A sociological approach to global biodiversity loss (commentary)

Several years ago, my colleague Richard York and I were sitting outside on a Eugene, Oregon patio discussing Elizabeth Kolbert’s then-new book, The Sixth Extinction, and we came to an odd conclusion. As Kolbert makes clear, there is no question that contemporary social processes are primarily responsible for the rapid extinction of non-human species. Yet sociologists, in particular environmental sociologists like us, whose goal it is to study relationships among social and environmental processes, were largely absent from discussions about the causes and consequences of extinction.

From this starting point, we set out to investigate what sociology could add. In particular, we were interested in exploring how sociologists could best approach the problem of biodiversity loss in a general, theoretical sense.

This approach, we quickly realized, would have to be different from sociological approaches to many other environmental problems. To make clear why this is the case, compare, from a sociological perspective, the problem of studying climate change to the problem of studying biodiversity loss. As a recent collection of studies demonstrates, sociologists now understand with compelling accuracy the ways in which certain social processes can lead to an increase or decrease in greenhouse gas emissions. These include the economic, demographic, political, cultural or other factors that generate either direct or indirect pressures on the environment, for example the specific ways in which population growth effects emissions in high income nations versus low income nations. Such analysis is largely possible because we have numerous data sets that, while not perfect, can provide a clear picture of what social processes are producing emissions, where, and when.

In contrast, the state of biodiversity is difficult to conceptualize, let alone measure. Even bypassing the difficulty of discerning what aspect of biodiversity to measure – e.g., genetic diversity, types of ecosystems, etc. – and focusing only on the number of extant species does not make for simple analyses. For instance, we know far more about the amount of carbon and methane currently in the atmosphere and where it came from than we do about even the number of species on the planet – let alone their current status. What is more, species, unlike greenhouse gases, reproduce according to processes that are often out of our control and highly subject to chance (which means they are much more difficult to predict).

In effect, our social relationships to other species are far more indefinite than our relationships with greenhouses gases. And therein lies the rub. The connections between social processes and environmental processes that generate biodiversity loss are very unclear compared to climate change, or even other environmental problems like oil spills or the clear-cutting of forests.

In our recent article published in the journal Social Currents, we show that, because of these difficulties, the global crisis of anthropogenic biodiversity loss should, first and foremost, be explained historically. This means paying attention to how large scale social processes, for instance the increasing commodification of global agriculture or changes in international banking, interact with large scale environmental processes, for example the entire size of a species’ habitat. The advantage of this is that we are then paying attention to how the big things, the things that set the stage, if you will, change in ways that generate more or less species extinctions. The disadvantage, however, is that if we exclusively stick to this wide-angled, big-history view, we cannot explain particular extinction episodes. We cannot exclusively look at the recent rise of tropical land-grabbing, for instance, to explain how a certain species went extinct. For that, we have to look at the history of a species in depth.

In other words, we need to be mindful of the big, global changes in social and environmental processes, but also be mindful that these big, global changes do not completely cause species extinctions by themselves. We should always remember that every species extinction has its own particular history.

A concrete example will ground this point. As Mongabay has reported, populations of the Grauer’s gorilla declined 77 percent between 1994 and 2014, and are now confined to eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC’s brutal civil war and mining operations are mostly responsible for the Gruaer’s gorilla now being critically endangered. At a broader social scale, however, the ongoing presence of militias and miners is in part a result of the digital revolution. Explosive growth in computer and cell phone use meant that demand for coltan, a metallic ore mined in the DRC that allows capacitators to handle high voltages and temperatures, exploded as well. While coltan mining is not the only cause of this civil war, it is certainly a driver of it, and such conflict has directly coincided with the decline in Grauer’s gorilla populations.

To be clear, we are not claiming that transformations in global capital demands are singularly responsible for the critical status of Grauer’s gorillas. Nevertheless, they have certainly fused with the specific histories of Grauer’s gorilla populations in ways that have, at least in part, set the stage for their near extinction. Our point is that these and other global social processes are indelibly connected to current processes of biodiversity loss, yet the way they are connected is dependent upon the specific context of their historical interaction.

Overall, we believe that sociology can become an important contributor to research on biodiversity loss. For this to happen, however, it should be based on analysis of how broad social and environmental structures contribute to biodiversity loss, as well as the ways in which actual species extinctions are dependent upon a specific historical context. The processes involved may include the legacy of a certain kind of subsistence agriculture, the creation of a dam, the characteristics of a small island versus a large continent, a specific cultural practice, or the recent formation of a regional trade agreement. In the case of Grauer’s gorillas, it is a combination of a global technological revolution, the minerals available in their habitat, and the colonial history of the DRC, among other social and environmental processes. Whatever these processes may be, our primary goal should be to understand how they combine over time to drive biodiversity loss.

CITATION

• Besek, J. F. & York, R. (2018).Toward a Sociology of Biodiversity Loss. Social Currents. doi:10.1177/2329496518815867

Jordan Fox Besek is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and RENEW (Research and Education in Energy, Environment and Water) faculty at SUNY at Buffalo.

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