conceptualizations of ‘nature’ and its transformative impact on ways of seeing, particularly on ways of seeing the relationship between human societies and the natural world. The environmental movement has had, from its inception, a contradictory relationship with science. This is apparent in the fact that the environmental dangers posed by science and technology were initially popularized by a scientist and a woman, Rachel Carson. So, while the environmental movement has developed a profound critique of ‘big’ science and its technological applications, it is dependent upon scientists to alert it to environmental threats and, in turn, scientists are dependent on the environmental movement to popularize their ideas (Castells, 2009). Moreover scientists and scientific knowledges can be found on both sides of the environmental debate (Beck, 1992; Mol and Spaargaren, 1993: 442). The movement also developed a critique of dominant conceptions of nature by building on and transforming conservationist and preservationist views (Jamison, 2001). Such views predated the environmental movement and argued, in different ways, for a modification of the exploitative relation between human society and the natural world; they tended, however, to be based on an anthropocentric and masculinist view of the relationship between humans and the environment (Kheel, 2008). The environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s built on these views but challenged their anthropocentrism, arguing that humans had no pre-eminent place in the ecological systems of which they were part. Finally, the environmental movement both challenged the dominant view of nature as something to be exploited and facilitated the diffusion of the idea of ecological crisis (Hannigan, 2006: 45); in other words it 6 © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Society, nature and sociology reframed and redefined the relationship between society and nature as one of crisis rather than stability. It also paved the way for the wider diffusion of ideas about human ecology and their application to the understanding of social and political problems (Jamison, 2001) and, in the 1980s, for the emergence of environmental sociology (Hannigan, 2006). It therefore contributed to new ways of seeing and understanding the world which particularly affected conceptualizations of nature and its relation to society. In Castells’ words, it changed ‘the way we think about our collective relationship to nature’ (Castells, 2009: 6). The feminist movement and ecofeminist thought While the environmental movement emphasized the connectedness of society and nature, and embraced an ecological world-view that saw humankind as only one part of nature, feminism took a different view. Feminists developed a critique of the supposed ‘naturalness’ of women’s subordination, taking issue with the gendered subtexts of the founding ‘fathers’ of sociology and with the ways in which women’s alleged closer relationship with nature was constructed within social and political thought and used as legitimation for their subordinate social and political status. Furthermore, they developed social and, especially, cultural explanations of gender, separating it from a consideration of biological sex (see Oakley, 1972; de Beauvoir, 1972). These explanations attempted to get away from the biological reductionism which had characterized understandings of women’s subordinate social position (Sayers, 1982) and, in the process, denied any place to ‘nature’ or ‘biology’ in their explanatory frameworks. Feminists also developed a critique of Western knowledge and of the dichotomies underpinning Western philosophical thought, both of which were important to the development of ecofeminism. They argued that, far from being objective and impartial, Western knowledge was the product of a partial, masculinist world-view. It was predicated on the viewpoint of white, middle-class Western men who were able to abstract themselves from the social and material world and produce knowledge which was claimed to be objective and universal but which was actually subjective and partial (see Charles, 1996 for a summary of these arguments). Science was characterized as a ‘masculinist project’ (Mellor, 1997: 118) and the rise of scientific rationality was linked to the release of ‘the full destructive potential of Western patriarchal culture’ (Mellor, 1997: 116). Prior to the emergence of rational science, it was argued, nature had been conceptualized as ‘a living being and nurturing mother’ albeit one that could be ‘wild, uncontrolled, and evil’ (Kheel, 2008: 212). With the development of capitalism and modern industry, an image of nature as a machine emerged and this, so Carolyn Merchant argues, encouraged the exploitative relation to nature that characterizes both science and capitalist production (Merchant, 1980). Thus feminists critique the claim that knowledge is ‘disembodied, impersonal and transcendent’ and argue that ‘the detachment of the scientific model . . . has led to the technologies of life or death such as nuclear physics and molecular © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 7 Bob Carter and Nickie Charles biology’ (Mellor, 1997: 118). Furthermore, it was argued, Western knowledge is opposed to embodied ways of knowing. Ecofeminists view nature and the natural world as embracing humanity rather than as something which is separate and separable from it; in this they concur with views advanced within the wider environmental movement. Ecofeminists also argue that the dualisms of Western philosophical thought are underpinned by a ‘logic of domination’ which legitimates the abuse of nature, women and other oppressed groups. This logic of domination elevates the masculine over the feminine associating it with reason, the mind, autonomy and culture. The feminine, by contrast, is associated with emotion, the body and the material world, including nature. This conceptual system ‘underlies the abuse of nature, women, and other marginalized humans in the Western world’ (Kheel, 2008: 210). Contrary to some critics (eg Meyer, 1999), ecofeminists do not necessarily argue that a transformation in dualistic modes of thought is sufficient to eliminate an exploitative relation to ‘nature’; on the contrary, oppressive and masculinist modes of thought are linked to material practices, and capitalist production in particular is identified as the cause of environmental degradation (Merchant, 1999). These dualisms associating women with nature and men with culture were assumed to be universal, thereby providing an explanation for women’s ‘universal’ oppression. This assumption, however, came under attack from within social anthropology. Anthropologists recognized that cultures other than their own had different world views and cosmologies and did not necessarily distinguish nature from culture or associate women with nature (see for eg Descola, 1996; Howell, 1996). These cosmologies, according to Descola, could be classified as totemic, animic and naturalism. A totemic classificatory system makes ‘use of empirically observable discontinuities between natural species to organize, conceptually, a segmentary order delimiting social units’; an animic classificatory system ‘endows natural beings with human dispositions and social attributes’ (Descola, 1996: 87) while naturalism is ‘the belief that nature does exist, that certain things owe their existence and development to a principle extraneous both to chance and to the effects of human will’ (Descola, 1996: 88). Naturalism ‘creates a specific ontological domain, a place of order and necessity where nothing happens without a reason or a cause’ (Descola, 1996: 88). And, as Descola points out, this is the Western view of nature and, in his view, is no more ‘true’ than totemism or animism; all are culturally relative. Ethnographic evidence of this sort demonstrated that there was no universal understanding of nature as a realm separate from human society. This meant, firstly that not all societies viewed women as closer to nature than men and nature as separable from and subordinate to culture; second that the evidence of women’s universal subordination was questionable; and thirdly that the way different societies understood their relation to their environment did not necessarily involve relations of hierarchy and power. This opened the way to cultural relativism and a stepping back from advancing universal explanations of allegedly universal phenomena. These issues are addressed by Peter Dickens (this volume) who 8 © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Society, nature and sociology links dualistic modes of thought and cosmologies both to the ways in which societies are organized and to the structure of the psyche. The civil rights, environmental and feminist movements have clearly challenged dominant conceptions of society and nature by pointing to their fundamental interconnections and by demonstrating their cultural relativity and their association with gendered and racialised hierarchies. They have, in different ways, questioned the values and assumptions associated with modernity, the valuing of progress, growth and risk-taking for example, analysing them not only as capitalist but also as masculinist and racist. In this sense they have been engaged in a cultural politics which challenges the way we think about the world and the practices in which we engage. These reconceptualizations were to have significant repercussions for sociology as a discipline and, arguably, constitute a continuing challenge to its very existence (eg Law, 2008; Jamison, 2001). ‘Nature’ in crisis: ‘society’ under threat The other challenges to sociological thinking came, on the one hand, from threats to the continued existence of human society such as that posed by nuclear weapons and the release of radiation from Chernobyl (1986) and, on the other hand, from the development of technologies of the body in particular and biotechnology more generally. These developments have led some sociologists (notably Beck) to suggest that modernity is being replaced by what he terms ‘risk society’. Risk society has been brought about by the emergence of risks which are unbounded, potentially catastrophic and global. It signals a shift from a society marked by distribution-based conflicts to one marked by ‘the production, definition and distribution of risks’ (Mol and Spaargaren, 1993: 440). Along with others, Beck takes the emergence of ‘new’ social movements in the 1960s and 1970s as indicating a transition to a new type of society. In his view, science and technology have contributed to the emergence of these risks and are ‘no longer capable of providing the security that is sought by the population to reduce their own anxieties and fears’; as a result, they have been ‘demystified’ (Mol and Spaargaren, 1993: 443). The idea of risk society contrasts with the suggestion that a third phase of modernity, ecological modernity, is emerging which involves a transformation of industrial production such that it becomes ‘an ecologically rational organization of production and consumption’ (Mol and Spaargaren, 1993: 437) taking ‘into account the maintenance of the existing sustenance base’ (Hannigan, 2006: 