Nature, Time, Space, and Scale: Confronting the Challenges of Global Environmental Problems

Non-humans in the form of nature’s dynamics have prompted human agents to modify their social practices: earthquakes shook the Japanese population into reinforcing building codes and recently questioning nuclear reactors.  For many global environmental problems, such as anthropogenic climate change, there are however enormous time lags and/or spatial distances between causal social practices and environmental consequences and there are issues of scale whereby any one cause can be dismissed as minor.  People can discount the future to gain immediate economic benefits and may not experience serious adverse consequences until it is too late to avoid disaster or tip the environment into a new state less beneficial to humans.  This is what Giddens labelled as his paradox and what disaster sociologists call the incubation of disaster.  Disasters are best conceived of as focusing events that can prompt action, but they can on the contrary be dismissed as Acts of God.  Moreover land, water, and atmospheric space on our planet are huge, so it takes an enormous accumulation of pollution and much time to degrade them globally.  Some anthropogenic problems are resolved by non-humans: the Gulf of Mexico contaminated by the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher is coming back to life.  This paper re-thinks Weberian sociological theory in terms of i) his neglected concept of non-social action, hence expectations concerning actions of non-humans and time, space, and scale, and ii) the enduring conflict of value spheres, particularly economic versus environmental benefits.  It calls attention to the importance of assumptions about non-human actants that underpin society’s practices when anthropogenic environmental threats for the distant future are glimpsed, but not known for certain.  It brings Adam’s analysis of time to the centre of environmental sociology.  It demonstrates how this framework can be used to gain insight into contemporary environmental problems like climate change.