As I consider the readings from the this semester, I think of the word critique as it applies to the use of a term, rhetoric, or prescription in environmental scholarship. Though from different time periods or political leanings, it seems as though there is uniformity in what writers are asking their audience to pay attention to. Environmental thought is changing, but with patterns of discourse.
Science and Consensus
Logically, science and technology play an important role in environmentalism. However, the public perception of science and the idea of scientific consensus is prevalent in academia. Mike Hulme in Why We Disagree About Climate Change and Leigh Phillips in Austerity Ecology outline public understandings of science and its utilization for an environmentalism agenda (Hulme 2009; Phillips 2015). Hulme considers the role of science in public policy and debate regarding climate change, and though climate change is hailed as a scientific consensus, nearly all scientific findings are debated or interpreted diversely (Hulme 2009). Therefore, to tout climate change as as a fact, we’re utilizing post-normal science, which is founded in situations of high uncertainty and high degree of risk (Hulme 2009, 79). However, the scientific community may advise against environmentalist movements, as Phillips argues with the anti-GMO movement, which he sees as a clear representation of “green-left progressives’ retreat from reason,” (Phillips 2015, 155). He accuses those environmentalists of choosing the couple of studies that “fly in the face of a wider consensus” (157), alluding to the greater scientific finding that GMO foods were not unsafe to ingest (Phillips 2015). Anti-GMO movements ignore the history of genetic modification from years of selective breeding in agriculture and the potential benefit from increased crop yield (Phillips 2015).
The Flaw of Individual Action
Individual action is normally prescribed, projecting that cumulative action from multiple consumers will solve environmental problems (Proctor, “Ecotypes: Scale”, Accessed 4/10/17). Michael Maniates illustrates this issue in his 2001 essay, in which he highlights the ubiquity of individual consumer-based actions that do not address the other scales of action (Maniates 2001). However, he not only notes its prevalence, but its detriment to any long-term environmental action, as individualization “insulates people from the political lessons of collective struggle for social change” (Maniates 2001, 44). Along this line, Paul Steinberg in Who Rules the Earth? notes that immortalizing social rules through institutional change is the way to address environmental problems even when public interest is low; he stresses the need to “institutionalize new practices” (Steinberg 2015, 29). Since rules influence virtually every part of modern life, including property, government, and the market, then it seems sufficient to alter those rules to institute cap and trade programs, conservation easements, or pollution parameters, to name a few (Steinberg 2015).
Nature as a Cultural Construct
The concept of nature doesn’t have a uniform definition, and is contingent upon the worldview of whoever speaks about it. Our understanding of nature now asserts that we apply a cultural level to natural processes, and therefore the consideration of nature as separate from humans is inaccurate. Hulme notes that climate (an aspect of nature) includes a physical element but also is evaluated differently by cultures, for example on the pleasantness of a climate (Hulme 2009, The Social Meanings of Climate). There are also cultural assumptions regarding the idea of nature, such as its need to be conquered or conserved, its instability or its resilience (Hulme 2009, 21-28). The idea of nature as separate from culture is in and of itself a cultural projection, therefore Love Your Monsters authors Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus argue that environmentalism going forward should assume and celebrate cultural and natural concept integration (Hulme 2009; Shellenberger Nordhaus 2011). They emphasize human ingenuity to solve environmental problems, and to embrace the new idea of the Anthropocene, fundamentally changing environmental discourse (Shellenberger Nordhaus 2011).
[Featured image from The Breakthrough Institute]
References
Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree About Climate Change. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Maniates, Michael F. 2001. “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” Global Environmental Politics 1 (3): 31–52.
Phillips, Leigh. 2015. Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff. Winchester, UK ; Washington, USA: Zero Books.
Shellenberger, Michael, Nordhaus, Ted eds. 2011. Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Breakthrough Institute.
Steinberg, Paul F. 2015. Who Rules the Earth?: How Social Rules Shape Our Planet and Our Lives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.