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Biodiversity: our solutions are in nature
In December, governments from around the world will gather at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference ( COP15 ) in Montreal, Canada, to agree on a new set of goals that will guide global actions to protect and restore nature through 2030.
Biodiversity is the multitude of living things that make up life on Earth. It encompasses the 8 million or so species on the planet—from plants and animals to fungi and bacteria—and the ecosystems that house them, such as oceans, forests, mountain environments and coral reefs.
But nature is in crisis . The world is losing species at a rate 1,000 times greater than at any other time in recorded human history, and one million species are threatened with extinction.
Nature-based solutions offer ways to promote human well-being, tackle the climate crisis and protect the planet.
“Despite all our technological advances we are completely dependent on healthy and vibrant ecosystems for our water, food, medicines, clothes, fuel, shelter and energy,” says Elizabeth Mrema, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity .
“Despite all our technological advances we are completely dependent on healthy and vibrant ecosystems for our water, food, medicines, clothes, fuel, shelter and energy,” says Mrema.
Why is biodiversity essential for people and planet ?
Biodiversity ensures we have fertile soil, as well as a variety of foods, including fruits and vegetables to eat. It is the foundation of most of our industries and livelihoods and helps regulate climate through carbon storage and regulating rainfall. It also filters air and water and mitigates the impact of natural disasters such as landslides and coastal storms.
On land, the most important ecosystems and biodiversity refuges are forests, which are home to most of Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity: 80 per cent of amphibian species; 75 per cent of bird species, and 68 per cent of mammal species, according to The State of the World’s Forests .
Why is biodiversity important for human health?
“Healthy ecosystems can protect against the spread of disease: Where native biodiversity is high, the infection rate for some zoonotic diseases can be lowered,” said UN Environment Programme (UNEP) biodiversity expert Doreen Robinson.
UNEP research shows that when nature suffers, human health is also at risk. About 60 per cent of human infections are estimated to have an animal origin. Rampant development is putting animals and humans in closer contact, increasing the risk of diseases like COVID-19 spreading.
Nature is also an essential source of many drugs used in modern medicine. Plants, animals and microbes enable medical researchers to understand human physiology and treat diseases . Four billion people rely primarily on natural medicines, and about 70 per cent of cancer drugs are either natural products or synthetic ones inspired by nature. In the United States, at least 118 of the top 150 prescription drugs are based on natural sources .
How is biodiversity connected to the economy?
Biodiversity underpins economic prosperity. Roughly US$44 trillion of economic value generation—which represents more than half of global GDP — is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services.
Construction, agriculture, and food and beverages are the three largest industries that are most dependent on nature. Such industries require either the direct extraction of resources from forests and oceans or rely on ecosystem services such as healthy soils, clean water, pollination and a stable climate.
Billions of people depend on natural resources for their livelihoods, food and energy, which are vital to human well-being. Among the hundreds of millions of people living in poverty, 70 per cent are directly dependent on wild species , and one in five people globally rely on wild species for income and food.
Why is biodiversity key to tackling the climate crisis?
The climate crisis is likely to become one of the most significant drivers of biodiversity loss by the end of the century . Global warming is already impacting species and ecosystems around the globe, with coral reefs, mountains and polar ecosystems among the most vulnerable.
Healthy ecosystems will be vital to tackling this crisis. Land and oceans are natural "carbon sinks" absorbing more than half of all greenhouse gas emissions, sparing the world from even more rapid warming. Conserving and restoring natural spaces on land and in water is essential for limiting carbon emissions, providing one-third of the mitigation effort needed in the next decade.
Nature’s value in the fight against the climate crisis also lies beyond its ability to suck carbon out of the air. Forests, wetlands and other ecosystems act as buffers against extreme weather, protecting houses, crops, water supplies and vital infrastructure.
The conservation, restoration and sustainable use of nature are essential to meeting our climate goals , while full delivery of the Paris Agreement is needed to address the accelerating biodiveristy loss crisis.
From December 7-19, countries will meet in Montreal for COP15 to strike a landmark agreement to guide global actions on biodiversity. The framework will need to lay out an ambitious plan that addresses the key drivers of biodiversity loss and puts us on the path to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030.
See UNEP’s COP-15 page for more information and the latest updates.
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Gorillas are some of the most endangered animals on the planet. They aren't the only species struggling with the effects of humans on their habitat. Image: Eric Kilby /Shutterstock.com
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Humans are causing life on Earth to vanish
Ecosystems, the fabric of life on which we all depend, are declining rapidly because of human actions. But there is still time to save them.
Human pressure on nature has soared since the 1970s. We have been using more and more natural resources, and this has come at a cost.
If we lose large portions of the natural world, human quality of life will be severely reduced and the lives of future generations will be threatened unless effective action is taken.
Over the last 50 years, nature's capacity to support us has plummeted. Air and water quality are reducing, soils are depleting, crops are short of pollinators, and coasts are less protected from storms.
Prof Andy Purvis, a Museum research leader, has spent three years studying human interactions with nature. Alongside experts from more than 50 different countries, he has produced the most comprehensive review ever of the worldwide state of nature, with a summary published in the journal Science .
It was coordinated by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an independent body that provides policymakers with objective scientific assessments about the state of knowledge regarding the planet’s biodiversity.
The latest report paints a shocking picture. We are changing nature on a global scale and the impacts of our actions are being distributed unequally.
'It was terrifying to see how close we are to playing Russian roulette with the only world we have,' says Andy. 'But it's also been inspiring, because there is a way out of this.
'What has given hope to the many scientists who worked on this report has been the way the public are fully aware of the dangers and want action. We just need to make sure the politicians remember that too.'
A diagram from the report showing the risk of extinction in different groups of species, assuming that species with limited or no data are equally threatened as other species in their taxonomic group.
Nature feeling the squeeze
Since the 1970s, Earth's population has doubled, and consumption has increased by 45% per capita.
The world is increasingly managed in a way that maximises the flow of material from nature, to meet rising human demands for resources like food, energy and timber.
As a result, humans have directly altered at least 70% of Earth's land, mainly for growing plants and keeping animals. These activities necessitate deforestation, the degradation of land, loss of biodiversity and pollution, and they have the biggest impacts on land and freshwater ecosystems.
About 77% of rivers longer than 1,000 kilometres no longer flow freely from source to sea, despite supporting millions of people.
The main cause of ocean change is overfishing, but 66% of the ocean's surface has also been affected by other processes like runoff from agriculture and plastic pollution.
Live coral cover on reefs has nearly halved in the past 150 years and is predicted to disappear completely within the next 80 years. Coral reefs are home to some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet.
The number of alien species - species found outside their natural range - has risen, as humans move organisms around the world, which disrupts and often diminishes the richness of local biodiversity. This, combined with human-driven changes in habitat, also threatens many endemic species.
In addition, fewer varieties of plants and animals are being preserved due to standardisations in farming practices, market preferences, large-scale trade and loss of local and indigenous knowledge.
Nature also benefits humans in non-material ways. We learn from it and are inspired by it. It gives us physical and psychological experiences and supports our identity and sense of place. But its capacity to provide these services has also diminished.
What's causing it?
The loss of ecosystems is caused mainly by changes in land and sea use, exploitation, climate change, pollution and the introduction of invasive species.
Some things have a direct impact on nature, like the dumping of waste into the ocean.
Other causes are indirect. Those include demographic, economic, political and institutional arrangements underpinned by social values, and they interact with one another.
For example, vast areas of land managed by Indigenous Peoples are experiencing a decline in ecosystems at a slower rate than everywhere else. But the rights of Indigenous Peoples are being threatened, which could result in faster deterioration of these areas. This would have a detrimental impact on wider ecosystems and societies.
Coral reefs are bleaching at an unprecedented rate
Trading overseas has increased by 900% since the start of the post-industrial era and the extraction of living materials from nature has risen by 200%.
The growing physical distance between supply and demand means people don't see the destruction caused by their consumption.
'Before the Industrial Revolution, people had to look after the environment around them because that's where they got their products from,' says Andy. 'If they didn't look after it, they would face the consequences.
'Now with globalisation, we have massive environmental impacts a long way from where we live. But we are insulated from these impacts, so they are abstract to us.'
Overseas trading also creates and increases inequality. The pressure for material goods comes mostly from middle and high-income countries and is often met by low to middle-income countries.
For example, Japan, US and Europe alone consumed 64% of the world's imports of fish products. High income countries have their own fisheries but most of these have collapsed. Fishing now takes place in previously unexploited or underexploited fisheries, most of which belong to low-income countries.
'With the massive increase in trade, there is no longer that imperative to make sustainable choices,' says Andy. 'We can overexploit natural resources somewhere else in the world and the magnitudes of our choices are invisible to us.'
What does the future hold?
The report analysed in detail how the world will look under three very different scenarios.
- Global sustainability: the whole world shifts towards sustainability by respecting environmental boundaries and making sure economic development includes everyone. Wealth is distributed evenly, resources and energy are used less, and emphasis is on economic growth and human wellbeing.
- Regional competition: there is a rise in nationalism with the focus mostly on domestic issues. There is less investment in education, particularly in the developing world. High-income countries will continue exporting the damage, resulting in some strong and lasting environmental destruction for future generations to deal with.
- Economic optimism: the world puts faith in new and innovative technologies that are still to be invented, which help us cope with environmental problems. Emissions will continue, but with the idea that technology will mitigate them. There will be stronger investment in health and education, and global markets are reasonably integrated with shared goals.
Combating the loss of ecosystems is going to be complex and will require a nexus approach. This means thinking about how different components of the problem such as nature, politics and socioeconomics all interact with one another.
An example of a nexus approach would be to reduce biodiversity loss by changing how we farm, while at the same time making sure people have enough food, their livelihoods are not undermined, and social conflicts are not aggravated.
The way to avoid some of these issues may be to focus on regenerating and restoring high-carbon ecosystems such as forests and wetlands. Similarly the need for food could be met by changing dietary choices and reducing waste.
Switching to clean energy is an important step which would allow other changes to happen more easily. Obtaining coal and gas involves destroying vast amounts of land and seascapes as well as polluting the environment beyond extraction.
But in order to achieve this fully, the world needs to revaluate current political structures and societal norms, which tend not to value nature. One way of doing that is by improving existing environmental policies and regulations, as well as removing and reforming harmful policies.
'I hope people can see that this is not a drill,' says Andy. 'This really is an emergency and I hope they act on it.'
The Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have decided that the IPBES Global Assessment Report will form the scientific and technical evidence base for the intergovernmental negotiations in 2020, to agree on a global biodiversity framework for the next decade and to replace the Aichi Biodiversity Targets that expire next year.
IPBES Chair Anna Maria Hernandez concludes, 'This new article makes it even more clear that we need profound, system-wide change and that this requires urgent action from policymakers, business, communities and every individual.
'Working in tandem with other knowledge systems, such as Indigenous and local knowledge, science has spoken, and nobody can say that they did not know. There is literally no time to waste.'
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How are climate change and biodiversity loss linked?
The climate crisis and biodiversity loss are closely connected but the good news is, so are the solutions.
The world is in trouble: one million animals and plants face extinction
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Destruction of nature as dangerous as climate change, scientists warn
Unsustainable exploitation of the natural world threatens food and water security of billions of people, major UN-backed biodiversity study reveals
Human destruction of nature is rapidly eroding the world’s capacity to provide food, water and security to billions of people, according to the most comprehensive biodiversity study in more than a decade.
Such is the rate of decline that the risks posed by biodiversity loss should be considered on the same scale as those of climate change, noted the authors of the UN-backed report, which was released in Medellin, Colombia on Friday.
