Newsletter of the Section on Environment and Technology
                         American Sociological Association

Point Counterpoint: Environment, Society, or Both?

Welcome to the first E&T point counterpoint discussion. This column was envisioned to focus debate in a public forum, allowing E&T members to share and develop diverse viewpoints, and providing a starting point to engage others in debate. The column will run periodically, as willing authors collaborate and contribute. (Contact me with your ideas for future installments.) Our first question, aptly posed by Steve Kroll-Smith (University of New Orleans), concerns how we, as sociologists, think about the environment.

Kroll-Smith provides one answer in his "point" and Bill Freudenburg (University of Wisconsin) gives
another in his "counterpoint." The debaters welcome your comments, as well. Of course, responses should be constructive and add to the debate. Please send your comments to me for possible inclusion in a future issue.

First Topic: Dancing With The Devil: Sociology and the Physical-Organic World

Environmental sociologists dance with the devil, though always with some awkwardness. A few of us attempt a bold embrace, a clutching, clumsy slow dance. Most of us, however, acknowledge our wicked partner with barely a nod, dancing at a safe distance, as if we came to the dance alone. The devil is, of course, the environment. At once physical, organic and symbolic, environments maliciously torment many of us who worry about where sociology ends and biology, ecology, atmospheric science, and physiology, among other "non-social" disciplines begin.

The question that bedevils many of us in sociology is simple to pose: Is the first, second or third person plural at the bottom of everything we think or write about environments? Or, do environments exist independently of thinking and language? Answer "yes" to the first question and you are a "social constructionist," or perhaps, less kindly, a "fuzzy-headed idealist." Answer yes to the second question and you are likely to be charged with sociological nihilism. After all, what makes us sociologists is our steadfast belief in the inviolate connection of the social with the social. How can (or should) sociologists dance with this devilish partner?

Point: Steve Kroll-Smith

The question of how environmental sociologists should think about the physical and organic is also an inquiry into what passes for truth in sociology. The fact that we are still asking this question after two hundred years reminds me of why I enjoy this discipline. But I admit to enjoying the company of people who prefer to be uncertain about what is true.

With some modification of the language Rorty (1982) uses to investigate the truth claims of philosophy, we can discern two types of sociological truth. One type assumes a correspondence between valid sociological knowledge and the world as it is actually organized. Assumed here is the idea that, at its best, sociology is able to formulate sentences that lock on to the real nature of society and environment relationships. Thus, a correspondence approach offers an ocular vision of truth as discernable with the trained eye. True sociological knowledge makes real society, culture, politics, environments and so on transparent, visible to the interested (and presumably educated) reader.

Competing with this realist version is an idealist or textual version of truth. A textual approach to truth assumes that what is real about societies and environments are the words and gestures people use to make sense of their lives with one another and with organic and inorganic matter. Sociological truth is found in the way things are said and done as opposed to the way things "really are." Truth, in other words, is a collection of words that take their meanings from other words rather than arguing that they somehow make the real world transparent. Truth as correspondence is roundly and justly critiqued by the textual  theorists, many of whom, however, would replace one reductive stance with another. To wit, there is only the text!

Embedded in these two versions of truth is the unresolvable "it is," "it isn't" debate. I don't believe it is necessary to frame the question of sociological truth into an "it is", "it isn't" argument. For that matter, there is little to be gained by the "society and environment are objective facts," "society and environment are text" debate. What I find useful is a version of sociological truth that is not committed to one or the other standard versions and is willing to risk imagining other versions. What I have in mind, following Kenneth Burke, is a pluralistic approach to sociological truth (see Burke 1989:26, 115). It starts from the simple assumption that the correspondence and textual theories of sociological truths about environments and societies are, in fact, both true.

Each version is a particular cluster of words that directs attention to one of several sociological truths about environments. Avoiding the foundationalist tones of both the correspondence and textual approaches to truth, pluralism encourages investigators to be circumspect and cautious, to be aware of where their particular version of truth stops and another begins. The pluralist position acknowledges that a sociological truth is both a selection from a possible range of truths and also a deflection from other plausible versions.

