5 - Social ecology: the dialectical emergence of nature and society

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter, political theology of nature interacts with the political theory of social ecology. To begin the discussion, I offer three interpretative principles by which any ecological inquiry must be oriented today. These three principles are:

First, the issue of the scaling of the human in relation to the non-human: can such scaling be achieved in non-reductive ways, both for the human creature and the mundus? In what ways are we to think of such a scale, of such proportioning? Can human–nature relations be thought of, and practised, as both rich and satisfying and yet as working within certain constraints? The interpretative issue is no longer the dependence of the human on the non-human. Instead, what is at stake is how to interpret that dependence.

Second, the matter of scaling cannot be addressed without attention to how it is that the human emerges from the non-human. What is the relation between what Bookchin calls ‘first nature’ and ‘second nature’? Bookchin defines ‘first nature’ like this: ‘Biological nature is above all the cumulative evolution of ever-differentiating and increasingly complex life-forms with a vibrant and interactive inorganic world.’ Bookchin defines ‘second nature’ as a ‘cultural, social and political “nature” that today has all but absorbed first nature’. What is the relation between these two? That the human is an emergent creature is not contested; the interpretation of that emergence is.