Among the standout findings are that exploitable fisheries in the world’s most populous region – the Asia-Pacific – are on course to decline to zero by 2048; that freshwater availability in the Americas has halved since the 1950s and that 42% of land species in Europe have declined in the past decade.
Underscoring the grim trends, this report was released in the week that the decimation of French bird populations was revealed, as well as the death of the last male northern white rhinoceros , leaving the species only two females from extinction.
“The time for action was yesterday or the day before,” said Robert Watson, the chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) which compiled the research. “Governments recognise we have a problem. Now we need action, but unfortunately the action we have now is not at the level we need.”
“We must act to halt and reverse the unsustainable use of nature or risk not only the future we want but even the lives we currently lead,” he added.
Divided into four regional reports, the study of studies has been written by more than 550 experts from over 100 countries and taken three years to complete. Approved by the governments of 129 members nations, the IPBES reports aim to provide a knowledge base for global action on biodiversity in much the same way that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is used by policymakers to set carbon emission targets.
Although poaching often grabs the headlines for the demise of the rhino and other animals, worldwide the biggest threats to nature are from habitat loss, invasive species , chemicals and climate change .
Conversion of forests to croplands and wetlands to shrimp farms has fed a human population that has more than doubled since the 1960s, but at a devastating cost to other species – such as pollinating insects and oxygen-producing plants – on which our climate, economy and well-being depend.
In the Americas, more than 95% of high-grass prairies have been transformed into farms, along with 72% of dry forests and 88% of the Atlantic forests, notes the report. The Amazon rainforest is still mostly intact, but it is rapidly diminishing and degrading along with an even faster disappearing cerrado (tropical savannah). Between 2003 to 2013, the area under cultivation in Brazil’s northeast agricultural frontier more than doubled to 2.5m hectares, according to the report.
“The world has lost over 130m hectares of rainforests since 1990 and we lose dozens of species every day, pushing the Earth’s ecological system to its limit,” said Achim Steiner, administrator of the UN Development Programme. “Biodiversity and the ecosystem services it supports are not only the foundation for our life on Earth, but critical to the livelihoods and well-being of people everywhere.”
The rate of decline is moreover accelerating. In the Americas – which has about 40% of the world’s remaining biodiversity – the regional population is gobbling up resources at twice the rate of the global average. Despite having 13% of the people on the planet, it is using a quarter of the resources, said Jake Rice, a co-chair of the Americas assessment.
Since the start of colonisation by Europeans 500 years ago, he said 30% of biodiversity has been lost in the region. This will rise to 40% in the next 10 years unless policies and behaviours are transformed.
“It will take fundamental change in how we live as individuals, communities and corporations,” he said. “We keep making choices to borrow from the future to live well today. We need a different way of thinking about economics with a higher accountability of the costs in the future to the benefits we take today,” Rice said.
“It’s because of us,” added Mark Rounsevell, co-chair of the European assessment. “We are responsible for all of the declines of biodiversity. We need to decouple economic growth from degradation of nature. We need to measure wealth beyond economic indicators. GDP only goes so far.”
The authors stressed the close connection between climate change and biodiversity loss, which are adversely affecting each other. By 2050, they believe climate change could replace land-conversion as the main driver of extinction.
In many regions, the report says current biodiversity trends are jeopardising UN global development goals to provide food, water, clothing and housing. They also weaken natural defences against extreme weather events, which will become more common due to climate change.
Although the number of conservation areas has increased, most governments are failing to achieve the biodiversity targets set at the 2010 UN conference in Aichi, Japan. In the Americas, only 20% of key biodiversity areas are protected.
The authors urged an end to subsidies for agriculture and energy that are encouraging unsustainable production. The European Union’s support for fishing was among those cited for criticism. Watson also urged people to switch to a more sustainable diet (less beef, more chicken and vegetables) and to waste less food, water and energy.
There are glimmers of hope. In northern Asia, forest cover has increased by more than 22% as a result of tree-planting programs, mostly in China. But this was from a very low base and with far fewer species than in the past. In Africa, there has been a partial recovery of some species, though there is still a long way to go.
Watson – a former chair of the IPCC and a leading figure in the largely successful campaign to reduce the gases that were causing a hole in the ozone layer – said the biodiversity report was the most comprehensive since 2005 and the first of its type that involved not just scientists, but governments and other stakeholders.
Despite the grim outlook, he said there was cause for hope. The report outlines several different future paths, depending on the policies adopted by governments and the choices made by consumers. None completely halt biodiversity loss, but the worst-case scenarios can be avoided with greater conservation efforts. The missing link is to involve policymakers across government and to accept that biodiversity affects every area of the economy. Currently, these concerns are widely accepted by foreign and environment ministries; the challenge is to move the debate to incorporate this in other areas of government, such as agriculture, energy and water. Businesses and individual consumers also need to play a more responsible role, said Watson.
“We don’t make recommendations because governments don’t like being told what to do. So, instead, we give them options,” he said.
The IPBES report will be used to inform decision-makers at a major UN conference later this year. Signatories to the Convention for Biodiversity will meet in Sharm El-Sheikh in November to discuss ways to raise targets and strengthen compliance. But there have been more than 140 scientific reports since 1977, almost all of which have warned of deterioration of the climate or natural world. Without more pressure from civil society, media and voters, governments have been reluctant to sacrifice short-term economic goals to meet the longer-term environmental challenge to human wellbeing.
“Biodiversity is under serious threat in many regions of the world and it is time for policymakers to take action at national, regional and global levels,” said José Graziano da Silva, director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Others have put the crisis in starker terms. Biologist Paul Ehrlich, has warned that civilisational collapse is a “near certainty” in the next few decades due to the destruction of the natural world.
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Ecosystem collapse ‘inevitable’ unless wildlife losses reversed
Cop15 brokers talk up hopes for nature deal as conference enters final stretch
Cop15: UK accused of hypocrisy over environment protection targets
Cop15: Lula calls on rich nations to give more to protect Earth’s ecosystems
US actor James Cromwell stages dinosaur protest at Cop15
Humanity has become ‘weapon of mass extinction’, UN head tells Cop15 launch
MPs urge Sunak to attend Cop15 biodiversity summit in Canada
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- 1 Centre for Functional Ecology, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
- 2 Department of Social Sciences and Management, Universidade Aberta, Lisbon, Portugal
The dominant manners in which environmental issues have been framed by sociology are deeply problematic. Environmental sociology is still firmly rooted in the Cartesian separation of Society and Nature. This separation is one of the epistemic foundations of Western modernity—one which is inextricably linked to its capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal dimensions. This societal model reifies both humanity and nature as entities that exist in an undeniably anthropocentric cosmos in which the former is the only true actor. Anthropos makes himself and the world around him. He conquers, masters, and appropriates the non-human, turning it into the mere environment of his existence, there solely for his use. If sociology remains trapped in this paradigm it continues to be blind to the multiple space-time specific interrelations of life-elements through which heterogeneous and contingent ontologies of humans and extra-humans are enacted. If these processes of interconnection are not given due attention, the socioecological worlds in which we—human as well as others—live cannot be adequately understood. But misunderstandings are not the only issue at stake. When dealing with life-or-death phenomena such as climate change, to remain trapped inside the Society/Nature divide is to be fundamentally unable to contribute to world reenactments that do not oppress—or, potentially, extinguish—life, both human and extra-human. From the inside of Anthropos' relation to his environment the only way of conceiving current socioecological problems is by framing them in terms of an environmental crisis which could, hypothetically, be solved by the very same societal model that created it. But if the transformation of some of the world(s)' life-elements into the environment of the Human is part of the problem, then, socioecological issues cannot be adequately understood or addressed if they are framed as an environmental crisis. Instead, these problems need to be conceived as a crisis of Western modernity itself and of the kind of worlds that are possible and impossible to build within it.
Introduction
Sociology studies interaction—specifically, it studies interactional distributions and enactments of power-knowledge and ontologies. That much still remains true. But there have been considerable changes—both within and outside the social sciences—since the times of Marx, Weber, Simmel, and other classical sociologists. The field's opening to the study of environmental issues has shattered many of what have historically been its epistemological and ontological foundations. As is the case of all of the social sciences and humanities, “thinking through the environment” deeply “unsettles” many of sociology's core assumptions 1 , 2 .
In order to be able to adequately understand “environmental issues”—and among them the very much urgent issue of climate change—sociology needs to move beyond the analytical exclusive focus on human interaction(s). There have been several proposals in this direction, but they still remain less than mainstream research stances (although it is arguable that this is less the case now than it was some decades ago). It is not possible to remain trapped inside the confines of what humans do with each other and expect to understand the myriad interrelations of human and extra-human life-elements 3 of the world(s). To remain enclosed by an a priori defined privilege of human interaction is to stay incapable of seeing the true extent of the networks of life-elements that compose the socioecological phenomena that sociology studies. This does not mean that sociologists must become experts of all things, which would undoubtedly lead them to become experts of nothing. But there is a need to significantly widen the scope of the interrelations that we study. Humanity still has an important place in research, but the analytical focus must move from the intra-human to “the web of life,” to adopt Moore's (2016a , b ) concept.
To be precise, the problem at hand is the Western modern paradigm of knowledge and practice in which sociology moves itself (i.e., the paradigm for whose constitution and maintenance it contributes). Among other things, this paradigm is patriarchal, colonial, capitalist, and anthropocentric. It institutionalizes forms of existence that enact specific types of human-nature relations where the second term is subordinated to the first ( Santos, 1991 , p. 14 et seq .; Santos, 2006 , p. 91 et seq ., p. 169 et seq ; Plumwood, 1993 ; Lander, 2009 ; Latour, 2010 ; Moore, 2016a , b ).
Given this, what is needed is not a calibration of research elements similar to the one that was done from the 1960s onward when, to accompany formal political decolonization happening in the Global South, sociology started opening its doors to the study of human worlds outside of the West (obviously, there where sociologists preoccupied with extra-Western phenomena before this date, but they were far from being the majority). To replicate this now is unsustainable because we are not dealing with more human elements to add to the mix. For some decades now, we have been facing an irruption of the extra-human into what has historically been a human-focused field of inquiry. It is not further human populations that are entering our field of vision but trees, and animals, and water, and gases, and rocks. As such, any attempt to merely add up a new element—the environment, nature, or whatever one chooses to call it—to our considerations simply does not work 4 .
If epistemological and ontological changes stop there, as they are prone to do, sociology is not doing anything very original. It is merely replicating the same Cartesian divide of Society vs. Nature that has, since its beginning, characterized it. For 200 years, sociologists have mainly dealt with this divide by focusing on just one of its poles—the better one, the most interesting one; or so we thought. To add the environment to our conceptualization of the world still leaves us trapped in a conceptualization of an anthropocentric world. We still focus on Society. We just start taking into account the ways in which human action conditions Nature.
“Thinking through the environment” ( Rose et al., 2010 ) should be unsettling for sociology. It should lead us not to rethink but rather to fundamentally unthink ( Wallerstein, 2001 ) what sociology has taken for granted for far too long. This exercise of unthinking Western modernity and its foundational epistemological and ontological assumptions leads to the radically relationist study of the multiple and heterogeneous interconnections between different life-elements of the world(s), neither of them a priori classifiable as belonging to “humanity” or “nature” but rather thus constituted through and along the very process of interrelation. As such, adding up Nature to Society (or Humanity, or Culture, or any equivalent) does not do. This position validates the reification of both terms and keeps them, as they have been for 500 years in slightly different ways, in relation to each other ( Moore, 2016a , b ). And, given human privilege vis-à-vis the non-human, Society's relation to Nature wrongly distributes agency, viewing it solely as a human capacity, thus turning nature into mere passivity. Even narratives on the Earth's revenge on humanity reinforce this insofar as in them nature's action is mostly re-action to the effects of what humanity—the only true actor in this story—does.