From this vantage point, truth is more like a tolerance for difference that opens up possibilities and keeps them open. Its focus is not on whether a particular version of truth is true or false, but whether or not its particular terminology or vocabulary works to intelligibly frame the particular interests of the investigator. Stripped of its claims to universality, truth becomes "a tool which helps us cope or make sense of the world" (Rorty 1979:11).

Finally, a pluralistic version of truth suggests the possibility of additional truths, such as the critical-realist version that would join both the physical, organic and the social into coherent sentences. But that must wait for another discussion. My counsel? Dance with the devils, but don't fall hopelessly in love with any one of
them.

Counterpoint: Bill Freudenburg

Dancing, Diving, or Dealing with the Environment:  A Devil or a Deep Blue Sea?

In developing my counterpoint, I consider both the main question posed above, involving the relationship between sociology and the physical-organic world, and Editor Roschke's column in the Winter ET&S concerning the question of "where we place our work," in the tiers of our discipline.

In his comments, Steve Kroll-Smith demonstrates his erudition in the process of outlining a two-way typology of "correspondence" versus "textual" theories of "sociological truth." My own remarks will come in two sections, the first of which will offer a relatively simple point in response to the comments from Dr. Kroll-Smith, and the second of which will present a somewhat more complex point in response to what I take to be the central challenge for this debate.

Good Idea, Bad Poetry

First, the simpler point. In his remarks, Steve Kroll-Smith notes that a disagreement over "correspondence" versus "textual" theories can quickly turn into "an 'it is,' 'it isn't' argument." Drawing on his elegant formulation, he suggests that we avoid such an argument, because the two theories "are, in fact, both true." I endorse his recommendation that we avoid such arguments, albeit for slightly different reasons. In my view, the "correspondence" and the "textual" theories are not just "both true," but in an equally important sense, also "both false."

To put the matter more straightforwardly, I believe that the truth or falsity of such arguments will always need to be judged in light of yet another model I wouldn't dare call it a "theory"  which differs a bit from either of the options that Steve identifies. In general, I believe that any field is most likely to advance through a process in which our theories are seen not as sheer truth, not as sheer words, and also not simply as straightforward syntheses of the two. Instead, our theories any theories should represent the best we've been able to do, so far, in a larger process sometimes known simply as "successive approximation."

Perhaps the most succinct summary of this basically good idea is provided by a bit of bad poetry, which (if memory serves) was initially put forth by Piet Hein:
     The way to truth is simple
     and easy to express:
     To err, and err, and err again
     but less, and less, and less.

Do our theories correspond to whatever may be the "real" truth of the universe around us? Under favorable circumstances, they may be reasonably close perhaps even "close enough," at least for now but they will probably never reach perfection. Yet that actually gives us all the more reason to try them out, and to try to improve them. The true value of a theory can only be seen if at least some of us find it sufficiently promising that we use it as at least a provisional guide for our expectations, whether in our work or in our lives. The more often and the more seriously a theory is "tried out" in such ways, the sooner we will encounter the cases and the contexts where it proves not to be such a useful guide and at that point, at least if we are sufficiently rigorous in our thinking, we have the opportunity to learn, and to improve, leaving others as well as ourselves in a position of being able to "err again," but maybe by just a bit less.

What the Devil?

That's it for the simpler point. Now I'd like to turn to the somewhat more complex one, which goes back to what I take to be the central question that of understanding the relationship between (what we take to be) "social" and "environmental." For the remainder of my remarks, I will be stealing freely from work with my colleagues Scott Frickel and Bob Gramling (see especially Freudenburg et al. 1995, 1996; Gramling and Freudenburg 1996).

Perhaps the first thing to be said about understanding the social/environmental relationship is that the very question leads us back to Editor Roschke and others' recent discussions of where we stand with respect to the discipline of sociology. In some ways, in other words, "Environmental Sociology" is a subfield or a specialized area within the "larger discipline" of Sociology, but in other ways, it is broader than all of Sociology; it includes essentially everything the discipline has traditionally defined as being within its own purview, and then some, adding the biophysical world, as well. It may be precisely for that reason that we would need to worry about the relationships between everything that has traditionally been thought of as "social," on the one hand, and what has generally been understood as the separate biophysical environment, on the other. It may also be for that reason that a group of sociologists might think about the very process of worrying about that relationship as involving a dance with a "devil," and an awkward dance at that.

