People and nature: The emerging signature of a relational journal

It is now 3 years since People and Nature was launched as the British Ecological Society's journal of relational thinking. Since that formative and auspicious moment, the Journal has published over 160 papers exploring critical linkages between, and assemblages of, these highly interdependent, if not co-constructed, worlds of ‘people’ and ‘nature’. We wrote in the opening editorial of the motivation and opportunity for conducting broadly defined interdisciplinary research, and emphatically of the need to sustain and foster creative dialogues between ecology and other disciplines to elaborate understandings of people and nature both critical by design and applied in scope. Given the many and diverse submissions that have arisen from this invitation, it seems warranted to now ask, what is the emerging signature of our relational journal? Thus, what kinds of topics and themes have come to preoccupy its work? What models of interdisciplinarity are shaping its approaches to inquiry? And, what kinds of relational thinking are duly emerging? In offering some initial answers to these questions, our concern is less to say what People and Nature is or is not as a Journal—still less to prescribe and narrow the types of articles we now welcome—but rather, to characterise our current trajectory while renewing and insisting on our commitment to innovations that draw from varied arenas of knowledge production. We have only just started. People and Nature was launched as a broad-scope journal, suggesting a willingness to explore the idea of nature through a variety of conceptual and empirical lenses. As befits the Journal's academic provenance, ‘ecology’, ‘biodiversity’ and ‘wildlife’ feature prominently in how nature is constructed and understood. Within this, a focus on people within the plight and fate of species—from hen harriers to shortfin mako sharks—has provided one focus (French et al., 2019; Gibbs et al., 2020; St John et al., 2019). The categories of ‘environment’, ‘landscape’ and ‘seascape’ have more generally emerged as surrogates for the natural world, as have the generic categories of ‘green’ and ‘blue’ space, arguably pointing to the broader disciplinary origins of published work. What counts as a venue for the study of people–nature relations is consequently diverse in scale, extent and geographical focus. Work has encompassed the study of protected areas of high biodiversity value (Martinez-Harms et al., 2021) alongside the study of extensive and monolithic agricultural landscapes (Case et al., 2020). It has interrogated the urban nature of the mega-city (Oh et al., 2021) and the cultural landscapes of the garden (Teuber, 2021). It has explored vast stretches of the open sea (Blenckner et al., 2021; Fleming et al., 2019) alongside the micro worlds of the river corridor (Leigh et al., 2019). And it has encompassed the study of nature both near and far: the nearby nature of the local park and woodland (Austen et al., 2021; Hoyle et al., 2019); the hidden and mysterious nature of the ocean floor and; the luminous nature of the moon in the night sky (Kaikkonen & van Putten, 2021). Such is our emerging emphasis on plurality when accounting for nature. But what of the plurality of the ‘people’ of People and Nature? In the published record, we find a natural world that is imagined, shaped, managed and occupied by an array of human actors, inter alia: farmers, hunters, traders, fishers, anglers, divers, beekeepers, game keepers, bird watchers, forest dwellers, urban residents, lay people, experts, scientists, indigenous communities, children, rangers, pastoralists, conservationists, hobbyists, enthusiasts, pet owners, gamers, gardeners, consumers, artists, filmmakers, urban planners and policymakers. And as central protagonists in the empirical life of People and Nature, the thoughts, perspectives, practices, values and behaviour of people enter the fray of the Journal in a variety of data guises—as responses in a survey; as words in an interview or focus group; as represented subjects of an ethnography; and as observed behaviours in experiments. In pulling these human and non-human worlds together, the Journal has also partly emerged as a venue for advancing a social-ecological systems view of people–nature relations, with harmonising approaches to natural resource management—such as ecosystem services, nature's benefits to people, nature-based solutions—acting as prominent conceptual and analytical starting points for study (e.g. Berdejo-Espinola et al., 2021; Hinson et al., 2022; Thogmartin et al., 2022). These system frameworks carry with them the ambition of creating highly integrative scenarios-based analyses of people–nature relationships, often with a strong economic and institutional dimension. At the same time, the study of a material nature ‘out there’ is starting to be folded into the study of wider circuits of culture. Critical and synoptic treatments of the framing and staging of different natures across a variety of mass media, and their various effects on peoples' values, attitudes, behaviours and practices, has been an emerging focus. Critic-driven analysis of conventional media content—from the wildlife documentary to the horror film—now sit alongside efforts to understand how nature is articulated and performed through the hyper-realities of the online game and the technologically enabled worlds of the smartphone ( Boissat et al., 2021; Chiacchio & Pigoni, 2022; Crowley et al., 2021). Researchers of People and Nature are increasingly as likely to be researchers of the screenscape as they are the landscape or the seascape. As we assemble around the gamified worlds of Red Dead Redemption 2, scrutinise the Twitter feed, and make sense of the Instagram