Unthinking what we know—including what we know about how we know—implies refusing to understand this issue in terms of humanity's relation to nature but rather conceptualizing it in terms of the space-time specific interrelations of different elements of the web of life. These are not in relation to each other, and much less are they in a binary relation in which one of the parts acts upon the other, the former's actions generating a set of consequences on the latter. These multiple life-elements enter into multiple space-time localized relations with each other, collectively establishing contingent, dynamic, and conflictual arrangements of human and extra-human beings and things—in Haraway's (2016 , p. 34 et passim ) formulation, composing “multispecies muddles.” In other words, through their collective practices they compose collectives; they collectively enact worlds.
In this essay we propose to unthink some of sociology's foundations of knowledge and practice. We do this by focusing on the Western modern dominant concept of nature, and particularly by discussing its transformation into the environment. The first section starts by looking at the Cartesian conception of the world in terms of Society/Nature, which necessarily subordinates the life-elements placed in the second term to those placed in the first. We then locate the Society/Nature divide within the wider Western modern dualistic logic, which is inherently totalizing and hierarchical. With this background, we argue that current mainstream sociological approaches to the study of human-nature relations have not sufficiently broke with its paradigmatic Western modern origins, making them unable to understand the multiplicity of interrelations between life-elements by which socioecological phenomena are enacted. The following section starts by looking at how nature is turned into the environment of Western modern humanity, which is an essential process for the latter's dominant approach to the government of human life. We then discuss how this is inextricable from capitalism insofar as it allows nature to be enacted as a series of commodities. Following this we argue that if the concept of the environment is inherently problematic, then environmental sociology has a foundational problem that it may be unable of solving. The section ends by contending that, due to these conceptual and practical problems, the environmental crisis is the wrong framing for the current Western modern crisis of enactment of socioecological ontologies and worlds.
There are far more sociological concepts and practices in need of unthinking. And much more could be said about nature and (its conversion into) the environment. Our position in this essay is quite humble and has no pretension to exhaustively discuss all that need to be unthought. We are merely pointing to some of the perplexities that have been bothering us in our common research, thus adding to the collective effort(s) of unthinking Western modern enactments of life with the hope that others will find this exercise relatable to their own intellectual and political concerns.
Questioning Nature
The last 50 years have seen the emergence of many significant contributions to the exercise of unthinking Western modern enactments of the world(s) that inspires this essay: from the historical-philosophical tours de force of Foucault (1994 , 2005a , b , 2012a ), Kuhn (2009) , or Feyerabend (1993) , to science and technology studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT), passing through several schools of feminist and decolonial thought 5 . All of these have been listened to and developed by many other researchers, and we build our own work from and alongside them. Nonetheless, the critical exercise of unthinking and re-enacting is still far from being the norm for research carried out within sociology. This is undoubtedly the case of research on matters of human-nature relations.
Most sociological research on the general field of the relation of humanity to the rest of the cosmos has a firm footing on the Cartesian division of Nature and Society (or Culture, or any equivalent) ( Descartes, 1982 ). As is the case of other fields on inquiry, research on “the environment” develops both through stances that are (to various degrees) critical of certain arrangements of practices characteristic of Western capitalist modernity and through positions which present—and, many times, believe—themselves as defending the axiological neutrality of science. Both of them are very much heterogeneous and this analytical partition is merely a shorthand. But most of these stances tend to implicitly validate and solidify the Social Contract argument of Hobbes (2002) , Rousseau (2003) , or Locke (2001) , according to which the creation of any sort of civil and political—in essence, social—state is inherently dependent on the exit from the state of nature 6 . In this fashion, the sum of human beings, all of them exemplars of ego cogito , is withdrawn from the rest of the cosmos. All that is not humanity is thus transferred to one or more of the following categories: chaos, vital threat, landscape, romantic ideal, and/or resource reservoir.
No matter what category each of the constitutive parts of the non-human is put in—and the exact distribution varies dynamically according to space and time—it is thought of as being in relation to humanity. However, by definition, it is not part of humanity. Human and non-human (natural), their ontologies are different, even if the existence of each of them is ontologically dependent on the existence of the other. Ego cogito does not change his or her essence because of the action of the elements of the non-human 7 . He is in himself and from himself. In the same manner, nature's essence is unchangeable. The modern project of dominion of nature ( Plumwood, 1993 ; Scott, 1998 ; Serres, 1998 ; Latour, 2010 ; Debaise et al., 2015 ) operates around the idea of taming nature, of molding it to humanity's wishes (or rather to the wishes of some members of humanity). In this fashion, Western modern human action is able to reshape nature's appearance, to cut down trees, to relocate animals and plants, to make water change its course, to hollow out nature by extracting what lies within it, to disrupt its homeostatic equilibriums. But this does not change nature's essence as Nature opposed to Human, as Nature in so far as it is non-Human. Nature's role as the Great Outside of the Human is not up for questioning. Paradoxically, it is assumed to remain (ontologically) the same even as it is made to change (geologically, geographically, biologically, etc.) by human action. It remains reality out-there, existing independently of how it is perceived, prior to statements made about it, in a definite and singular form ( Law, 2004 , p. 23 et seq .). It can be seen, interpreted, measured, classified, used, etc., precisely because of its ontological stability.
The Society/Nature divide is a fundamental foundation of Western modern thought patterns, which are inherently dualistic ( Santos, 1991 , p. 14 et seq .; Santos, 2006 , p. 91 et seq .; Plumwood, 1993 ; Said, 2003 ; Castro-Gómez, 2005 ; Lander, 2009 ) 8 , 9 . There are many dichotomies that play a relevant role in Western modernity—Mind/Body, Self/Other, White/Non-white, Metropole/Colony, West/East, and so forth. But Society/Nature, alongside Subject/Object and Male/Female, are the fundamental modern dichotomies in reference to which all others work ( Plumwood, 1993 , p. 41 et seq .). Importantly, modern dichotomies are expressions of hierarchical relations, one of the terms being privileged and the other subaltern. As Plumwood (1993 , p. 41 et seq .) argues, this hierarchical logic is where the command role played by the former three dichotomies becomes clear: the privileged term of every other dichotomy—Mind, Self, White, Metropole, West, etc.—tends to be seen as having characteristics associated with Masculinity, Society, and the active and rational Subject, whereas the subordinate term—Body, Other, Non-white, Colony, East, etc.—tends to be associated with Femininity, Nature, and the irrational (in the sense of being incapable of rational thought) and passive Object.
This hierarchical logic is clear in the dominant conceptualization of Society/Nature. The mythologem that is the state of nature is what one leaves in order to collectively create a social existence, the only one that truly matters, the one that, although imperfect, is far better that the alternative of nature—with its chaos, dirtiness, discomfort, aggression, etc. And we must keep in mind that, within this paradigm, nature is in fact the only alternative to society. It is the sole alternative because dichotomies are exercises in totality-as-way-of-ordering-reality, i.e., they are representations of a universe in which nothing can exist outside either one or the other of the two entities in relation, thus conceptually eliminating even the imagination, not to mention the praxis , of an existence unrelated to this logic ( Plumwood, 1993 ; Santos, 2006 , p. 91 et seq .).
Most sociological research on issues of the environment implicitly solidifies this philosophical stance. Uncritically taking for granted that there is something fundamentally different (i.e., better) in humanity (or society, or culture, or whatever else one chooses to call it), this heterogeneous field of inquiry tends to practice a “sociology of the social” ( Latour, 2007 ) which, paradoxically, is extended from the social to its outside—without ever truly rearticulating the terms of their relationship. For Latour (2007 , p. 160 et passim ), a sociology of the social is doomed to be unsuccessful in its enterprise of understanding the uncertainty and dynamism of human life because it tries to explain the social by the social instead of focusing of the myriad processes of association of human and extra-human life-elements by which both “the social” and other realms of thought and practice are enacted. The practice of a sociology of the social to study issues considered to be outside the social creates an epistemic conflict: not only should the social be explained by the social but nature, for centuries understood in Western modern thought as explaining itself as much as society does (as long as science was able to progressively determine its/their laws of operation), now also is (at least in part) explainable by the social 10 . The passivity of nature characteristic of Western modern philosophy, opposed to the reflexive action of humans, is thus reinforced—even in narratives about the Earth's revenge on humanity because of the damage the latter inflicts upon it nature's action is re-action, making humanity into the true actor of the story insofar as without it no movement would have been made by the other term of the dichotomy.
A sociology of the social can do nothing but fail when trying to understand the heterogeneous interrelations of human and extra-human life-elements. It fails by design—albeit not reflexively so—because such a sociology is firmly grounded on the Society/Nature divide and, from this standpoint, multiplicity is not visible. If it cannot be seen, the myriad connections between different life-elements cannot be made into this sociology's central research topic. As such, the worldly relations explored by this field must be reduced to those that are understandable in terms of Society/Nature. In this manner, as a starting point, the world's life-elements are distributed into the categories of this dichotomy. When research starts, this has already been done, which leads to the placement of the elements of the two categories in relation to each other—fundamentally distinct, one of them acting over the other. If they are in relation to each other, they cannot be in relation with each other. This would presuppose that there are more than two elements in relation, it would presuppose that worlds are not yet taxonomically distributed into categories, leaving their life-elements relatively free to roam and communicate with one another with disregard for analytical borders. It would assume that these worlds are not only where these life-elements act and exist but also that they are the contingent and dynamic result of this very action and existence—a form of existence-as-action which can only be carried out by the efforts, work, and energy of space-time localized humans and extra-humans.
This leaves a sociology of the social with only one way of conceiving human-natural relations. If life-elements do not interact in ways that enact worlds—which, among other things, perform-contain contingent stabilizations of nature and society—, then, it is from within each of the two realms of Society and Nature that all things must emerge, eventually overflowing from one to the other. In other words, a sociology of the social can only conceive a world in which phenomena specific to one of these realms condition existence in the other. This is a cause and effect model of limited interrelation in which, generally, human action—the action of the Human—develops through human-specific processes that occur in the environment of Nature. There is no significant interplay in the generative process by which these phenomena start; they occur because humans do things with one another. But what they do together has such a magnitude that converts them into causes of—mainly damaging—natural processes (e.g., deforestation, emissions of greenhouse gases). Human actions emerge as causes of these phenomena, leading to a set of consequences which occur in the realm of Nature, depleting and degrading it. This can, eventually, come back to haunt us; but we alone caused it and the second level consequences—from human to nature back to human—by which natural phenomena with human causes damage Society do not make Nature into a true actor in this story. Granted, this cause and effect mode of thinking can be made into something complex, attuned to the idea that different human processes can combine themselves to cause one outcome and that the same human phenomenon can contribute to several environmental consequences. But this only works if the Society/Nature divide is accepted and validated. And even then this limited conception of action and interaction is inherently incapable of seeing much of the actions and interactions by which the worlds in which we—humans as well as others—live are collectively enacted.
