FACTOR K (SUSCEPTIBILIDAD DE EROSIÓN DEL SUELO)

Establishing the Conceptual Framework

The conceptual framing of research that concerns itself with reality-producing engagements is, by definition, an ontological enterprise. The beliefs, values and intentions that underscore the ways in which we meet the world, and indeed, the ways in which we strive to sustain it, summon our skills as builders, makers and collaborators. More than this, they summon our ways of coming to know. Whilst our epistemologies carry us into this enterprise, the dynamic interaction of what we know and how we know leads inevitably to an ontological engagement with worlds that are constantly being made, unmade and remade. Separations here lie more in the realm of the ideational or notional than in the actual interactions that apply between species, elements and places; we can build fences, but seldom can we exclude or evict the interlopers. That is to say, the spaces and places that we occupy as human beings are subject to unending movement, change and transformation. To the flux of these processes we must add the species and elements that occupy both built and natural environments.

Reconciling the tensions that apply when natural-human-other is disentangled or de-coupled necessarily demanded strong consideration in the development of a research methodology that would speak to the issues of community sustainability in its fullness. By extension, the need to develop an inclusive architecture about which a sound research process could be built led in the general direction of constructivism, particularly because of its potential to offer a level of fit between the various elements of the research (human- nature-environment). Given this initial engagement, a more detailed exploration of constructivism, along with its strengths and limits, was indicated.

A familiar conceptualisation within the social sciences generally, its more specific applications have arisen within sociologies of scientific knowledge (SSK), the social construction of technology (SCOT) and social constructivism

generally339_{. In many respects these variants of constructivism have}

contributed significantly to discourse that centres on the nature of reality, as well as the reality-producing elements of social life. As a counterforce to scientific determinism, constructivism has made some meaningful challenge, particularly with regard to notions of ‘proof’ and ‘truth’. Here, the linear or hierarchical order that emerges when Science ‘proves’ its theories on the basis of limited engagements, has led constructivists to resituate the arrival of a particular scientific advance within the milieu in which it arises. This becomes critically important when contained, laboratory-based ‘developments’ are released into far more complex environments. The examples here abound: DDT, CFC’s, phosphates, along with a range of medical applications that do their work on isolated systems, whilst simultaneously distorting the context and functioning of the whole in which they become immersed340_.

In effect, exposing the delusion that Science can capture and develop facts-in- isolation disrupts the closed-court of its legitimacy. Accordingly, the rubric of rationality is peeled back to reveal the hegemonic nature of its claims341

. Yet that said, social constructivism and its attendant variations can themselves be limited by the degree to which the social stands prominent in the shaping of material worlds. More to the point, social constructivism can at times be situated as equally deterministic precisely because the cast of reality is formed by the social context in which it is located. Needless to say, this impasse gives rise to high-octane debates between scientists, realists (materialists) and constructivists, manifest in claim and counter-claim discourse about what constitutes reality, along with the ways in which it is ‘produced’342_.

339 _{Law, J. & Singleton, V. (2000) “Performing technologies stories: On Social Constructivism,}

Performance and Performativity”, Technology and Culture, 41, pp. 765-766

340 _{See for example: van Emden, H.F. and Peakall, D.B (eds) (1999), Beyond Silent Spring:}

Integrated Pest Management and Chemical Safety, UNEP, ICIPE, Chapman & Hall, London - a joint project initiated by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE). Review available in Integrated Pest Management Reviews 4: 269–272, 1999.

341 _{Stengers, I. (2012), “Reclaiming Animism”, e-flux journal, No. 36, July, p.2} 342 _{See: Law, J. & Singleton, V. (2000) “Performing technologies stories: On Social}

Constructivism, Performance and Performativity”, Technology and Culture, 41 and

Latour, B. (2003), The promises of constructivism, in Idhe, D. (ed.), Chasing Technology: Matrix of Materiality, Indiana Series for the Philosophy of Science, Indiana University Press

Discourse and debates about the value of constructivism have infused such disciplines as environmental sociology343_{, critical realism}344_{, the philosophy of}

science345_{, science studies and others}346_{, yet a more recent challenge has been}

taken up by one of its own protagonists. Challenging the idea of Agency

In the broader social-political-environmental context the idea of human agency is seldom accounted for in the wide-ranging debates that accompany environmental degradation. As noted in Chapter One, Latour contributes significantly to extending our awareness of a force inimical to climatic degradation, yet his exposition of the disciplinary limitations that accompany the idea of human agency is equally telling and salient to this work.

