- Email: [email protected]
Ecological concepts: Seeing, placing, imposing
Geoforum xxx (2015) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Critical review
Ecological concepts: Seeing, placing, imposing Stephen Bocking Environmental and Resource Science/Studies Program, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario K9J7B8, Canada
a r t i c l e
i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 22 August 2015 Accepted 24 August 2015 Available online xxxx
Concepts – abstract representations of nature – are ubiquitous in scientific work. Through them scientists organize and communicate knowledge, classify landscapes and regions, and control and conserve nature. Indeed, concepts create nature, serving not just as knowledge, but as physical objects – ‘‘forests” came into existence through the practice of scientific forestry, and we speak of mobile organisms as ‘‘invasive species” because of concepts constructed by conservation biologists. And so it has also been, as the contributors to this special issue explain, with several concepts essential to ecology and environmental science: faunal regions, animal migrations, ecosystems, and rewilding. Through analysis of their complex histories – both scientific and social – these authors demonstrate how these concepts originated, and now circulate and organize knowledge and power. This essay builds on these articles: outlining essential questions, identifying general lessons, and exploring potential future work. It also situates these articles in relation to work in several fields: the history and historical geography of science, environmental history, and political ecology. In doing so, it explores how scientific concepts are constructed as stable and uncontested, and how they derive from this status the capacity to circulate and to speak for nature: serving diverse institutional and social roles, imparting power to those who wield them, organizing not just nature, but humans. They therefore demand careful attention: because they reflect not merely reality, but the times and places in which they were created, and because they have consequences. From these features stem their ambiguous place in historical and geographical research, as essential tools that nevertheless require cautious and critical reflection. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Concepts Ecology History Politics Place Nature
Contents 1. 2. 3. 4.
Introduction Seeing . . . . . Placing. . . . . Imposing . . . References .
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1. Introduction Ecologists view concepts as ways of thinking and doing – essential guides to organizing the study of organisms and environments. At certain times in their history particular concepts have achieved special authority. More than a century ago Henry Chandler Cowles E-mail address: [email protected]
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paced the Indiana Sand Dunes, constructing out of his observations of plants a concept of dynamic succession. Two decades later Charles Elton surveyed Bear Island, sketching niches, food webs and other concepts with which to organize the analysis of animal communities. In the 1940s Raymond Lindeman combined these concepts with his observations of life and death in Cedar Bog Lake, forming concepts of energy flow and transformation that would influence generations of ideas about ecosystems. More recently,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.08.014 0016-7185/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Bocking, S. Ecological concepts: Seeing, placing, imposing. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2015.08.014
2
S. Bocking / Geoforum xxx (2015) xxx–xxx
ecological concepts have proliferated (a presentation at the August 2015 meeting of the Ecological Society of America identified 130), reflecting rapid scientific, social and technological change, and confirming their continuing importance as contentious instruments of understanding, influence and power. Attention to concepts might be taken as a return to traditional history of science, in which a discipline’s progress is defined by its conceptual development (Mayr, 1982: 23). But the episodes mentioned above, and those examined in this issue of Geoforum, testify to the links between concepts and topics of lively interest to both scientists and those who study science. The locations where ecologists formed these concepts illustrate the importance of the places of research, exemplifying the geography as well as the history of science. Their methods testify to the relations between concepts and material practices. The wider movement of these concepts reflects the capacity of knowledge to circulate within the scientific community and in larger circles of influence. Concepts implicate the formation of disciplines, the social structure of scientific activity, and the authority of knowledge, exercised through both practical roles and impacts on conversations about humanity’s place in the world. Many of these conversations concern nature itself, that ‘‘most complex” of all words, as Raymond Williams once noted (Williams, 1976: 219). That ancient concept has been joined by many others – biodiversity, carrying capacity, ecosystem services, resilience, invasive species, to note a few – each serving not just as description but as ethical imperative or political program: amalgams of nature and culture. These concepts have also been tied to other ideas – consider, for example, the relation between ecosystem services and the role of the market in setting environmental priorities, or the ties between invasive species and ideas about race and nation. Ideas about global change are allied to other concepts: the future, prediction, expertise, the environment (Robin et al., 2013: 6). Most recently, the Anthropocene has become a terrain of debate over humanity’s status as a planetary force. Geologists have framed this concept in scientific terms, aspiring to define it precisely according to the stratigraphic record. But it also embodies a sense of global limits, and both hopeful and pessimistic visions of society, and has provoked the coining of other concepts, such as the Capitalocene, that contest its political assumptions and implications. Like the Anthropocene, coined by two chemists, these concepts originated among scientists before traveling into wider worlds of practice and politics. These scientific origins reflect the dominance of science in environmental affairs – they travel beyond science because they do work: shaping how people understand and manipulate nature, making scientific advice useable, imparting scientific authority to political agendas. How concepts form, change, circulate, and organize knowledge and power becomes evident in these papers. Kristin Greer’s analysis of faunal regions and British imperial power in the Atlantic illustrates how taxonomic and biogeographic concepts incorporate knowledge, power, and cultural values. Robert Wilson places animal movements into North Americans environmental history, offering a reminder that humans too are part of the ‘‘natural” concept of migration. Laura Cameron and Sinead Earley examine how the ecosystem concept has circulated while carrying a heavy freight of political and scientific meanings. And Dolly Jørgensen tracks the multiplication of meanings of rewilding, and their shared ideal of landscapes without humans. Each of these papers offer careful analysis of where concepts came from and how they have represented the world, served as both scientific and social phenomena, and excluded other ways of knowing and living in nature. Concepts are therefore central to our understanding of how people understand and act in the world – a category of analysis fully assimilated into the history and geography of science. But just
as Tansley saw the need in 1935 to examine the ‘‘use and abuse” of ecological concepts, so, I think, some critical consolidation and selfconscious reflection might be helpful in our own era of active invention of concepts (Tansley, 1935). These papers present many possibilities for such a consolidation, but I would like to focus on a few ideas that may be of general value.
