We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature. We’ve lost our connection to ourselves.
(Originally from fern and moss, Reblogged from Displace)
On these accounts, critical realism squares with a mild form of relativism. Recognizing the social construction of knowledge does not, for critical realists, entail a necessary capitulation to radical and nihilistic forms of relativism, though naive absolutism is forever dismissed, as knowledge is an interaction of subject and object. Critical realism is a sort of acknowledgement that direct access to a preordered reality is impossible and that knowledge is always fallible and incomplete, coupled with an optimism that this admission need pose no fatal blow to the project of finding better explanations for reality.
Critical realism is not, however, an epistemology alone; it is perhaps even better known for its ontological commitments. Largely following Bhaskar, critical-realist ontology involves a stratification model of reality. In Bhaskar’s model, reality consists of the domains of teh real, the actual, and the empirical (1975). The latter is the world we experience; it is, operationally, the limit of reality according to restrictive forms of empiricism present in some positivist approaches to science. The actual domain is the realm of events, not all of which are experienced by people. The real domain is that of generative mechanisms or structures (in conjunction with contingent conditions) responsible for events, which themselves are unobservable. Structures are defined by Sayer as “sets of internally [i.e., necessarily, not contingently] related objects or practices (1992:92). Critical-realist ontology thus involves a denial of atomism, the notion that events are merely contingently related. Its focus on underlying structural causes of phenomena would also lead to a materialist interpretation of different ideas of nature. In other words, the epistemological question, “Which truth-claim is more adequate?” is joined by the ontological question: “What kinds of historical/geographical structural relations and contingent conditions have combined to result in this diverse set of truth claims?”
I identified two related but distinct points of contention in debates about the social construction of nature, which might be better elucidated through greater terminological precision. The first concerns the epistemological implications of understanding our concepts of nature as socially constructed, historically and geographically situated, and in that sense contingent. I pointed out that, in so far as all concepts are constructed, the construction metaphor may not be the most effective way to refute taken for granted beliefs about particular things. In light of the metaphysical baggage the term carries, refutationists would do better to dispense with it altogether and simply call misconceptions of nature wrong. A second major point of contention concerns the metaphysical implications of understanding ‘nature’ as a socially constructed and ontologically contingent phenomenon. For many critics of constructionism, ‘nature’ is precisely that which is *not* socially contingent, but the ‘social-construction of nature’ is used in so many ways that it is not always clear what is meant by the term. Some use it in a nominalist vein to denaturalize ‘nature’ as always conceptually and discursively mediated, others in a more liberal, ontologically idealist way to suggest that natural phenomena are literally built by people, while yet others use the construction metaphor to explore the ways that the matter of nature is realized discursively or through networks of practical engagements with heterogeneous other beings. These different understandings of teh who, what and how of nature’s construction turn largely on the relationships between the process of conceptual construal and of materially constructing, but unfortunately use of the noun ‘construction’ obscures the relationships at issue between the process and the outcome of the construction.
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The variety of constructionisms suggests that it is possible to understand the social construction of nature in a number of ways, but unless people are more careful with their terms the world-views implied by claims about the social construction of nature will be no clearer than the politics.
The economic invisibility of nature: What comes to humans from nature doesn’t get priced in markets
Economics has become the currency of policy and unless we address this invisibility, we are going to get the results we are seeing, which is the gradual degradation and loss of this valuable asset.
To whom should this get paid? That genetic material probably belonged, if it could belong to anyone, to a community of four people, who parted with their knowledge to help researchers find the molecule… Today the depletion of ocean fisheries is so significant that it is affecting the ability of the poor to feed their families.
It is actually the poor who depend most on these ecosystem services… If we measure how much they’re worth to the poor, the answers are more like 45%, 75%, 90% [of GDP], because these are important assets for the poor. You can’t have a proper model for development if at the same time you’re destroying your asset, which is ecological infrastructure.
The reason this is happening boils down… to our inability to perceive the difference between public benefits and private profits. We tend to constantly ignore public wealth simply because it is common wealth.
What are the costs of doing business as usual? -$2.15 trillion.
This is not illegal stuff. If you drill water to make Coke, it’s not illegal, but it costs the community.Basically the stuff of life is natural capital, we need to recognise that and build that into our (economic) systems. Calculating this at the state level is being done, but calculating this at the business level is more difficult.
If we had accounted for these costs of logging due to losses of flooding, of topsoil, of waterways, of productivity, to local communities, those costs are almost twice as much as the market cost of timber. The cost of timber ought to have been three times what it was to reflect the true pain and cost to society.
The way to do this is to do it on a company basis, to take leadership in important sectors, and to disclose these costs… We are measuring it because you cannot manage what you do not measure.
If we do this, we can compare the social performance of companies.
We are not only risking the extinction of the entire coral species or a forth of all the fish species, but we are risking the lives and livelihoods of more than 500 million people who live in the developing world. In selecting targets of 450ppm or 2 degrees rise, we have made an ethical choice in society to not coral reefs. We may have done that, so let’s think about it and what it means. I don’t think we can afford too much of such ethical choices.
I’m not sure if this means that quantitative, positivistic economics is merging with more qualitative, critical human-nature geography, or that they’re moving further apart. They seem to move in the same direction, i.e. towards considering the networks, the different actors involved, more environmental, hydrogeomorphological and political-economic and social analyses of ecosystem and economic change.
But maybe this is the way forward, speaking the language of firms, of policy, of governance. But it also seems a bit of a compromise from the revolutionary aims of most political and economic geography, perhaps almost to the point where it is counter-revolutionary, because it is only staving off the realisation that it is still a morally unethical form of exploitation. It seems like it might only extend the uneven power relations already present between the developed and developing worlds, between corporations and small communities, into new discussions - discussions about the ‘price’ and ‘value’ of nature.
Who can be an urban ecological citizen? Who has “rights to the city,” as well as obligations, duties, and the necessary virtues, to play a legitimate role in keeping it healthy? Traditionalists argue that citizenship involves enforceable contracts. But moral as well as contractual, legal aspects matter, resulting in an ecological citizenship that includes nonhumans. Such citizenship revolves around the pursuit of ecological justice and is underpinned by an ethics of care… This ethic is not rooted in some generalized compassion or sense of responsibility, but rather in co-evolutionary processes… Citizenly relations thus stretch across the nature-society divide.
The importance of animals in nature-society relations rest in their own right both as a natural other and as a metonym for the rest of nature’s ‘other’. As such, the relational assemblages involving humans and animals have changed markedly over the years as animals have concomitantly been increasingly marginalized or commodified… in this ecotouristic context, particular assemblages of performance – clearly and purposefully mediated by tourist operators – can emerge to affect a rapidly changing coconstitution of place.
