ABSTRACT
What would a thorough understanding of society-nature relations look like? How can we understand contemporary alienation from nature? This chapter tries to answer these questions, concentrating particularly on the relations between abstract and concrete knowledge. These links, which are based on a reading of critical realism, are important if we are going to understand not only people’s alienated relations with nature but also the prospects for more emancipated forms of understanding. They are also important, this chapter will suggest, if we are to adequately understand the alienation of other species. In all, these links need to be made in order to understand the full scope of environmental politics. Realist epistemology, which focuses on the range of causal mechanisms and processes which generate concrete events, strongly suggests that such politics are by no means only about the environment. They are as much about social relations. And when we turn to the actual practice of green politics we find that this is indeed the case. It is as much about the social relations of class, gender and other sources of oppression, particularly the division of labour in modern society. I will shortly give two examples of this, one concerned with the relations between humans and animals, the other with the resistance of indigenous peoples to modernity. The division of labour, along with other processes such as the penetration of market relations, will again emerge from this as a common alienating process for both humans and other animals.