2. Seeing A starting point can be the relations between concepts and perceptions. These are often at best rather distant. As Castree (2014) noted recently, much of our understanding of nature is secondhand, based on what we hear from others, rather than what we see ourselves. Much of what scientists seek to explain is also beyond human perception: change on global scales or over long periods of time; the movement of energy in ecosystems; the effects of contaminants at only a few parts per billion. Concepts tell us what we could perceive if we were there, serving as ways of ‘‘seeing,” understanding, and acting on otherwise invisible phenomena. But concepts do, after all, also relate to physical matter – the stuff of observation – and these papers examine several episodes in which people have used concepts to make sense of things, placing them within larger frames of understanding. Barbed wire exemplify the collision between animal migrations and property lines. Heck cattle and mammoth DNA are the stuff with which to rewild the European landscape. Tropical fish in the untropical environs of Halifax justify a biogeographic region. To these instances we can add others in which scientists’ experience in nature has shaped their concepts. One is the relation between survey practices and species concepts: as Robert Kohler has explained, American naturalists’ shift to survey collecting encouraged them to adopt a new concept of species that could accommodate broad variation, not narrow types (Kohler, 2006). Another is the relation described by Naomi Oreskes between geologists’ field practices and their reception of continental drift (Oreskes, 1999). A third is the transformation of atmospheric observations into the concept of global climate change (Edwards, 2010). These episodes remind us that the workaday world of science is not only about conceptualization, but also observing, manipulating, and living in the world. Close attention must therefore be paid to how scientific practices – and all the other activities that form part of living, working, and experiencing – form relations between nature and concepts. But we can also turn this relation around: concepts are not just the product of our perceptions, but actively shape them. That our understanding of nature is mediated by our knowledge, assumptions and interests is not an argument that needs to be made; but it’s worth putting in order just what roles concepts play in the complicated relations between our minds and the world. A prominent one is that of imposing order, suggesting what to look for, guiding the selection and collection of evidence and the construction of stable facts. Concepts describing the distribution and interactions of species, or the movement of energy and nutrients, privilege certain ecological processes as fundamental, and so determine what should be observed, and why. Allied to this disciplining of observation by concepts is their role in defining disciplines themselves. Disciplinary concepts assert shared ways of seeing and practicing, specifying research objects, methods, and study sites, underpinning scientists’ collective identities. They also constitute claims that the organization of scientific activity corresponds to how nature itself is organized. We can see this in the history of ecology: in Cowles’ designation, just as the discipline was becoming established in America, of succession as the basis for dynamic plant ecology; and Tansley’s coining, when he perceived that his discipline was at a turning point, of the ecosystem as ecologists’ shared unit of study. Similar ties can be
Please cite this article in press as: Bocking, S. Ecological concepts: Seeing, placing, imposing. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2015.08.014
S. Bocking / Geoforum xxx (2015) xxx–xxx
identified between concepts and institutions, including the relation between global change and global institutions of environmental research and governance such as the International GeosphereBiosphere Program and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These are dynamic relations: some concepts have been coined not to reinforce but to transcend disciplines, by asserting that phenomena examined by separate specialties should be considered together. Global change is one such concept; the environment, as the foundation of interdisciplinary environmental sciences, is another; resilience is yet another. The concept of coproduction advanced by Sheila Jasanoff and her science and technology studies colleagues can help in working out these reciprocal relations between concepts, disciplines and institutions (Jasanoff, 2004). There is an interesting issue here regarding scientific identities: the role of concepts in asserting disciplines may have been especially important to scientists with less sharply defined or more uncertain identities – such as ecologists. In the early decades of their discipline they had to distinguish themselves from amateur naturalists and from other scientific fields also concerned with the outdoors, such as limnology (De Bont, 2015). In the postwar era they often had to assert their status in situations where the physical sciences were dominant (such as the national laboratories of the Atomic Energy Commission). In both contexts concepts were essential to asserting ecologists’ distinctive and disciplined ways of seeing. It is then perhaps not surprising that ecologists have tended to profligacy when it comes to creating new concepts.
