Environmental Social Scientists Research Articles

Indigenous Perspectives on Dismantling the Legacies of Settler Colonialism in Rural Sociology☆

AbstractRural Sociology has failed to incorporate Settler‐colonialism and Indigenous theory in studying rural social relations. This presents a serious gap in the discipline's conceptualization of land as the foundation of social reproduction. Indigenous theory provides rich insights about humans' relations among themselves and with the more‐than‐human that inform our understanding of Settler colonialism as a driver of social formation, and human–environmental interactions more generally. This paper, written by four Indigenous environmental social scientists and one Settler rural sociologist, invites the discipline to engage Indigeneity and Settler colonialism in methodologically, theoretically, and ethically appropriate ways.

Political ecology and decolonial research: co-production with the Iñupiat in Utqiaġvik

Environmental social science research designs have shifted over the past several decades to include an increased commitment to multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary team-based work that have had dual but complementary foci. These address power and equity in the substantive aspects of research, and also to adopt more engaged forms of practice, including decolonial approaches. The fields of political ecology, human geography, and environmental anthropology have been especially open to converge with indigenous scholarship, particularly decolonial and settler colonial theories and research designs, within dominant human-environmental social science paradigms. Scholars at the forefront of this dialogue highlight the ontological (ways of knowing), epistemological (how we know), and institutional (institutions of higher education) transformations that need to occur in order for this to take place. In this article we contribute to this literature in two ways. First, we highlight the synergies between political ecology and decolonial scholarship, particularly focusing on the power dynamics in research programs and historical legacies of human-environmental relationships, including those of researchers. Second, we explore how decolonial research pushes political ecologists and other environmental social scientists to not only consider adopting international and local standards of working with, by and for Indigenous Peoples within research programs but how this work ultimately extends to research and education within their home institutions and organizations. Through integrating decolonized research practices in the environmental social sciences, we argue that synthesizing multiple knowledge practices and transforming institutional structures will enhance team-based environmental social science work to improve collaboration with Indigenous scientists, subsistence practitioners, agency representatives, and sovereign members of Indigenous communities.Keywords: Alaska; collaboration; co-production; decolonial; Indigenous Knowledges; Iñupiaq Peoples

Ideology Critique for the Environmental Social Sciences: What Reproduces the Treadmill of Production?

Environmental social scientists should analyze ideologies that reproduce ecologically unsustainable societies through the method of ideology critique. Ideology refers to ideas and practices that conceal contradictions through the legitimation and/or reification of the social order. Ideology critique is a method that allows the researcher to unmask systemic contradictions concealed by ideology. While the primary purpose of this project is to revisit and revise conceptual and methodological tools for the environmental social sciences, I provide examples of ideologies that may aid in the reproduction of the “treadmill of production” or the expansionistic production cycle that accelerates resource use and pollution.

Marine resource management and conservation in the Anthropocene

SUMMARYBecause the Anthropocene by definition is an epoch during which environmental change is largely anthropogenic and driven by social, economic, psychological and political forces, environmental social scientists can effectively analyse human behaviour and knowledge systems in this context. In this subject review, we summarize key ways in which the environmental social sciences can better inform fisheries management policy and practice and marine conservation in the Anthropocene. We argue that environmental social scientists are particularly well positioned to synergize research to fill the gaps between: (1) local behaviours/needs/worldviews and marine resource management and biological conservation concerns; and (2) large-scale drivers of planetary environmental change (globalization, affluence, technological change, etc.) and local cognitive, socioeconomic, cultural and historical processes that shape human behaviour in the marine environment. To illustrate this, we synthesize the roles of various environmental social science disciplines in better understanding the interaction between humans and tropical marine ecosystems in developing nations where issues arising from human–coastal interactions are particularly pronounced. We focus on: (1) the application of the environmental social sciences in marine resource management and conservation; (2) the development of ‘new’ socially equitable marine conservation; (3) repopulating the seascape; (4) incorporating multi-scale dynamics of marine social–ecological systems; and (5) envisioning the future of marine resource management and conservation for producing policies and projects for comprehensive and successful resource management and conservation in the Anthropocene.

