The Human-Nature Relationship and the Social and Physical World

How do we reconcile the human-nature relationship to take into account both the social and physical world?

The relationship between nature and humans is such that it lets us arrive at no easy answers when attempting to analyse it. Instead it poses questions, and provides us with opposing viewpoints that attempt to define just exactly what that relationship is. Sociology generally has not given this relationship too much thought, until the 1970s when ‘environmental sociology’ began to emerge as a discipline in its own right.

Sociology, almost by definition is anthropocentric, in that it is the study of human society and solely interested in human relations. Nature and wilderness on the other hand have been seen as something outside of the human experience or realm. We see our world in terms of culture, the distinctive learned aspects of our society, involving both built culture, the material objects we create, and the more intangible examples like language and ceremony and law. Culture is the lens with which we use to interpret our world.

The role of sociology here then is to define perspectives of viewing and perceiving the environment which transcend cultural limitations of understanding. This is necessary because the extent of our culture and society is such that it leaves many individuals feeling dissociated from the natural world.

Following on from this comes interpretations of the nature of ‘wilderness’. Like all constructions, this too is subject to the cultural lens, and so conflict arises when different values and uses are ascribed to the environment. This has been influentially described by Peter Hay as “the ambivalence of the wilderness.”

This ambivalence is represented in sociological perspectives that seek to understand the human interpretation of the natural world. To be highlighted are the ‘mild social-constructionism’ and ‘critical realist’ approaches, as these are both useful, moderate perspectives that acknowledge their own fallibility.

Whatever the definitions or value placed upon wilderness and the environment, the reality that humans are a part of the natural world and require its resources for survival is undeniable. Perhaps the role which environmental sociology needs to play is that which will resolve the complacent construction that resources are endless so that it achieves some practical meaning in terms of changing human patterns of consumption. Here is the need to distinguish between natural capital and natural income, recognizing that the use of one is exploitive, and the other sustainable; in resolving this, perhaps it will finally reconcile the human-nature relationship and divide.

It is not hard to imagine or understand why many people feel dissociated from nature. But it is also a feeling which is hard to define. This dissociation can be attributed to our culture, both materially and immaterially, and its effect of insulating us from the natural world. Our clothing, housing, transport and all other conveniences and comforts all serve to limit the awareness we each have of being a physical organic body existing within an environment that is human independent and indifferent.

Pointed out by Simmons (1993: 66) is an emergent anthropological perspective of the 1960s that “humans were not behaviourally homogenous in the way of many animal species, and that an understanding of the ecological required a knowledge of the social.” What this means is humans can exhibit quite varied cultural practices as a result of their environment, and that a greater knowledge of our social needs is required to understand our ecological relationship; especially when this relationship becomes exploitative.

As societies made the early transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian means of subsistence and economy there arose the basic principles that would underpin the fundamental conflict that now exists between industrial and post-industrial society, where the nature dissociation is greatest, and the environment. The hunter-gatherer society functioned with the aim of meeting the primary needs of its members of food and shelter. Any trading that occurred involved the exchange of goods directly related to the tools needed for clothing, hunting and food preparation. In contrast, the agrarian society required the creation of surplus so that members could be involved in activities not essential to individual society.

Here we see the beginnings of the human-nature dissociation, whereby one individual is not directly involved in meeting their own needs for survival. Borgmann suggests that in the days of hunter-gathering “the nature of realities and the reality of nature were divine. The world was full of divinities” (1995: 31). This understanding is the cultural construct of the time, and is considerably more benign in outcome considering low population density. Simmons highlights the suggestion that the “perceptual selectivity” made possible by low population and life expectancy could “ignore any longer term trends in the environment” (1993: 158). There is a sense that as a society we have inherited this complacency and tendency to ignore environmental problems so long as immediate needs are being met, whereas the difference may now be that management of the natural environment requires an intensely practical approach.

Perhaps somewhere in our psyche we retain an innate feeling of subservience to nature, both through being dependent on a wild landscape for survival, and this same landscape being a source of danger. For the majority of the population, this individual human-nature relationship has passed, and we live in almost completely man-made environments. When Peter Hay wrote of “the ambivalence of the wilderness” he was referring to the mixed and dual nature of the feelings and interpretations that humans hold toward the ‘wilderness’. It is seen as both a place and source of danger, and as a provider.

This has been born out in different ways, with on one hand people’s interaction with the land taking on a spiritual nature, and the opposite, where there is perceived a need to tame and conquer nature, so that it provides what humans need without any nasty surprises. This has resulted in two simplified perspectives on ‘wilderness’. Firstly that it has intrinsic value due to its lack of human interference, and that there is a need to preserve human-free spaces. And secondly, that ‘wilderness’ has no real value, because it serves no primary human needs, and thus has no cultural value or need of protection.

