Nature-Society Theory

Nature, it has been said many times, is a complex term that is both very familiar and extremely elusive. From “natural yogurt” to “human nature,” from “nature parks” to “natural boundaries,” the term has a range of uses so wide that a loss of grip on what it is we have in mind seems almost inevitable. Since geography framed itself as the discipline entrusted to study the relationship between humans and nature, the changes in our understanding of what nature is have profoundly affected what geographers study and how they study it. The prevalent Western geographical practices traditionally followed the modern dichotomy—presented as the commonsense understanding of the world—that separates nature from culture, or nature from society. In our everyday language, if something is social, then almost by definition it cannot be natural. And if something is described as natural, then it is unlikely to have much to do with society. Thus, despite a rich history of engaging with nature and the environment, geography started to interrogate nature in itself only in recent decades, having previously treated it reductively. Environmental determinism, possibilism, human ecology, and cultural ecology—as well as, to a certain extent, ecological anthropology—have thus been challenged or outright replaced by a multitude of intellectual newcomers. This entry explores many of these challenges, mentioning what new ways of thinking about nature and society have emerged, and how these have changed geographical practices. These include the social production of nature, the social construction of [Page 1995]nature or “social nature,” political ecology, as well as innovative approaches to materialities, heavily influenced by science studies.

None of these challenges emerged or exists in isolation, however much their proponents attempt to police the boundaries around them; instead, responses to these challenges have drawn productively and opportunistically from sources as wide as Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, postmodernist, and postcolonial thought. Presenting these challenges as a succession of different schools or coherent approaches would be both artificial and stunted; instead, ideas have traveled, been challenged, rejected, and adopted by a variety of authors coming from different backgrounds. While some authors are easier to place within this spectrum, others resist fixity and draw creatively from a variety of more or less compatible new paradigms. Changes in the way nature and society are considered have not come from the social sciences alone; as many “new” ecologists and some political ecologists have highlighted, the understanding developed by ecologists and biologists that nature is not stagnant nor in equilibrium has also had a profound impact, changing how nature-society theories are made.