Wilderness: Comprehensive Linkage Between Social Construction And Its Relation To Nature

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The essays aim will be to provide a comprehensive linkage between what is meant by social construction and its relation to nature and describe its importance in modern day world. Social construction as a theory does not belong to a single individual but instead forms collective ideas from where new conversations can begin. Social construction is an extremely controversial topic because it conforms around unsettling ideas about truth, or oneself. Some central notions of social constructionism are; whatever exists makes no notion of how we talk characterise it and when an object will be categorized by humans it will be through set of relationships humans feel with the community its part of.

Furthermore, any construction made to explain a topic will bear that there is no value neutral description of the world. For example science can carry out practices of prediction and control but just because science makes predictions does not mean they have to be true. Social constructionism is divided into two approaches representational approach and material approach. Discursive constructionism is most distinctive in its foregrounding of the epistemic position of both the researcher and what is researched. It is focused on how we think about nature and what our thinking reflects on various issues happening around the world.

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Material approach focuses on how human create nature around them. Let’s now discuss why social constructionism is important. Sara Jude published an article called “The social construction of Africa’s Lion Kings”. Lion King is a great example of social constructionism of nature and wildlife in Africa. Sarah talks about her experiences with lions later on in her life when two were killed by the villagers in Africa who lived in terror after a young boy and heads of livestock were discovered. She talks about how westernised thinking disregards indigenous African people and believe them to be incompatible with nature as they killed the lions instead of conserving them while disregarding the threat they felt.

Thus she believed that meanings we attach to words like environment, wilderness and nature are more relative to our cultures than to the reality of what exists. She concluded by saying that through understanding social construction of nature we can open ways to examine how our perspectives differ through cultural filters and guide in making approaches that are more mutually beneficial to all. David Demeritt’s paper aims to attain a clarification of what is meant by social construction of nature which can then be used to understand the nature, the knowledge and the world. He further talks about construction as refutation and construction as philosophical critique where the first one can be linked to the ideas of realism and is quite traditional and for the latter he talks about the dualism that helped him differentiate true concepts of nature from the untrue ones.

He concludes the essay by talking about how by understanding social construction of nature humans can realise their power to shape natures through their concepts and material practices that can aid them in constructing nature. William Cronon’s work ‘The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’ argues that human beings need to change the way they think about wilderness and that no direct link exists between wilderness and nature. He claims that ‘if we allow ourselves to believe that nature be wild then our very presence in nature represents it fall’. He illustrated a new urban cultural invention where he does not want wilderness to be the landscape that has been preserved artificially to show unity with nature. When talking about the western culture, he pleads with readers to recognize the surroundings they live in as nature and believed that only when we stop thinking of wilderness as “a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural” will we find solutions to our environmental problems. The conclusion shows an understanding of how different aspects of nature such as cultural filters, power to change and separating ourselves from nature influence humans thinking and helps in social construction of nature.

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