138 The international handbook of environmental sociology environmental sociology to transcend the human–nature dichotomy: ‘conjoint consti- tution’ and ‘coevolution’. We build on these two frameworks to develop the notion of socio- ecological agency. Conjoint constitution The notion of conjoint constitution was proposed by Freudenburg et al., (1995) to high- light the idea that what are often taken as the separable social and physical aspects of a situation are in fact at each stage conjointly constituted and connected with one another. These authors identifi ed four approaches through which society–environment relation- ships have been addressed within environmental sociology: (1) analytic separation; (2) analytic primacy; (3) dualistic balance; and (4) conjoint constitution. The fi rst three main- tain a neat distinction between the physical and the social dimensions of reality. Only in the fourth approach is this dualism challenged through the view that biophysical facts are signifi cantly shaped by social construction, while at the same time social phenomena are shaped by stimuli and constraints from the biophysical world. Thus, attempting to allocate parts of reality into ‘social’ and ‘physical’ categories may contribute as much to confusion as to understanding. Reality is perhaps best understood not in terms of these distinctions, but in terms of their fundamental interconnectedness: The relevant challenge is thus not to explore the extent to which one set of factors or the other can be ignored or forgotten, but instead to understand the extent to which each can become a taken- for- granted part of the other – and to realize that it is the taken- for- grantedness itself [. . .] that can lead to ill- advised assumptions about what appear to be ‘natural’ physical condi- tions or ‘strictly social’ factors. (Freudenburg et al., 1995: 372) Conjoint constitution has an indisputable value for advancing environmental sociology in epistemological terms. Its recognition that the social is inherent in what is usually seen as the physical, just as the physical is often integral to what is perceived as the social, is a positive step in the direction of overcoming the ‘human exceptionalism’ mirage. The recognition of ‘mutual contingency’ draws sociologists’ attention to the risk of ignoring or overlooking important aspects of a situation, and thus developing ‘unrealistically constrained analyses of socially signifi cant questions and problems’ (Freudenburg et al., 1995: 388). However, conjoint constitution does not address the implications for society at large of challenging the human–nature dualism. It promotes ref exivity and the bet- terment of the ‘academic mind’ (Freudenburg et al., 1996), but misses the opportunity of challenging some of the most deeply entrenched assumptions of modern societies that quite unproblematically situate individual experience into dichotomous space. Through conjoint constitution sociology might be better epistemologically equipped for carrying out its modernist task of grasping reality, but will fall short of challenging the modernist assumptions to be found at the origin of the present global environmental crisis. Coevolutionary frameworks The popularity of coevolutionary concepts for describing the reciprocal inf uence between human beings and their environment is fairly owed to Norgaard (1981, 1994), who was possibly inspired by Boulding’s (1978) notions of ecodynamics, integrative systems and the evolutionary interpretation of history. Presently, there is a rapidly growing literature within ecological economics, and other fi elds, about the coevolution-
Socio- ecological agency 139 ary character of the relationships between values, knowledge, organization, technology and the environment (Norgaard, 1997). Within this emerging literature coevolution is often presented as a set of framing concepts (e.g. variation, selection, adaptation) that can explain change across interacting systems (Kallis, 2007). Some authors, however, are starting to draw on evolutionary theory in order to develop an overarching framework, or coevolutionary theory, for understanding both natural and social evolution (Winder et al., 2005; Gual and Norgaard, 2008; Hodgson, 2008). The main challenge for this endeavour is to establish the extent to which the ‘logical structure of evolution’ is equiva- lent between social and biological phenomena (Farrell, 2007). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to review this body of work. However, from the point of view of environ- mental sociology, it is worth noting that it is marked by a deep structuralist bias that assumes a rigid causal determinism in social life. The contribution of sociology to this coevolutionary debate has so far been surprisingly meagre. It seems reasonable to think that environmental sociologists have a unique opportunity to transcend the structuralist bias of coevolution. To do so, they should bring to the fore of the debate the universe of meanings, creativity and bewilderment that characterize cognitive systems and human agency. In fact, sociology has been relatively active in questioning unproblematic uses of structure (e.g. Giddens, 1979). As expressed by Sewell (1992: 2): What tends to get lost in the language of structure is the effi cacy of human action – or ‘agency’ . . . A social science trapped in an unexamined metaphor of structure tends to reduce actors to clev- erly programmed automatons. A second and closely related problem with the notion of structure is that it makes dealing with change awkward. The metaphor of structure implies stability. For this reason, structural language lends itself readily to explanations of how social life is shaped into consistent patterns, but not to explanations of how these patterns change over time. However, the