3. Placing Living and working are usually linked to places, and so are concepts. These papers illustrate several ways in which concepts ‘‘take place”. Ideas about a faunal region formed amidst Atlantic waters and species. The concept of migration is embedded in a North American landscape transformed by settlement. The ecosystem concept evolved in the British countryside and the British Columbia forest. Rewilding is imagined in, among other places, the American Great Plains, Scotland, and the Arabian Peninsula. To these instances we can add many others in which ecological concepts have been situated (Kingsland, 2010). As Richard Grove explained, in the eighteenth century Pierre Poivre and other naturalists described the relation between forest loss and climate change in terms of a ‘‘desiccationist” concept formed out of their encounter with tropical island environments (Grove, 1995). Concepts of health and illness have often been associated with specific places – from health resorts to miasmic landscapes (Mitman, 2007; Nash, 2007). The ecosystem and related concepts such as the microcosm and the biocoenosis have tended to emerge through study of discrete, bounded habitats such as lakes (Acot, 2009). Regions have also become associated with concepts, as in the theoretical formulations of tropical ecology, desert ecology, and boreal ecology; Soviet scientists’ concept of permafrost signified both a soil type and a region (Chu, 2015). So places inspire concepts, and concepts help make sense of places at various scales, from the research site, to the region, to the globe. Concepts should therefore also find their place on the agendas of historical geographers and environmental historians. Concepts are not simply imposed on nature, nor do humans alone determine them; instead, they represent contingent relations between humans and nature that are mediated by places, the social contexts of scientific activity, and scientific institutions and disciplines. Concepts can also be challenged by a dynamic world – as evident in these essays in the disrupted boundaries of biogeographic regions and ecosystems. Concepts change over time, gaining new meanings while retaining the old, and speaking in several
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registers. Writing their history is therefore not about identifying their origins or ‘‘essential” character, but understanding how they change to fit evolving circumstances and purposes. (The mistaken search for conceptual origins is especially evident in studies of the history of environmentalism.) Another kind of relation between concepts and nature is represented by their role in severing knowledge from place. Concepts commonly serve as empirical generalizations, useful beyond the sites of their formation. While ecologists may study in distinctive places, such as the Arctic, deserts, tropical forests or an ocean shoreline, they will nevertheless often also assert that the knowledge gained there is relevant to other environments. Numerous aspects of scientific activity contribute to the mobility of knowledge: standardized research practices, ‘‘placeless” laboratories, networks of communication and formal credentials. In these systems of circulation concepts also play central roles, packaging local knowledge, transforming it into what everyone knows. Concepts may also be transformed as they are mobilized – evaporating into abstractions that hold everywhere because they describe nowhere. This can become a matter of debate, especially when a mobile concept displaces other forms of knowledge. Wilderness is a noteworthy example: some see it as a universal ideal, but for others it represents the imposition of western ideologies (including a firm distinction between nature and society) on non-western cultures (Guha, 1997). The concept of climate change is another: its framing as s global phenomenon in the industrialized world’s labs and computer centres has tended to submerge local experience of and adaptation to variable climates. These frictions (to use Anna Tsing’s useful term) also hint at the relations between concepts and power (Tsing, 2005).
4. Imposing Concepts can travel beyond the scientific community, to be imposed by resource managers, activists, and industrialists. Incorporating political and social ideas, and enforced or contested in those terms, they become entangled in systems of knowledge and power. We have seen several such systems in these papers: the British Empire, land and property relations, resource management institutions, restoration projects. And while ecologists have long debated these entanglements and their roles as scientists or activists, the careers of their concepts can remind us that these issues are often not up to them to decide (Robbins and Moore, 2013). Concepts exert influence in several registers, changing not only perceptions of nature, but nature itself. This influence is often subtle: asserting the credibility, relevance, or legitimacy of claims about the world, or shifting assumptions about what is natural or realistic. Some concepts, such as the ecosystem, have gained wide currency, capturing the public imagination or becoming themselves captured by interests: outcomes more likely when a concept is ambiguous enough – or ‘‘plastic,” as Jørgensen explains in the case of rewilding – to mean different things to different audiences. In contrast, the machinery of environmental administration has fostered an array of more specific concepts, enabling application of expert knowledge to regulation, planning and other practical matters. Maximum sustained yield in fisheries management, allowable limits in regulation of toxic substances, cores and corridors in conservation biology, Natural Channel Design in stream restoration, ecosystem services in market-based nature conservation, and Valued Ecosystem Components in environmental impact assessment: these and other concepts render nature legible, creating objects that can be managed, justifying decisions, and reinforcing institutional authority. They also incorporate various assumptions regarding resources, risk, and administrative rational-
Please cite this article in press as: Bocking, S. Ecological concepts: Seeing, placing, imposing. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2015.08.014
