Environment and Society. Paul Robbins

define as the rules and norms governing our interactions with nature and resources. Institutional approaches address environmental problems largely as the product of “common property” problems that are amenable to creative rule-making, incentives, and self-regulation. Chapter 5 examines ethics-based approaches to the environment, with their often radical ways of rethinking the place of humans in a world filled with other living and non-living things. The view of the environment as a problem of risk and hazard is explored in Chapter 6, where we also consider the potentials and pitfalls of technologies that seek to address such challenges. This approach proposes a series of formal procedures for making the best choices possible, given that environments and environmental problems are inherently uncertain and highly variable. This is followed by a description of political economy approaches in Chapter 7, which are those that view the human relationship with nature as one rooted in the economy, but which insist that the economy is based in, and has fundamental implications for, power relationships: who gets what, who works for whom, and who pays. Contrary to market-based approaches, these point to the environmentally corrosive impacts of market economics. In Chapter 8 we describe approaches to environment and society that stress social construction, which we define as the tendency for people to understand and interpret environmental issues and processes through language, stories, and images that are often inherited or imposed through systems of media, government, education, or industry. These stories are not harmless, since they can encourage or overlook very real actions, impacts, and behaviors with serious environmental and social consequences. In Chapter 9, we introduce the critical contributions of feminist thought. This approach includes serious consideration of how the specific conditions of patriarchal society contribute to social and environmental challenges that continue to mark our world. It also provides a window on possible solutions and new ways of being in the environment. Chapter 10 closes this section of the book by engaging with critical theories of race and the environment, which locate many of the ecological dysfunctions and failures of our current world in long-standing and unresolved problems of structural racism and environmental injustice.

      Within these several ways of seeing are many others, of course. Within questions of risk are deeper questions of progress, economic growth, ecomodern thinking, and its limits. We have nested many of these perspectives within larger categories of thought, though without pretending we can do more than introduce many important concepts. So too, many perspectives are threaded into one another. No critical look at population as an environmental question can set aside feminist critiques of this approach, for example, and the racial outcomes of environmental injustice have, within them, political economy as well. As such, many themes are interlaced throughout this part of the book.

Part II presents a set of nine critical objects and examines each of them using a sample of these approaches. Each chapter begins with a “short history” of the object followed by a discussion of ways in which the characteristics of the object present a puzzle or conundrum, and then presents divergent ways of thinking about the object from competing points of view. In Chapter 11, we introduce carbon dioxide (CO₂), a curious gas with a complicated history on Earth that shows it to vary widely over time, with enormous implications for the forms of life dwelling here. As one of the most important greenhouse gases, moreover, CO₂ has become an increasingly contested object, with competing views about its control, regulation, and circulation. In Chapter 12, we discuss trees. These plants have been companions of human civilization since the beginning, though the long relationship has been marked by dramatic ebbs and flows. In this chapter we take the opportunity to introduce varying theories to account for deforestation and reforestation, as well as a startling ethical proposal for trees to legally represent themselves. Chapter 13 is dedicated to wolves, a species with which humans have a current love–hate relationship and whose return throughout North America and parts of Europe and Asia represents a dramatic change in the way humans and animals relate. This chapter stresses diverse cultural understandings of the same animals, and the implications of our ethics and institutions for the many animals that share the landscape with humanity. Chapter 14 addresses uranium, a natural element that has been harnessed for extraordinary power and benefit, but which has a history rich in danger, injustice, and environmental harm. The tuna takes center stage in Chapter 15, and with it the profound problems faced by the world’s oceans. Here, human economics and ethics collide in a consideration of how fish production and consumption are regulated and managed in a complex world. Chapter 16 discusses lawns and the risks posed by the artificial chemical inputs required to maintain them. Chapter 17 addresses one of the world’s fastest-growing commodities, bottled water. This object has the rare dual role as a solution to problems of water supply in some parts of the world, while being a clear luxury item – with attendant environmental problems – in others. We next examine French fries (also called “chips”!) in Chapter 18, a culinary invention that connects the complex centuries-old history of the transatlantic “Columbian Exchange” with the health controversies and industrial food economies of the twenty-first century. We close by addressing e-waste in Chapter 19, all the hazardous trash from cell phones, computers, and other electronics that continues to build up in landfills around the world, but which has also become a source of “treasure” for people and companies who mine it for recyclable materials.

      Quite intentionally we have selected objects for exploration, rather than problems. We do this for two reasons. First, while many objects are obviously linked to problems (trees to deforestation, as we shall see in Chapter 12, for example), not all human relations with non-humans are problems. Second, we intend by this structure to invite people to think seriously about how different things in the world (giraffes, cell phones, tapeworms, diamonds, chainsaws …) have their own unique relationship to people and present specific sorts of puzzles owing to their specific characteristics (they swim, they melt, they migrate, they are poisonous when eaten …). This is intended as an opportunity to break away from the environment as an undifferentiated generic problem, one universally characterized by a state of immediate and unique crisis. While global climate change is a critical (and sprawling) suite of problems, for example, the long and complex relationship of people to carbon dioxide itself provides a focused entry point, filled with specific challenges and opportunities. We do indeed face enormous environmental problems, but we believe them to be best solved by exploring the specificities and differences, as well as commonalties, of both people and things.

      We do not pretend to have provided an exhaustive list of socio-environmental situations, interactions, and problems. Instead we provide a few key examples to show how objects are tools to think with, and to demonstrate the implications of divergent ways of seeing environmental issues.

We have also provided boxed discussions throughout the text entitled: “Environmental Solution?” Our use of the question mark is both intentional and provocative. All the examples we describe have been considered, by someone, to be a solution to environmental problems. We invite readers to consider whether these solutions make sense but also to interrogate the theoretical assumptions that underpin each such solution, using the tools we have provided in the text to think critically about what constitutes a sensible way to address environmental challenges.

      It is also important to note that this is not an environmental science