Complexity, Dynamism, and Agency: How Can Dialectical Biology Inform Geography?

Abstract

Dialectical approaches, variously interpreted, have been advocated for by geographers for several decades. At the same time, critical environmental geography has recently become dominated by vital materialist strands of thought, the advocates of which have sometimes framed their own work in opposition to dialectics. Critics perceive two major problems with a dialectical framework; that it cements a nature–society dualism and that it insufficiently accounts for the agency or vitality of non‐human life. This paper seeks to address these criticisms by engaging with work by biologists who have been influenced by dialectical ideas. I outline two examples, Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins’ understanding of the way organism and environment mutually construct each other and research by Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer that offers a non‐dualist approach to wildlife conservation in agricultural ecosystems. The article discusses some of the ways in which these understandings might inform contemporary debates in political ecology.

Assemblage theory and disaster risk management

“…Smith and O'Keefe, 1980). Despite the more contemporary and hybridised interpretations of these dialectical approaches which can usefully dissolve the false society/nature dualism (Royle, 2017), these approaches still tend to overemphasise the dominance of capitalist relations in specific contexts (Gabriel, 2014), where other more powerful relations -such as geopolitics, uncertain scientific understandings and cultural imaginaries -may be of equal importance to the analysis (Collier and Ong, 2005;Grove, 2009). It is these tensions and assumptions that were, and remain to be, contested by advocates of 'flat ontologies' in geography (Marston et al, 2005).…”

Moving towards public policy-ready science: philosophical insights on the social-ecological systems perspective for conservation science

“…For us, this is how a socialecological system ultimately works. Dialectical thinking could have deep positive implications for the SES perspective, and also for conservation science, something that has been largely overlooked by researchers and practitioners (but see Norton 2003;Lewontin and Levins 2007;Royle 2017). Dialectical thinking give us the ability to view issues from multiple perspectives (i.e.…”

“…Resuming the dialectical understanding of the SES perspective, the non-linear effects, delayed responses, feedback loops and extensive temporal-spatial heterogeneity that characterize a SES (Spangenberg 2011;Cavender-Bares et al 2015;Maass and Equihua 2015) are purely dialectical logic, something that has not been totally recognized by the mainstream discourse yet, partly because it was under a Newtonian logic that we were taught to understand interactions (indeed, linear causeeffect relationships are a minority in a SES; see Clark and York 2005;Lewontin and Levins 2007). This is why it is impossible to talk about SES without changing the epistemological and ontological settings (Table 1); and dialectical thinking stands as a path full of tools to solve these philosophical issues (see Royle 2017).…”

“…The order of the rows does not imply, in any way, a hierarchy. 2005; Lewontin and Levins 2007;Royle 2017). Second, the ES concept could positively be used as a way to jump the 'apparent' bridge between social and ecological systems, acting as what some authors call 'boundary concept' (e.g., Schleyer et al 2017; see below).…”

Political ecology III: Who are ‘the people’?

“…Barua and Sinha’s (2017) research on the range of diverse actants animating the urban political ecology of Delhi thus brings together work on animal geographies, ANT and a critique of political economy. Similarly, Royle (2017) attempts to move beyond the somewhat unhelpful false antitheses (Castree, 2002) of hybridity (ANT) vs political economy (Marxism) by learning from a number of ‘dialectical biologists’. Among the latter, Lewontin’s understanding of how organisms shape their environments provides a novel basis for considering environmental questions, positing organisms not as objects of evolution but as internally related to the process of evolution.…”