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ism, while dismissing those ways of knowing, including sensory experience – taste, smell, touch – that expertise excludes (Parr, 2006). These concepts present a significant irony: while they constitute assertions that decisions are based on sound, expert knowledge, agencies find them especially useful for concealing how little may actually be known. To take two of the above examples: management by maximum sustained yield requires only basic demographic information about fish, enabling decisions even in the midst of ignorance about their ecological relations; similarly, allowable limits provide a basis for regulation even when little is known about the subtle or long-term effects of toxic substances. In both cases, these concepts make possible the numbers without which trust evaporates and decision-making grinds to a halt. It hardly needs to be pointed out that the role of concepts in enabling decisions in the absence of knowledge has immense political implications. In fact, these concepts are packed with politics: imposing ethical consequences for nature and people, and preferences regarding the roles of experts in society. Consider, for example, the influential concept of the old growth forest. It looks like a description of nature: calling to mind trees at all stages of life (especially big ones), in a productive ecosystem with a rich array of species but in which the human species is at most a visitor. But conservation biologists and their legal allies formed this concept not just to describe, but to advocate: to justify a new forest politics in which ecological functions are considered alongside resource values (Swedlow, 2012). Political implications of concepts are also evident in other objects: a tree farm defined by the view of forests as sites of industrial production or carbon sequestration, or a protected area defined as wilderness – both objects combining description and prescription, justifying displacement of other uses and values, including those of nearby communities that may have their own concepts attached to nature (Goldman, 2004; Leach and Scoones, 2015). But these aspects of concepts also present an interesting paradox: entangled in politics and social preferences, their authority nevertheless stems from their status as distilled representations of reality: just what science is supposed to provide. And with this authority comes power. It is not surprising, therefore, that debates about the environment are often not about specific places or issues, but concepts – like the Anthropocene – that are stand-ins for concerns about humanity’s place in the global environment. At the same time, debates today about other concepts – such as equity, autonomy, and indigenous rights – testify to the shifting terrain of environmental politics: a questioning of assumptions about who has authority over the environment. Understanding how these concepts have emerged and played roles in global and local political debates can be the shared project of historians of science, environmental historians, historical geographers and political ecol-
ogists. Making concepts transparent, opening up the workings of knowledge and power they represent, can provide a basis for questioning them, enabling multiple ways of thinking, empowering those excluded from their operations, and encouraging the free play of creativity and complexity. At stake is the prospect of more effective and democratic forms of scientific expertise – what a concept. References Acot, P., 2009. Ecosystems. In: Bowler, P.J., Pickstone, J.V. (Eds.), The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences, The Cambridge History of Science, 6. Cambridge University Press, pp. 451–466. Castree, N., 2014. Making Sense of Nature: Representation, Politics and Democracy. Routledge, London. Chu, P.Y., 2015. Mapping permafrost country: creating an environmental object in the Soviet Union, 1920s–1940s. Environ. Hist. 20, 396–421. De Bont, R., 2015. Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870–1930. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Edwards, P., 2010. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. MIT Press, Cambridge. Goldman, M., 2004. Imperial science, imperial nature: environmental knowledge for the world (bank). In: Jasanoff, S., Martello, M. (Eds.), Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance. MIT Press, Cambridge. Grove, R.H., 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Guha, R., 1997. The authoritarian biologist and the arrogance of anti-humanism: wildlife conservation in the third world. Ecologist 27 (1), 14–20. Jasanoff, S., 2004. States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order. Routledge. Kingsland, S., 2010. The role of place in the history of ecology. In: Billick, I., Price, M. V. (Eds.), The Ecology of Place: Contributions of Place-Based Research to Ecological Understanding. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 15–39. Kohler, R., 2006. All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850–1950. Princeton University Press. Leach, M., Scoones, I. (Eds.), 2015. Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa. Routledge. Mayr, E., 1982. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Mitman, G., 2007. Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes. Yale University Press, New Haven. Nash, L., 2007. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. University of California Press. Oreskes, N., 1999. The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science. Oxford University Press. Parr, J., 2006. Smells like? Sources of uncertainty in the history of the great lakes environment. Environ. Hist. 11 (2), 269–299. Robbins, P., Moore, S.A., 2013. Ecological anxiety disorder: diagnosing the politics of the anthropocene. Cult. Geogr. 20 (1), 3–19. Robin, L., Sörlin, S., Warde, P., 2013. Introduction: documenting global change. In: Robin, L., Sörlin, S., Warde, P. (Eds.), The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change. Yale University Press, New Haven, pp. 1–14. Swedlow, B., 2012. Cultural coproduction of four states of knowledge. Sci. Technol. Hum. Values 37 (3), 151–179. Tansley, A., 1935. The use and abuse of vegetational concepts and terms. Ecology 16, 284–307. Tsing, A., 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press. Williams, R., 1976. Keywords. London, Fontana.