With regard to constructivism, Latour347

sets out to discard the social as qualifier in the reclamation of the constructed. Echoing the content of his earlier cited work he throws up an overdue challenge to the ways in which various academic disciplines assert the notion of human agency. This is particularly ironic, given Latour’s long-held commitment to constructivism. Indeed, in this critical exploration he argues against his own original ‘constructions’ of what constructivism means and establishes some hope of reframing the meaning attributed to it, with the effect that it emerges as a more organic formulation - one that attributes meaning to the interactivity of human, material, technological and scientific. Rather than through the isolation of each case, it is to the relational dynamic between them that constructivism must look. That is to say, constructivism emerges as a qualified and redefined concept that does not assert the primacy of the human ‘maker’ or ‘constructor’. Instead it captures something of the

343 _{Irwin, A (2001), ‘Society, Nature, Knowledge: Co-constructing the Social and the Natural’,}

in Sociology and the Environment: A Critical Introduction to Society, Nature and Knowledge, Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 161-187

344_{Forsyth, T. in Stainer, A. and Lopez, G. (eds) (2001) After postmodernism: critical realism?}

Athlone Press, London, pp. 146-154

345 _{Stengers", I. (2008) “A Constructivist Reading of Process and Reality”, Theory Culture Society}

2008 25: 91

346 _{Law, J. & Singleton,V. (2000) “Performing technologies stories: On Social Constructivism,}

Performance and Performativity”, Technology and Culture, 41, pp. 765-775

347

Latour, B. (2003) ‘The promises of constructivism’, Paper prepared for a chapter in Don Idhe (editor), Chasing Technology: Matrix of Materiality, Indiana Series for the Philosophy of Science, Indiana University Press, pp. 2-5.

dialectical movement between states of order, development, emergence and incorporation as they manifest in multiple-species worlds that are constructed through interplay, not isolated command or agency.

While Latour’s more abstract discourse has its value, especially with regard to the ways in which we apprehend reality, Isabelle Stengers348 _{turns toward}

animism as a vehicle through which some reclamation process might take place. As a point of clarification, animism as she explores it extends to those features of life that animate our explorations and endeavours, rather than the more specific cosmologies that invest visceral forces with a causal or originary quality that enlivens the world in some invisible and indiscernible fashion. Here she draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in contrasting the differentiated hierarchies of fact with the rhizomatic quality of belief.

For Stengers, the rhizomatic metaphor expresses lateral connections that produce ‘heterogeneous practices, concerns, and ways of giving meaning to the inhabitants of this earth, with none being privileged and any being liable to connect with any other’. In the process, the nature of ‘belief’ constitutes an ecological anarchy, ‘because…connections must be produced. They are events, linkages – like symbiosis. They are what is and what will remain heterogeneous’349_.

Stengers does not dispatch Science generally, yet she is critical of the degree to which it generally naturalises its evidence as fact. In the process it discards anything that smacks of mere belief, irrespective of its value in establishing linkages between aspects of all life. Here she challenges the idea that if the particular belief cannot be detained and captured by Science, then the tests that produce both proof and truth are not satisfied. Consequently, belief, or the animating force of connection to something other than the stuff of Science, is cast off as inconsequential in the grander scheme of reality making.

348 _{Stengers, I. (2012) ‘Reclaiming Animism’, e-flux journal, No. 36, July, p.2} 349

Importantly, Stengers locates Science with a capital S as a general conquest bent on translating everything that exists into objective, rational knowledge. By contrast, small-s science ‘requires thinking in terms of an adventure…’350_.

In situating the small-s sciences as adventures, Stengers makes the point that ‘achievements’ within their various domains arise through their enrolment in partner-relations with the subjects of their explorations. That is, the relation between scientist and respondent is entangled, non-linear and not necessarily subject to the privilege or provenance of either science or scientist. In short, ‘things’ enact their being in relation, not isolation. More to the point, they do not always express a behaviour or characteristic mode of being that performs in line with structured parameters.

The Ontological Nature of Social Research

In an extensive exploration of constructivism, Law and Singleton351

expose some contrasting approaches. In relation to SSK (sociologies of scientific knowledge) and SCOT (the social construction of technology) they note a level of avoidance by constructivists in accepting the ‘performative consequences of their own work’. In this they are critical of the way that these discrete variants of constructivism uncouple their constructions of research findings from those that they seek to describe. By implication, the performance (or enactment) of reality is as much about the ways in which it is described and defined, as by those elements of it that supposedly stand beyond the reach of the researcher. As they note, …’to tell techno-science stories is, in some measure or other, to perform techno-science realities’.352

More broadly, the performance of social science research that extends beyond the techno-scientific speaks to the ontological politics of the research process itself. Contextualising the ‘power of social science and its methods’, Law and Urry note that ‘…the social-and-physical changes in the world are – and need to be – paralleled by changes in the methods of social inquiry.’ By implication,

350 _{ibid., pp. 2-3}

351 _{Law, J. & Singleton, V. (2000) ‘Performing technologies stories: On Social Constructivism,}

Performance and Performativity’, Technology and Culture, 41, p. 767

‘the social sciences need to re-imagine themselves, their methods and, indeed, their worlds if they are to work productively in the twenty-first century’353

One of the driving forces in this discourse about social inquiry is the degree to which it has been held in the thrall of ‘nineteenth century, nation-state based politics’354_{. According to Law and Urry, the degree to which this has been an}

embedded characteristic surfaces in its ongoing reproduction. In many respects this resonates with the view that the social sciences can and do fall into the trap of deterministic or relativistic conceptualisations, such that they reproduce the artifice of their big-S Science cohorts.

