Nature Society Configurations

I'm just going to do this one in pictures for now, maybe write about it later...

Option 1: nature and society as two separate realms

Option 2: nature and society as largely separate but with some fuzzy overlap

Option 3: nature and society as a single hybrid realm

Option 4: society as a part of nature

Human impacts on or in the environment?

Another thought which illustrates for me the inadequacy of a division between the nature and unnatural, or between nature and society. This one was triggered by a passage from Bill McKibben's book The End of Nature, which is quoted in a Rough Guide to The Earth as suggesting that:

we could let human activity alter the climate so that a hotter-than-before day is essentially a human artifact. But if we take steps to stop altering the climate, a normal cool day is also an artificial event which we have decided to create (Ince, 2007: 272).

Thus, by actively choosing to mitigate global climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions we are still creating a human-altered/influenced/managed environment. Through our very presence, self-awareness and power to effect environmental change, whatever we as a species choose to do represents a choice of type of impact in our environment, rather than a choice of level of impact on the environment. This is especially the case given the level of global awareness which has emerged in the past half-century.

This is illustrated on a smaller scale by the management of nature reserves and national parks, which ranges from hands-on management to hands-off 'un-management', and with varying degrees of intervention in between. All of these types of management represent active choices to effect a certain outcome which we have determined is best. And the same is true on the global scale in the case of climate change. Trying to view nature or the environment as a separate domain in which we can choose our level of impact is clearly unrealistic - because of our presence, self-awareness and power to effect environmental change we are always choosing our type of impact. Some form of environmental impact will always result from our actions as a species, since we are a part of our environmental system, not a separate unnatural or social domain.

The question: whether breaking down the division between nature and society in our thinking would lead to a better understanding of the effect that human activity has within our environment?

Are there any natural landscapes left?

When the prevalent dualism of nature vs. society is applied to landscapes, it creates another dualism - landscapes are divided into natural landscapes or man-made landscapes (aka anthropogenic, human, social ... landscapes). Then building on this often-unquestioned dualism of landscapes, many of our environmental movements have an explicit focus on preventing the 'natural' landscapes from being influenced by society/humans, and thus becoming 'man-made' landscapes.

Examples of this type of environmental organisation include the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council, all of whom call for the protection of 'wild places' or 'wilderness' - our 'natural' landscapes.

While I would tend to reject these categories based on the nature/society dualism, it is clear that of the variety of landscapes on earth today, the level of direct human influence does vary. Yet I would disagree that a landscape can be characterised as either natural or man-made. And perhaps global climate change, what some would describe as the ultimate environmental challenge, will finally destroy this landscape dualism. I suggest this because global climate change presents anthropogenic environmental change on a truly global scale, thus affecting all landscapes, whether they were previously 'natural' or 'man-made'. Perhaps, for better or worse, the onset of anthropogenic global climate change will put an end to the idea that any landscape can be truly pristine and natural, that a Garden of Eden might still exist in the wilderness which can be preserved and maintained through careful management.

But where does this leave those environmental organisations? Do we simply have to choose what to protect in a different way, or does this herald the rise of a completely new approach in for the environmental movement?

Paradox

Have you ever come across a new idea or concept which hasn't been part of your thinking before, and then in the following weeks, found it cropping up in everything you read? Paradox is one of those for me. First it cropped up in an article by James Proctor which I found useful in forming the conclusion to an essay about the role of Geography in the field of Political Ecology. Proctor cites Kierkegaard's view that be ability to "retain paradox is the mark of good inquiry" (1998) in calling for a geography which does not flatten reality under a forced nature-culture dualism, and this clarified for me the argument that I had formed to argue a similar point.

Having thought about this, the notion of paradox suddenly started to seem central to other aspects of my reading - particularly in work questioning the meanings of 'nature', for example Cronon's edited book Uncommon Ground. And again in literature about happiness, which I was using to explore how the economic concept of utility has failed to produce outcomes which maximise human happiness. Much of the happiness literature described how a paradoxical notion of self/the individual as divided and separate from society has tended to produce flawed understandings of happiness.

And most recently, one of the two comments posted in response to posts on this blog has been from Geoffrey Edwards, for whom paradox forms a central interest and subject of two blogs. The suggestion there is that we are in the middle of a paradigm shift from a dominance of orthodoxy to one of paradoxy. Read more here.

Anyone else have anything else to say about paradoxes?