No Return: Refractive Materialism and New Ecology

• In Event: Social Theory and Environmental Change

Abstract

This paper diagnoses a persistent conceptual flaw in theories of society-environment interaction: the continued reliance on an equilibrium-based model of ecology incapable of accounting for today’s unprecedented, unpredictable, and irreversible environmental crises. While neighboring fields have adopted the insights of “new ecology,” with its themes of dynamic non-equilibrium, complexity, uncertainty, and spatial and temporal variation, sociology has largely retained a “balance of nature” model, often to justify a simplified normative critique of environmental degradation. To address this shortfall and integrate new ecological thinking into sociological theory, I advance a framework termed “refractive materialism.” Grounded in critical realism, this theory demonstrates the sociological merits of analytical dualism over socio-ecological hybridity for analyses of the social causes and consequences of dynamic and unpredictable environmental change. It treats the social and biophysical as irreducible ontological strata with distinct, emergent properties and reciprocal causal relations. From this basis, it analyzes how stochastic ecological disruptions are refracted by power-laden, sedimented institutional structures, which provide the socio-cultural prisms through which individuals and groups transfigure—and inevitably reduce—changing environments into stable objects of social order. In so doing, it leverages new ecology’s attention to how historical dynamics operating at multiple, intersecting spatial and temporal scales converge in particular local ecological disruptions and generate unforeseen consequences. This renewed attention to complex environmental as well as social contingency can facilitate fresh analysis of socio-ecological conjunctures at a distinctly local level, thereby resisting the normative tendency toward reductive, generalized crisis narratives (e.g. of “capitalism” or “the state”) that impoverish analysis and often presuppose a disrupted yet restorable balance of nature. This framework is tentatively operationalized through a brief case study of wildfire adaptation and fire-prone landscapes.

Author

• Laird Gallagher, Brown University