only signifi cant attempt at outlining a structuralist/constructionist coevo- lutionary framework in environmental sociology can be found in Woodgate and Redclift (1998), which has unfortunately not produced much in the way of academic progeny. These authors draw on metaphors from systems ecology and evolutionary ecology to explore ecosystems’ transformations by human agency, and vice versa. They propose to incorporate an actor- oriented analysis within the coevolutionary framework with the goal of comparing the meanings and values that are attached to social and environmental phenomena by diff erent individuals. This understanding of structure ref ects Giddens’s (1979) concept of ‘duality of structure’, indicating that structure arises out of agency as well as providing its context (Woodgate and Redclift, 1998). The link between agency and socio- ecological structures is established by acknowledging that the links between individuals and institutions condition the natural, economic and policy structures, which in turn provide the backdrop to social action, and inf uence both the development of social choices and the environmental possibilities and constraints. Human agency is conceptualized within this framework as the ways in which diff erent social actors manage and interpret their surrounding environment (in a broad sense). Accordingly, individuals’ interpretations and socially generated symbols do not need to be analysed in separation from the material conditions in which they are constructed: The social spaces or life- worlds created and experienced by each of these diff erent actors are characterized by specifi c sets of material and symbolic social relations, which defi ne their struc- tures, and can be located in terms of time–space boundaries. (Woodgate and Redclift, 1998: 15)
140 The international handbook of environmental sociology Interestingly, after including self- ref exive human agents within the structuralist equa- tion, these authors reach the conclusion that modernity is leading humanity towards a ‘coevolutionary cul- de- sac’ due to the increasing dissociation of dominant values from material realities and the fact that the evolution of these values is increasingly dependent on ‘internal [social] games’. Modernist, structuralist and mutually constitutive notions of agency Modernism replaced worldviews dominated by literal interpretations of mythologies, as well as the religious ideologization of spirituality, with the agreement on a common material (‘natural’) reality as a unifying cultural factor (Manuel- Navarrete et al., 2004). Unfortunately, this remarkable achievement came at the cost of confi ning human agency (and sociology) to the boundaries of individualism and rational self- interest (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). Arguably, the need to free individuals from the strait jacket of pre- modern worldviews and traditions led to overemphasizing separateness and independ- ence. As a result, a view emerged of isolated individuals, who were completely deprived of meanings arising from either their interplay with ecological and biological processes, or their access to spiritual dimensions. The relationship of modern agents towards materiality is mostly viewed as medi- ated by (objective) rationality and (subjective) wants, whereas social agency is often reduced to management, control and the reproduction of established social roles; or through predictable actions and decisions to fulfi l material necessities, utilitarian inter- ests (e.g. seeking power, social prestige or socially constructed material rewards) and self- imposed moral imperatives. In this context, it is not surprising that sociologists embraced functionalist and structuralist frameworks to determine and reify social rela- tions while relegating agency to rational choices mediated by compromising means–ends and normative moral imperatives (e.g. Parsons, 1968; Hechter and Kanazawa 1997). The mainstreaming of the concept of stakeholders (individuals, organizations, nation- states) across social sciences signals the zenith of this particular interpretation of agency (see Meyer and Jepperson, 2000 for a critique of interest- based approaches to action). In recent decades, however, multiple alternative versions of human agency have been surfacing from diverse sociological grounds. These versions share an emphasis on the dual, relational, intersubjective, empowering and self- ref exive dimensions of agency. One of the primordial eff orts to reformulate agency as the outcome of creative and innovative individuals is Giddens’s ‘theory of structuration’. This theory recognizes that structure is better understood as a process with the capacity not only to constrain but also to enable action. As a result, ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘enabled’ agents have the power to transform structures if they act together (Giddens, 1984). Building on Giddens’s structuration and Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice’ (1977), Sewell (1992) describes structures as sets of mutually sustained (virtual) schemas and (actual) resources that empower and constrain social action. Unlike Giddens, Sewell emphasizes the role of materiality in reproducing social structures. Unlike Bourdieu, he explains change as arising from within the operation of structures internal to a society, rather than from events outside the system – that is, from the agents’ decisions to transpose new schemas and remobilize the resources that make up the structure. As a result, agency is both constituent of structure and inherent in all human beings (ibid.: 20):