Speaking for the ‘people disciplines’: Global change science and its human dimensions

A number of global change scientists have been enjoining their peers to alter their modus operandi. Calls have been issued for more ‘decision relevant’ forms of inquiry more squarely focused on ‘human dimensions’ as societies enter a ‘no analogue’ planetary situation. This paper analyses the way certain geoscientists who study global change imagine the ‘people disciplines’ to be of relevance to their own endeavours. It reveals a rather narrow understanding of the social sciences to be in play, alongside a largely nominal inclusion of the humanities. The paper suggests reasons for this combination of partiality and omission, and suggests why a much wider and more plural understanding of human dimensions is important. This understanding, it is shown, should rebound on the human dimensions of global change science itself. Some suggestions for new encounters between geoscientists, environmental social scientists and humanists are offered. Around 30 years after the first global change research programmes were created, it is unfortunate that the wider social sciences and humanities are not more visible to, and engaged with, global change scientists. Their relative marginality is a long-run problem. Yet visibility and engagement are vital to avoid ‘science imperialism’ by default in our knowledge of people–planet interactions in the Anthropocene. One hopes that in less than a decade hence, visibility and engagement increase significantly.

Superintelligence and Natural Resources: Morality and Technology in a Brave New World

ABSTRACTA growing majority of artificial intelligence (AI) scientists and engineers believe human-level intelligence will be attained before the dawn of the 22nd century, while a large number believe this will happen much sooner. At this point, the elevation to “superintelligence,” or systems that have superhuman levels of general intelligence, would likely proceed very rapidly. With this in mind, this commentary has three goals: (1) to provide an overview of how a leading scholar, Nick Bostrom, conceives of superintelligence, with its potential and risks, (2) to bring attention to a burgeoning form of common pool resource extraction, space mining, that may benefit from superintelligence management, and (3) to suggest that environmental social scientists should play a key role in programming seed AI, infusing it not only with our existing collective knowledge, but also with just values.

Changing the Anthropo(s)cene

This article explores the relationships between geographers and the ‘Anthroposcene’. The latter comprises the networks, institutions and publications devoted to comprehending and responding to a fast-changing Earth departing from Holocene boundary conditions. The Anthroposcene necessarily mediates peoples’ understanding of what are said to be epochal alterations to our planetary home. It is currently dominated by geoscientists and certain environmental social scientists. Some geographers are among their number. Whilst these researchers are working hard to alert decision-makers and publics to the epic scale, scope and magnitude of ‘the human impact’, their work currently tends to screen out the insights of both critical social science and the environmental humanities. Both forms of inquiry are strongly represented in contemporary Anglophone Geography and have been central to human geography’s ‘environmental turn’ this last 20 years. The article suggests reasons why many geographers who are not currently part of the Anthroposcene might want to get their voices heard therein and thereby change the ‘scene’. Global change research (and politics) is entering a formative moment, and it’s important that a range of epistemic communities shape its content and tenor looking ahead. The stakes are high and place responsibilities on a wide range of environmental researchers and educators.

Journeying into interobjectivity: how worlds can be multiple and real

The culture-nature division is fundamental to the division of academic labour between the social and natural sciences. In the face of climate change and other broad environmental threats, natural and social scientists are becoming critical of this division of labour. This paper considers Contested Natures (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998) and heterotopia in the social sciences and social-ecological systems in the natural sciences as attempts to undo this division. These attempts, I argue, reproduce the ontological division fundamental to the problem they aim to overcome. Using a curious coincidence on a trip to the field, I explore a language that avoids the subject/object distinction characteristic of this ontological divide. By closely considering the point on my journey where my travelling companions — a GPS navigator and a small Japanese sedan — encountered their limits, I find a metaphysical starting point for a multiplicity of natures that are more than mentally-held cultural constructions of nature, or linkages between diverse social systems and an ecological realm. The argument suggests that multiple worlds emerge from the disentangling operations of interobjectively extended bodies and that the apparent unity between multiple worlds is itself a product of such interobjectivity.

Practicing the cultural green economy: where now for environmental social science?

