Environmental Degradation

Theoretically, as many proposals exist for tackling the origin of the phenomena of environmental degradation as do different views on how to define it. First, this plethora of theoretical approaches always begins with an interest in identifying certain variables suitable for strategic policies of intercession, that is, environmental amelioration. Thus, the very question of how to define environmental degradation is contentious because it innately promotes particular policies and de-legitimizes others.

Second, besides having raw politics determine environmental degradation policy first and then popularize a theory to justify such policy afterward, the definition of environmental degradation also wrestles with difficulties in the organization of Western institutionalized divisions in academia. Particular methodological cultures compete against one another to reduce environmental degradation to their discipline instead of working together on defining environmental degradation. The topic of environmental degradation thus became divided across separate disciplines of biology, physical sciences, and social sciences (social sciences itself divided across sociology, political science, economics, and anthropological divisions of methodology). Thus the topic of environmental degradation tends to mirror reductionisms inherent in this disciplinary division, with each providing a reductionist construct on most occasions.

In short, what has passed historically for analysis of much environmental degradation has been a series of cultural filters and viewpoints that influenced approaches to its treatment. The environmental degradation construct historically determined what should be done—if anything—to ameliorate environmental degradation. What is being reacted to, in many cases, is this environmental degradation construct.

However, taking the question of the definition of environmental degradation into account as a historical issue of change in the construct, a pattern emerges of moving from arguments about philosophical primacy of a single factor of population—with monotonic, monocausal, ahistorical, and quantitative/mathematical requirements of timeless “unalterable” issues—toward explanations of environmental degradation more multivariate (multiple variables without any of them being reducible to another), historical, strategic, and highly interdisciplinary. Arguably, as multiple variables enter the definition, the robustness of the model improves toward relational and interscientific definitions of environmental degradation. With multiple variables involved in modeling environmental degradation, the areas or variables to deal with expand. Instead of only one recognizable venue of intercession, a far more problematized, political, relational, and interscientific model of environmental degradation with multiple areas for intercession [Page 318]comes to the fore—demoting previous reductionist attempts to link environmental degradation to philosophical conjecture about only one factor of population and its preeminence instead of its relation with other factors.