Only by rejecting this dichotomy as something that exists a priori , as something that predates action(s), and by understanding it as the contingent and dynamic result of (both human and extra-human) action(s), can multiplicity be taken into account. The multiplicity of heterogeneous relations between different life-elements—human, animal, plant, or mineral—is what enables each and all of them to act and to enact different arrangements [or, in Moore's (2016b) term, “bundles”] of human and extra-human ( Callon, 1986 ; Law, 2002 , 2004 ; Mol, 2002 ; Latour, 2007 , 2010 ; Haraway, 2016 ; Moore, 2016b ). And the life-elements that are distributed into nature or society—which are not predetermined once and for all but rather are the object of historical and spatial conflicts, as black slaves and most women could attest—act in ways that make inappropriate the cause and effect thought models of sociology of the social's study of the environment. When different life-elements come together to act—both in peaceful and (mostly) in conflictual ways—, they are not a priori “nature” or “humanity” but are thus made through and along their collective actions. And the actions of different networks of human and extra-human life-elements constantly overflow each of the networks that originally performs them to reach other such networks, creating multiple flows of mutual communication between what is, at a certain time and in a certain place, constructed as social and natural.
Given these shortcomings, a sociology of the social provides an inadequate framing for the understanding of the myriad relations between humanity and nature. No matter how critical it may be, research developed within this paradigm falls back into a form of Western modern reification of both Society (or Humanity, etc.) and Nature. In other words, it starts from an implicit decision to distribute the world's life-elements into these two—and only these two—categories and then proceeds to ascribe them two ontologically incommensurable essences. It is only if this conception and practice of sociology is rejected that it is possible to comprehend the myriad interrelations between (human and extra-human) life-elements. In order to move beyond this paradigm, after having started to explore the conversion of the extra-human into Nature, we now continue the discussion by looking at the enactment of Nature as the environment.
Nature Becomes the Environment of the Human
Perhaps the main shortcoming of the extension of a sociology of the social to the study of the relations between human and extra-human is immediately visible in the expression “environmental sociology.” What does this sociology deal with? The environment of something that does not belong to it. It deals with reified nature, understood as the outside that is all around equally reified humanity 11 . As Serres puts it, “the word environment , commonly used in this context (…) [,] assumes that we humans are at the center of a system of nature” ( Serres, 1998 , p. 33).
Such a sociology most definitely does not study the dynamic and heterogeneous interrelations between different things of and in the world, it does not highlight how these temporally and spatially specific interconnections between human and extra-human life-elements are precisely the processes by which worlds and those who live in them are collectively enacted. In short, it does not address the various forms of creating certain space-time specific arrangements of life, i.e., of creating contingent and precarious realities and of distributing their component elements in them by processes of categorization as human and other-than-human ( Law, 2004 ; Latour, 2007 , 2010 ; Debaise et al., 2015 ; Haraway, 2016 ; Moore, 2016b ).
Instead, sociology starts from the positive exception of the Human. In Western modernity, given the hierarchical relation of the terms of the duality that is Society/Nature, the Human is not only outside of the non-human; it is above it. It is epistemologically, ontologically, and morally superior to Nature 12 . Nature appears in relation to —and never with —humanity, merely as the milieu of its life chances, as the resource reservoir from which humanity derives “natural resources” and, depending on space and time, as locus and arche of potential threats to its life.
As Foucault made clear, the emergence of a biopolitical rationality of government 13 in eighteenth century Europe elevated the concept- praxis of (human) population to the role of central subject-object of intervention ( Foucault, 1980 , 1994 , 2006 , 2009 , 2010 ). Around this period, the exercise of power took as its main preoccupation the protection of the human life of the collective that is population, aiming to increase its life opportunities by guaranteeing that its behavior did not deviate from statistical-scientific normality in ways that endangered it. The consolidation of industrial capitalism, the maintenance of colonial residents and administrations, and military strength-in-numbers within (as well as outside) Europe, all required large quantities of relatively healthy human beings. In order to meet this requirement of protection of human life (at least of that human life which power-knowledge conflicts lead to be placed into categories of the Human), governmental interventions became more effective by indirectly guiding these human collectives instead of directly prescribing and adjusting their conducts. As such, governmental exercises assumed the form of interventions on the milieu , the environment in which populations lived, aiming to change the manner in which collective phenomena were shaped by changing the conditions which framed the possibilities for each unit of the population to act ( Foucault, 2009 , p. 29 et seq .). The underlying logic is simple to explain, even if the processes by which it is enacted are very much complex. Want to decrease mortality rates and increase the general health of the inhabitants of a certain city? Don't prohibit individual behaviors that make people sick, like unsanitary eating or hygienic habits. Don't threaten individuals with the strong arm of the law in order to stop them from doing what has been scientifically discovered to be harmful for them. Instead, construct and maintain centrally regulated urban sewage systems, create a process of regular garbage collection, or lower taxes on food rich in protein and vitamins.
Granted, Foucault's focus is not on the environment understood as Nature—even if the phenomena which affect a human population's life are both “natural” and “social”: laws, commerce, traditions, or taxation, as well as food, climate, or disease ( Foucault, 2009 ). Furthermore, his periodization of Western modern intervention on the environment in order to govern life is off by some 200 years ( McBrien, 2016 ; Moore, 2016b ; Parenti, 2016 ). But his insight on the central role played by the environment of humanity in Western modern governmental exercises must not be downplayed 14 . If one dates the start of Western modernity to the transatlantic colonial arrival of 1492 ( Wallerstein, 1993 , 2004 ; Dussel, 1995 ; Mignolo, 1995 , 2000 ; Lander, 2005 ; Quijano, 2007 ; McBrien, 2016 ; Moore, 2016b ), it becomes clear that humanity (at least that part of humanity which arrived on American shores and its descendants) has since then constructed the extra-human as being up for grabs.
This is the geohistorical 15 moment of the start of the Western modern logic of “mastery and possession” of nature—“the master words launched by Descartes at the dawn of the scientific and technological age, when our Western reason went off to conquer the universe” ( Serres, 1998 , p. 32). As Dussel (1995) argues, the ego cogito was historically preceded by the ego conquiro , the Human who, having arrived outside of Europe, immediately defined the world of the non-human as existing solely for his benefit. This was the premise behind the definition of the “New World”—and, with it, of the totality of the non-human—as terra nullius , mere nature without humans which could for this motive be freely appropriated by humanity ( Johnston and Lawson, 2005 , pp. 364–365; Mignolo, 1995 , p. 260 et passim ; Plumwood, 1993 , p. 111, pp. 161–163; Wolfe, 2006 ). The process by which large portions of humanity were relegated to categories of Nature-outside-humanity was simply the necessary condition of this operation of humanity's mastery and possession of the world of the non-human. So, a double disqualification is at work in Western modern paradigm's conception of Society/Nature: on the one hand, to the Human belongs the world, subordinating nature to humanity; on the other hand, the Human is reduced to the part of humanity which in fact masters and possesses nature, de facto and/or de jure de-humanizing most human beings (in various ways), thus disqualifying them as they are placed in the concomitantly disqualified space (and time 16 ) of nature ( Dussel, 1995 ; Moore, 2016b , pp. 78–79 et passim ).
This is the paradigm in which environmental sociology moves itself. What it sees and how it sees it are strongly conditioned by the manner in which nature is transformed into the environment of humanity. As environment, nature is enacted as the mere surroundings of the Human, the latter existing at the center of an undeniably anthropocentric cosmos. Since this is a Western modern cosmos, Anthropos is clearly defined. He is ego cogito but that is not all that he is. Anthropos at the center of the universe, Anthropos for whom the universe exists, is also a capitalist being—perhaps this is what he primarily is, as the world-ecology school of thought argues by defending the “Capitalocene” as the most precise concept to encapsulate the current geohistorical era ( Moore, 2016a , b ). As such, within the Western modern paradigm, nature is enacted as the environment of homo oeconomicus .
As the environment of modern homines oeconomicae , nature—or, to be more precise, all supposedly non-human elements of the anthropocentric world—are made into resources to be conquered, dominated, and appropriated ( Serres, 1998 ; Moore, 2016b ). The reification of the extra-human as Nature is the first step of a process by which all discrete units of this Nature are enacted as potential resources to be used and depleted with all the might and the right the Human confers upon himself at the expense of all other beings and things. The environment of humanity is humanity's reservoir of potential resources. In this manner, nature-as-environment loses any meaning in itself and all of its potential significance derives from the use Western modern capitalist humanity gives it. Its lack of meaning outside of Western modern capitalist standards makes reified nature into an entity whose discrete units, both those that are known and those that might be known, are made into things-as-potential-commodities. It is not the case of the non-human being immediately enacted as commodity. Rather, it is enacted as something that, in itself, is nothing besides a collection of smaller things, each one of them potentially commodifiable 17 . In other words, nature-as-environment has no meaning besides that which Western modern capitalism is able of giving it and each of its components, and this societal model is only able to give meaning to commodities (or, to put it more precisely, it is only capable of ascribing meaning to something by commodifying it). At any given time, the environment has some discreet units that are not commodified, as well as others that are. According to the space-time specific necessities of capitalist modernity, the life-elements that are categorized as any form of Nature are brought from the field of potential commodity to that of actual commodity (and vice versa), thus expanding the total field of capitalist commodification of the non-human world 18 .
This modus operandi of commodification by grabbing parts of the environment and re-signifying (i.e., re-enacting) them as things with mercantile value transforms these life-elements into “fictitious commodities.” For Polanyi (2001 , pp. 71–80 et passim ), a process of commodification has a “fictitious” character when it ascribes market value to things that were not produced with the explicit intention of being sold as merchandise. Thus, the commodification of such things de-signifies them insofar as the market is fundamentally incapable of exhausting their total meaning. In other words, they are far more than something with market value and to transform them into commodities is to reduce all of their cultural meaning to market criteria, which makes them into elements of the world whose total significance capitalism in not able to grasp, even though it is very much capable of using and abusing them. Polanyi's foremost examples of such “fictitious commodities” are money, labor, and land—the last of which he describes as “the natural surroundings in which [society] exists,” making “land [into] only another name for nature” ( Polanyi, 2001 , p. 75).
Polanyi's discussion of “fictitious commodities” is framed in epistemological and ontological terms that are conflictual with the position we espouse in this essay. He is clearly conceptualizing commodification through the lenses of Society/Nature, reifying land-as-environment, as well as essentializing the remaining “fictitious commodities,” as is apparent when he writes that “labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities: the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them. In other words, according to the empirical definition of a commodity they are not commodities. (…) None of them is produced for sale. The commodity description of labor, land, and money is entirely fictitious” ( Polanyi, 2001 , pp. 75–76). In this sense, when he writes that “land is only another name for nature”, he immediately adds that this nature “is not produced by man” ( Polanyi, 2001 , p. 75).
Following Moore (2016b )—and taking a cue from a staple position in STS and ANT—, we can argue that, in Western capitalist modernity, everything that is commodified is “originally” produced as a commodity (by being grabbed from the resource reservoir that is the environment and enacted as a commodity). The point is that there is no such thing as Nature out-there with an original essence that puts it outside the collective action of human-and-extra-human arrangements by which space-time specific ontologies and worlds are enacted—some of them as commodities. The process of “originally” producing something as a commodity is precisely this enactment.
Nonetheless, Polanyi's insight is valuable in two ways. On the one hand, it makes clear that commodification is inherently incapable of exhausting the potential meanings—the potential life—of the elements of the world(s) which are commodified (i.e., other enactments of these life-elements are possible and none has the totalizing capacity of exhausting all that any of them might be made to be). On the other hand, Polanyi's argument highlights that the peculiar market-based enactment of some life-elements as commodities is inherently damaging, both to them and to the world(s) to which they belong to (i.e., which they, together with other life-elements, compose).