Debates concerning the development of the green economy necessarily focus on “upstream” issues that underpin the re‐structuring of national and regional economies through the lenses of financial, institutional and regulatory change. However, the growing interest in the cultural green economy requires a re‐scaling of debates surrounding the links that occur in complex socio‐technical systems, notably between individual consumers, social units and the architectures of the developing green economy. This necessitates a research and policy agenda that is attentive to both the complexities of such interactions (between structures, processes and practices) and the imperative to foster change in practices within wider society. This article explores the ways in which environmental social scientists have examined and evidenced these issues, arguing that two major barriers still exist for creating adequate understandings and opportunities for change. First, the overt focus on the individual consumer as a unit of measurement and political attention has stifled debate concerning the ways in which environmentally related social practices have developed in association with wider economic contexts. In this way, environmental social scientists have often failed to make the connections between individuals, practices and the economic system. Second, in adopting a largely individualistic perspective, environmental social scientists have tended to focus their attention on incrementalist and narrowly defined views of what ecological citizenship might look like and constitute in the green economy. The article therefore argues that environmental social scientists need to constructively engage in a new inter‐disciplinary dialogue about the role, purpose and ethics of citizen participation in developing and sustaining the green economy in an age of climate change and potential resource scarcity.

Matching and mechanisms in protected area and poverty alleviation research

Excitement among social scientists about the discovery of randomized controlled trials has been tempered by the recognition that experimental research and related designs may be infeasible, prohibitively expensive, or even unsuitable for an enormous range of questions of interest to social science and policy (1⇓–3). Recourse to matching-based statistical approaches can enable more transparent causal inference with observational data. The recent upsurge in environmental science writings that use matching techniques borrows from a long and continuing history of such use in medicine, public health, and economics (4⇓–6) and should be welcomed for demonstrating the utility of another important tool in the search for improved estimation of causal effects of environmental interventions. Ferraro and Hanauer (7), leaders in the application of matching-based techniques to identify impacts of protected areas (PAs), present a fresh innovation for environmental social scientists by supplementing the matching-based approach to estimate the effects of protected areas on poverty in Costa Rica with an analysis of three causal mechanisms that may connect protected areas to observed poverty effects. They found that only ecotourism reduced poverty. Changes in forest cover and infrastructure turned out not to have significant effects. My comment examines issues related to data, theory, and policy relevance that pertain to many recent matching-based studies of the effects of protected areas (7⇓–9).

Are we counting what counts? A closer look at environmental concern, pro-environmental behaviour, and carbon footprint

Three parallel lines of inquiry regarding individuals' support for the environment have developed within the environmental social sciences. These include individuals' concern for the environment, research on private sphere pro-environmental behaviour (PEB), i.e. household actions seeking to improve the environment (e.g. buying better light bulbs), and more recently, ecological and carbon footprints. Researchers have noted that the correlates of this third form of support for the environment are not necessarily the same as the predictors of the first two forms. Using Canadian survey data, this study examines the relationships among, and predictors of, all three forms. Evidence that there is not a link between private sphere PEB and household carbon footprints, and that measures of socio-economic status (education and income) have different effects on different types of support for the environment, invites a discussion of whether environmental social scientists are really counting what counts.

Humans, Animals, and Health: From Ecology to Entanglement

Medical and environmental social scientists have recently become interested in how health brings human and nonhuman animals together. is article discusses historical approaches to this question. It then explores applied disease ecology, which examines how anthropogenic landscape change leads to “disease emergence.” The article goes on to review two critical approaches to the question. Critics of bio-security concern themselves with the ways in which animal and human lives are regulated in the context of “emerging diseases” such as avian influenza and foot and mouth disease. Scholarship on human-animal “entanglement” focuses on the ways in which disease, instead of alienating humans from other life forms, brings their intimate relationships into sharper relief. The article argues that health is one terrain for developing a critical environmental analysis of the production of life, where life is the ongoing, dynamic result of human and nonhuman interactions over time.