The second step is to proceed to the more direct question "Do environments exist independently of thinking and language?" I can provide an equally direct answer: "Yes." It is possible to be particularly clear on that point if we accept the widespread assumption that "thinking and language" are things that people do. According to geologists' interpretations of the geological record, for example, "environments" (complete with swamps, volcanoes, plants, dinosaurs, primordial ooze, and more) clearly did exist, for roughly a jillion years, before the presence of any critters we would recognize today as "people." For those who, unlike me, are unwilling to accept the geologists' accounts as being at least reasonable approximations of what might ultimately be called "truth," another jillion examples are provided by any location in what we call "the known universe" where no human beings are present, which is to say most of the known universe.

Again here, I am willing to accept, at least until better evidence comes along, the arguments of astronomers and others that the rest of the universe really does exist, and that it has long existed, even for the thousands of years before any of us on planet earth knew that it went that far out. Either of these examples would be more than sufficient, in my view, to meet the philosophical standard of "existence proof" anything that exists is possible.

The tougher challenges arise, of course, when we try to grapple with questions that lie just beneath the surface of the central challenge, and that concern many Environmental Sociologists on a more or less daily basis. Those questions have to do not just with the existence of the biophysical world, but with its importance in human affairs. In the interest of keeping my remarks on this point reasonably brief, I will be ignoring the two most extreme points of view, which I take to be basically silly one being the argument that the biophysical environment is absolutely irrelevant for human and social life, and the other being the claim that there's absolutely no difference between social and biophysical/environmental processes.

In between these illogical extremes, I believe, there seem to be four main logical possibilities for conceptualizing the relationship between the social and the biophysical. All have been taken quite seriously at one time or another, but the one that I have argued to be most helpful (here as elsewhere, doing so with my colleagues Scott Frickel and/or Bob Gramling) is one that tends to have received perhaps the least attention to date.

The first of the four logical possibilities, which seems to be the first instinct of almost every western-trained academic, involves analytical separation the drawing of distinctions, such that one item is deemed to be "social," while the next is physical or "environmental." This kind of typologizing, to be sure, offers certain advantages in terms of logical simplification, but it has its weaknesses, as well.

One of those weaknesses shows up as soon as we consider what may be most academics' second tendency, namely the tendency to grant analytical primacy to one side of that logical dividing line or the other.  Some of us, in other words, decide that our true calling is to focus on the social, while others decide to focus on the environmental. Soon, in what may be a peculiarly male form of behavior, we start to attack those who dare to emphasize the "wrong" side of the line. Once this process gets started, it seems to take on a life of its own, perhaps in part because of what Bob Gramling and I (Freudenburg and Gramling 1994; cf. Coleman 1957) have called "the spiral of stereotypes." That's our term for what happens when the partisans on one side of a battle stop talking to the folks on the other side but not about the folks on the other side.

Having decided to focus with ever-increasing precision on "strictly social variables," for example, the first set of purists may go so far as Stanley (1968:855), arguing that "the main accomplishment and direction of the social sciences to date" should be seen as involving "the progressive substitution of sociocultural explanations for those stressing the determinative influence of physical nature." In response, other card-carrying sociologists (those who do see important effects of "physical nature" on human behavior, or vice versa) may respond by noting that reactions such as Stanley's show a curious form of hypervigilance a tendency to level the charge of "environmental determinism" toward analyses that might "suggest that biological or environmental factors have any degree of influence upon human affairs" (Dunlap and Catton 1983:117, emphasis in original). Perhaps, such authors suggest, the real problem is "sociocultural determinism" on the part of some of the hyper-vigilant sociologists. Once this process gets started, of course, it can become just as entertaining as professional wrestling, but at least in my view, it tends to have just as little to do with genuine intellectual progress.