25). Developments in technologies of the body, such as reproductive technology, have also changed understandings of what is ‘natural’. Marilyn Strathern argues that the debates about reproductive technology, specifically surrogate motherhood during the 1980s, were about ‘the intrusion of technology into biological process’ and ‘interference with natural relations’; she suggests that Nature itself was under threat (Strathern, 1992: 41). In her words, ‘Artificial processes are seen to substitute for natural ones, and thus present themselves as “interfering with nature” . . . What is interfered with is the very idea of a natural fact. Or, to © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 9 Bob Carter and Nickie Charles put it another way, of the difference between natural and cultural ones’ (Strathern, 1992: 43). This coming together of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in reproductive technology is also a characteristic of genetic technology and Strathern’s arguments are echoed by Nikolas Rose (this volume). Beck argues in a similar way that nature no longer exists outside society or, indeed, society outside nature, because it has been so changed by human intervention (Beck, 1992: 80; see also Jamison, 2001). Industrial processes and the environmental degradation that they cause have resulted in nature becoming ‘a historical product’ (Beck, 1992: 80). Moreover, the ‘destruction of nature . . . becomes an integral part of the social, political and economic dynamic’ (Beck, 1992: 80). This he calls the societalization of nature, which, through the creation of ‘global social, economic and medical threats to people’, gives rise to newly emergent social, political and economic conflicts. Environmental problems thereby become social problems with attendant ‘risks’ for the future of democracy. The question of whether nature any longer has an independent existence has therefore emerged both from environmental degradation associated with capitalist industrial production and from developments in biotechnology. There no longer appears to be a natural realm which is independent of human activity. These developments – scientific, technological and industrial – mesh with ideas about cultural relativism and cosmologies which have no concept of ‘nature’ that is separate from something called ‘society’ or ‘culture’, and provide support for the argument that ‘nature’ is socially constructed. Such positions, however, ignore the compelling argument that aspects of nature may be modified but nature is not created by human activity. As Ted Benton puts it: [E]vidence of the potentially catastrophic implications of ecological degradation on a global scale might serve to remind us of the role of non-human nature, as well as human embodiment itself, in providing the bedrock conditions of possibility for any sort of human activity at all. (Benton, 2009: 226) New social movements, together with scientific and technological developments which create threats to the survival of both nature and society, have challenged sociology to incorporate ‘nature’ into theories of social reality, to recognize that human beings are part of a social and natural environment and that the natural environment, far from being infinitely exploitable, sets limits on what humankind is able to do. New social movements are also associated with the emergence of a new type of society, one which supersedes the modern epoch and the understandings of nature in which sociological notions of society and individual are grounded (Strathern, 1992). This has given rise to two different approaches to society and nature. The first retains a notion of nature which is connected to but conceptually distinguishable from society, while the second argues that it is no longer possible to make this conceptual distinction (or that it is one ‘choice’ amongst many). In what follows we look first at approaches that retain a notion of ‘nature’ and then at those which supersede it in one way or another. 10 © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Society, nature and sociology Reconceptualizing nature and society Nature as real The concern with the body and sexuality reasserts the materiality of bodies and their social and cultural effects. There has also been a move to reconceptualize sex and gender, with some arguing that sex as well as gender is socially constructed (Delphy, 1996) and others suggesting that our biology is influential in the way we experience gender. Similarly, some variants of ecological or environmental sociology insist that nature is not only ‘real’ with real effects on human societies but that sociology needs to take it into account in order fully to understand human societies. This insistence that ‘nature’ is an important dimension of human existence and that it ought to be encompassed within a properly sociological imagination poses a challenge to sociology as a discipline. This is because it would require not only that sociology consider the social, economic and political consequences of environmental degradation, as argued by Beck, but that it take into account the action of biological materiality on social processes. Ted Benton has discussed this at length in various works and he, in common with Peter Dickens, argues that it is possible to do this without resorting to biological reductionism, something that sociologists, with reason, have been at pains to avoid. His contribution to this volume illustrates this contention through an exploration of naturalistic explanations of human evolution. The importance of his chapter is that he shows how, in explaining human evolution, Darwin investigated