ABSTRACT
Environmental issues are inherently complex, involving many uncertainties. There is thus far greater ambiguity associated with their definition than is generally acknowledged, especially by natural scientists (Grove-White and Szerszynski 1992). To a striking extent, such definitions are malleable and culturally shaped (Douglas 1975, Wynne 1982). Indeed, it has been suggested that part of the reason that particular issues gain prominence on the environmental agenda may be because of their resonance with deeper tensions in society as a whole, over and above concerns about their more obvious environmentally harmful effects (Grove-White 1992). This line of thought has been taken further by Conca and Lipschutz (1993), who suggest that the ‘global environment’, apart from being a complex geobiophysical system, is also ‘ultimately, a social construction, through which individuals and groups derive and define competing notions of authority, legitimacy, and sovereignity’.