Please cite this article in press as: Bocking, S. Ecological concepts: Seeing, placing, imposing. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2015.08.014
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Critical review
Ecological concepts: Seeing, placing, imposing Stephen Bocking Environmental and Resource Science/Studies Program, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario K9J7B8, Canada
a r t i c l e
i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 22 August 2015 Accepted 24 August 2015 Available online xxxx
Concepts – abstract representations of nature – are ubiquitous in scientific work. Through them scientists organize and communicate knowledge, classify landscapes and regions, and control and conserve nature. Indeed, concepts create nature, serving not just as knowledge, but as physical objects – ‘‘forests” came into existence through the practice of scientific forestry, and we speak of mobile organisms as ‘‘invasive species” because of concepts constructed by conservation biologists. And so it has also been, as the contributors to this special issue explain, with several concepts essential to ecology and environmental science: faunal regions, animal migrations, ecosystems, and rewilding. Through analysis of their complex histories – both scientific and social – these authors demonstrate how these concepts originated, and now circulate and organize knowledge and power. This essay builds on these articles: outlining essential questions, identifying general lessons, and exploring potential future work. It also situates these articles in relation to work in several fields: the history and historical geography of science, environmental history, and political ecology. In doing so, it explores how scientific concepts are constructed as stable and uncontested, and how they derive from this status the capacity to circulate and to speak for nature: serving diverse institutional and social roles, imparting power to those who wield them, organizing not just nature, but humans. They therefore demand careful attention: because they reflect not merely reality, but the times and places in which they were created, and because they have consequences. From these features stem their ambiguous place in historical and geographical research, as essential tools that nevertheless require cautious and critical reflection. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Concepts Ecology History Politics Place Nature
Contents 1. 2. 3. 4.
Introduction Seeing . . . . . Placing. . . . . Imposing . . . References .
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1. Introduction Ecologists view concepts as ways of thinking and doing – essential guides to organizing the study of organisms and environments. At certain times in their history particular concepts have achieved special authority. More than a century ago Henry Chandler Cowles E-mail address: [email protected]
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paced the Indiana Sand Dunes, constructing out of his observations of plants a concept of dynamic succession. Two decades later Charles Elton surveyed Bear Island, sketching niches, food webs and other concepts with which to organize the analysis of animal communities. In the 1940s Raymond Lindeman combined these concepts with his observations of life and death in Cedar Bog Lake, forming concepts of energy flow and transformation that would influence generations of ideas about ecosystems. More recently,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.08.014 0016-7185/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Bocking, S. Ecological concepts: Seeing, placing, imposing. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2015.08.014
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ecological concepts have proliferated (a presentation at the August 2015 meeting of the Ecological Society of America identified 130), reflecting rapid scientific, social and technological change, and confirming their continuing importance as contentious instruments of understanding, influence and power. Attention to concepts might be taken as a return to traditional history of science, in which a discipline’s progress is defined by its conceptual development (Mayr, 1982: 23). But the episodes mentioned above, and those examined in this issue of Geoforum, testify to the links between concepts and topics of lively interest to both scientists and those who study science. The locations where ecologists formed these concepts illustrate the importance of the places of research, exemplifying the geography as well as the history of science. Their methods testify to the relations between concepts and material practices. The wider movement of these concepts reflects the capacity of knowledge to circulate within the scientific community and in larger circles of influence. Concepts implicate the formation of disciplines, the social structure of scientific activity, and the authority of knowledge, exercised through both practical roles and impacts on conversations about humanity’s place in the world. Many of these conversations concern nature itself, that ‘‘most complex” of all words, as Raymond Williams once noted (Williams, 1976: 219). That ancient concept has been joined by many others – biodiversity, carrying capacity, ecosystem services, resilience, invasive species, to note a few – each serving not just as description but as ethical imperative or political program: amalgams of nature and culture. These concepts have also been tied to other ideas – consider, for example, the relation between ecosystem services and the role of the market in setting environmental priorities, or the ties between invasive species and ideas about race and nation. Ideas about global change are allied to other concepts: the future, prediction, expertise, the environment (Robin et al., 2013: 6). Most recently, the Anthropocene has become a terrain of debate over humanity’s status as a planetary force. Geologists have framed this concept in scientific terms, aspiring to define it precisely according to the stratigraphic record. But it also embodies a sense of global limits, and both hopeful and pessimistic visions of society, and has provoked the coining of other concepts, such as the Capitalocene, that contest its political assumptions and implications. Like the Anthropocene, coined by two chemists, these concepts originated among scientists before traveling into wider worlds of practice and politics. These scientific origins reflect the dominance of science in environmental affairs – they travel beyond science because they do work: shaping how people understand and manipulate nature, making scientific advice useable, imparting scientific authority to political agendas. How concepts form, change, circulate, and organize knowledge and power becomes evident in these papers. Kristin Greer’s analysis of faunal regions and British imperial power in the Atlantic illustrates how taxonomic and biogeographic concepts incorporate knowledge, power, and cultural values. Robert Wilson places animal movements into North Americans environmental history, offering a reminder that humans too are part of the ‘‘natural” concept of migration. Laura Cameron and Sinead Earley examine how the ecosystem concept has circulated while carrying a heavy freight of political and scientific meanings. And Dolly Jørgensen tracks the multiplication of meanings of rewilding, and their shared ideal of landscapes without humans. Each of these papers offer careful analysis of where concepts came from and how they have represented the world, served as both scientific and social phenomena, and excluded other ways of knowing and living in nature. Concepts are therefore central to our understanding of how people understand and act in the world – a category of analysis fully assimilated into the history and geography of science. But just
as Tansley saw the need in 1935 to examine the ‘‘use and abuse” of ecological concepts, so, I think, some critical consolidation and selfconscious reflection might be helpful in our own era of active invention of concepts (Tansley, 1935). These papers present many possibilities for such a consolidation, but I would like to focus on a few ideas that may be of general value.
