Social relationships with nature: elements of a framework for socio-ecological structure analysis

Abstract

This primarily conceptual contribution introduces a sociological framework for tracing the effects and the sources of stability or instability of societal nature relations to the thoughts, feelings and doings of actually existing people. Drawing on critical debates on societal nature relations, we argue that modern capitalist societalization is inherently expansionary, that the rapid expansion of human economic activity over the past two centuries was only possible based on fossil resources, and that therefore, moving to a post-fossil world will require reinventing the very essence of what “society” is. To investigate the implications of such a fundamental overhaul at the level of how socialized people relate to socialized nature, we build on the relational sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to suggest the framework of a space of social relationships with nature. We describe the iterative process in which we arrived at this conception, moving back and forth between theoretical considerations and hermeneutic analysis of qualitative material from case studies of bio-based economic activities in four European regions. From the iterative process, we synthesize four elementary forms of social relationship with nature (“natural capital”, “nature as partner”, “natural heritage” and nature as “the environment”) and provide an illustrative corner case for each. From the systematic differences that emerge, we then draw out two principal axes of a spatial representation partly homologous with Bourdieu’s social space: a vertical axis indicating the degree of active involvement in and access to the means of abstract-expansionary societalization, and a horizontal representing the form of that involvement, along a continuum from dualist, instrumental and appropriative to holist, mutual or caring relationships with nature. In conclusion, we propose further research to apply and develop this relational framework across local or national contexts and scales as a means to analyze tensions and conflicts around transformations of the societal nature relations.

Keywords:

• societal nature relations
• human-nature relationships
• relational sociology
• mentalities
• social-ecological transformation
• societalization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To Bourdieu, the social space is differentiated into fields, each of which has its own set of specific dispositions shared by the actors taking part in its social ‘game’ (illusio) and its own logics of practice. To not complicate things further, we refrain from discussing this differentiation – suffice it to say that we consciously opt not to speak of an ‘ecological field’, as no one is exempt from depending on nature, just like nobody is exempt from class relations.

2 For further information on the context of our research, see https://www.flumen.uni-jena.de.

3 A challenge in doing this is to find ways to keep the biophysical dimension and relations of externalization and internalization present in this kind of nationally restricted research. One way in which we address this is by including a measure of respondents’ CO₂ emissions footprint, as a very rough indicator for the relative extent of resource use and socio-ecological externalization among different socioeconomic groups.

Additional information

Funding

The work for this paper was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of the work of the junior research group “Mentalities in Flux” (flumen) (2019–2024, grant number 031B0749).