Environmental Ethics

Volume 31, Issue 4, Winter 2009

Nature of the Third Kind
Toward an Explicitly Relational Constructionism

One aspect of social constructionist thought, which seldom receives the kind of explicit attention it warrants, has considerable potential: namely, the observation that our limited knowings of the world are achieved in numerous, yet deeply particularized, relational engagements in and with it. Foregrounding and elaborating such relational engagements provides an alternate way of developing a typology of constructionist thought. By emphasizing relationality as inherent in both social constructionism and many environmental and deep ecological positions, a potentially useful and powerful way of bringing the so-called warring factions to the treaty table emerges. A tripartite scheme of “natures,” focusing on relationality with the natural world, can provide a framework for dissolving some of the disputes in the literature, such as deep ecology’s current discomfort with constructionist thought.