Environmental Politics After Nature: Conflicting Socioecological Futures

This article is about the logic and dynamics of environmental politics when the environment at stake is profoundly socioecological. We investigate the socioecological forests of the coalfields of Appalachian Ohio, where once decimated forests are again widespread. Conceptualizing forests as power-laden relationships among various people, trees, and other nonhumans, we identify multiple distinct forest types that currently exist as both material reality and future vision. Each forest is characterized by antagonistic ideas about ideal species composition, structure, and function and about specific actions and actors deemed necessary and threatening for the forest's persistence. Each forest represents a very different vision for how socioecological relationships should be fostered. We argue, first, that broad acceptance that the environment is fundamentally socioecological does not mark the end of environmentalism. Rather, urges to environmentalism proliferate as people aim to foster the social natures they envision—and do so through interventions that are internal to what the forest is and does. Second, the proliferation of environmentalisms generates new forms of environmental conflict, which manifests over what sorts of social natures can and should exist (i.e., what they should do and for whom) and which interventions are beneficial or harmful to the survival and proliferation of the forest in the future. Ultimately, we demonstrate that socioecological futures are being shaped today through political struggle not over naturalness but over what should be done, by whom, to bring about which social natures, and to the benefit of whom (human and nonhuman).