Ecologies Of and As Explanation: Ecological Thinking in the Disciplines

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  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 05. Constructing Nature

Abstract

Using a mix of historical, census, and ethnographic methods, in this paper I trace the rise of some of these new scholarly activities, focusing on the emergence of conservation science as a good discipline to “think with” ideas of interdisciplinary development and expert environmental knowledge creation. Introducing the concept of “ecology of and as explanation,” I show the convergence of “ecological thinking” across a range of traditional disciplines and point to some of the things that this convergence brackets out of consideration. Though the problems with ecological explanation can be seen most clearly in exactly these recursive cases where an ecology of the social is used to explain an ecology of the natural, I argue that this ecological slippage is not limited to conservation or the environmental sciences but is present in the social sciences as well. In both kinds of ecological thinking (social ecological and natural ecological) it is easy to think that “everything” has been included—all mechanisms, processes and actors are present and accounted for, and if not, one can add them in as another term (or terms) in one’s equation (or elements of one’s theory, or actors in one’s politics).

Author

• Zoe Nyssa, Harvard University