Socio- ecological agency 141 To be an agent means to be capable of exerting some degree of control over the social relations in which one is enmeshed, which in turn implies the ability to transform those social relations to some degree . . . The specifi c forms that agency will take consequently vary enormously and are culturally and historically determined. But a capacity for agency is as much a given for humans as the capacity for respiration. Consequently, even though agency characterizes all persons, its sources and mode of exercise are laden with structurally reproduced diff erences of power and implicated in collective struggles and resistances. Sewell’s proposal illuminates agents’ capacities to ‘play around’ with schemas (or procedures) and material resources (and the meanings collectively ascribed to them). However, it says little about agents’ motivations and actual potential (e.g. introspective or ref exive power) to enact transformations or sustain reproductions, other than saying that these are determined culturally and historically (and thus structurally?). A legitimate question is whether this is not just a more sophisticated version of the structuralist or systemic arguments underlying the notions of coevolution and conjoint constitution out- lined in the previous section. That is, to what extent is the agent defi ned as reactive to, or a mere product of, the spatio- temporal and socio- material coevolution of structure. The acknowledgement of the mutual constitution of structure and agency should not lead to the structuration of agency. There must be a moment or a degree in which the agent is freed from, or transcends, structure in order to make social creativity possible. This is crucial in the context of the present global environmental crisis because this context will demand a radical transformation of the structures of modernity that have led us into the crisis in the fi rst place. A key question is then: how can this structural transforma- tion possibly occur if agency is so highly conditioned by the reproduction of these same structures? Are our reactions to the changes that we are inf icting on the planet the only chance to provoke structural transformations or does human agency undergo such structural transformations in proactive, rather than merely reactive, terms? The main argument of this chapter is that the chances of overcoming the global envi- ronmental crisis would be much greater if the mutual co- creation of material and social structures were mediated by a self- ref exive, or transcendental, form of agency enacted by individuals in their interaction with not only society and the environment, but also with themselves: with their inner worlds. Therefore the crucial questions for environmen- tal sociology are: does this kind of agency actually exist? Can it be created or promoted? Is agency limited to the transposition of existing schemas into new contexts (as Sewell suggests) or it is conceivable that agents can suddenly start off brand new schemas not conditioned by past structures? We argue that these key questions can be eff ectively addressed through the notion of socio- ecological agency. Socio- ecological agency in the anthropocene Environmental sociology has mostly focused on overcoming the dichotomy between material and social systems. It has been argued that this dividing line is an intellectual construct that can be analytically convenient in the proper circ*mstances. However, the profuse reifi cation of this illusory divide by society at large is a threat to the planet’s life support systems. Presently, human beings are capable of altering the composition of the atmosphere, modifying the earth’s nutrient cycles and causing major biodi- versity extinctions. For the fi rst time we are not only the agents of social change and
142 The international handbook of environmental sociology ecosystem change at the local level, but also the main agents aff ecting the dynamics and evolution of the global environment. This unprecedented power suggests a new type of agency that goes far beyond the discussion of how individuals aff ect social structures. We argue that the task of transcending the human–nature divide set by environmental sociology requires thinking in terms of a novel form of human agency, which we call socio- ecological agency. The term socio- ecological does not mean that agency is shifted away from human beings. It is still, so to speak, enacted within the individual person. However, it emphasizes both the idea that human agency rarely takes place as an iso- lated process and the need to consider our inf uence on life support structures as well as social structures. Yet, does this twist in meaning necessitate the coinage of a brand new term? Why is it that the global environmental crisis cannot be properly addressed through the conventional analytic construct of ‘human agency’? How can this empirical rupture be justifi ed? To start answering these questions, it is crucial to notice that global environmental change entails a new type of material constraint. Modernist conceptions of agency have undoubtedly considered material constraints. We should fi rst note, however, that these constraints were usually related to depletion of resources or degradation of local (i.e. localized) environmental services; second, that local societies confronted with self- inf icted environmental threats were arguably never as aware as we are now of the damage that their actions were about to inf ict upon themselves; and third, that they could often count on the possibility of migrating elsewhere. On the contrary, the present emerging ‘socio- ecological agents’ have the task ahead of dealing with self- imposed material constraints, which surface from a clear awareness about self- inf icted threats (e.g. climate change) and with no place else to go to avoid these threats. Additionally, it is important to note that such voluntary limits are not only to be adopted by individu- als and specifi