Toward a Multicultural Ecology

Abstract

T he debate between realists and constructivists has polarized much environmental scholarship in recent years. Although social constructivist accounts have proven fruitful in making sense of a wide range of social phenomena, their more recent application to natural phenomena, and especially to environmental issues, has raised questions that prove discomforting for many environmental scholars and activists. The dilemma raised by constructivists is this: If nature, wilderness, ecology, and the environment are all socially constructed-ideas about the world rather than the world itself-what is it exactly that environmental protection efforts are fighting to defend and preserve? 1 This debate flared up among environmental scholars following the publication of William Cronon's (1995a) article "The Trouble With Wilderness" and the edited collection Uncommon Ground (Cronon, 1995b). Although not an entirely original argument (see, e.g., Callicott, 1991;Nelson, 1996), Cronon's cultural and historical deconstruction of the wilderness idea managed to make it into the popular press, with an excerpt published in The New York Times. In a series of articles and magazine editorials, conservation biologist Michael Soulé (1995), Earth First! cofounder Dave Foreman (1996/1997), biocentric deep ecologists George Sessions (1995a) and Paul Shepard (1995), and poet Gary Snyder (1996 responded by decrying Cronon and his postmodern deconstructionist allies as new enemies of environmentalism, responsible for what Soulé and Lease (1995) called a "social siege of nature" that ostensibly both parallels and supports the physical siege of nature by industrial society.

Probing the interfaces between the social sciences and social-ecological resilience: insights from integrative and hybrid perspectives in the social sciences

“…Space limits me from delving into these in more detail, but there are numerous overviews of the compatibilities and tensions among the diversity of naturehuman perspectives in the social sciences (for example, with regards to sociology, see Woodgate and Redclift 1998, Belsky 2002, Buttel 2002, White 2006, Dunlap and Marshall 2007, McLaughlin and Dietz 2008, Mol 2010, Catton 2012. Over the past two decades, in partial reaction to some strands of constructivism and to postmodernist perspectives, a contingent of social scientists have argued for bringing nature back in the social sciences (Catton 1992) and for "more engagement with ecological theory and ecological processes as they articulate with social processes in contingent, dynamic ways" (Nightingale 2002:1; see also Ivakhiv 2002, Zimmerer 2003, Carolan 2005, White 2006, Whatmore 2013). …”

“…In contrast to "hybrid" perspectives, an ontological and conceptual separation of the social and nonhuman biophysical worlds is retained. Examples of such scholarship include Norgaard's (1984) concept of coevolution, Bunker's (1985Bunker's ( , 2003 and Bunker and Ciccantell's (1999) materio-spatial world systems/new historical materialist approach, Nauser and Steiner's (1993) human ecology, Crumley's (1994) historical ecology, Woodgate and Redclift's (1998) coevolution/social construction framework, Escobar's (1999) antiessentialist political ecology, Forsyth's (2001Forsyth's ( , 2003 and Forsyth and Evans' (2013) critical realist political ecology, Prew's (2003) notion of world-ecosystem, and Carolan's (2005) ecologically embedded sociology (regarding the nature-human dualism underpinning some of these works, see Ivakhiv 2002). Much of the postpositivist traditions in environmental subfields of the social sciences, e.g., ecological/environmental economics, and interdisciplinary fields, such as sustainability science, landchange sciences, global-change sciences, natural-hazards research, and vulnerability studies, can also be said to generally adopt an integrative approach (e.g., Burton et al 1978, Ostrom 1990, Blaikie et al 1994, Turner et al 2003, Sen 2004, Clark 2007, Dasgupta 2010, Kates 2011, Levin et al 2013).…”

“…Not only is there an analytical focus on human actors, but there is also a tendency to not acknowledge the imbalances and differences between actors within a network, such as humans' unique ability to imagine, reflect, and learn (Kirsch andMitchell 2004, Laurier andPhilo 1999 as cited by Castree 2002; G. Watson unpublished report). Some scholars have proposed that these shortcomings can be overcome by complementing ANT with other social theories such as political ecology (Ivakhiv 2002, Robbins 2004, Cherlet 2010. Others have applied ANT to issues of inequity and injustice (Holifield 2009, Ernstson 2013a and incorporated into ANT analyses norms, values, and other intangible dimensions of the social world (Heek 2013).…”

The processes of defining corporate responsibility: a study of Swedish garment retailers' responsibility

“…Although, up to the present day ANT has mainly been applied in studies of environmental, rather than social aspects in both general research (e.g. Selman and Wragg 1999a;Selman and Wragg 1999b;Ivakhiv 2002;Van Amerom 2002;Gollagher 2003), and that of corporate responsibility (e.g. Neale 1997;Catasús 2000;Füssel and Georg 2000;Stubbs 2000).…”

Colouring Cape Breton “Celtic”

“…I will begin by examining the lingering dualism surrounding discussions of people/ culture/society and place/nature/environment. By a detour through actor network theory, I will articulate a practice-centred model, a "multicultural political ecology," which sees ecologies and ethnicities as "always already" intertwined within an "original hybridity" of the natural and the cultural, from which the separation of "culture" and "nature" is possible only through the labour by which each is purified of its other (Ivakhiv 2002). In this view, culture is always intermingled with place and ecology, and the process of untangling the claims of rootedness from the practices by which such intermingling occurs is always complex and fraught with risks.…”