In this derivatively polanyian sense, the process of turning non-human elements of the world(s) into a series of “fictitious commodities”—i.e., into resources for human production and consumption, into things that exist solely to guarantee the life of the Human 19 —is at the very core of Western modernity. This societal model exists because the extra-human is turned (reified) into Nature, which in turn is transformed into the environment of the Human and dealt with (i.e., enacted) as a reservoir of potential commodities. It is this particular kind of commodification that enables the typically Western modern capitalist human modes of action and existence that do not reflexively take into account the manner in which different networks of human and extra-human life-elements act together to enact certain types of worldly arrangements (i.e., certain types of worlds). In other words, this sequential process starts with the reification of the non-human, follows to its conversion into the Great Outside, there solely for the use of the Human, then fragments this environment into discreet units, and lastly picks and chooses which units will be commodified in a given space and time. It is this process that enables the kinds of careless human action and existence that disregard the wellbeing of the extra-human, in extremis disregarding the very condition of possibility of its existence. Given that the different life-elements of the world(s) do not adjust themselves willingly to Western modern fragmentation of reality—or, to be more precise, Western modern's enactment of fragmented realities—, the forms of human action and existence that are made possible by the sequential process of reification of the extra-human are both genocidal and suicidal. The practical symbiosis of human and extra-human life-elements of space-time specific networks, symbolically denied in Western modernity, implies that the uncaring disregard that leads to the extermination of the extra-human also describes a suicidal operation by which the Human disregards its own conditions of possibility, its own conditions of a future, of any future 20 .
If this is the “environment” in “environmental sociology,” then, this field of inquiry has a problem. Not one it can discard or correct but something more profound, which marks its very core, making “environmental sociology” inextricably linked to this enactment of the environment. As such, the only way of successfully facing this problem is to unthink the core concept of the environment. But given the intimate connection of this concept to the field of sociology that studies it, to unthink the environment is to leave environmental sociology behind in direction to a conception and a practice of sociology that has discarded the Society/Nature divide and taken as its focus the myriad interrelations between different life-elements of the world(s) by which contingent, precarious, and dynamic “multispecies muddles” ( Haraway, 2016 , p. 34 et passim ) are enacted. This would be a sociology which, while being attentive of human peculiarities, would not presume humanity to be the only peculiar entity in the cosmos and would rather assume that giving due attention to the interconnectedness of human and extra-human life-elements of specific space-times is fundamental to the adequate understanding of the phenomena it deals with. In other words, in order to make environmental sociology relevant at a politically and intellectually fundamental level, it must be unmade and reforged into something very different from what it was and still predominantly is.
If the environment is part of what must be unthought, a field of inquiry that takes it to be its core concept—or at least one of its core concepts—cannot frame the right questions for the right issues, thus making it unable of providing hypotheses and coordinates for action which might be used to face the problems at hand. It is unable of providing these hypotheses and coordinates because it is not looking at the phenomena that need to be looked at. The prime example of this is perhaps the focus on environmental problems, many times conceptualized as an (the?) environmental crisis. There can only be an environmental crisis if the extra-human is reduced to the Great Outside of the Human. Only in this paradigm does human action damage what is fundamentally other-than-human, creating a sustainability problem.
Within this paradigm, many are the solutions proposed to this unsustainability of the life of the Human. These tend to be framed in the general terms of greening capitalism, of making sure that Western modern capitalism survives by trying to reduce the rate of world(s)-destruction, thusly guaranteeing the eternal reproduction both of this societal model and of its inherent destruction of worlds, including itself. The main approach to this is technocratic ( Crist, 2016 ; Hartley, 2016 ), appearing in the form of proposals to reforest critical areas of the planet; of geoengineering projects ( Altvater, 2016 ); of attempts to reduce greenhouse gases emissions by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energies or through regulated market trade of carbon credits ( Vossole, 2013 ); and so forth. At best, these are all short-term palliatives aiming to minimize—but not to fundamentally combat—climate change and other “environmental” problems. All of these solutions are doomed to fail simply because what is problematic is Western modern capitalism itself—within which both the damages and the solutions are being enacted ( Serres, 1998 ; Moore, 2016b ) 21 .
Environmental sociology is, at most, a very minor player in this game of climate/environmental-palliative prescription 22 . But it does share with this technocratic approach the same core concepts of the environment and the environmental crisis, thus reflecting many of the same shortcomings that are apparent in policy-making, engineering, economics, the natural sciences, and other technocratic fields. So maybe it is time to leave environmental sociology behind. In the face of contemporary threats to planetary life, it is increasingly urgent to move on to the radical relationism of space-time specific multiple and heterogeneous arrangements of different life-elements of the world(s), both human and extra-human. If we start making this movement, the environmental crisis is shown as fundamentally inadequate as a problem with which we should concern ourselves. It is shown to be a life-and-death-enactment fraught with the same symbolical and material problems that have marked Western modernity since its beginning—the very same problems that have brought about a state of affairs in which very real dangers are upon us. Since the environment is a severely limited, blind, and extinction-prone way of enacting the extra-human, the environmental crisis is the wrong framing for these dangers.
None of this means that all is well; far from it. Although we distance ourselves from certain discourses about the current and/or inevitably coming planetary (i.e., “environmental”) catastrophe 23 , here, we stand with Latour (2011) : one should give due attention to the Apocalypse brought about through poorly enacted realities of human and extra-human entanglement; it is not because the End has been repeatedly announced throughout history and never came that one should blind him or herself to the fact that profound and rapid changes to the biosphere are verifiable and very likely to increase in the near future, making the Apocalypse a significant material possibility—at least for humanity, but we can be sure that if we go down we will be taking others with us.
There is a vital crisis—literally a crisis of vitality, a crisis of life enactments—but this is a crisis of world(s)-building. It is a crisis of Western modernity and of the types of life-realities that are possible (and impossible) to enact within its boundaries. It is a crisis of a societal model that, as Marx (1975) reminded us, is based on the alienation of humanity from nature, making the latter into a mere means of guaranteeing human life—which is inextricable from the alienation of each human being from what he or she produces, from his or her own self, and from other human beings 24 . This changes the problems we—both human and extra-human—have to face, making it inevitable to conclude that only through revolutionary change 25 of the Western modern capitalist societal model could the world(s)-building crisis be unmade—even if its consequences will very likely shape the conditions of possibility for most, if not all, future enactments of human-with-extra-human arrangements of life.
(Definitively Not) Conclusions: Unthinking From the Margins
How can we leave the world(s)-building crisis behind? How can Western modern problematic enactments of the web of life be successfully unmade and remade in ways that do not oppress the world(s)' life-elements, both human and extra-human? Unthinking the epistemic foundations of both Western modernity and of its predominant forms of knowledge, including the social sciences, is the first step for the much-needed reenactment of life. One of the things that this process leads to is to the reforging of environmental sociology into something quite different from what it has been. It leads to dropping the environment from a sociology that concerns itself with the multiple, heterogeneous, space-time specific relations of life-elements by which humanity and nature are contingently made and remade.
But how can this be achieved? Any answer to this question is fraught with the pitfalls of hubris . Aiming to provide definite answers to similar questions is a very Western modern stance. It is, without a doubt, possible to attempt to do so—but only at the risk of replicating the very paradigm that created the problems discussed in this essay, as well as many others. We do not have any such proposal to close what has been said. We cannot have it because what has been said is entirely open-ended. And since life is always locally enacted in particular places and times, by particular networks of human and extra-human elements, the problems of life can only be—precariously—dealt with by each of the multitudes that are implicated in its enactments. Answers for problems related to the enactments of life can—and quite likely need to—be inter-locally coordinated, but no one locality or actor is able of providing them for the others. All that we dare to put forward are tentative sensibilities and intuitions.
By their inter-local contingent and conflictual coordination(s), the multiple processes of life-reenactment that are needed in order to overcome life-and-death issues such as changes to the biosphere, deforestation, or the extinction of entire species, are inherently revolutionary. And revolutions are arduous things to make—especially when, like what is at stake in these cases of life-enactments, they cannot be made once and for all.
One cannot leave Western modernity by establishing something else in an instant. It is not possible to enact what one cannot imagine and our—individual as well as collective—imaginations are severely—albeit not completely—limited by Western modern habits of thought and practice. Given this, any revolution of Western modern forms of enacting life can only be done from within Western modernity itself. Fortunately, Western modernity is not homogeneous. It is a succession of life-enactments that have manifold forms, although they share some fundamental (i.e., paradigmatic) assumptions.
As Law and Lien (2012a) remind us, Western modernity enacts the Society/Culture divide both coherently and non-coherently. This societal model has an undeniable will-to-singularity. It attempts to construct singular ontologies of both Society and Nature that are valid everywhere. But, at the same time and with the same relative importance, even within Western modernity there are multiple enactments of society and nature. Each specific space-time makes and remakes their own version of both. This does not annul the will-to-singularity but rather makes unicity inherently dependent on multiplicity.
This is a relevant opening. It allows for revolution from within. It allows for the exploration of the multiplicity, contingency, and ambivalence that are intrinsic to Western modernity as a possible way of reframing what this societal model has tried to solidify. In this manner, it might be possible to shake things up just enough to turn solids into fluids, to agitate life-elements just enough to make it possible for them to connect with each other in different, non-oppressive and non-extinction-prone forms. Unthinking what and how we know about the elements of life is one of the fundamental processes by which Western modernity can be productively and revolutionarily shaken through its non-coherences.
It is much more likely that this can be done not from the center(s) of Western modernity but from its margins. By definition, these margins are not outside of this societal model and of its predominant ways of knowing. But these are the places where Western modernity, through its non-coherences, comes into direct contact with the possibility of something other than itself. It is from here that a transformative exercise of “border thinking” ( Mignolo, 2000 )—or, rather, border unthinking—can be carried out. These margins are the places where ontologies and realities are not-quite-made, where they are almost-enacted, where they start to be performed by local networks of life-elements but are then interrupted and discarded 26 . But even though they are not fully made, they make a statement about the potentiality of other ways of enacting the web of life. And even when these other forms of enacting ontologies of and relations between “nature,” “humanity,” and other categories, are dropped due to their impracticality or their high costs, their potentiality remains.
A sociology that deals with the multiple enactments of the web of life—and definitively not one that is “environmental”—can contribute to this border unthinking. It can do so by looking at how the world(s) can be, not in a metaphysical sense, but by exploring empirically partially enacted potentialities. It can do so by looking for those ontologies of nature, humanity, and so forth, that, although not completely enacted, are perceived and whose making is started by local actors only to then be interrupted and discarded for a myriad of reasons. It is from what can be (made to be) that it might be possible to productively fracture Western modernity's crisis of world(s)-building in direction to a multiplicity of space-time localized socioecological enactments that do not subjugate life, whether it is contingently distributed and performed as human or as extra-human.
Author Contributions
JA and FA contributed to the development of this essay's arguments, as well as to the writing and revision of the submitted manuscript.
Both JA's and FA's research for this paper was done as part of ReNATURE–Valorization of the natural endogenous resources of the Centro region (project reference CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-000007), hosted at the Centre for Functional Ecology (CFE) of the University of Coimbra (UC), and funded by CENTRO2020.
Besides this, FA's research was also supported by ECOSTACK–Stacking of ecosystem services: mechanisms and interactions for optimal crop protection, pollination enhancement, and productivity, EU H2020 (Grant Agreement 773554—H2020-SFS-2016-2017/H2020-SFS-2017-2), 2018-2022; and by B-GOOD–Giving Beekeeping Guidance by cOmputatiOnal-assisted Decision making, H2020 (H2020-SFS-2018-2020), 2019-2024.