Gary W. Luck, Digby Race and Rosemary Black (eds): Demographic change in Australia’s rural landscapes: Implications for society and the environment. Volume 12 of the Landscape Series

Demographic change in Australia’s rural landscapes is a valuable and highly informative collection which examines contemporary population dynamics in rural Australia, identifying some of the drivers of demographic change using case studies or international comparisons, and exploring the implications for rural areas, their residents and communities. The volume presents an integrated, interdisciplinary approach with contributions from 24 geographers, sociologists, ecologists, educators, economists, resource and environmental managers, landscape planners, demographers and social scientists. The contributors share their diverse academic, policy and research expertise through interactive and reflective discussions which explore the environmental, land-use, social and economic effects of population growth and decline in rural Australia. Whilst the chapters stand alone as unique contributions, they also address the findings of other authors thus allowing readers to focus on those chapters of most interest, or consume the entire volume without superfluous repetition. It is this interdisciplinary approach and the format of each chapter (each with an introductory photo to set the scene, abstract, key words and numbered subheadings) which is a key strength of the book. The book consists of 16 chapters, with the first and last written by the editors. The first chapter provides an overview of the principal patterns, drivers and implications of demographic change for Australia’s rural communities, landscapes and land management, and introduces the core population dynamics affecting rural Australia: population decline as a result of restricted opportunities; and population growth resulting from counter-urbanization. The chapters that follow explore in more detail some of the variability that occurs within these broad trends.

What's Nature Got To Do With It? A Situated Historical Perspective on Socio‐natural Commodities

Nature(s) have been commodified since the early days of capitalism, but through processes and socio-natural relationships mediated by their times, histories and localities. While the conditions under which nature's commodities are being trademarked today may be new, their potential for commodification is not. Commodifications of nature should not come as a surprise to environmental social scientists and activists. In this article, I argue that commodification of ‘nature's products, places and processes’ produces new sorts of socio-natures. Situated histories of rubber are particularly relevant because, like carbon, ecosystem services and other recently commodified natures, rubber sits comfortably on the line between a fictitious commodity and a commodity produced explicitly for market: the latex alone has almost no use value, and to give it any exchange value, it requires processing. Yet analytically, it is still considered a ‘natural commodity’, different from ‘synthetic rubber’ and other tradable tree latexes in qualities and socio-natural characteristics. However, it is the social relations constituting rubber's production and trade in various rainforest and agro-forestry environments that have given it a positive or negative connotation, rather than its natural properties or the ecological contexts within which it has been produced. By situating rubber in three of its globally important temporal and spatial contexts, I show how it has been subjected to fairy-tale-like stories that masked and naturalized its commodity lives of the moment. Understanding how history is told or remains untold is thus an essential part of the politics of knowledge production, but also of human experience and mobilization for change. It should be part of any political ecology analysis.

Levels of learning in environmental expertise: from generalism to personally indexed specialisation

The past 15 years in Finland have witnessed a diversification among environmental experts. In addition to engineers and biologists, increasing numbers of environmental scientists – from both the natural and social sciences – have entered the job market. Universities in Finland have tried to respond to this challenge by implementing innovative forms of environmental education. This article inquires into the experiences of Finnish environmental social scientists who have received a form of education that explicitly aims at increasing their capacity to discern social and ecological nuances in environmental issues. These ideas seem to promote a particular form of “practical wisdom” or phronesis. The article analyses a set of interviews with both supporters of, and participating students in, two educational programmes with “phronetic” aims to assess how these new environmental experts define their expertise and professional identities. We claim that students had to learn to frame and contextualise not only complex environmental issues, but also their own abilities and capacities as analysts of such complex issues. The research results are useful for strategic decision-making in both environmental and science policy.

Climate forums: virtual discourses on climate change and the sustainable lifestyle

Internet discussion forums and other forms of virtual social networking media are increasingly being used as sites of discursive practice. Quite apart from the research opportunities offered by conventional forms of Internet research (such as surveys and polls), discussion forums (alongside Web-logs and social networking sites) arguably provide new opportunities for social researchers to gather data in this very particular, but nonetheless popular cultural context. This paper explores the phenomenon through the large amount of textual data generated from an article on climate change and sustainable lifestyles in the Guardian newspaper. The discourses that emerged in reaction to this article provide valuable insights into the social construction of climate change and sustainable lifestyles, demonstrating conflicting arguments relating to the acceptance of climate change as a human-induced phenomenon, the reliability of data used to assert arguments concerning global warming and the contested views expressed over the value of adopting more sustainable lifestyles. Further, the paper argues that environmental social scientists need to become aware of the potential for analysing virtual discussion forums and social networking sites as valuable data sources for their research, recognising that these represent both cultural artefacts in their own right and alternative sites of discursive practice for anonymous and immediate everyday talk.

