This interesting topic of yours touches a timely subject in social research: the relationship between humans and nature (and technology). The distinction between what is considered human and what not has been a special interest of mine for some time now. The following are challenges I am coming into grips with in my own study, so maybe they will also be of help in your research.

First, to continue from Stephen, I also find the notion that nature only now has an intrinsic social component slightly unexpected. Has not one of the key ideas of structural anthropology been that in non-Western cultures, the order of nature and the social order correspond to each other? Also as a side note, Latour takes an opposite approach from Polanyi above in claiming that modernity and especially modern Science (with a capital S) meant the separation of an uncontested nature from its human representations, not the other way about. Your study sounds like it is contrasting the current situation to Latour’s “modernity” where nature and culture were indeed separated at least on some ideal level.

My actual question is based on an assumption that you are including the material domain of objects in your study and perhaps not even making an a priori distinction between what constitutes human and what constitutes nature. If so, there is a useful word of advice from Ian Hacking. Hacking holds that humans differ from the physical world in that humans are “interactive kinds”: the way one for example labels a person (as an eco-conscious consumer, a green citizen, a conservationist etc.) has implications for the way (s)he is able to live her life. While biological, chemical and physical objects are intertwined with our lives, they possess no such interactive quality: a fishery for instance does not regulate its behavior according to how it is called. My question is, were you thinking of making such difference between humans and non-humans in your analysis?

I think this Hacking’s distinction is very suitable for social scientists in multidisclipinary projects: it helps to focus on the special character of human assemblages while also keeping critical distance from the traditional study of mere “social facts”.

First, I am curious about how concepts of (environmental?) “security” and “biocomplexity” relate to each other. It seems like security could be locally defined in a number of ways in relation to patterns of living, forms of livelihood (fishing), or even to non-human activities. Is biocomplexity a description of the heterogeneous interactions that one must be able to map in order to think about interventions into “security” in these domains? (As an aside, it would be helpful to me to have more clarity about the relationships between biocomplexity and a term like “biodiversity”, which seems like more a state than an analytical frame, if that is the right way to put it.) What are the kinds of disruptions that one is concerned about in modeling this field of biocomplexity and, thus, threats to security?

Second, I was struck by the formulation that human activities are being recognized as part of environmental processes, and that, therefore, social science is necessarily enlisted in studies of/via biocomplexity. I was reminded of Polanyi’s (and Foucault’s) claims that liberalism revolutionize the study of Man by seeing human beings from the animal side. In other words, to understand social processes one needed to refer to biological facts of human existence. Here there is an almost inverse process and claim: In order to understand the environment you need to refer to the social facts of human interaction with the environment. I don’t know where it goes, but the resonance (even in inverted form) across two centuries somehow struck me.