not only the influence of ‘nature’ but also that of ‘society’ on human development, showing that their effects were different. This supports arguments for the retention of an idea of nature with different laws of causality from those operating at the social level. Such a view of nature can also be found in both Marx and contemporary forms of ecological Marxism. Marx’s work, despite its ambiguities, provides the basis for environmentalist arguments that recognize the influence of political ideas and structures on the character of the relationship between the natural and the social. It thereby avoids reducing the natural to the social, since for Marx the natural world possesses its own properties and powers, independent of human activity yet whose effects are mediated through the forms of that activity; and it avoids reducing the social to the natural, since the social world has emergent properties of its own that are themselves the product of the exercise of distinctively human properties and powers of language and reflexivity. Marx’s analysis contains a powerful critical theory of environmental crisis, one which identifies ‘capital’s hunger for materials and energy’ as ‘quantitatively anti-ecological’ (Burkett, 1999: 112). There are two sources of environmental crisis for Marx according to this interpretation. The first is a crisis of capital accumulation, where the technological advances and rising productivity associated with the expansion and reproduction of capital accumulation generate an increase in the quantity of natural forces and objects that capital must appropri- © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 11 Bob Carter and Nickie Charles ate as materials and as instruments of production; more and more of the earth’s resources must be turned into saleable objects of exchange value. Those resources that cannot be produced and sold at a profit, that are not socially valued within capitalist social relations, such as fertile land or an unpolluted environment, are simply neglected. The crisis of capital accumulation generates imbalances between capital’s material requirements (fossil-based fuels, for instance) and the natural conditions of raw materials production (global warming creates droughts which in turn significantly impair crop growth). The second form of crisis Marx points to is in the quality of human social development, particularly the increasing material and energy circulation produced by capitalism’s industrial division of town and country. Urban spaces and industrial production generate vast amounts of human and industrial waste matter which has to be disposed of or re-circulated. This is another example of a use value that cannot be converted readily into exchange value. Ecological Marxism argues that capitalist production is exploitative, not only of the working class but also of nature. Nature, or the environment, is both a source of raw materials and a depository for waste; the metaphors of ‘tap’ and ‘sink’ (O’Connor, 1998) or ‘mine’ and ‘dumping ground’ (Sachs, 1999: 26) have been used to describe this relationship. O’Connor has suggested, building on Marx’s analysis, that this constitutes a second contradiction of capitalism, one in which humanity is on a collision course with the natural world (O’Connor, 1998: xii). Capitalism, because it is a self-expanding system of economic growth (O’Connor, 1998: 10), is unable to operate in an environmentally sustainable manner and is the root of the current environmental crisis. Ecological Marxism, for O’Connor, recognizes the ‘irreducible autonomy of nature, as enabling and constraining human projects’ (O’Connor, 1998: 4) and that the ‘rhythms and cycles’ of nature ‘are governed by a different logic than the rhythms and cycles of capital’ (O’Connor, 1998: 10). Ecological Marxism argues further that the struggle over the conditions of production should be understood as including struggles over nature; over the conditions which enable the reproduction of the conditions of production to continue. This struggle is engaged in by new social movements and aims to protect the ‘viability of the social and natural environment as means of life and life itself’ (O’Connor, 1998: 12). Thus nature is conceptualized as constituting a fundamental part of the conditions of production, conditions that capitalist production itself is destroying. ‘After nature’ An alternative approach argues that ‘nature’ no longer has an autonomous existence, if it ever did, and that we are ‘after nature’ (Strathern, 1992). This is not necessarily because the material, biological world no longer exists but because the idea of nature no longer provides the grounding in relation to which human beings construct societies and culture: nature is no longer conceptualized as an ‘autonomous domain’ (Strathern, 1992: 194). Furthermore this transformation in the way in which ‘nature’ functions conceptually has partly been 12 © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Society, nature and sociology brought about by the effect of biotechnology; relationships which were previously thought to be ‘natural’, such as that between mother and child, can now be seen ‘either as socially constructed or as a natural state of affairs (socially) assisted’. This means that choice is exercised about ‘what to consider natural’ (Strathern, 1992: 196). This destabilization of context is what, in Strathern’s view, explains the perception of ecological crisis. If nature has not disappeared, then, its grounding function has. It no longer provides a model or analogy for the very idea of context. With the destabilising of relation, context and