In expanding constructivism to the level of an inclusive concept, the ontological nature of research is more readily apprehended. That is to say, the nature of co-created reality, as opposed to theorizing that delineates various knowledge streams about it, becomes more fully available. Irwin355_{, in his}

challenge to develop a level of theoretical pluralism with regard to the social- natural divide, sees the need for the social sciences to re-couple the more usually isolated fields of society and nature, particularly in dealing with the pressing challenges that arise for both. Clearly, the separations between them diminish and limit the degree of any meaningful engagement in either sphere. More to the point, perhaps, the generalizable configurations embedded in internationalised agendas carry binaries and separations between human and other in ways that limit the reconciliation of both. As he notes:

The whole thrust of the co-constructivist concept is towards the recognition that environmental matters overlap and interconnect with a diversity of social practices. In that way also, it is possible to surmise that environmental change will be a product of a whole range of social practices and not simply of intentional environmental engagement. The international agenda of sustainability may not in the end be as important as smaller changes in social practice that cumulatively and undramatically change our world. Whilst it is relatively easy to focus on high-profile environmental decisions, the incremental shifts of industry, institutional politics and wider publics may ultimately have greater socio-environmental impact.356

[Emphasis added]

353 _{Law, J. & Urry, J. (2004) ‘Enacting the Social’, Economy and Society, 33, p. 390} 354 _{ibid., p. 391}

355 _{Irwin, A (2001) ‘Society, Nature, Knowledge: Co-constructing the Social and the Natural’,}

in Sociology and the Environment: A Critical Introduction to Society, Nature and Knowledge, Chapter 7, Polity Press, Cambridge

What these critical explorations expose is the interplay between the forces at work that do the constructing of reality. On the one hand we deal with what is given – a material environment, say, or an ecosystem, or a species population - on the other we confront a polity that carries belief, reason and context into transformative relations that combine to become emergent qualities that constitute co-constructions and versions of reality. For the sceptic, a point of reference that reasserts the value of collaborative construction (co- construction) and exposes the limits of truth and proof: Newton and gravity, whilst secure at ground zero, are dislodged beyond it by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In each case there exists a level of substantive proof to efficacy and application, yet both pertain to quite specific contexts. The one does not negate the other, but neither can it include it, given the specific conditions within which it will apply. On Earth, at ground zero, gravity performs, enacts, resolves. What goes up will come down. Now to the heavens: breach the gravitational field of the planet and not only will the ‘up’ not come ‘down’ of its own volition, it will have to be violently propelled, against its will, to comply. Should propulsion fail, so the fall will be reconfigured as ‘drift’ – up and out and gone, breaching every certainty that was ever invested in old science.

In relation to the development of this thesis, it has not been my intention to dispel the value and efficacy of all-science, yet it is nonetheless important to situate the sciences beside their counterparts, particularly because of the ways in which the one can be informed by the other. Importantly, if the beliefs and values that occupy social-natural contexts are excluded from the interplay of complex systems then the central requirement of coherence is lost. That is, we are individually and collectively steered by both knowledge and beliefs, along with the values ascribed to both.

In drawing on the stock of this work my purpose has been to develop the means by which community sustainability might be re-searched. As a starting point, community is described by what it includes, rather than by what it excludes. Here, sustainability is coupled with the complexity of its local contexts, and in the process accounted for through the multivariate ways in which it is performed. Rather than homogenising through definition the term

‘community sustainability’, I have chosen to engage with, rather than avoid, interpretations and constructions of sustainability that express the complex interactions that occur between place, species and the knowledge and values that give some effect to the ways in which sustainability is performed.

The development of a conceptual framework within which this process could be articulated owes much to the philosophical-scientific dimension articulated above, but also to the social sciences. In particular, the ontological and performative dimensions of community sustainability, as well as the constructed nature of social and other worlds. As indicated, I have avoided the more usual attribution of social and instead engage with Stenger’s co- constructivist approach, which develops a synthesis of the social and material as interactive and relationally dynamic.

In aligning the substantive theoretical-conceptual value of the works cited above, the communographic approach was crafted to fit the broadened human-natural context. Beginning with the Research Design, the following section deals more explicitly with the Methodology and Methods that were applied to the primary research.