Nature’s misrecognition is socially constructed and socially correctable

Evidence

Dean’s notion of ‘accountability’ (1996) is very useful in understanding, and responding to, misrecognition in the social and cultural realms. In Dean’s framework the focus is on the process of the construction of the status of the misrecognized; she insists we uncover where accountability and responsibility lie for both the construction of problematic notions and the reconstruction of ones based in more authentic recognition. In addressing nature specifically, Bennett (2004: 349) insists on a ‘recognition of the agential powers of natural and artifactual things, greater awareness of the dense web of their connections with each other and with human bodies, and, finally, a more cautious, intelligent approach to our interventions in that ecology’. The view here is a Foucauldian one: what nature is, and how it has been treated and misrecognized, is maintained by the construction of the meaning and status of, and relationship with, nature. In this, we are both individually and socially—in addition to politically—complicit. — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice, 470

Categorization

• SEED: The Foucauldian claim that nature’s degraded status is a social construction we are all complicit in sustaining could anchor an essay on how language and norms — not just law — create ecological injustice.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own framing note: storytelling/interpretation as method — recognition of nature operates in discourse, not only institutions. — connects to: Climate change instantiates all three forms of status misrecognition of nature — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 467; Formal education can erode rather than sharpen perception of the natural world — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 83; Modern scientific language still encodes the sexualized coercion of nature — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 682 (+4 more)