Property as a Perspective of Environmental Sociology: Beyond the Tragedy of the Global Commons

Abstract

Global environmental issues such as ozone depletion, deforestation, acid rain, and others have become of general interest. While globe-oriented discourse on environmental issues is not altogether wrong, sociologists should notice that it is in danger of misleading us to a kind of holism. One of the most important roles of environmental sociology is to go beyond a holistic preoccupation with the globe in favor of a much more penetrating analysis of the global-local relationships that are entailed by environmental issues. In this paper, the concept of property will be introduced as a perspective from which to conceptualize the mutual relations of causality between the local and global environmental crisis.

I use the term “property” to refer to a social relationship among people regarding the environment. There are nine types of property: communal possession, communal ownership, private possession, private ownership, appropriation, individual property, private corporate ownership, public corporate ownership and management. It seems reasonable to consider local and global environmental issues as the effects of mutual elimination among these types of property in our societies. If the corporate ownership closely connected with the global market economy eliminates many types of property owned by natural persons living in local forest communities, for example, its ecosystem will be more vulnerable. Deforestation in Indonesia provides a notable example.

Global environmental issues are caused by property as social relationship rather than a “tragedy of the global commons”. Environmental sociology will enrich the study of mutual relations of causality between local and global environmental crisis with a better conceptualization of property.