Recent years have seen a growing debate over what is the most appropriate form of conceptual framework for understanding human society’s relations with nature. One argument, stemming from the postmodern insistence that there can be no absolute truths or discourses, asserts that the environment (and our relations with it) is a purely social construction. It is simply a product of language, discourse and power-plays. Our description of the environment, according to this view, has no reference to real and material processes ‘out there’. The environment or nature is only what society (and some groups more than others) care to make of it. Furthermore this type of construction gets used to inform our understanding of human societies. A second argument is that there are indeed real causal mechanisms, processes and relationships ‘out there’. They exist independent of our own understandings, language and theoretical constructs even though the observable forms they take are dependent on contingent social and natural conditions.