Environment as global risk

Sociologists have always been unsure about their relations with the human environment. They issue warnings to students at an early stage of their studies to avoid ‘geographical determinism’, which means trying to explain social facts from natural surroundings like Herodotus occasionally did: ‘the natives are black because of the hot climate’.

Émile Durkheim, the great French founder of professional sociology, wrote that ‘it is not the land which explains man, it is man which explains the land’. He was equally dismissive that climate might be a causal factor in suicide rates. He insisted that ‘a social fact can only be explained by another social fact’, and in this way believed he could make sociology into an independent science.

But it is one thing to assert the distinct reality of society and quite another to treat it as immune to outside influence or indeed as the only source of change in the world. Human beings make their own history but not under conditions of their own choosing; this was Karl Marx’s more modest formulation of humankind’s fate. But in terms of Marx’s own materialism he too overstated the independence of humankind from wider reality. If we emphasise society as a human construction, nature is a constituent and not simply on the outside. Society, human social relations, exist in and through material objects, either natural or manufactured. Is technology human or non-human? The answer is that, as an extension of social relations, it is both. In considering collectivities in previous lectures we saw the motor vehicle literally as a feature of society in motion.

This complexity of relations between human beings, society and the natural world is only an intensification of the intricate relations between any species and its environment, which prompted the German biologist Ernest Haeckel to invent the term ‘ecology’ in 1868 to refer to its study. Since then there have been a variety of attempts to develop ecological approaches to human existence. American sociologists in Chicago developed human ecology mainly as the study of the unplanned concentration and distribution of human activities in different areas. The division of urban space between leafy suburb and downtown slum is an outcome of human activity, which determines relations between the dwellers of each area.

The early Chicago approach to the environment was not dissimilar to the Marxist approach to the economy. Each stressed the unplanned outcomes of human activities for the organisation of social relations. It was sociological in Durkheim’s sense that ‘man explains the land’. Even when resources were taken into account they became an aspect of an ecosystem sustaining a population. In the late twentieth century there has been a broad shift of opinion away from treating the environment as the inexhaustible storehouse for modern expansion. Rather than being self-sustaining, human activity can equally well be self-destructive by damaging the conditions for its own existence. Since the Brundtland Report of 1987 the idea of ‘sustainable development’ has become the watchword for a new politics of the environment.

Sociologists have assimilated the concerns of the environmental movement and turned to accounting for its sources of social support and its responses to the environment. The sociology of the environment becomes the sociology of environmentalism, the study of organisation for the environment. There are some who might regard this as a retreat into navel gazing. Instead of being concerned directly with human impact on the environment, sociologists have come to study why people are concerned with it and how they organise themselves for it. This is a more modest project in many ways. But this refocusing on social relations entails a radical reassessment of humankind’s place in nature.

For a start it refuses to assume that nature is under control. Nor does it assume a self-sustaining ecosystem. Rather, it points to human reactions to an environment which is unpredictable. It acknowledges that human activities have had effects on the environment, but the environment also strikes back. The consequences are dangerous and chaotic compared with the regularities of urban zoning.

Sociologists have come to emphasise that much social organisation is now concerned with the management of risk, and exposure to environmental hazards is one of the main forms of risk. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck has summed up contemporary social relations as risk society, a threatening image compared with older ideas of a modern affluent or welfare society but one which expresses today’s widespread sense of personal insecurity. In some ways this is reminiscent of non-modern societies. For 2,000 years the Chinese emperor was held to be responsible for warding off natural disaster and the provision of water and flood control, and emergency food supplies were key features of social organisation in imperial China.

The sociology of human relations with the environment means serious study of the exposures to risk and to the enjoyment of environmental benefits of different human groups. It takes organising for and in relation to the environment as a central theme. It equally recognises the historic transformation of the environment as an outcome of economic development. But unlike older approaches this new environmental sociology has no expectation that the transformed environment is any more controlled, benign or predictable than it has ever been. The threats are different however. There have been real changes and one of them is the enhancement of global risk.

