Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how concepts of social ecology capture the relational character of environmental interactions. What concepts were coined in social ecology institutes in Vermont and Vienna, for example? How did the members of the “thought collectives” relate to their sociopolitical environments?

Paper long abstract:

The 1980s and 90s were the heyday of research collectives and political groups on social ecology. Born out of an awareness of the climate crisis and social inequality, they sought a transdisciplinary dialogue between their members and society rooted in multiple perspectives—including the sciences and the humanities, the arts and new technologies. In this paper, I look at concepts of environmental knowledge that have been coined in two different places: The Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont – with Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl as advocates of social ecology in the sense of municipalism, and, secondly, the Vienna Institute for Social Ecology and the concept of the social metabolism. Interestingly, the two institutes have very different approaches to social ecology—with the relationality of environment-interaction as a common ground. In this paper, I examine how members of these collectives defined key concepts of social ecology, and how the social ecology collectives interacted with other groups in civil society in the places where they were based. Through these key questions, and by tracing the concepts and knowledge exchange between and around social ecology institutes, the paper aims to contribute to the history of social ecological thought in the last third of the twentieth century.

Fleck, Ludwik. 1979. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Translated by Frederick Bradley and Trenn, Thaddeus J. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.