Chapter 8: Social Construction of Nature

Chapter 8: Social Construction of Nature

Chapter 8 discusses the concept of the social construction of nature, which is an analytic used to challenge dominant forms of knowledge about the environment. The constructivist perspective argues that all knowledge is socially constructed in a specific context with uneven relations of power. Social constructivist theory is presented with examples and its limitations.

Welcome to the Jungle

No matter how remote a place may be, all nature is socially constructed.

1. Social construction – any category, condition, or thing that is understood to have certain characteristics because people agree that it does.
2. For example, wilderness and nature are concepts of the natural world that are socially constructed as entirely separate from society.
3. A constructivist examines how concepts, beliefs, and practices shape not only how we understand the world, but also the actual world itself.

So You Say it’s “Natural”?

1. The word nature has three different but often overlapping meanings that are not always made explicit when the word is used. In all three of these meanings, nature is taken to be something separate from society.

(i)the essential quality and character of something;

(ii)the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both;

(iii)the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings.

1. The way that we understand the “natural” properties of something depends on the social context, or the set of social relations, in which these concepts were created. The social context determines in part which concepts are conceived, which ones take hold, and which ones are dismissed.
2. Race is an example of a concept that was socially constructed as natural, even using scientific methods, measurements, and discourse to justify domination of other people. The social relations that generated the concept of race are very real, but the genetic basis does not exist.
3. How do we know if something is socially constructed? We can ask some questions:
4. Is this claim or concept natural, inevitable, timeless, and universal?
5. If not, at what point was it invented? Under what conditions?
6. What are the social, political, or environmental effects of believing that this claim or concept is true, natural, or inevitable?
7. Would we be better off doing away with the concept altogether, or rethinking it in a fundamental way?

The social construction of “New World” natures

1. Europeans created an image of the New World as pristine and unchanged by humans, despite the very complex and dramatic environmental changes created by the indigenous societies.
2. Large cities, deforestation, irrigation
3. The image of the pristine new world was supported by:
4. Religious beliefs about an unchanged Eden
5. The desire to justify colonial expansion and domination of inhabited territory
6. Does it matter whether the assumptions were true? It is more important to ask what happened because of those assumptions, and who benefitted.
7. The knowledge that is most widely accepted or accepted by the most powerful will be used to control environmental resources.

Environmental Discourse

1. Discourse – basically, spoken and written language that not only represents the world, but can also materially change it. Includes:
2. Narrative – a story with a beginning and an end
3. Concept – a single idea
4. Ideology – belief about how the world is and how it ought to be
5. Signifying practices – modes and methods of representation
6. Through the process of producing a discourse, the origin of the elements disappears and we begin to accept the discourse as true without question.
7. A social constructivist wants to destabilize environmental discourses and find out how the origins of their elements have influenced environmental knowledge. Of particular interest are the institutions that create and sustain these discourses along with particular relations of power that influenced the creation of environmental knowledge and discourse.

Power/Knowledge

1. Michel Foucault uses the term power/knowledge to remind us that there are relations of power embedded in all knowledge (and discourse).
2. Power is not something that one has or can give away, power is something that is used by one entity over another.
3. It is through these power relationships that even marginalized ways of knowing may destabilize the dominant discourses.

The discourse of North African desertification

1. A series of reports from the 18th century until as recent as 1997 suggest that the Sahara Desert is advancing and replacing productive forest and farm land. This assessment has provided justification for a number of international programs aiming to convert the land cover “back” to a desired form.
2. However, current studies show that the region has had periodic shifts but no radical changes as have been previously assumed.
3. Was it a lack of information, or did the discourse of desertification serve someone?
4. French colonial officers used it to justify greater control over the land, as well as settlement and control over nomadic populations.

Wilderness: a troublesome discourse

The concept of wilderness is problematic because:

1. It is specific to Western European cultures, and the concept is constantly shifting.
2. It shifted from meaning barren wasteland that should be dominated and civilized to a pure, untouched landscape that should be preserved. Either way, the concept disguises human values as natural conditions.
3. It has often been applied to places that are inhabited and altered by people, sometimes with displacement and violence.
4. It places the focus on places assumed to be wilderness (which do not technically exist anyway) and takes the focus away from other valuable natural areas or conditions.

Social constructivist arguments should not be used to prevent preservation, but to force an examination of whose values are being represented and whose idea of nature is being created or sustained.

The Limits of Constructivism: Science, Relativism, and the Very Material World

What about science?

1. Science is often assumed to be objective method for discovering the truth of nature, but social constructivists have shown that the practices and even the findings of science are socially constructed as well.

The threat of relativism

1. Relativism argues that all beliefs, truths, and facts are socially constructed in a particular social context.
2. So what information can we believe, and act on?
3. There are different shades of relativism. Many relativists will readily agree that there are influences other than the social context.

Constructivism in a material world

1. The problem with relativism is that there are things and systems that operate independently of human behavior, no matter what knowledge we construct about them.
2. An alternative concept is that of co-production, which argues that humans and non-humans produce and change one another through interactions.