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Ana Manso for discussing an earlier draft of this paper.
1. ^ We are borrowing the formulation of Rose et al. (2010) : “Thinking through the environment, unsettling the Humanities.”
2. ^ This article's arguments focus on the case of environmental sociology. The fact that we are both sociologists is not irrelevant to this choice as it makes sociology the discipline whose limits and potentialities we know best. Nevertheless, the issues discussed are of broader paradigmatic consequence to the (heterogeneous) whole of Western modernity. As such, we are inclined to believe that many of what is said might be pertinent to discussions held in other fields of knowledge that still regard themselves as studying “environmental” phenomena.
3. ^ We use the term “life-elements” to refer to all entities of the world(s) that, in one way or another, contribute to the collective enactment(s) of life. These are both biologically living elements and all the other things of the world(s) that, together with the former, make up what Moore (2016a , b ) calls the “web of life.”
4. ^ See Moore (2016a , b ) for a critique of this “green arithmetic,” “the idea that our histories may be considered and narrated by adding up Humanity (or Society) and Nature, or even Capitalism plus Nature. (…) [S]uch dualisms are part of the problem—they are fundamental to the thinking that as brought the biosphere to its present transition toward a less habitable world. (…) [T]he categories of “Society” and “Nature”—Society without nature, Nature without humans—are part of the problem, intellectually and politically” ( Moore, 2016a , p. 2).
5. ^ There are too many references to quote for any of these (internally very much heterogeneous) lines of work. We merely highlight some of those we consider to be especially relevant for this exercise of unthinking. For STS and ANT, see Callon (1986) , Latour (2007 , 2010 ), Latour and Callon (1981) , Law (2002 , 2004 ), and Mol (2002) . Haraway (1991) and Plumwood (1993) present two feminist positions that are particularly relevant for issues discussed in this essay. For the case of decolonial thought, see Dussel (1995) ; Mignolo (1995 , 2000 ); Lander (2005) , Said (2003) , and Quijano (2007) .
6. ^ Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke had fundamental divergences on several topics, which cannot be discussed here. Nonetheless, they shared the general argument mentioned.
7. ^ He might modify his lifestyle as a response to altered environmental conditions, but this is another matter altogether.
8. ^ One should bear in mind that the idea that there is a difference between mind and body, as well as between humanity and nature, is not an idiosyncrasy of Western capitalist modernity ( Plumwood, 1993 , pp. 69–103 et passim ). However, as Moore puts it, “capitalism was the first civilization to organize itself on this basis” ( Moore, 2016b , p. 84).
9. ^ Law and Lien (2012a) remind us that nature and society (or culture) are paradoxically both coherent and non-coherent in Western modernity. On the one hand, there is an undeniable will to make them singular—only one Nature and one Society, which are the same everywhere. On the other hand, since both nature and society are enacted by the practices of actor-networks that are bound to particular places and temporalities, each local network enacts—slightly or pronouncedly—different ontologies of nature and society, and therefore different forms of their relationship. But even if no two enactments of Society/Nature are the same, at any given space-time, the Western modern dualism of Society/Nature that is being enacted tends to be (re)presented as singular (i.e., as the form of Society/Nature). And, since these different enactments coordinate themselves in various ways, they converge (dynamically and contingently) to form one ontology of Society and one ontology of Nature—that is always dependent on their multiplicity. In this manner, much like Bauman (1989 , 1991 ) has shown, Western modernity's inherent ambivalence emerges as its defining characteristic, making ontological multiplicity not that which negates ontological unity but rather that upon which this unity is made ( Law, 2002 , 2004 ; Mol, 2002 ; Law and Lien, 2012a , b ). We will return to this in the conclusion of this essay.
10. ^ Nature is now at least in part but not entirely explained by the social. The extension of a sociology of the social to the study of phenomena historically considered to be outside of society presupposes that natural phenomena are conditioned by human action. As such, what happens in society changes nature—geographically, geologically, biologically, even if not ontologically—, making nature only understandable if society is taken into account. But this logic does not negate scientific specialization, i.e., it does not deny that there are natural phenomena that can only be understood by the natural sciences—even if even the latter have increasingly started to take into account a (mostly homogenized and abstract) role played by Humanity in the shaping of the phenomena they study.
11. ^ Although we are discussing the specific case of environmental sociology, other environmental social sciences deal with the non-human in a generally similar fashion: they accept and solidify the fracture between Society and Nature, they grant a privilege to the Human, and they contribute to the transformation of nature into mere surrounding of ego cogito . Different social sciences have historically approached the environment in different ways. But, insofar as their practitioners regard what they study as the “environment,” these social sciences also share an epistemic positioning. A specific social science, sociology included, can have practitioners focused on understanding the socioecological enactment of worlds, as well as practitioners who study the human (or social, etc.) dimensions of “environmental” phenomena. The latter work in the same episteme as environmental sociologists, even if the former might not. Since this is a Western modern conception, in general terms, the natural sciences subscribe to the same conception of nature-as-the-environment-of-the-Human, albeit their focus is on the other side of the divide (with some researchers trying to bridge it without unmaking it, much like what happens in the social sciences).
12. ^ The Human is morally superior to Nature insofar as ethics is defined solely as an affair of humanity. Nature is not less moral, it is not immoral, it simply is—and in that pure existence, it is amoral in reference to the Human who thus becomes the only potentially moral entity.
13. ^ “Government” is understood by Foucault (1983 , 2009 , 2010 , 2012b ) as the “conduction of conducts,” which always occurs within the framework of a given governmentality, i.e., a certain “art of government” or “rationality of government.”
14. ^ See Parenti (2016 , pp. 170–171 et passim ) for a theoretical framing of Foucault's biopolitical logic of government through the milieu in terms that make it possible to mobilize his thought in the study of the multiple interrelations between human and extra-human life-elements. Parenti does this by highlighting the dimension of biopower which deals with the enactment of non-human nature(s) as a way of enacting specific human arrangements—which, given the necessary interconnections between human and extra-human implicated in these power-knowledge exercises, by definition makes them into specific human-and-extra-human arrangements. He calls this dimension of biopower “geopower”: “if biopower is about harnessing, channeling, enhancing, and deploying the powers of bodies at the scale of territorially defined populations, then geopower is similarly the statecraft and technologies of power that make territory and the biosphere accessible, legible, knowable, and utilizable” ( Parenti, 2016 , p. 171). The extension of Foucault's work to issues of human-and-extra-human enactments of collective life is being carried out by the environmentality (i.e., the environmental governmentality) school of thought. A brief exposition of environmentality's general stance can be found in Malette (2011) .
15. ^ According to Moore, the multiple interconnections between human and extra-human life-elements through which material-symbolical worlds are enacted makes geology a fundamentally historical phenomenon. As he puts it, “the co-produced character of resource production, unfolding through the human/extra-human nexus,” which he names “the oikeios ,” turns geology into “geohistory”: “Geology, in other words, becomes geohistory through definite relations of power and production; these definite relations are geographical, which is to say they are not relations between humans alone” ( Moore, 2016b , p. 95).
16. ^ One of the upmost indicators of this disqualification is the representation of humans as existing at the head of the arrow of time, always moving forward through multidimensional-albeit-linear progress, whereas non-humans, in the state of nature, are immobilized—or at the very least very much slowed down—in a time of very little value by Western modern standards. See Fabian (2014) for a framing of this logic in terms of what he calls the “denial of coevalness.”
17. ^ This applies to human beings reified as part of Nature as well as to extra-human life-elements, i.e., to unpaid domestic labor developed in the oikos for the reproduction of human biological life as it turned into wage-labor as well as to fossil fuel reserves as they turned into one modern capitalism's main energy sources.
18. ^ See Moore (2016b ) for a discussion of how capitalism functions by making a zone of exploitation of paid work-energy dependent on a zone of appropriation of non-paid human and extra-human work-energy. Life-elements are never placed in one of these zones once and for all but rather are moved from one to the other according to capitalism's space-time specific needs and capabilities.
19. ^ The life of the Human should be understood as a specific manner of living symbolically valued in Western modernity.
20. ^ See McBrien (2016) for a discussion of capitalism as a world-ecology inextricably linked to extinction, which the author frames in terms of the necrotic properties of capitalism. According to him, “capitalism was born from extinction, and from capital, extinction has flowed” ( McBrien, 2016 , p. 116). Capitalism is not only a productive system; its productive process is inherently based on destruction and death. If capitalism is a necrotic socioecological system, then, it is simultaneously genocidal and suicidal. Capital accumulation is only possible through the conversion of life into death—into resources to be depleted or into things to be annihilated because they stand in the way of these resources. In this manner, “extinction is both the immediate success and ultimate failure of the real subsumption of the earth by capital; the ecology of capital is constructed through attempted erasure of existing ecologies—ecologies that include humans” ( McBrien, 2016 , p. 117). This logic highlights the inseparable link of genocide and suicide in capital's necrosis insofar as it leads to a increasing production of negative value: if capital needs nature to appropriate and extinguish in order to generate value, then, the very process of capital accumulation decreases the part of nature that is available to be thusly appropriated, symmetrically increasing forms of nature that are hostile to this accumulation and cannot be incorporated into or avoided by this modus operandi in the longue durée (e.g., toxic waste, garbage, greenhouse gases). See also Moore (2016b ) on the extinction of Cheap Nature by capital accumulation.
21. ^ We do not intend to reduce all proposals to deal with the environmental crisis to their technocratic variations. There are other types of proposals, namely those emerging from the heterogeneous schools of environmentalism. Their discussion is beyond this essay. Nevertheless, it can be argued that most of them operate in the same epistemological and ontological framework of scientific and policy-related technocracy, and thus share the many of the same problems. Sometimes the solutions they propose are dependent on the same technologies as scientific and policy-related technocracy. But even when they are framed around notions of “going back to nature,” of living in harmony with a Nature that exist out-there, undisturbed by human action, these solutions are firmly rooted in Society/Nature. While seeking to denounce Nature's degradation by Society, both entities are reified and solidly placed in relation to each other—and a relation in which humanity is the only true actor to be found among the multiple life-elements of the cosmos. The will to leave the environment undisturbed does so in more ways than one, making it impossible to leave the environment behind and move on to space-time specific enactments of worlds through the myriad interrelations of life-elements.
22. ^ In general, all environmental social sciences are minor players in this game, with the exceptions of (behavioral) psychology and (neoclassic) economics, which have a relevant role in environmental policy making ( Shove, 2010 ). Nonetheless, even economics and psychology have not shifted the dominance of the natural sciences in this field.
23. ^ See McBrien (2016) and Haraway (2016) for a critical discussion of “catastrophism” and of how mainstream narratives on the Anthropocene reinforce this worldview.
24. ^ See also Moore (2016a , p. 86 et passim ).
25. ^ Having just quoted Marx, the meaning of revolution could be misconstrued by some readers. We are not a priori framing it in any way, neither in terms of process nor in terms of teleology. By definition, the fundamental transformation of a societal model is revolutionary. And, also by definition, fundamental transformations are violent—sometimes physically, but always epistemologically and ontologically, and thus materially. But the specific character of such violent actions can only be defined by the actors who collectively develop the multiple space-time localized practices by which such transformations are brought about. Taking an example from decolonial historical processes, the “non-violent” Gandhi-model ( Gandhi, 2006 ) of revolution is not necessarily less violent than the Fanon-model ( Fanon, 2001 , 2008 ), although they are carried out by very different sets of actors-elements and practices. The inherent violence of these processes is profoundly variable both in scope and in kind, and only during their development can it be decided and classified in any way. Analytically and politically, physical intra- and inter-species overt aggression is only one of the many forms revolutionary violence can assume.