post, the question of where nature ‘ends’ and culture ‘begins’ is increasingly a moot point. The future of People and Nature is not one where we seek to clarify, still less police, these distinctions between the human and natural worlds, but rather a future where we seek better to understand and interrogate the consequences of a world becoming more hybridised. We might say this evident fascination with mediated natures signifies a broader commitment to interpretative research, and thus a decisive move towards the social sciences and humanities in making sense of people–nature relations. This move is further evidenced by the maturing of work in the area of cultural ecosystem services, a recurring area of publication (Egarter Vigl et al., 2021; Gould et al., 2019; Jones et al., 2022) as well as the gradual treatment and application of concepts more familiar to critical theory researchers, among these discourse and metaphor analysis and the study of environmental aesthetics. People and Nature was launched as a venue for interdisciplinary research. The prominence we have given to interdisciplinarity is partly a function of the thematic scope of our work: researching the relations between the human and non-human worlds invites us to go beyond strong, but ultimately compartmentalised, forms of mono- and multi-disciplinary knowledge. As a journal growing out of the natural sciences, we pointed to the way ecology could be put in conversation with a diverse range of disciplines from across the social sciences and humanities: economics, geography, indigenous studies, history, law, literature, medicine, philosophy, politics, psychology, anthropology and sociology. Interdisciplinarity thus remains something of a first principle in this Journal's efforts to recognise and grapple with the messy, uncertain, complex and entangled relations of the human and non-human realms; the placement of ecology in a larger social realm. Yet, it remains the case that disciplinary knowledge still matters greatly to an overall assessment of the originality, significance and rigour of work submitted to the Journal and how an audience for that work is built upon publication. People and Nature may well be a venue for interdisciplinarity, but it cannot avoid scrutiny by the disciplinary traditions, expectations, preferences and preoccupations that bear witness to it, not only our readers, but also as editors and reviewers. We neither wish to suppress or ignore these multiple disciplinary predilections. In fact, it is only through this scrutiny by disciplines that novelty, importance and quality of our published research are shaped and regulated, not simply asserted. It is also how boundaries and viable boundary crossings between disciplines can become evident. In the same vein, we do not seek to ‘straight-jacket’ research into a People and Nature version of interdisciplinarity. The emerging tendency is towards multi-authored, mix-specialist teams, typically straddling the natural and social sciences and conducting work of applied nature. It is thus worth reiterating that People and Nature also invites and welcomes critical and creative single-authored scholarship. It invites and welcomes contributions that are interdisciplinary within as well as between the social and natural sciences. And it invites and welcomes contributions that contribute to theoretical and conceptual advancement. [join] the few languages we have, from the life sciences and elsewhere, for dealing with the present ecological mess. A new sense of the fragility of the world, as a bio-physical-social entity, accompanies a new necessity to apprehend the interdependence of entities and beings of all kinds. An appeal to ‘relations’ is crisp and all-embracing. Indeed, it is relations all the way down. When we consider matters of people and nature from the perspective of relations, it is likely that many of us would have in mind the study of interactions. Interactionalism, as we might term it, provides a significant, arguably deeply intuitive, way of conceiving of relations across diverse modes of inquiry. For example, relational understanding of people and nature might be taken to mean empirical study of the interactions between particular components of the social and physical world—the farmer negotiating the extensive landscape, the urban resident recreating in the park—and so forth. However, the idea of relationality goes further than interactionalism. Whereas interactions are commonly understood as taking place between beings and things that pre-exist those interactions (in what is sometimes called a ‘substance ontology’), relational thinking involves recognising a deeper set of entanglements (Hertz et al., 2020; Todd, 2014). Specifically, in this sense, relationality allows that entities do not exist before they are in relationship; rather their separate existence at any point in time is a snapshot of a deep and dynamic set of relations with other entities over space and time. By these process or relational ontologies, the relations are primary, and entities as a category on their own are secondary. Clearly, we do not pre-exist our interactions with nature: our relations with nature today are a product of our coevolution with thousands of species, including microbes, companion animals and livestock, predators, and ecosystems, situated in social relations and contexts. Judging by the published record, it is interactionalism that has, to date defined the relational thinking of People and Nature. We continue to welcome manuscripts that will surely focus on such interactions, but we are also keen to go further, to fully grapple with these wider and deeper manifestations of relational thinking. It is, as Strathern (2018) insists, relations all the way down.

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