Publication: “Men who love the oak trees”: services and care in the cork oak forests of Southern Andalusia
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Abstract
Our article is aligned with the growing interest from the sustainability science in the need to broaden our view of the connections between humans and nature for better understanding them that helps to improve environmental governance systems. Our work aims to provide evidence that helps to overcome the dualistic and utilitarian prejudices that the ecosystem services framework presents on this issue, hindering its potential, both theoretically and practically. To this end, it is essential to incorporate the affective dimension that often permeates this relationship and turns it into care. Moreover, we do this in a social-ecological context such as that of the European Mediterranean, which is different from that of the non-western indigenous populations, of which we have examples that demonstrate the proactive role that people have played and continue to play in the construction and conservation of valuable ecosystems. We take as a case study the activities carried out by the people who work in the cork oak forests of southern Andalusia for their maintenance and for the extraction of cork. Drawing on the knowledge gained from a long period of mainly ethnographic re-search, we advocate incorporating the care practices, knowledge, and feelings that permeate the relationships that these workers have with the trees and the forest into the governance spaces of these landscapes as fundamental elements to achieve the sustainable management of cork oak forests. This is particularly relevant in a context marked by the decline in the socio-environmental conditions of these agroforestry social-ecological systems due to ageing of the trees and the diseases affecting them as a result of changes in use and management, aggravated by climate change.
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The notion of the services that ecosystems (ES) provide to humans presents a new framework for understanding human-environment relationships and managing them in a more sustainable way (Costanza et al. 1997, Folke 2006a, De Groot et al. 2006, 2010, Egoh et al. 2007, Fisher et al. 2008, 2009). However, this proposal, aside from the risk of economistic reductionism (Ariely 2008, Stiglitz et al. 2010, Chan et al. 2012a, 2012b, Felipe-Lucía et al. 2014, 2015), presents from the outset a clear biophysical prejudice, focusing on the factors and elements of ecosystems that provide services to human beings, but paying little or no attention to the opposite direction, that is, to the services that humans provide, or could potentially provide, for the maintenance of core ecosystem processes.
The concept of nature’s contributions to people (NCP), incorporated in the IPBES conceptual framework, is an important step forward in this regard, recognizing the central and pervasive role that culture and local knowledge play in defining all links between people and nature (UNEP 2014, Díaz et al. 2015, Pascual et al. 2017, Díaz et al. 2018). This research is an initial attempt to overcome the ontological separation between human beings and nature, and to view such contributions as co-produced results because of the interaction between nature and humans.
The IPBES approach involves the inclusion of relational values (RV) as well as intrinsic and instrumental values in the understanding of our relationships with nature (Kellert 2002, 2006, Klain et al. 2017, Mattijssen et al. 2020, West et al. 2020, Riechers et al. 2021a, 2021b). RV are defined as, “... a normative human sense of connection or kinship with other living things, reflective and expressive of care, identity, belonging and responsibility, and congruent with notions of what it means to live a ‘good life’ ...” (West et al. 2018:30).
This pluralistic approach to knowledge and values makes it possible to incorporate a wide range of Western and non-Western ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies of human-nature relations, as well as to consider aspects such as cultural identity, social cohesion, the symbolic dimension and moral responsibility toward nature, which are absent from the perspective based solely on intrinsic and instrumental values (Pascual et al. 2017, Chan et al. 2018, Himes and Muraca 2018, Knippenberg et al. 2018, Ross et al. 2018, Saxena et al. 2018).
At the same time, and as a consequence of the above, the IPBES approach is also a strong affirmation of the need to incorporate RV and local people’s knowledge in environmental governance and in public policies for the stewardship and conservation of nature (Pascual et al. 2017). This makes it possible to overcome, on the one hand, the paradigm of utilitarian environmentalism in which these public policies are still mostly installed, reproducing the same ontological and epistemological biases that place human beings outside and above nature (Muradian and Gómez-Baggenthun 2021), and on the other hand, the reductionism of the instrumental vision, commodification, and the logics of compensation that underpin the system of payment for services (Sommerville et al. 2009, Kosoy and Corbera 2010, Muradian et al. 2013, Pascual et al. 2014, Singh 2015).
But even so, a unidirectional conception of the relationship between nature and human beings continues to prevail, in which nature is the sole provider of these contributions and human beings, if not the sole, then the main beneficiary of them. It focuses on conceptualizing nature’s “benefits” as “contributions” and loses the focus of the direct relationship between nature and society mediated by culture and practice (Jax et al. 2018, Kenter 2018). Thus, such an approach ignores the benefits that humans provide or could potentially provide to the other bio-physical components of those ecosystems of which they are integrally part.
In line with the contribution of Comberti et al. (2015), we aim to move in this other direction, highlighting the contribution that actions carried out by humans in nature can have for the maintenance of biophysical functions, biodiversity, and services in and for the social-ecological systems (SES) of which they are part. To this end, we begin with the concept of SES to address the analysis of human relationships with nature, understanding that, like any other component of ecosystems, people interact with the other biophysical components, not only taking advantage of the benefits they provide, but also, at least potentially, providing services that contribute to the maintenance of basic ecological functions, fostering diversity, and thus helping to reinforce their resilience and health (Holling 1973, 2001, Davidson-Hunt and Berkes 2003, Turner et al. 2003, Olsson et al. 2004a, 2004b, Folke 2006b, Walker and Salt 2006, Escalera-Reyes and Ruiz-Ballesteros 2011).
In the current stage of development of the ecosystem services framework, this dialectical and multidirectional nature of the relationship between the different components of ecosystem services has not been sufficiently considered, with notable exceptions (Spangenberg et al. 2014, Cundill et al. 2017). This implies not only maintaining the biophysical bias referred to above, but also falling into an anti-systemic approach, only considering the polarized and one-way relationship between nature and human beings, presuming the latter to be only the beneficiaries of the services provided by the former.
To overcome this shortcoming, we need more in-depth knowledge of the cultural elements through which the utilization/service provision relationships that occur between human beings and the other components of SES develop. We must, therefore, pay attention to essentially human attributes such as creativity, feelings, and affections as fundamental aspects that guide action and support the services that human beings provide in the social-ecological contexts of which they are part (Mayer and Frantz 2004, Nisbet et al. 2009, Perkins 2010, Escalera-Reyes 2013).
This leads us to consider the value of the notion of care for the correct understanding of this cognitive, sentimental, and affective dimension, and its applicability for a more sustainable management of SES. Here, care is understood as unpaid work performed to meet the needs of other beings, be they individuals (an organism) or ecosystems as a whole (a forest), implemented through the application of culturally specific norms, knowledge, and practices, at the same time based on and expressed through values that are neither chrematistic nor mercantile, but on feelings, affection, or love toward others, be they human or non-human. (Federici 2012, Escalera-Reyes 2013). Thus, as Jax et al. point out, it “... shifts the focus of practical measures from the quality of the ecosystem to the quality of the interaction” (2018:25).
Bibliographic reference
Escalera-Reyes, J., and A. Coca-Pérez. 2025. “Men who love the oak trees”: services and care in the cork oak forests of Southern Andalusia. Ecology and Society 30(1):32. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-15698-300132