Social theories of environmental reform - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 76

or environment is 'pulled into society', as much as society is 'pulled
into nature'. The concept of nature as external to society, either in
the form of a sustenance-base carrying social activities (Schnaiberg) or
as a sink and reservoir exploited for human progress (environmental
sciences), is outdated. According to Beck, only when it is recognised
that society and environment in reflexive modernity are intermingled
in many diverging ways, can one make sense of the (world) risk-society
as emerging right under our eyes. The formaldehyde in your kitchen,
the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) risks in your food and
the nuclear fallout of Chernobyl all give proof of the outdated charac-
ter (or at least the limited use) of the sociological concept of 'nature'
in isolation from social practices, networks, institutions and agents.
Power and inequality; inclusion and exclusion
Finally, the social theory of networks and flows changes our ideas of
power and inequality. Within the social theory of networks and flows,
power and inequality are no longer only related to ownership of cap-
ital, as has been the dominant view in neo-Marxist studies, nor to
the state, as was the mainstream conviction in most other schools of
thought. In addition to these 'conventional' categories of power and
inequality, the sociology of flows defines new inequalities in terms of
having relative access to, being included in or being decoupled from,
the key networks and flows. Groups, persons, cities and regions with
access to the core flows and located in or close to the central nodes and
moorings of global networks, are the wealthy and powerful. Following
Rifkin ( 2000 ), it is access to the information flows via the Internet, to
the flows of monetary capital and to the skills of people moving around
the world, that distinguishes the better-off people, groups, cities and
regions from their marginalised equivalents. This 'access to' and 'inclu-
sion in' concerns both direct access and inclusion as well as the ability
and capability to structure the scapes and infrastructures to partially
influence the mobile flows in terms of speed, direction, intensity and so
on. Or, as Castells puts it: who has the power and capability to handle
the switches between and the programs of the networks that matter?
In following this analytical path, an environmental sociology of flows
perspective has two operationalisations of power and inequality. First,
it pays attention to the conditions for access to environmental flows
and to the scapes and networks that structure the current of strategic
environmental flows. And it analyses in some detail the consequences