26. ^ See Law and Lien (2012b) for an empirical discussion of these not-quite-enacted ontologies in the case of salmon farming.
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Keywords: capitalism, environment, environmental crisis, nature, social sciences, society, sociology, western modernity
Citation: Aldeia J and Alves F (2019) Against the Environment. Problems in Society/Nature Relations. Front. Sociol. 4:29. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2019.00029
Received: 07 January 2019; Accepted: 28 March 2019; Published: 24 April 2019.
Reviewed by:
Copyright © 2019 Aldeia and Alves. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: João Aldeia, [email protected]
This article is part of the Research Topic
Climate Change and Society
Essay on Nature
Impact of Nature
In its broadest sense, nature refers to the physical world around us and its components, including the atmosphere, oceans, landforms, and wildlife. It encompasses the diversity of flora and fauna, geological features, and the intricacies of weather patterns. In its most basic form, nature can be a vast and interconnected network of living and non-living elements that support and sustain each other. As a result, nature has been a critical factor in shaping human civilizations throughout history and continues to play an essential role in our lives today. Let’s look at the other details in Essay on Nature.
Nature is a source of inspiration and awe for human beings. It encompasses the diversity of flora and fauna, geological features, and the intricacies of weather patterns and has been a critical factor in shaping human civilizations throughout history. In addition to its spiritual significance, nature has practical value as a source of food, medicine, and materials. As a result, nature has been instrumental in human survival and progress, providing us with the essential resources we need to thrive.
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Moreover, spending time in natural environments has impacted human health profoundly. Let’s look at a few more details in Essay on Nature.
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Nature is also known to impact human health profoundly. Studies have shown that spending time in natural environments can help reduce stress levels, lower blood pressure, and improve overall well-being. Exposure to natural light, fresh air, and greenery was also linked to improved mental health, reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety. Moreover, research has indicated that exposure to nature can enhance cognitive functioning and creativity, making it an essential component of a healthy and well-rounded life.
Nature’s Relationship with Human Civilization
Humans have always had a complex relationship with nature. Humans have relied on the natural world for food, shelter, and resources for thousands of years, and our civilizations have been deeply entwined with the environment. However, with the growth of industrialization, the strain on the environment has become increasingly significant. Natural systems are also altered, and many species have become endangered, leading to a decline in biodiversity and environmental degradation. We must take steps to protect and conserve nature for future generations.
Conserving Nature for Future Generations
As the impact of human activities on the environment continues to grow, it is becoming increasingly essential to protect and conserve nature. This includes preserving natural habitats, protecting endangered species, and reducing our use of natural resources. Conservation efforts must balance the need for economic growth and development with the importance of preserving the environment for future generations. This requires a collective effort from individuals, communities, and governments to implement sustainable practices and minimize our environmental impact.
The Importance of Environmental Education
To preserve and protect nature for future generations, we must educate people about the environment and the importance of conservation. Environmental education is then integrated into school curricula and accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds. It should focus on scientific facts and ecological issues and encourage individuals to develop a personal connection with nature and appreciate its beauty and significance. This includes learning about the intricacies of natural systems, understanding the impact of human activities on the environment, and developing a sense of environmental responsibility.
Challenges Faced by Nature
Nature faces many challenges due to human activities, including deforestation, pollution, and the over-exploitation of natural resources. Climate change is a growing threat, with rising temperatures causing melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and shifts in weather patterns that can be devastating to wildlife and habitats. The loss of biodiversity is also a significant concern, with many species becoming endangered and at risk of extinction.
Another challenge is the fragmentation of habitats, which results in the decline of species and ecosystems. This fragmentation occurs as natural habitats become destroyed to make way for human development, reducing the available space for wildlife and altering ecosystems. The introduction of invasive species can also have a significant impact, altering ecosystems and out-competing native species, leading to a decline in biodiversity.
In addition to the environmental challenges, there are also economic and social challenges to preserving nature. Exploiting natural resources for financial gain can lead to overuse and degradation, making it challenging to balance conservation efforts with economic development. There is also a lack of political will to implement conservation measures and enforce environmental laws, leading to a lack of progress in protecting nature.
This article, Essay on Nature is a helpful resource for students. Nature is a precious resource essential in shaping human civilizations and sustaining human life. Its practical value as a source of food, medicine, and materials had combined with its impact on human health and well-being. However, the growth of human activities has put increasing strain on the environment, making it imperative that we take steps to protect and conserve nature for future generations. Environmental education is a critical component of this effort, and individuals of all ages and backgrounds are also encouraged to develop a sense of environmental responsibility and an appreciation for the beauty and significance of nature.
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Essay On Global Environment Problems
Overpopulation in the early 1900's.
In the early 1900’s, the population of the world was a mere 1.6 billion people. Now, within the last century, the population has risen dramatically to 7.4 billion people. As the population of this planet remains on a rapid incline, it does not display any indication of subsiding. Today, overpopulation of the human race is one of the most critical issues that the world must face. Although many individuals remain unaware of this epidemic, the effects of overpopulation are becoming explicitly clear to see with the passing of each day. Climate change, loss of natural habitats, pollution, and the overconsumption of limited natural resources, such as fossil fuels and water, are only a small quantity of environmental issues imposed upon Earth
The World On A Turtle's Back Analysis
Unlike modern people’s view, animals were highly revered and regarded as sacred creatures in most Native American civilizations in the past. The Iroquois, like most Native American peoples, emphasize the importance of living in harmony with the natural world through the creation myth "The World on a Turtle 's Back" which expresses the relations toward all living things. However, in modern society, people take both the world and the animals for granted and start to neglect the importance of harmony in nature.
The Way To Rainy Mountain Land Analysis
How can one become one with their environment? Connection with one 's environment was always easier to maintain until the industrial age came into existence. With the birth of modern society came the birth of social responsibilities and burdens unknown to man. In “The Way to Rainy Mountain” and “A place for literature,” Barry Lopez and N. Momaday Momaday explain the impact of lands on its occupants. In “the white heron,” Sarah Jewett explains the feeling of reconnection with one’s inner voice though nature. In “The Way to Rainy Mountain” Momaday explains the connection between the Native Americans and the lands they held until they were forced out of it by the Americans. In “the white heron,” Jewett explains the feeling of reconnection with
Sandra Steingraber's Despair Not
Do you want an environment crisis to happen? Do you know what causes it? Do you know what it is and what will happen? Heat trapping gasses such as carbon dioxide, methane, pollutants. There are also fossil fuels, primarily coal, petroleum, and natural gases. There are droughts, floods, acidifying oceans, dissolving coral reefs, and faltering plankton stocks caused by those things (745). All of these things can and will cause a devastating crisis in the world. The past, present, and the future have and will be exposed and affected by all of those things. Some of the insects we need now to take care of this earth and to help the animal and human population survive, may not be here in the future. The animals are getting affected by the environmental
The Earth's Process Has Changed Population Of Organisms Essay
Well, scientist say Earth’s process over time has changed organisms and the amount of those organisms that exist. This has been caused by many things such as Pangea, landforms and natural disasters. The things that cause changes in population also can create new organisms and cause extinction to others. All in all, Earth’s process has cause changes in organisms population.
Why Do Americans Use Steroids In Sports
environment, which is seen in the idea of climate change. According too many scientist even a
Dbq Human Environment
Since the beginning of mankind, there have been many examples of humans developing both positive and negative relationships with the environment. From early Native Americans preciously cultivating and restoring their natural surroundings, to large manufacturing conglomerates of the modern age polluting air and water without regard, the interaction between humans and their environment has been both productive and destructive in various ways. By evaluating that it is much more important for a developing civilization/nation to conserve and protect its resources rather than fully develop them, we can completely understand the unique impacts that the human race has had on the environment, and how significant the negative gaffes and consequently,
Combining Rhetorical Modes
Pollution occurs in the world naturally as well by the hand of humans. Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into the natural environment that cause adverse change. For example, when a cow passes gas a large amount of methane gas is released into the atmosphere. Methane is twenty one times more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide, this results in the global temperature increasing. Humans contribute to pollution as well, for example, a person drives to work everyday in a car that runs on gas, the gas burning in his engine causes carbon monoxide to be released, increasing the global temperature.
African American Colonialism
There are many environmental problems that surround us everyday in this world. The Ecosystem around us includes humans, glaciers, mountains, plant life, rocks, oceans and seas. Many engineering developments are resulting in our resource depletion and are ultimately leading to environmental destruction. As our modern technologies have advanced, with the increase in the use of plastic, rubber, oil and metals, our resources have been depleted. Because of this, many environmental issues have come about like pollution, climate change, global warming, deforestation, overpopulation, industrial and household waste, acid rain, ozone layer depletion, genetic engineering of food, and
Hurricane Simulation
If we noticed it or not, our planet is warming up. All the way from North Pole to South Pole. Since 1906, the global average surface temperature has gone up from 1.1 to 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit, this is more noticeable in the polar regions. This effects of the rising temperatures isn’t to be taken lightly just because the average surface temperature has gone up by .5. The small change in heat is melting the glaciers, not just the north and south poles but mountain glaciers, ice sheets covering West Antarctica and Greenland, and Arctic sea ice. This is even changing the precipitation patterns, and having animals migrate to habitats that they will most likely no survive and more. Researcher Bill Fraser has been studying the drop in population of
Global Warming Solutions
What is global warming? Global warming is defined as “ an increase in the earth 's average atmospheric temperature that causes corresponding changes in climate, and that may result from the greenhouse effect" (“Global warming”). Natural events and human that causes global warming are believed to be factors to increase in average temperatures. This essay looks into the growing problem of global warming and suggests reasonable solutions to it. It also evaluates the effectiveness of these solutions.
Effects Of Bumblebees On The Environment
The environment could be at risk if animals start going extinct. Every animal has a job to do, for example, a bumblebee helps pollinate plants. Without the bumblebee the plant population would decrease and that would affect all the animal because plants give off oxygen, and almost every living thing needs oxygen to survive. Without animals, everything would just fall apart and start dying. If the top predator of the food chain were to disappear, other animal populations would start to overpopulate and that would also affect the environment. For example, when the wolf population went down, the elk population grew causing the willow trees to decrease, and when the willow tree population decreased many birds lost their homes, causing the insect
How Does Climate Change Affect Biodiversity
This paper seeks to research the study of climate change and its effects on biodiversity. This will be done by first understanding what climate change is and what the different effects are. Once this is understood, it will be easier to apply this knowledge to the study of biodiversity and how species are affected. Real life examples of different species that are affected will be mentioned and explained.
Reflective Essay About The Environment
As the result of my experience this semester I can conclude that this experience was a life changing experience. The way I viewed things in the past about the environment has changed. In the past I was not aware of the importance of living a more sustainable life. Also, how protecting our environment is one of the today’s most serious issues. Some of issues and information that I learned throughout this semester was the web life, food web, overpopulation, mutualism & commensalism, climate change, pollution, rainforest & sea destruction, and the extinction of many animals and plants. It was interesting to learn about the cause and prevention of erosion, while doing my EACAP project. I was not aware of the importance of preventing erosion from the trail. I have many take away this semester not only I have learned about current environmental issue, but also the history of it. Now that I know that someday, we can run out of sources I value than more than ever.
