The environment is arguably an invention of our imagination. What we know from experience of much of the world, moreover, is related to us through stories, conventions, and ideas that we learn from other people. Processes and transitions are captured in conceptual terms that are fundamentally symbolic and abstract. This is as true for modern urban residents as it is for forest-dwelling agriculturists, perhaps more so. Ideas about nature inevitably reflect our social world. This is the basic claim of constructivism.
In its most radical form, “hard” constructivism takes this symbolic and ideational character of environmental knowledge extremely seriously. It insists that it is social context alone that conditions and determines our concepts for understanding the world, and so creates the world, at least effectively, in the process. This position suggests that things are true because they are held to be true by the socially powerful and influential, because they are true on television, and because they are true in our minds. As philosopher of science Steve Woogar insists, “nature and reality are the by-product rather than the pre-determinants of scientific activity.” Environmental conflicts are, therefore, struggles over ideas about nature, in which one group prevails, not because they hold a better or more accurate account of a process—soil erosion, global warming, ozone depletion—but because they access and mobilize social power to create consensus on the truth.
For most political ecologists, this approach is somewhat too sharp a double-edged sword. While it allows a critical examination of how politically empowered environmental science has influenced and created the environments of the world around us, which is an important political ecological project, this approach does not allow us to make references to non-human actors and processes (like soil, trees, and climate) in explaining outcomes. This makes hard constructivism unattractive to many researchers. While producing a valuable open space for accepting and appreciating alternative constructions of the environment held by other social communities, like forest dwellers, nomadic herders, and religious philosophers, this approach makes the symbolic systems of humans sovereign over all other reality, apparently disabling empirical investigation in traditional environmental science.
As a result, most political ecologists tacitly cling to a “softer” form of constructivism, which holds that our concepts of reality are real and have force in the world but that they reflect incomplete, incorrect, biased, and false understandings of an empirical reality. In other words, the objective world is real and independent of our categorization but filtered through subjective conceptual systems and scientific methods that are socially conditioned. Within this approach to constructivism, there are differing emphases, which center attention either on people’s misunderstanding of objective facts or on the social biases that enter into scientific exploration.
In the first case, false and socially biased categories of the world like “race,” are important to understand and explore even while their reality—consistent, racially-differentiated genetic differences—does not objectively exist. Since people hold them experientially, these concepts or social constructions make a difference in the world, often with harmful effects and therefore need to be understood. This “social object” approach to nature is attractive for political ecologists, who are able to assume that ecological science can reveal real environmental trends, like soil erosion, while social investigation can show how ignorant people can create false pictures of the world through power-laden social processes. This approach is satisfactory for most researchers since they consider themselves scientists. They can insist that their way of seeing the problem, using the tools of science, helps to unmask biased and incorrect views of nature.
The confidence that such an approach places in scientific practice, however, is highly problematic. As radical constructivists persuasively point out, and as is revealed in histories of science, the very categories of scientific investigation are the same order of “social object” as the false commonsensical notions of the lay population.
The history of ecology is revealing in this respect. The dominant theories of the operation of natural systems have consistently reflected the prevailing social languages and assumptions of their times. Emerging during the high Industrial age, the science of ecology came to depend heavily on metaphors and concepts from mechanical engineering, with orderly, cyclical processes structured around balance and symmetry. It also drew heavily, and somewhat contradictorily, upon philosophical Romanticism and the obsession with holism and interdependence, as is found in Romantic writers like Henry David Thoreau. These metaphors, on which science depends, became unsatisfactory in recent years, either because they reflected reality poorly, or didn’t fit changing social and cultural codes and now are in a state of upheaval.
This should be in no way surprising, ecologist Daniel Botkin insists: Previous views of nature, either as an organic whole or as a divinely ordered house, clearly reflected the social languages available to those who sought to explain nature’s order. So too, the history of primatology, studied in careful detail by Donna Haraway, shows similar socially-bounded evolution; the changing topics of explorations and experiments on chimpanzees and gorillas (maternal instinct, aggression, competition) reflect the social concerns of their historical moment. It reads more like a history of contemporary American culture than the orderly evolution of animal ethology. Our scientific ideas of nature inevitably reflect the social conditions and dominant metaphors in which they were formed. This is not necessarily bad. With changing metaphors come emerging ways of thinking about and reinventing the world. Science is not free of “social objects.”
An alternative soft constructivist approach, “social institutional constructivism,” allows that such biases are a structural part of scientific practice, but that they nevertheless do not solely determine the conditions of the objective material world. Rather these conceptual biases in science help to explain why science sometimes gets facts wrong. For social institutional constructivists, wrong ideas about nature are a product of the inevitable “socialness” of scientific communities. Overtime, however, and through progressive experimentation and refutation the “social” ideas are purged from our understanding of nature, moving towards a true understanding of the objects of the natural world. This is especially true, a social institutional constructivist might argue, as contemporary ecology and life sciences become more and more reflexive about the metaphors that underpin their analysis of objective systems.
As an approach to political ecology, this is perhaps the most common and attractive compromise. Knowledges are all different, most researchers maintain, and different experiences, like those of biologists, herders, historians, farmers, and foresters, do indeed produce extremely different categorical structures for interpreting the objective realities of the natural world. Even so, these knowledges can be examined by incorporating local ways of knowing into a flexible but rigorous scientific framework, which will distill myths from realities and produce better, more emancipatory knowledge. Acknowledging the socially situated character of science, the method can still be used to test contested claims.
This approach is a pragmatic compromise but is troubling for many observers of science and politics. From a philosophical and historical point of view, it is somewhat unconvincing and asymmetrical; social institutional constructivism insists that only falsehoods, those situations where scientific facts are wrong, can be explained socially, whereas facts and true understandings of nature have no social component.
For some political ecologists who are most definitely interested in how environmental concepts become powerful and true, this might be quite unsatisfactory. Such an approach only functions to explain things that we believe to be “wrong” including the dominant account of nature, and only if we are already confident that whatever the claims are, they are wrong, and scientifically untrue. Generally, this means that the claims of others (“enemies” like state oil conservationists, World Bank officers, or seed company representatives) can be disposed of as “constructions,” while the claims of other parties (“allies” like local herders or fishermen) are held up as environmental “knowledge.” Where even those allies’ knowledges fail the practical tests of science—whatever that is taken to mean—they too become constructions.
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