grounding, it is no surprise that the present crisis (epoch) appears an ecological one. (Strathern, 1992: 195) Strathern argues that ‘the End of Nature is really After Nature: a point of apprehension, in this case of the constructional roles that particular concept has played in our perceptions’ (Strathern, 1992: 191). We have moved beyond the modern epoch which was characterized by a distinction and connection between society and nature, each being defined in relation to the other and, although sharing similarities, also differing. Culture and nature may be connected together as domains that run in analogous fashion insofar as each operates in a similar way according to laws of its own; at the same time, each is also connected to a whole other range of phenomena which differentiate them – the activities of human beings, for instance, by contrast with the physical properties of the universe. (Strathern, 1992: 73) For Strathern, we are now ‘after nature’; there is no longer a grounding notion of nature in relation to which we are able to understand society, culture and the individual. Others, such as Haraway (2003) with her notion of natureculture, and Swyngedouw (1999) with the idea of socio-nature, take this further, refusing any distinction, conceptual or otherwise, between society and nature. Neither society nor nature exist independently of the practices and performances which create the realities of which they are part and which bring them into being (Law, 2009); there is therefore no essential difference or boundary between them. This shift in thinking about society and nature is marked by a move from asking why things happen to charting the ‘how’ of social processes in minute detail, a move from causal explanation to phenomenological description; indeed phenomenology and ethnomethodology came under attack in the 1970s for having no concept of society so it should not be a surprise that their resurgence is associated with a denial of the conceptual distinction between society and nature (Worsley, 1974). Some of these differences are represented in this volume. Thus Ted Benton, Peter Dickens and Kate Soper argue for recognition of an external reality, the different layers of which are governed by different types of causality, while Nikolas Rose takes the view that nature can no longer be seen as a realm separate from society. He argues this in relation to biotechnology, specifically genetics, and approaches the issue through an exploration of the normal and the pathological. For him this raises ethical questions about what sorts of human © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 13 Bob Carter and Nickie Charles beings we would like to become, questions also touched upon by Kate Soper in the final chapter of the volume. Challenging the discipline Some variants of environmental sociology, such as the new ecological paradigm which was advanced in the late 1970s, argue that sociology has to change in order to be able to ‘make it environmental in its preconceptions’; thus rather than ‘avoiding’ the concept of nature, sociology should incorporate it (Foster, 2002: 56). Arguably such incorporation is only possible by a transformation of sociology and of its object of study – the social. Indeed there are many who argue that for environmental issues to be taken seriously there has to be a reconfiguration of the disciplines such that disciplinary boundaries are broken down and society and nature can be conceptualized as different parts of a single whole (Jamison, 2001; Descola and Palsson, 1996). Such reconceptualizations serve to displace concepts such as ‘society’ thereby ‘fundamentally altering the sociological tradition’ and have developed inter alia from the sociology of networks and flows (Mol and Spaargaren, 2005: 96). Material flows ‘become the unit of analysis’ and this, it has been argued, represents a radicalization of the new ecological paradigm advanced in the 1970s. Furthermore, environmental flows are made ‘inherently social’ and are not ‘necessarily or exclusively material. They also can be for the most part social, or a combination or hybrid: a social-material flow’ (Mol and Spaargaren, 2005: 99). Mobility is another key concept that is elaborated in Urry’s chapter (this volume) and explored empirically in the chapter by Flynn et al. Thus the ‘mobility of environmental ideas, information, and interpretation frameworks flowing between networks and nodes around the globe can – according to the sociology of flows – be interpreted in much the same way as material flows’ (Mol and Spaargaren, 2005: 99). Urry’s ‘sociology of flows’ is influenced by actor-network theory and ‘argues for a merge of the natural and the social into hybrids, putting “material worlds” or hybrids at the center of analysis’ (Mol and Spaargaren, 2005: 99). Thus the sociology of flows does not distinguish between nature and society or the material and the social. Mol and Spaargaren note that the merging of society and nature has serious consequences for sociology as a discipline. For Urry the division between society and nature is outdated, as is the division between the natural and social sciences, and what is now needed is ‘complexity sciences’ in order to understand contemporary developments. This model is clearly derived from complexity and chaos theory, as is talk of flows, fluids, fractals, autopoiesis and so on, all concepts which are mobilized by Urry and borrowed from models developed within the natural sciences. The call for an integration of social and natural sciences has been on the agenda since the 1970s and the emergence of the environmental movement; indeed it is said to be one of the consequences of this movement (Jamison, 2001) and is supported by several of our contributors. 