New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies

Epilogue: Preservation in the Age of Entanglement: STS and the History of Future Urban Nature

212 Preservation in the Age of Entanglement STS and the History of Future Urban Nature Sverker So � rlin Preservation and conservation are standard tropes of environmental history , nowadays often cited as icons of the field’s backward past rather than its bright future. In this chapter I argue that, on the contrary, there is currently a major transformation regarding how we understand the social-ecological processes of protecting nature and how previous dichotomies between nature and culture can be transcended in order both to better understand preservation as a social phenomenon and to inform policy. Environmental history can play an important role in this transformation. This chapter attempts to demonstrate that concept and theory from the field of science and technology studies (STS) can assist environmental historians very productively in that work. The focus is on preservation of urban nature, partly because urban nature is already an interesting field of preservation and partly, and perhaps most importantly, because cities are rapidly growing to become the hegemonic life-form of the large majority of the world’s population and thus will likely shape, on an unprecedented scale, what we will come to understand in the future as nature, both inside and outside urban regions. The general frame of thinking that I will apply is actor-network theory (ANT), here taken in its broad sense, starting with the sociology of translaEpilogue Preservation in the Age of Entanglement 213 tion, developed by Michel Callon and others in the 1980s.1 This line of work has been refined and further developed in the work of Bruno Latour. It is particularly Latour’s work on mobilization of resources and “actants” and “weights” for the shaping of new narratives that I will apply.2 That has not been common. In fact, it is rather striking that protection of nature has not hitherto been an area with many applications of ANT. To preserve nature is to attempt something that goes against the grain of common capitalist uses of nature and real estate. It requires extraordinary efforts of mobilization of a kind that the sociology of translation can provide and where convincing counternarratives are essential. A possible explanation for the lack of interest is that early STS did not include a wider interpretive framework that could include nature. STS was chiefly about individual interaction in social microspaces , not about society and its interaction with natural macrospaces. Work inspired by STS in a range of disciplines, including the social sciences , ecology, and design, has started to address these shortcomings over the last decade. From this work I would like to single out Bruno Latour’s concept of nature politics as key, since it provides links between preservation and other applications of social thought to contemporary environmental concerns .3 One concept that is particularly important in this regard is entanglement . Darwinian in origin, this is a concept that Latour uses as an image of the blurring and permeated boundary that exists between the human and nonhuman worlds.4 Whereas previous narratives of modernity focused on the separation of culture from nature and emphasized the superiority of reason and science in relation to the natural world, entanglement signifies the rising currency of a rather different narrative. We become ever more enmeshed through science and technology and through the way we lead our lives and engage with nature everywhere. If entanglement is thus the general direction of modernity derived from STS’s engagement with ecology, and nature politics the emerging arena for dealing with it, translation and narrative can be used as its analytical applications. This is thus the interpretive framework, inspired by STS, that I would like to set in motion in this paper on preservation of urban nature. I will do so by drawing on empirical work done in many cities around the world but especially in Stockholm, where ecologists, architects, sociologists, and historians have been able to reformulate the very idea of what is going on when urban nature is defined, acquires value, and is protected. The Received Environmental View of Preservation The standard narrative of preservation is based on rich historical documentation and broad sources. Work on this history has been conducted by scholars of geography, the biological field sciences such as zoology, ecology, botany, and many others. In recent decades, however, much of the work has 214 Sverker So � rlin been conducted by environmental historians. Indeed, work on preservation, and its related concept of conservation...