People have told me that I need to take economics because it is so applicable to the “real world.” It explains the movement of resources and labor and money and thus, it explains our world. Of all the sciences out there, I can think of no other that is as socially constructed as economics. And something labeled “political economy” is even more anthropocentric and highly social. It makes sense that we define our relationship with resources and landscapes and other aspects of what we call “the environment” through socially constructed means because, truly that is all we have. There is a reason that the Lorax spoke FOR the trees– the trees, and Carbon Dioxide, and wolves cannot speak for themselves to humans in human institutions. It takes human “experts” in biology and climate science and economics and politics to put together these explanations.
These explanations that we rely on are often claimed to be “natural.” Capitalism naturally contradicts itself, forest succession occurs naturally. Capitalism did NOT originate in non-human, anthropocentric beginnings. Forests, on the other hand, experienced succession probably before human beings studied them. This goes back to the idea that humans are in fact a part of “nature” and human constructions and social constructions are also “natural.” Other species certainly have social structures- hierarchies, clans, royalty- but that way we learn about them, indeed the words I just used to describe them, center and relate to human social structures.
It is essentialist to declare that social constructions are “bad.” But it is important to recognize that things have a certain level of bias and are in fact socially constructed, and may not be objective fact, or “the way things are” for all sentient beings at all times of history and beyond. Social construction relates so intimately with the concept of institutions. Institutions seem to codify many of the social constructions that humans have taken at face value in history, as well as being social constructions in themselves. For instance, the institutions of justice in The United States codified race and racism for many decades with Jim Crow Laws and other means of legal differentiation and discrimination, but the widespread understanding that this institution was a representation of the way things are and is natural and immovable is a social construction in itself.