Introduction — The Development of Social Ecology

Abstract

Interdisciplinary social ecology investigates the human use of natural resources and the interaction between nature and society in theoretical terms of “societal relations to nature”, “societal metabolism” and “colonisation of nature”. The concepts of nature and society relate to each other; however, the differences between them are not dismissed in social ecology with a unifying term such as that of “social-ecological systems” in recent ecology, but analysed with the “relational” terms above. In the new sociological literature society is described as a network or knowledge society, with global flows, “hybrids”, “actants” and “socionatures”, in a terminology that claims to indicate the recent changes in society and nature. This post-modernist terminology is not used in social ecology when knowledge from the social and the natural sciences is combined. Instead of simply changing concepts, social ecology tries in interdisciplinary analyses to lift the cognitive barriers between natural and social sciences, and between science, policy and social practices of resource use. This cognitive programme is the theme of this book, which is guided by the hypothesis that the theoryguided thinking, interdisciplinary research and knowledge synthesis of interdisciplinary social ecology are required to understand the changing interaction of society and nature in the era called “the anthropocene”.