Ecological crisis and nature management: the virtualization and actualization tension in Doñana's disaster

Abstract

There is currently a high level of awareness regarding the impact of technological innovation on the social organization of modern societies. One can then speak of modern societies as undergoing a process of ‘virtualisation’. As an example of this we present, in this paper, a research where we explore how the notion of virtualisation works as a powerful resource for the understanding of contemporary social dynamics. We analyse an ecological disaster and how ecologist groups and governmental agencies engage in a tension of virtualisation-actualisation that gives as a result a different management of nature and of nature-society distinctions. So, as a product of virtualisation the instituted distinctions become more fluid or, as a product of actualization, the Natural Park where the disaster occurred, is firmly territorialized.