c societies, but they must be embraced by humanity as a whole. In other words, it is of little use if only some individual agents or specifi c collectives manage to self- constrain their consumption of, for example, fossil fuels. In the end they might be equally, or even more, aff ected than anyone else by global climate change. It might be argued that the scaling up of environmental constraints we have described does not justify the claim for a new type of agency. It is conceivable that through con- ventional human agency, modern individuals are eventually capable of transforming social structures at a global scale in order to self- impose the necessary constraints. Yet we argue that global environmental change forces us to address a more fundamental question, namely how the need to become stewards of the planet is going to transform the nature of individual human identities. We contend that this type of transformation is unlikely to happen as merely the outcome of our perceived self- interest or moral impera- tives. Rather, it is likely to emerge from a radical realization about the reciprocity and double directionality that exists between humanity and the planet as a whole, includ- ing our increasing ability to inf uence the genetic make- up of life. This is precisely the main point that environmental sociology is trying to put forward, namely the mutual co- creation between environment and society, which departs at one extreme from uni- directional deterministic relations through which genetic, ecological or social structures may be seen as determining agency (Sewell, 1992; Redclift, 2001; Judkins et al., 2007). At the other extreme of unidirectional thinking, we may fi nd chimeras of human agency entirely determining these structures through social or genetic engineering. An example
Socio- ecological agency 143 is what Finkler (2000: 3) calls the ‘hegemony of the gene that leads to the medicalization of kinship’. While it is dubious that unidirectional explanations can entirely account for histori- cal nature–human relations, such explanations will become increasingly inadequate and incomplete in the context of global environmental change. The implications of acknowl- edging the multidirectional relationships between materiality and cognition are para- mount for human identity and agency, as well as for our grasping of the origins of life on Earth. For instance, the era of Earth stewardship challenges creationist identities assum- ing that the planet was formed and then human beings were quite unproblematically put on it to socialize according to a written code. It also challenges evolutionist identities postulating that life and self- awareness mysteriously emerged stochastically, or as the result of highly improbable contingencies. These rather improvised explanations are out- moded by the palpable verifi cation that human beings are a planetary species (i.e. cannot exist outside the planet in their material form), while at the same time the earth has become a human planet (i.e. dramatically shaped by human beings, and inevitably so?). Traditional assumptions about the origins of life and cognition need to be challenged, and environmental sociology is in a good position to do it. In the following paragraphs we argue that socio- ecological agency may become a means through which a much- needed globalized form of identity based on human–planet reciprocity can be enacted. In order to make a more convincing argument for the need to rethink human agency in socio- ecological terms, we shall discuss three of its main aspects: fi rst, the essential role that ref exivity and meaning- making processes play in its conceptualization; second, the consideration of individual, social and material forms of agency as interconnected aspects of socio- ecological agency; and third, the implications of socio- ecological agency in terms of the construction of the fundamental myths and stories about the origin of life on Earth and the emergence of human beings, self- awareness and cognition. A convenient starting point to explore socio- ecological agency is ref exivity, which becomes the processes through which the individual makes sense of her/his own tran- sient life in the context of a living planet. Individual agents are constantly ref ecting and creating meanings about their own relationship with material and social processes and structures. However, the fact that human beings are having an unprecedented inf uence on the earth’s metabolism, of which they are an integral part, leads to a much broader conception of agency far beyond their individuality and immediate sociocultural context. Therefore socio- ecological agency requires an understanding of ref exivity that highlights the fact that in any interaction with the ‘external world’, we are simultaneously disclos- ing something about ourselves. Socio- ecological ref exivity entails a critical stance which challenges both the traditional scientifi c ideal of objective inquiry and the modern ideal of a clear- cut separation between individuals, social structures and the environment. Beck et al. (1994) identify ref exivity as an organizing systemic principle in late moder- nity. ‘Ref exive modernization’ refers to a recursive turn of modernity upon itself. This involves the emergence of a collective form of self- ref ection about our shared identity as human beings, which was not previously available to us. Linearity and the following of rules, in consonance with a set of pre- established roles, characterized the functioning of pre- ref exive modern individuals and institutions (e.g. family, ethnic group and the state). These institutions are now in crisis, and the functions that were once taking place at the interface of institution and role are now taking place much closer to the subject.