A Basic Accounting of Variation in Municipal Solid‐Waste Generation at the County Level in Texas, 2006: Groundwork for Applying Metabolic‐Rift Theory to Waste Generation

Abstract Environmental social scientists debate whether or not modern development reduces society's impact on the biosphere. The empirical research informing the discussion has not yet adequately examined the social determinants of municipal solid‐waste (MSW) generation, an increasingly relevant issue, both ecologically and sociologically. A primary problem for this research concerns the increasing exchange of MSW across state and county borders. A convenient way to avoid this problem is to examine variation between counties with landfills that service only the county in which the landfills are located. I applied this restriction to a cross‐sectional analysis of total MSW generated in Texas at the county level for 2006. Using robust regression, this study found that two basic measures of modern development, population per square mile and per capita income, are both positively related to total MSW generated at the county level and together explain about 73 percent of the variation in the dependent variable. The evidence corroborates the metabolic‐rift theory. The concentration of people onto smaller land areas, or urbanization, and increasing wealth in a capitalist economy contribute to the metabolic rupture between human society and the environment.

Oil Conflict in Ecuador

This article has three purposes. First, the photographs and text narrate the diverse and persistent mobilization efforts against the oil sector operating in the Amazon region of Ecuador. Second, the study explores limitations of resistance networks composed of Northern environmental and Ecuadorian domestic groups. These networks tend to target Northern oil multinationals while overlooking the increasing interest and influence of Asian oil firms in the Amazon. Third, the article is aimed at showing how photography can complement interviewing in field research and how it can be of methodological interest to environmental social scientists in the complex way it defines the role of the researcher.

Ecogender: Locating Gender in Environmental Social Science

Ecofeminism contends that there are important interconnections between the domination of women and the domination of the environment, a perspective that might be expected to attract the interest of environmental social scientists. However, environmental social scientists have largely ignored ecofeminism, despite feminism's increasing incorporation in general social science. This may be attributed to the common contention that ecofeminism suffers from a tendency to become more an ideological construct than an academic perspective. But despite a recent surge in cross-disciplinary research, especially in critical geography, political ecology, and poststructuralism, questions of gender remain rarely addressed within mainstream environmental social sciences. Given this neglect, we present an alternative conception, what we term “ecogender studies.” “Ecogender studies” draws on those strands of ecofeminism that embrace a relational and dialogic conception of gender and its intersection with other inequalities, and departs from those ecofeminist strands that sacralize an essentialist “nature” and romanticize non-Western traditions.

Policy analysis for sustainable development

PurposeThe paper seeks to propose the basic competencies of environmental social scientists regarding policy analysis for sustainable development. The ultimate goal is to contribute to an improvement of educational programmes in higher education by suggesting a toolbox that should be integrated in the curriculum.Design/methodology/approachStarting from the basic research questions regarding governance for sustainable development, five methods are identified capable of answering the following questions: reconstruction of policy theories; stakeholder analysis; impact assessment; cost‐benefit analysis; discourse analysis. Relevant information was collected through a literature review and practical experience by the authors.FindingsThese include: minimum content of the toolbox with methods of policy analysis for sustainable development; examples of how the toolbox can be applied; strengths and weaknesses of the methods; specification of competencies of environmental social scientists active in the area of policy analysis for sustainable development.Practical implicationsThe paper proposes which methods of policy analysis for sustainable development should be integrated in higher education as well as how this should be done.Originality/valueThe paper systematically analyses the implications of the policy context in the domain of sustainable development for policy analysis in this area. In addition it gives a review of five basic methods: how they can be used to analyse policy issues from a sustainable development perspective. Aiming at reinforcing the input of scientific research in policy‐making, the paper eventually aims to promote sustainable development.