Toward an Eco-Social Approach to Environmental Degradation

Abstract

While some critical works offer alternatives on ways to analyze and interpret biophysical processes like soil degradation, they are often short on social critique, stopping precisely where leftists usually begin, such as in arguing explicitly against capitalist social relations and, rarely, developing ideas about egalitarian anti-capitalist alternatives. Comparatively, the left has been long on critique but short on developing alternative ways of understanding and explaining biophysical processes, especially soils. One way that such problems emerge is by failing to incorporate into the analysis what is known about the biophysical processes related to the type of environmental degradation investigated. This volume is an attempt to addresses this missing aspect of most leftist scholarship. It draws from what others have already developed theoretically regarding environmental degradation, but underlines the relative independence of the “natural bases,”¹ which form the analytical starting point of research on people-environment relations; hence the preference for the term “eco-social.” That is, the ecological or biophysical being a much larger multifarious set of processes, ecosystem precedes the social, even if it is we that sense, know, interpret, analyze, in other words, determine its meaning. To state the obvious, this is evident in our very bodies, an ecosystem in itself.