14 © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Society, nature and sociology The final development to mention here concerns the conflict between constructionism and realism that erupted into the ‘science wars’ in the 1990s (Law, 2008). At its most extreme this was a conflict over whether reality exists – a perennial philosophical problem which arguably is not the proper concern of sociology (Turnbull and Antalffy, 2009) – and raised the question of the extent to which ‘nature’ was constructed by scientific practice or existed externally to it. This has been a problem for those feminists wishing to hang on to ‘reality’ while recognizing that knowledges are situated and embodied. Donna Haraway puts this cogently when she says that she wants to have ‘an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims . . . and a no-nonsense commitment to a faithful account of the “real” world’ (Haraway, 1991: 187 our emphasis). Within sociology there are many who take a similar view, arguing for a social constructionist position without taking the view that reality has no independent existence. Social constructionists, according to Hannigan, do not claim that ‘environmental risks do not exist or that natural reality plays no identifiable role in producing knowledge about these risks’ (Hannigan, 2006: 29). On the contrary, they are interested in the different ways in which environmental problems are understood and how, through the pressures brought to bear by social movements, NGOs, the media and government, to name but a few, and the different discursive framing of environmental problems that are associated with different social actors, policies and practices emerge which may themselves have material consequences. Such processes are investigated by Chris Shaw (this volume) who combines a social constructionist with a critical realist approach to explore how the idea of a dangerous limit has been constructed and its potential consequences for efforts to halt global warming. His chapter is important because it shows that scientific uncertainties have been made into certainties in the process of developing policy. He calls for a recognition both of uncertainty and that science cannot provide all the answers; instead the development of climate change policies has to be subjected to a democratic process, which will embody a more positive precautionary principle and which will not be dominated by science and technology. In this he agrees with many of the contributors that the problem of climate change is something that cannot be solved through a reliance on science and technology alone. Sociology and environmental politics Sociology and the social sciences more generally have a critical part to play in understanding how the ecological crisis has come about, investigating its hugely unequal impact on human societies and contributing towards the development of social and political programmes that will avert or ameliorate the crisis. Although science and technology clearly have a critical part to play, it is unlikely that there will be a technological fix to solve the crisis. John Urry, in his chapter, © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 15 Bob Carter and Nickie Charles issues a passionate plea for sociology to engage with the debates about climate change, in this sense agreeing with the sentiments expressed by Chris Shaw that it is not sufficient to leave the question of climate change to the scientists. Other sociologists have taken up Urry’s challenge. As we have already seen, Beck’s concept of risk society is a contribution to understanding the profoundly undemocratic future that may be a consequence of ecological crisis. More recently Giddens has intervened in the debate by providing a prescription for tackling climate change based on sociological analysis of the problem and the possible ways in which global warming might be addressed. His approach has much in common with the ideas of ecological modernity, that modernity is now entering a phase where ecological concerns will be central to industrial production, although he also argues that an ensuring state that monitors what is happening and enables agreed goals to be achieved is essential. He therefore recognizes that capitalist enterprises left to their own devices will not necessarily deliver on climate change (Giddens, 2009). He argues that environmental justice is important, recognizing that those who are living in poverty will suffer disproportionately from climate change; what he fails to acknowledge, as MacGregor points out in her chapter, is that the majority of the poor are women and it is therefore women and children who will be affected disproportionately. Climate change is, in this sense, profoundly gendered, something that is not recognized by most environmental sociologists. Sherilyn MacGregor adopts a feminist social constructionist approach to illustrate a gendered analysis of climate change. For her gender is important to the way in which climate change is understood, in how it is experienced in daily life, and in institutional and individual responses to climate change (see also Mellor, 1997). MacGregor’s chapter shows that environmental degradation and climate change are not gender neutral; this raises the important question of environmental justice and how it is to be achieved if a concept of gender is missing from analyses of climate change. The chapter by Daniel De Hanas provides an example of women’s activism in relation to the environment and illustrates one of the