2. Seeing A starting point can be the relations between concepts and perceptions. These are often at best rather distant. As Castree (2014) noted recently, much of our understanding of nature is secondhand, based on what we hear from others, rather than what we see ourselves. Much of what scientists seek to explain is also beyond human perception: change on global scales or over long periods of time; the movement of energy in ecosystems; the effects of contaminants at only a few parts per billion. Concepts tell us what we could perceive if we were there, serving as ways of ‘‘seeing,” understanding, and acting on otherwise invisible phenomena. But concepts do, after all, also relate to physical matter – the stuff of observation – and these papers examine several episodes in which people have used concepts to make sense of things, placing them within larger frames of understanding. Barbed wire exemplify the collision between animal migrations and property lines. Heck cattle and mammoth DNA are the stuff with which to rewild the European landscape. Tropical fish in the untropical environs of Halifax justify a biogeographic region. To these instances we can add others in which scientists’ experience in nature has shaped their concepts. One is the relation between survey practices and species concepts: as Robert Kohler has explained, American naturalists’ shift to survey collecting encouraged them to adopt a new concept of species that could accommodate broad variation, not narrow types (Kohler, 2006). Another is the relation described by Naomi Oreskes between geologists’ field practices and their reception of continental drift (Oreskes, 1999). A third is the transformation of atmospheric observations into the concept of global climate change (Edwards, 2010). These episodes remind us that the workaday world of science is not only about conceptualization, but also observing, manipulating, and living in the world. Close attention must therefore be paid to how scientific practices – and all the other activities that form part of living, working, and experiencing – form relations between nature and concepts. But we can also turn this relation around: concepts are not just the product of our perceptions, but actively shape them. That our understanding of nature is mediated by our knowledge, assumptions and interests is not an argument that needs to be made; but it’s worth putting in order just what roles concepts play in the complicated relations between our minds and the world. A prominent one is that of imposing order, suggesting what to look for, guiding the selection and collection of evidence and the construction of stable facts. Concepts describing the distribution and interactions of species, or the movement of energy and nutrients, privilege certain ecological processes as fundamental, and so determine what should be observed, and why. Allied to this disciplining of observation by concepts is their role in defining disciplines themselves. Disciplinary concepts assert shared ways of seeing and practicing, specifying research objects, methods, and study sites, underpinning scientists’ collective identities. They also constitute claims that the organization of scientific activity corresponds to how nature itself is organized. We can see this in the history of ecology: in Cowles’ designation, just as the discipline was becoming established in America, of succession as the basis for dynamic plant ecology; and Tansley’s coining, when he perceived that his discipline was at a turning point, of the ecosystem as ecologists’ shared unit of study. Similar ties can be
Please cite this article in press as: Bocking, S. Ecological concepts: Seeing, placing, imposing. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2015.08.014
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identified between concepts and institutions, including the relation between global change and global institutions of environmental research and governance such as the International GeosphereBiosphere Program and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These are dynamic relations: some concepts have been coined not to reinforce but to transcend disciplines, by asserting that phenomena examined by separate specialties should be considered together. Global change is one such concept; the environment, as the foundation of interdisciplinary environmental sciences, is another; resilience is yet another. The concept of coproduction advanced by Sheila Jasanoff and her science and technology studies colleagues can help in working out these reciprocal relations between concepts, disciplines and institutions (Jasanoff, 2004). There is an interesting issue here regarding scientific identities: the role of concepts in asserting disciplines may have been especially important to scientists with less sharply defined or more uncertain identities – such as ecologists. In the early decades of their discipline they had to distinguish themselves from amateur naturalists and from other scientific fields also concerned with the outdoors, such as limnology (De Bont, 2015). In the postwar era they often had to assert their status in situations where the physical sciences were dominant (such as the national laboratories of the Atomic Energy Commission). In both contexts concepts were essential to asserting ecologists’ distinctive and disciplined ways of seeing. It is then perhaps not surprising that ecologists have tended to profligacy when it comes to creating new concepts.