It must be recognised, however, that ‘wilderness’ itself, as an idea, is a cultural construct. It is what a society perceives it to be, thus the ‘ambivalence’. David Graber writes;

wilderness has taken on connotations, and mythology, that specifically reflect latter-twentieth-century values of a distinctive Anglo-American bent. It now functions to provide solitude and counterpoint to technological society in a landscape that is managed to reveal as few traces of the passage of other humans as possible. (1995: 124)

There is a resurgence being experienced in the idea of wilderness and nature having spiritual value. This is perhaps a perhaps an offshoot of idealization of aboriginal societies that are seen to have lived completely harmoniously with their environment. But “unlike the hunters and gatherers who preceded then on the land, moderns who enter wilderness do so not to live on the land, nor to use it, but rather to experience it spiritually” (1995: 124). Graber continues by discussing the general lack of awareness that these visitors have of land use practices of these aboriginal societies that resulted in change to the landscapes through hunting, clearing and agriculture.

There are many academic ways of thinking which seek to explain why humans see nature the way we do and why we interact with the non-human world in certain ways. There are of course many difficulties for doing this, not that least that we each are raised in very different cultures with different values. Simmons explains this as being because humans also inhabit a psychological world. Of our species he writes:

As well as its biophysical surroundings, it has an environment which we understand culturally. Hence, how we act towards the non-human is a consequence of our beliefs both about ourselves and what it is we are acting upon (Simmons 1993: 1).

What this illustrates is the fundamental cultural limitations of completely objective interpretation. From this it is hard to find any sociological point of view that will truly stand the test of time in its definition or understanding of the human-nature relationship because of the continually changing cultural factors which influence our way of seeing the world. Those points of view that seek to unequivocally sum up this relationship will always find themselves at odds with more liberal points of view which are more upfront about their own shortcomings.

To take for example, the extreme social constructionist approach, which sees nature and all reality as a pure social construct, although it does accept cultural differences, is to deny the idea that nature exists in its own right regardless of human interference. In contrast, the mild social constructionist approach recognises the intrinsic value of nature, and also its indifference to human activity. That we exist within it, but that it is by no means dependent upon humans.

The scientific method, careful collection of data and objective analysis of results that are themselves replicable through repeating the progression of the experiment can be seen as the way to achieve the greatest, and purest understanding of things we observe in both the human and non-human world. But there is an approach that sees even this most objective tools of arriving at human understanding as itself subject to the ‘cultural lens’. The critical realist would argue that the very hypotheses set out at the beginning of experiments is subject to our cultural and social values, and also the individual aims and aspirations of the scientist conducting them.

The position that this leaves us with is that the academic interpretation of nature will always be multi-faceted and continuously changing. There is no doubt that human activity has a deep, and more often than not, detrimental effect on the natural world. Even now there is no clear favour towards either the scientific and technical approaches, or the perspectives that wish the environment to assume a more spiritual role.

The economist and essayist E.F. Schumacher writes on the “proper use of land”. Anthropocentrically, this phrase seems to encompass everything to do with the ability of humans to sustain their lives on earth, and by default, the way we interpret and value nature. He accepts that it at first seems to be a question of achieving technical balance, but goes on to say that “the more I think about it the more I realise it is not; it is a highly philosophical subject and we are really deceiving ourselves if we think that it requires a special inventiveness of a technical kind” (Schumacher 1998: 172).

Herewith comes the realisation that the philosophical, the academic and the spiritual must all inform the practical. And that practical approach in our complex society must acknowledge the provision for succeeding generations. Here, to remain on economic terms, is the distinction between ‘natural capital’ and ‘natural income’. These terms acknowledge the reality that we gain subsistence from the natural world. Ideally, humans would live only from ‘natural income’, without exploiting or eroding ‘natural capital’, i.e. use of fossil fuels, unsustainable logging, practices which create air pollution.

It is a return to the “ambivalence of the wilderness,” where the choice may have to be made between the paradigm of human dominion to one of a role of stewardship of the environment. Essentially, a true reconciliation of the human-nature relationship would be one that recognises human dependency upon the natural world, and that, while we can influence and change it, even exploit it, that this really impacts upon the human world as much as it does the natural world.

References:

Simmons, I.G. (1993) Interpreting Nature: Cultural Constructions of the Environment. New York: Routledge.

Borgmann, A (1995) The Nature of Reality and the Reality of Nature. In Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, ed. M. Soule and G. Lease. Washington, D.C: Island Press.

Graber, D (1995) Resolute Biocentrism: The Dilemma of Wilderness in National Parks. In Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, ed. M. Soule and G. Lease. Washington, D.C: Island Press.

Schumacher, E.F. (1998) This I Believe. Devon: Resurgence.