points made by MacGregor, that women’s activism often takes place within the constraints of gender divisions of labour. He situates his research in the context of discussions about the relationship of religions to environmental issues, arguing that Islam has more potential for environmental protection than does Christianity. He illustrates this through an exploration of a women’s programme on Muslim Community Radio, showing that the broadcasts sacralize environmentalism, promote the idea that Islam is modern, and challenge accepted gender divisions of labour. The three chapters that follow focus on alternative sources of energy and food production. Rob Flynn, Paul Bellaby and Miriam Ricci explore people’s attitudes to hydrogen, an alternative source of energy, investigating the gap that exists between values and action on environmental issues. They ask why it is that, even though people are now aware of the risks of global warming, they do not seem to have made appropriate changes in their behaviour, and provide 16 © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Society, nature and sociology evidence to show that people are ‘locked in’ to behaviours that rely on the use of non-renewable energy. They also show that women are often ‘greener’ than men in their environmental attitudes. While Flynn et al. explore views on hydrogen technology amongst those who are not directly affected by its generation, Carly McLachlan’s focus is on local reaction to renewable energy generation. She explores the reaction of ‘stakeholders’ and the public more generally to two specific developments, linking them to the different symbolic meanings of place and technology. She shows that ideas about the relationship between technology, nature and place are critical in people’s responses to the siting of alternative technology. Environmental arguments can be mobilized both in favour of, and against, such technologies, not only in terms of where they are sited, but also in terms of their desirability and the contribution they are likely to make to alleviating global warming. Perhaps a more fundamental way of countering climate change is to develop ways of producing which do not rely on practices that are exploitative and destructive of the environment. Such practices are explored by Liz Dowler, Moya Kneafsey, Rosie Cox and Lewis Holloway in their chapter on food production where they investigate those involved in ‘alternative’ or ‘sustainable’ food networks. They argue that ideas of reconnection and an ‘ethic of care’ are fundamental to these networks and that behaviour, in terms of values and practices, can and does change, given the right social context. This sort of change in values and practices, which has been characterized as post-material (Inglehart, 1990), is also advocated by Kate Soper. Along with many of the contributors, she argues that it is not sufficient to seek alternative sources of energy so that we can continue with our existing lifestyle; more radical changes are needed. As an early environmental campaigner put it: the accent must be far more on reducing the amount of travel than on looking for the technological ‘fix’. The crucial changes must be social rather than technological. We shall have to live closer to our work and shop locally, buying locally grown food and locally made goods, consisting far more of local materials. . . . In short, the key to alternative transport lies in the alternative to transport. (Rivers, 1976: 227 cited in Jamison, 2001) Soper poses the question of whether we can any longer distinguish between that which is artificially contrived and that which is naturally given – a question that is answered by Nikolas Rose in the negative but which others answer in the affirmative. Soper argues that, despite all the ways in which humans intervene in natural processes, nature continues to exist independently of human activity in the sense that ‘all our interventions . . . are dependent on the workings of physical law and process, and have their outcomes determined by them’. And she points out that her position, along with that of critical realists like Ted Benton and Peter Dickens, relies on a ‘ “realist” or theoretical concept of nature © 2010 The Authors. Editorial organisation © 2010 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 17 Bob Carter and Nickie Charles rather than ‘other more phenomenological or metaphysical concepts’. Soper’s argument about an alternative hedonism and care for the environment resonates with the arguments of Dowler et al. about a new ethic of care that they identify among alternative producers and consumers of food. The contributors to this volume present a powerful argument for sociological intervention in debates about climate change, particularly in understanding the socio-economic and cultural processes which have given rise to it and how they might be changed so as to avoid ecological catastrophe. And in order for sociologists to intervene effectively, sociology needs to engage across disciplinary boundaries. This means moving away from an insistence that sociology is only able to deal with the social or cultural, defined in contradistinction to the natural, and engaging with ‘nature’, however it is defined. The chapters in this book provide different illustrations of how this is happening and how sociology is beginning to address one of the most urgent problems facing humankind. Note 1 We are aware that there is disagreement about whether or not Marx, Weber and Durkheim can be considered, strictu sensu, sociologists (see for example Osborne and Rose, 2008). 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