3. Placing Living and working are usually linked to places, and so are concepts. These papers illustrate several ways in which concepts ‘‘take place”. Ideas about a faunal region formed amidst Atlantic waters and species. The concept of migration is embedded in a North American landscape transformed by settlement. The ecosystem concept evolved in the British countryside and the British Columbia forest. Rewilding is imagined in, among other places, the American Great Plains, Scotland, and the Arabian Peninsula. To these instances we can add many others in which ecological concepts have been situated (Kingsland, 2010). As Richard Grove explained, in the eighteenth century Pierre Poivre and other naturalists described the relation between forest loss and climate change in terms of a ‘‘desiccationist” concept formed out of their encounter with tropical island environments (Grove, 1995). Concepts of health and illness have often been associated with specific places – from health resorts to miasmic landscapes (Mitman, 2007; Nash, 2007). The ecosystem and related concepts such as the microcosm and the biocoenosis have tended to emerge through study of discrete, bounded habitats such as lakes (Acot, 2009). Regions have also become associated with concepts, as in the theoretical formulations of tropical ecology, desert ecology, and boreal ecology; Soviet scientists’ concept of permafrost signified both a soil type and a region (Chu, 2015). So places inspire concepts, and concepts help make sense of places at various scales, from the research site, to the region, to the globe. Concepts should therefore also find their place on the agendas of historical geographers and environmental historians. Concepts are not simply imposed on nature, nor do humans alone determine them; instead, they represent contingent relations between humans and nature that are mediated by places, the social contexts of scientific activity, and scientific institutions and disciplines. Concepts can also be challenged by a dynamic world – as evident in these essays in the disrupted boundaries of biogeographic regions and ecosystems. Concepts change over time, gaining new meanings while retaining the old, and speaking in several
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registers. Writing their history is therefore not about identifying their origins or ‘‘essential” character, but understanding how they change to fit evolving circumstances and purposes. (The mistaken search for conceptual origins is especially evident in studies of the history of environmentalism.) Another kind of relation between concepts and nature is represented by their role in severing knowledge from place. Concepts commonly serve as empirical generalizations, useful beyond the sites of their formation. While ecologists may study in distinctive places, such as the Arctic, deserts, tropical forests or an ocean shoreline, they will nevertheless often also assert that the knowledge gained there is relevant to other environments. Numerous aspects of scientific activity contribute to the mobility of knowledge: standardized research practices, ‘‘placeless” laboratories, networks of communication and formal credentials. In these systems of circulation concepts also play central roles, packaging local knowledge, transforming it into what everyone knows. Concepts may also be transformed as they are mobilized – evaporating into abstractions that hold everywhere because they describe nowhere. This can become a matter of debate, especially when a mobile concept displaces other forms of knowledge. Wilderness is a noteworthy example: some see it as a universal ideal, but for others it represents the imposition of western ideologies (including a firm distinction between nature and society) on non-western cultures (Guha, 1997). The concept of climate change is another: its framing as s global phenomenon in the industrialized world’s labs and computer centres has tended to submerge local experience of and adaptation to variable climates. These frictions (to use Anna Tsing’s useful term) also hint at the relations between concepts and power (Tsing, 2005).
4. Imposing Concepts can travel beyond the scientific community, to be imposed by resource managers, activists, and industrialists. Incorporating political and social ideas, and enforced or contested in those terms, they become entangled in systems of knowledge and power. We have seen several such systems in these papers: the British Empire, land and property relations, resource management institutions, restoration projects. And while ecologists have long debated these entanglements and their roles as scientists or activists, the careers of their concepts can remind us that these issues are often not up to them to decide (Robbins and Moore, 2013). Concepts exert influence in several registers, changing not only perceptions of nature, but nature itself. This influence is often subtle: asserting the credibility, relevance, or legitimacy of claims about the world, or shifting assumptions about what is natural or realistic. Some concepts, such as the ecosystem, have gained wide currency, capturing the public imagination or becoming themselves captured by interests: outcomes more likely when a concept is ambiguous enough – or ‘‘plastic,” as Jørgensen explains in the case of rewilding – to mean different things to different audiences. In contrast, the machinery of environmental administration has fostered an array of more specific concepts, enabling application of expert knowledge to regulation, planning and other practical matters. Maximum sustained yield in fisheries management, allowable limits in regulation of toxic substances, cores and corridors in conservation biology, Natural Channel Design in stream restoration, ecosystem services in market-based nature conservation, and Valued Ecosystem Components in environmental impact assessment: these and other concepts render nature legible, creating objects that can be managed, justifying decisions, and reinforcing institutional authority. They also incorporate various assumptions regarding resources, risk, and administrative rational-
Please cite this article in press as: Bocking, S. Ecological concepts: Seeing, placing, imposing. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2015.08.014