Sooner or later, however and it generally seems to happen only "later," after the wrestling match has long since lost most of its entertainment value there can come a time when most spectators, if not the wrestlers themselves, will be able to hear a message from someone who, like Steve Kroll-Smith, may be able to say, "Stop! You're both right!" (Such a person clearly needs to have a certain breadth of vision, but it also seems to help if he or she also has a reasonably high level of credibility within the field. Things may be even better if that distinguished colleague can use suitably impressive terminology, as in referring to "correspondence" versus "textual" theories, but we need further research on that last point.) Scott, Bob and I refer to this third approach as involving a dualistic balance, in honor of my colleague Fred Buttel, who was among the first scholars within the field of environmental sociology to refer to humans as a "dualistic" species being influenced/ constrained by environmental realities, just as other species are, but at the same time being "unique among the animal kingdom in their capacity for culture and symbolic communication" (Buttel 1986:338).

As may already be clear, my colleagues and I see the emphasis on a balanced or dualistic approach as having considerable strengths. Still, even this third approach shares with the other two approaches a naturalized or taken-for-granted tendency to view the physical and the social as being separate and distinct. The fourth and final approach, by contrast, emphasizes the extent to which (what we take to be) the physical is influenced by (what we take to be) the social, and vice versa. In essence, while the first three approaches all start with the assumption that the physical and the social need to be separated or that, "in reality," they already are separate the fourth and final approach completes the circle. It reminds us that the initial process of analytical distinction the act of drawing a line to separate the social from the biophysical was itself a human act, and an act of choice. The separation may well have been pursued in the interest of analytical usefulness and/or convenience, but ultimately, that act of separation is also capable of leading to battles that are anything but useful or convenient.

The basic assumption of the fourth and final approach, in other words, has to do instead with mutual contingency or con-joint constitution. According to this fourth approach, what have commonly been taken to be "physical facts" are likely in many cases to have been shaped strongly by social construction processes, while at the same time, even what appear to be "strictly social" phenomena are likely to have been shaped in important if often overlooked ways by the fact that social behaviors often respond to stimuli and constraints from the biophysical world.

Many of my colleagues have difficulty with this argument, claiming that it is excessively complex. My response is that it is actually quite simple, and that if it is difficult to understand, that may simply reflect the power of taken-for-granted assumptions. Having "learned" that the earth is flat, we can have difficulty "unlearning" that belief. As Charles Perrow has noted (1984:9), "Seeing is not necessarily believing; sometimes, we must believe before we can see."

In the interest of a straightforward, relatively concrete illustration, consider the example of technology. If we are forced to render a verdict that technology is either physical or social, the likelihood of coming up with a sensible answer may be quite small if only because of the presuppositions that are hidden within the framing of the question. On the one hand, technology is inherently a social product. It is the result of human ingenuity, manipulation, exertion, creativity, blind spots, and other human strengths and weaknesses, and it is often capable of changing what we understand to be "the" physical limits of a system. On the other hand, technology is also inherently physical, shaped by biophysical factors that are sometimes likely to be taken for granted and at other times to be taken as problematic, but that in practice can rarely be ignored with impunity as illustrated by everything from "human" flight, to habitable buildings near the north and south poles, to the electronic transfer of documents that physically remain in their initial locations. In the absence of fuel or properly working engines and wings, heavier-than-air transportation devices can and do fall out of the sky; except for traditional dwellings of the Inupiat and other indigenous peoples, habitable buildings in polar regions depend on the importing of energy and insulating materials; and even the electronic transfer of documents can only take place through the physical flows of electronic currents through appropriately designed circuits and across space. So is technology social, or is it physical or is it both? At least in my view, it is one of those aspects of human existence that lies at the confluence of the physical and the social; it is inherently and inevitably shaped by both.

What the Dickens?

Note that I am not making an argument that there is "no difference" between social and biophysical variables. Instead, I am characterizing the belief in "strictly" social (or biophysical) variables as a special kind of academic myth. Like many myths, this one is not entirely false, and its simplifications can even be useful but only up to a point. Its usefulness is that it can help us to understand one set of factors better by freeing us, for a time, from the complexities of needing to consider others; its limitation, paradoxically, is that it can seduce us into believing that we can be safe in forgetting about those non-considered factors, as when we simply forget about supposedly "non-social" variables. In the process, this initially useful assumption can ultimately help us to misunderstand both sets of factors, in part because of the very comfort provided by the erroneous belief that, as the "correspondence" theory summarized by Dr. Kroll-Smith might have it, the "two" worlds truly are separate from one another.