There are broadly three kinds of environmental change which expose our species to global risk. The first is in the cumulative depletion and eventual exhaustion of resources which have world-wide use, as with carbon fuels. The second is the degradation and destruction of the conditions for human life as an effect of the aggregate of human activities. The destruction of the ozone layer and consequent global warming is an example. The third is the consequences of catastrophe which because of technological advance has global outreach. The Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown of 1986 was one such foretaste of possibilities in this respect.

None of these are willed outcomes of human activities and their impact is irregular. For that reason the environment is an unpredictable and impersonal force in contemporary world history, releasing events to which the human response is to organise on a global scale. We can speak of globalisation in this respect, not as some inevitable natural process but as an incremental human response to the challenge of the size and scale of the new risks which have arisen out of humankind’s interaction with the environment.

The sociology of that response shows that there is no single strategy for dealing with global risk. ‘Think globally, act locally’, for years the slogan of Friends of the Earth, suggested a grass-roots popular movement, but Greenpeace has made its impact through professional organisation and use of the media. Additionally, both institutions of global governance in meetings like the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 and global capitalist interests have responded to environmental concerns.

Global risks cross frontiers and the awareness of this has forced sociology back to a direct concern with society beyond nation-state boundaries. In an older modern sociology the locatedness of social relations in particular places was taken for granted. Communities, cities and nation-states were all seen as territorial units and individuals took both their identity and roots from them. The territorial map of political divisions was also a map of society.

But social relations have never depended on fixity to place or proximity for their continuation. This is a variable feature of human society and contrary to many views there is no clear direction in history. Some societies have placed more emphasis on rootedness in a locality than others, and have also had different expectations of classes and groups. The European feudal lord or the Chinese official travelled from area to area, but the serf or peasant might be bound for a lifetime to one place.

Viking literature extols absence as the true test of a human relationship: ‘love will be lost if you sit too long at a friend’s fire.’ The saying ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ goes back to 1602. So what some sociologists and geographers have called disembedding, the abstraction of social relations and systems from particular places which new technology of communication and travel facilitates, is not so much new as the revival of consciousness that social relations occupy social space.

The geographer David Harvey has emphasised that the contemporary world involves time/space compression. We don’t have to stay in the same geographical location for long periods for people to rely on staying in touch with us. On the other hand staying in one place is no obstacle to world-wide communication. But this ‘small world’ effect is also a ‘multiple worlds’ experience. In any one place many scenes from different dramas are being enacted simultaneously.

This abstraction of social relations from particular places highlights the special features of human society. At the same time it makes geography a lot more interesting. For a start we can’t read off social class and status from territorial location in the way urban zoning theory assumed. The new media of social relations, communications and information technology, the development of a single world financial market and corporations with global outreach, constitute the forces of economic globalisation. The inner cities, industrial areas and countryside in the West are undergoing multiple transformations which are not just the effect of the decline of industry. A multinational aerospace corporation may be assembling aircraft in an area where farmers are producing organic food for local needs.

But globalisation processes don’t pull in one direction. Moreover, the consciousness of common risks in environmentalism and the new sense of global citizenship inspire new social movements. Campaigns for civil rights, of women or of children cross boundaries. This is globalisation from below. The nation-state in the past imposed a territorial frame on social relations which made it difficult to disentangle state, nation, society and place. Now the state finds it difficult to hold these together as people and organisations find their ties cross boundaries in multiple ways.

Any one place now presents to a greater or lesser degree a socioscape of ties with the wider world. It is not that people in general are less dependent on each other or on places than they were. The interdependencies cross the globe in a new way and the places may be various and miles apart. We used to think of people building up a personal milieu of people, objects and territory which was localised in one place. Now that milieu may be extended to many places, or even in virtual reality. In this respect our ability to travel 130 is less important than our access to representations of distant places. We become cultural tourists as we stroll through the shopping mall or relax in front of a screen.

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