Walking with Goethe from ecology to ecosystem services: A historical critique

• In Event: 2213 - Complicity and Cooptation: How Sociology has Changed Society, for Better and for Worse

Abstract

Based on the question, why do social scientists talk about “the ecosystem” now, why only now, and why has there
been and still continues to be some resistance towards opening the social sciences this way, this paper embarks on a
rhapsodic stroll through social sciences affairs with “the environment”. It reveals some historic layers of co-production of
disciplinary contexts as well as of structural ignorance. Beginning anecdotally with Goethe and von Humboldt to stress the
importance of the imagination for the discovery of the connections in the web of life that entangle “the social”, a case is
made that the study and critique of the contemporary transition of the political economy to become a BioEconomy (sic!)
requires a different take on the sociological imagination in general and on environmental sociology in particular, both a
product of the “Euromodernity of Empire”. It is the task of this essay to merely trace some of the lines of emergence of and
resistance to any serious engagement with environment, ecology, and the ecosystem in the social sciences, to parcel out
some of the consequences of these lines of flight, and then recontextualize them in the current challenge presented by the
transition to bioeconomy.

Authors

• Alexander I. Stingl, University of Warwick

• Gilles Lhuilier, Ecole Normale Superieure, Rennes (France)