Cause Of Environmental Degradation
According to www.conserve-energy-future.com, the first factor causing environmental degradation is overpopulation. Rinkesh, World’s Top Eco-Conscious Bloggers and website owner, stated that overpopulation leads to excessive consumption of goods and necessities which impacts natural resources. This is because more people demand more food, clothes, shelter and fuel. Because of this demand, their living space needs to be expanded in order to grow food and provide homes for people. Hence, deforestation increases. This is another effect of overpopulation that impacts the worsening of the environment [2]. For example decreased forest size increases the amount of carbon in the environment. More specifically, deforestation affects the wildlife and results in biodiversity loss and species extinction [1].
More about Essay On Global Environment Problems
The Beauty About The Nature
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
The Stars Awaken a Certain Reverence, Because Though Always Present, They Are Inaccessible;
but all natural objects make a kindred impression when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood. When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet . The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet . This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this, their warranty deeds give no title. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other;
who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.
Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith.
There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,
— no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.
I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.
Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.
Chapter I from Nature , published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures
What Is The Meaning Behind Nature, The Poem?
Emerson often referred to nature as the "Universal Being" in his many lectures. It was Emerson who deeply believed there was a spiritual sense of the natural world which felt was all around him.
Going deeper still in this discussion of the "Universal Being", Emerson writes, "The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship."
It's common sense that "nature" is everything you see that is NOT man-made, or changed by man (trees, foliage, mountains, etc.), but Emerson reminds us that nature was set forth to serve man. This is the essence of human will, for man to harness nature. Every object in nature has its own beauty. Therefore, Emerson advocates to view nature as a reality by building your own world and surrounding yourself with natural beauty.
- The purpose of science is to find the theory of nature.
- Nature wears the colors of the Spirit.
- A man is fed, not to fill his belly, but so he may work.
- Each natural action is graceful.
"Material objects are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side."
This quote is cited in numerous works and it is attributed to a "French philosopher." However, no name can be found in association with this quote.
What is the main point of Nature, by Emerson?
The central theme of Emerson's famous essay "Nature" is the harmony that exists between the natural world and human beings. In "Nature," Ralph Waldo Emerson contends that man should rid himself of material cares and instead of being burdened by unneeded stress, he can enjoy an original relation with the universe and experience what Emerson calls "the sublime."
What is the central idea of the essay Nature, by Emerson?
For Emerson, nature is not literally God but the body of God’s soul. ”Nature,” he writes, is “mind precipitated.” Emerson feels that to realize one’s role in this respect fully is to be in paradise (similar to heaven itself).
What is Emerson's view of the Nature of humans?
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- Nature Essay
Essay About Nature
Nature refers to the interaction between the physical surroundings around us and the life within it like atmosphere, climate, natural resources, ecosystem, flora, fauna, and humans. Nature is indeed God’s precious gift to Earth. It is the primary source of all the necessities for the nourishment of all living beings on Earth. Right from the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the house we live in is provided by nature. Nature is called ‘Mother Nature’ because just like our mother, she is always nurturing us with all our needs.
Whatever we see around us, right from the moment we step out of our house is part of nature. The trees, flowers, landscapes, insects, sunlight, breeze, everything that makes our environment so beautiful and mesmerizing are part of Nature. In short, our environment is nature. Nature has been there even before the evolution of human beings.
Importance of Nature
If not for nature then we wouldn’t be alive. The health benefits of nature for humans are incredible. The most important thing for survival given by nature is oxygen. The entire cycle of respiration is regulated by nature. The oxygen that we inhale is given by trees and the carbon dioxide we exhale is getting absorbed by trees.
The ecosystem of nature is a community in which producers (plants), consumers, and decomposers work together in their environment for survival. The natural fundamental processes like soil creation, photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, and water cycling, allow Earth to sustain life. We are dependent on these ecosystem services daily whether or not we are aware.
Nature provides us services round the clock: provisional services, regulating services, and non-material services. Provisional services include benefits extracted from nature such as food, water, natural fuels and fibres, and medicinal plants. Regulating services include regulation of natural processes that include decomposition, water purification, pollution, erosion and flood control, and also, climate regulation. Non-material services are the non-material benefits that improve the cultural development of humans such as recreation, creative inspiration from interaction with nature like art, music, architecture, and the influence of ecosystems on local and global cultures.
The interaction between humans and animals, which are a part of nature, alleviates stress, lessens pain and worries. Nature provides company and gives people a sense of purpose.
Studies and research have shown that children especially have a natural affinity with nature. Regular interaction with nature has boosted health development in children. Nature supports their physical and mental health and instills abilities to access risks as they grow.
Role and Importance of Nature
The natural cycle of our ecosystem is vital for the survival of organisms. We all should take care of all the components that make our nature complete. We should be sure not to pollute the water and air as they are gifts of Nature.
Mother nature fosters us and never harms us. Those who live close to nature are observed to be enjoying a healthy and peaceful life in comparison to those who live in urban areas. Nature gives the sound of running fresh air which revives us, sweet sounds of birds that touch our ears, and sounds of breezing waves in the ocean makes us move within.
All the great writers and poets have written about Mother Nature when they felt the exceptional beauty of nature or encountered any saddening scene of nature. Words Worth who was known as the poet of nature, has written many things in nature while being in close communion with nature and he has written many things about Nature. Nature is said to be the greatest teacher as it teaches the lessons of immortality and mortality. Staying in close contact with Nature makes our sight penetrative and broadens our vision to go through the mysteries of the planet earth. Those who are away from nature can’t understand the beauty that is held by Nature. The rise in population on planet earth is leading to a rise in consumption of natural resources. Because of increasing demands for fuels like Coal, petroleum, etc., air pollution is increasing at a rapid pace. The smoke discharged from factory units and exhaust tanks of cars is contaminating the air that we breathe. It is vital for us to plant more trees in order to reduce the effect of toxic air pollutants like Carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, etc.
Save Our Nature
Earth’s natural resources are not infinite and they cannot be replenished in a short period. The rapid increase in urbanization has used most of the resources like trees, minerals, fossil fuels, and water. Humans in their quest for a comfortable living have been using the resources of nature mindlessly. As a result, massive deforestation, resultant environmental pollution, wildlife destruction, and global warming are posing great threats to the survival of living beings.
Air that gives us oxygen to breathe is getting polluted by smoke, industrial emissions, automobile exhaust, burning of fossil fuels like coal, coke and furnace oil, and use of certain chemicals. The garbage and wastes thrown here and there cause pollution of air and land.
Sewage, organic wastage, industrial wastage, oil spillage, and chemicals pollute water. It is causing several water-borne diseases like cholera, jaundice and typhoid.
The use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers in agriculture adds to soil pollution. Due to the mindless cutting of trees and demolition of greeneries for industrialization and urbanization, the ecological balance is greatly hampered. Deforestation causes flood and soil erosion.
Earth has now become an ailing planet panting for care and nutrition for its rejuvenation. Unless mankind puts its best effort to save nature from these recurring situations, the Earth would turn into an unfit landmass for life and activity.
We should check deforestation and take up the planting of trees at a massive rate. It will not only save the animals from being extinct but also help create regular rainfall and preserve soil fertility. We should avoid over-dependence on fossil fuels like coal, petroleum products, and firewood which release harmful pollutants to the atmosphere. Non-conventional sources of energy like the sun, biogas and wind should be tapped to meet our growing need for energy. It will check and reduce global warming.
Every drop of water is vital for our survival. We should conserve water by its rational use, rainwater harvesting, checking the surface outflow, etc. industrial and domestic wastes should be properly treated before they are dumped into water bodies.
Every individual can do his or her bit of responsibility to help save the nature around us. To build a sustainable society, every human being should practice in heart and soul the three R’s of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. In this way, we can save our nature.
Nature Conservation
Nature conservation is very essential for future generations, if we will damage nature our future generations will suffer.
Nowadays, technological advancement is adversely affecting our nature. Humans are in the quest and search for prosperity and success that they have forgotten the value and importance of beautiful Nature around. The ignorance of nature by humans is the biggest threat to nature. It is essential to make people aware and make them understand the importance of nature so that they do not destroy it in the search for prosperity and success.
On high priority, we should take care of nature so that nature can continue to take care of us. Saving nature is the crying need of our time and we should not ignore it. We should embrace simple living and high thinking as the adage of our lives.
FAQs on Nature Essay
1. How Do You Define Nature?
Nature is defined as our environment. It is the interaction between the physical world around us and the life within it like the atmosphere, climate, natural resources, ecosystem, flora, fauna and humans. Nature also includes non-living things such as water, mountains, landscape, plants, trees and many other things. Nature adds life to mother earth. Nature is the treasure habitation of every essential element that sustains life on this planet earth. Human life on Earth would have been dull and meaningless without the amazing gifts of nature.
2. How is Nature Important to Us?
Nature is the only provider of everything that we need for survival. Nature provides us with food, water, natural fuels, fibres, and medicinal plants. Nature regulates natural processes that include decomposition, water purification, pollution, erosion, and flood control. It also provides non-material benefits like improving the cultural development of humans like recreation, etc.
An imbalance in nature can lead to earthquakes, global warming, floods, and drastic climate changes. It is our duty to understand the importance of nature and how it can negatively affect us all if this rapid consumption of natural resources, pollution, and urbanization takes place.
3. How Should We Save Our Nature?
We should check deforestation and take up the planting of trees at a massive rate. It will save the animals from being extinct but also help create regular rainfall and preserve soil fertility. We should avoid over-dependence on fossil fuels like coal, petroleum products, and firewood which release harmful pollutants to the atmosphere. We should start using non-conventional sources of energy like the sun, biogas, and wind to meet our growing need for energy. It will check and reduce global warming. Water is vital for our survival and we should rationalize our use of water.
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Humans are causing life on Earth to vanish. By Tammana Begum. First published 12 December 2019. 36. Ecosystems, the fabric of life on which we all depend, are declining rapidly because of human actions. But there is still time to save them. Human pressure on nature has soared since the 1970s. We have been using more and more natural resources ...
Destruction of nature as dangerous as climate change, scientists warn Unsustainable exploitation of the natural world threatens food and water security of billions of people, major UN-backed...
The dominant manners in which environmental issues have been framed by sociology are deeply problematic. Environmental sociology is still firmly rooted in the Cartesian separation of Society and Nature. This separation is one of the epistemic foundations of Western modernity—one which is inextricably linked to its capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal dimensions. This societal model reifies ...
Nature is an important and integral part of mankind. It is one of the greatest blessings for human life; however, nowadays humans fail to recognize it as one. Nature has been an inspiration for numerous poets, writers, artists and more of yesteryears. This remarkable creation inspired them to write poems and stories in the glory of it.
Nature faces many challenges due to human activities, including deforestation, pollution, and the over-exploitation of natural resources. Climate change is a growing threat, with rising temperatures causing melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and shifts in weather patterns that can be devastating to wildlife and habitats.
With a massive influx of natural disasters, warming and cooling periods, different types of weather patterns and much more, people need to be aware of what types of environmental problems our planet is facing. • Pollution: Pollution of air, water and soil require millions of years to recoup.
Nature Summary: "Nature" is an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson that was first published in 1836. In this work, Emerson reflects on the beauty and power of nature and argues that it can serve as a source of inspiration and enlightenment for individuals. He encourages readers to look beyond the surface of nature and appreciate its underlying ...
The interaction between humans and animals, which are a part of nature, alleviates stress, lessens pain and worries. Nature provides company and gives people a sense of purpose. Studies and research have shown that children especially have a natural affinity with nature. Regular interaction with nature has boosted health development in children.