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ism, while dismissing those ways of knowing, including sensory experience – taste, smell, touch – that expertise excludes (Parr, 2006). These concepts present a significant irony: while they constitute assertions that decisions are based on sound, expert knowledge, agencies find them especially useful for concealing how little may actually be known. To take two of the above examples: management by maximum sustained yield requires only basic demographic information about fish, enabling decisions even in the midst of ignorance about their ecological relations; similarly, allowable limits provide a basis for regulation even when little is known about the subtle or long-term effects of toxic substances. In both cases, these concepts make possible the numbers without which trust evaporates and decision-making grinds to a halt. It hardly needs to be pointed out that the role of concepts in enabling decisions in the absence of knowledge has immense political implications. In fact, these concepts are packed with politics: imposing ethical consequences for nature and people, and preferences regarding the roles of experts in society. Consider, for example, the influential concept of the old growth forest. It looks like a description of nature: calling to mind trees at all stages of life (especially big ones), in a productive ecosystem with a rich array of species but in which the human species is at most a visitor. But conservation biologists and their legal allies formed this concept not just to describe, but to advocate: to justify a new forest politics in which ecological functions are considered alongside resource values (Swedlow, 2012). Political implications of concepts are also evident in other objects: a tree farm defined by the view of forests as sites of industrial production or carbon sequestration, or a protected area defined as wilderness – both objects combining description and prescription, justifying displacement of other uses and values, including those of nearby communities that may have their own concepts attached to nature (Goldman, 2004; Leach and Scoones, 2015). But these aspects of concepts also present an interesting paradox: entangled in politics and social preferences, their authority nevertheless stems from their status as distilled representations of reality: just what science is supposed to provide. And with this authority comes power. It is not surprising, therefore, that debates about the environment are often not about specific places or issues, but concepts – like the Anthropocene – that are stand-ins for concerns about humanity’s place in the global environment. At the same time, debates today about other concepts – such as equity, autonomy, and indigenous rights – testify to the shifting terrain of environmental politics: a questioning of assumptions about who has authority over the environment. Understanding how these concepts have emerged and played roles in global and local political debates can be the shared project of historians of science, environmental historians, historical geographers and political ecol-
ogists. Making concepts transparent, opening up the workings of knowledge and power they represent, can provide a basis for questioning them, enabling multiple ways of thinking, empowering those excluded from their operations, and encouraging the free play of creativity and complexity. At stake is the prospect of more effective and democratic forms of scientific expertise – what a concept. References Acot, P., 2009. Ecosystems. In: Bowler, P.J., Pickstone, J.V. (Eds.), The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences, The Cambridge History of Science, 6. Cambridge University Press, pp. 451–466. Castree, N., 2014. Making Sense of Nature: Representation, Politics and Democracy. Routledge, London. Chu, P.Y., 2015. Mapping permafrost country: creating an environmental object in the Soviet Union, 1920s–1940s. Environ. Hist. 20, 396–421. De Bont, R., 2015. Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870–1930. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Edwards, P., 2010. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. MIT Press, Cambridge. Goldman, M., 2004. Imperial science, imperial nature: environmental knowledge for the world (bank). In: Jasanoff, S., Martello, M. (Eds.), Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance. MIT Press, Cambridge. Grove, R.H., 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Guha, R., 1997. The authoritarian biologist and the arrogance of anti-humanism: wildlife conservation in the third world. Ecologist 27 (1), 14–20. Jasanoff, S., 2004. States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order. Routledge. Kingsland, S., 2010. The role of place in the history of ecology. In: Billick, I., Price, M. V. (Eds.), The Ecology of Place: Contributions of Place-Based Research to Ecological Understanding. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 15–39. Kohler, R., 2006. All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850–1950. Princeton University Press. Leach, M., Scoones, I. (Eds.), 2015. Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa. Routledge. Mayr, E., 1982. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Mitman, G., 2007. Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes. Yale University Press, New Haven. Nash, L., 2007. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. University of California Press. Oreskes, N., 1999. The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science. Oxford University Press. Parr, J., 2006. Smells like? Sources of uncertainty in the history of the great lakes environment. Environ. Hist. 11 (2), 269–299. Robbins, P., Moore, S.A., 2013. Ecological anxiety disorder: diagnosing the politics of the anthropocene. Cult. Geogr. 20 (1), 3–19. Robin, L., Sörlin, S., Warde, P., 2013. Introduction: documenting global change. In: Robin, L., Sörlin, S., Warde, P. (Eds.), The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change. Yale University Press, New Haven, pp. 1–14. Swedlow, B., 2012. Cultural coproduction of four states of knowledge. Sci. Technol. Hum. Values 37 (3), 151–179. Tansley, A., 1935. The use and abuse of vegetational concepts and terms. Ecology 16, 284–307. Tsing, A., 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press. Williams, R., 1976. Keywords. London, Fontana.
Please cite this article in press as: Bocking, S. Ecological concepts: Seeing, placing, imposing. Geoforum (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2015.08.014