In the "real" world, by contrast, what are often assumed to be separably social and physical phenomena can instead prove to be conjointly constituted connected with one another as much as are the opposing poles of a magnet. When we try to saw the magnet in half, what we produce is not a separation of the north pole from the south, but a pair of magnets, each having its own north and south poles. One response to such "resistance" (cf. Pickering 1993) from the world we study, of course, is to saw the magnet again and again, hoping that we will ultimately achieve the purity of separation we originally expected. Unlike the process of successive approximation in science, however, I would argue that such sawing of magnets is destined to be little more than the creation of ever-smaller pieces the successive approximation of nothingness.

The other approach, which is the one I advocate, is to take a step back, and to reconsider the way in which we have chosen to divide our concepts, as well as our magnets. In the end, I believe, not just "environmental" sociologists but all sociologists may need to recognize that our ability to understand socially significant outcomes will ultimately depend not on the separation of the physical and the social, but on our capacity to recognize the extent to which each is a fundamental part of the other. Like the magnet, they may best be understood in terms of their dynamic interrelationships with one another and their mutual contingency not so much in terms of their "need" to be separated, but in terms of their ultimate inseparability.

As Scott, Bob and I have put it, with apologies to Dickens, academics have the best of minds, but also the worst of minds. One of the most important positive characteristics of the academic mind, in other words, is the ability to spot patterns that evade the awareness of others, and then to construct mental models to describe those patterns all while taking the models quite seriously, as when we systematically analyze the ways in which one aspect of a model, for example, may mesh or interact with another. At the same time, however, one of the worst characteristics of a typical academic mind is the accompanying tendency to take the mental models a bit too seriously so seriously that we forget the original purpose, which was to help us to understand the empirical world around us.

At least as I understand the task before us, accordingly, our challenge is to build on our strengths, which involve the best of minds, while coming to grips with the challenges inherent in the worst of minds. That challenge is complex, multifaceted, and at least in my view, most usefully approached through a process of successive approximation to err, and err, and err again, but less, and less, and less. In that process, one of the key requirements for academic sanity may well be that we give ourselves permission to enjoy the ideas, and sometimes even to enjoy the wrestling matches. An even more important requirement, however, both for our own sanity and for the value that our work can have to the people and the world around us, is that we remain alert as well to what may be the greatest risk of the academic mind the risk of becoming prisoners of our own perspectives.

References

Burke, Kenneth. 1989. Symbols and Society. Joseph Gusfield, Editor. Chicago University Press.

Buttel, Frederick H. 1986. "Sociology and the environment: The winding road toward human ecology." International Social Science Journal 38:337-56.

Coleman, James S. 1957. Community Conflict and the Press. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Dunlap, Riley E. and William R. Catton, Jr. 1983. "What environmental sociologists have in common (whether concerned with 'built' or 'natural' environments)." Sociological Inquiry 53: 113-35.

Freudenburg, William R., Scott Frickel and Robert Gramling. 1995. "Beyond the Nature/Society Divide: Learning to Think about a Mountain." Sociological Forum 10 (#3): 361-92.

__________. 1996. "Crossing the Next Divide: A Response to Andy Pickering." Sociological Forum 11 (#1): 161-75.

Freudenburg, William R. and Robert Gramling. 1994. Oil in Troubled Waters: Perceptions, Politics, and the Battle over Offshore Oil. Albany: State University of New York (SUNY) Press.

Gramling, Robert and William R. Freudenburg. 1996. "Environmental Sociology: Toward a Paradigm for the 21st Century." Sociological Spectrum 16 (#4, Oct.): 347-70.

Perrow, Charles. 1984. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. New York: Basic Books.

Pickering, Andrew. 1993. "The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science." American Journal of Sociology 99: 559-89.

Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.  Princeton University Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. University of Minnesota Press.

Stanley, Manfred. 1968. "Nature, culture and scarcity: Forward to a theoretical synthesis." American
Sociological Review 33:855-870.

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