Social organisation and risk

The relationship between environment and society is shaped by social organisation:

• Property relations decide how and by whom resources can be used. If the government owns a forest, it decides whether to lease it to timber companies or let villagers collect forest produce. Private ownership of land and wells decides whether others get access, and on what terms.
• The division of labour matters too. Landless labourers and women relate to resources differently from landowning men. In rural India, women feel scarcity most sharply, because gathering fuel and fetching water are usually their tasks, yet they do not control these resources.

Values, norms and knowledge also shape the relationship:

• The values of capitalism support the commodification of nature: turning it into things to be bought and sold for profit. A river's many meanings (ecological, useful, spiritual, beautiful) are reduced to profit and loss from selling its water.
• Socialist values of equality led some countries to seize land from large landlords and give it to landless peasants.
• Religious values have led some groups to protect sacred groves and species, and others to believe they may change the environment as they wish.
• Ideas about nature and society reflect their times: the 'nature-nurture' debate (are people poor because of innate ability, or because of disadvantage?), and the once common claims that women or Black people were 'naturally' less able, challenged as ideas of equality spread in the 18th century.
• Colonialism produced much knowledge about nature in order to make resources available to imperial powers: geology, geography, botany, zoology, forestry and hydraulic engineering were developed and institutionalised partly for this purpose.

Environmental management is hard. We do not know enough about natural processes to predict and control them, and industrialisation has made resource extraction faster and more complex. Complex technologies need sophisticated management that is often fragile and error-prone. We live in risk societies, using technologies and products we do not fully understand.

• Examples: the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, Mad Cow disease in Europe, and the Bhopal gas disaster.
• In Bhopal, on the night of 3 December 1984, the gas methyl isocyanate (MIC) leaked from the Union Carbide pesticide factory, killing about 4,000 people and permanently disabling about 2,00,000. The book's case study asks who was to blame.
• Example (new): a town that stores fireworks in a crowded market may never have had an accident, until a single spark shows how many small lapses (licences, inspections, storage) were connected.