144 The international handbook of environmental sociology Unidirectional rules and roles are progressively being denormalized in the light of non- linear ref exivity. Yet the outcome is neither chaos nor irrationality. Instead, the outcome is a reorganization in which the subject relates to institutions by being ref exive rather than by the strict following of rules and roles. Ref exive modernity calls for people’s willingness to learn, to be self- ref exive and question themselves, to seek wisdom, to be accepting of other perspectives and consider what they can learn from them, and to trust others in this process of mutual re- examination. Thus the search for personal meanings takes precedence over the unidirectional performance of function or the reproduction of social roles and structures. Socio- ecological ref exivity entails an ongoing understanding of the multidirectional interdependence between inner world (e.g. dreams, fantasies, emotional responses) and outer world (e.g. social and biophysical phenomena). Meaning is the ‘substance’ linking the intrapersonal (e.g. a particular trajectory unique to a person) with other beings and with some kind of ‘organic wholeness’ (Bateson, 1987; Young- Eisendrath and Miller, 2000). Persons are not bounded, unique, cognitively integrated entities; nor are they constructed only by social discourses. This alternative position suggests a permeable boundary between inner and outer that allows (1) the existence of an inner identity that gives rise to powerful internal thoughts, feelings and tendencies to act in a certain way, and (2) a continuous actualization of such identity through the person’s interaction with the extra- personal in the process of mutual co- creation (Varela et al., 1991). In the context of the current environmental crisis, ref exivity is required to question how individual and social values and worldviews aff ect our ways of interacting with ecosystems and how this interaction, in turn, aff ects our own sustainability and well- being. This implies shifting the focus from unidirectional management and decision- making towards making sense of the relational matrix within which individuals, social systems and ecosystems coevolve. Coercion aside (i.e. when free of diff erentials in status or power), we inf uence each other through the stories we tell. Socio- ecological agency requires a commitment to learning to learn, opening ourselves to other perspectives and, more importantly, to the observation of our personal experience of the world around us (Wenger, 1998). Even though each individual interprets reality in a unique way, the process of interpretation is somehow co- created through interactions with others and the environment. This ‘opening up’ makes people aware of the misplaced trust that they have put in the dominant social structures of their time, structures that, eventually, have instilled in individuals a value system that is entirely out of line with any consideration for human–nature interdependence. The second vital aspect of socio- ecological agency is the consideration of mater- ial, social and individual agencies. The notion of material agency is gaining currency within natural sciences due to the spectacular development of theories concerning self- organizing systems and, in particular, Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures. These theories show that matter and life are capable, within the limits of deterministic physical laws, of producing new patterns of organization and ‘doing things’ (typical examples include tornadoes and hurricanes). They evolve towards higher complexity, are path- dependent (i.e. have a history), and exhibit characteristics that are usually attributed to society and the human mind. These realizations blur the boundaries between the material, social and cognitive by rendering the possibility of characterizing all of them in terms of self- organizing open systems. By defi nition a system appears to have an iden-
Socio- ecological agency 145 tity and to ‘do something’ either actively or passively. Open systems are characterized by having an environment that provides their context. As described in Kay and Boyle (2008), complex self- organizing systems, unlike mechanical systems, can change their internal structure. As a consequence, ‘diff erent relationships and processes can develop, and the system can change its repertoire of behaviour. In short, the system can change its organization through internal agency’ (ibid.: 53). This is not to say that the agency of material and biological systems is equivalent to volitional human agency. However, socio- ecological agency involves understanding, and a more active consideration of, physical and biological processes, including their unfolding and evolution. The point is not to prescribe a moral code for regulating conf icts between diff erent types of agencies. Every individual and every society has to work this out for itself, as well as collectively. However, socio- ecological agency suggests the promotion of curios- ity, creativity, and non- exploitative and non- instrumental interaction in order to let a socio- ecological consciousness unfold (Goodwin, 1998; Castro- Laszlo, 2001). The over- whelming power that humanity has achieved over the planet has to be matched with a higher sense of responsibility and signifi cant attention towards one’s own life: To survive in this world, and to live fully and well, one must be attentive. To impose agendas on the world – ethical, political, economic, scientifi c – is, to some extent, to cease to pay attention, it is to organize one’s perception of the world according to the dictates of the mode of control. (Hester et al., 2000: 281) As a corollary, acknowledging and understanding the essence and functioning of mater- ial and social agency provides both a source of meaning for the consciousness of the socio- ecological agent, and inspirational guidance for his/her external interaction with the collective and material. This draws a stark contrast with the narrower understanding of human agency as independent actions involving volition and the decision to act or refrain from acting. The third fundamental dimension of socio- ecological agency addresses its implications for our existential stories about the origin of life on Earth and about the emergence of human beings, self- awareness and cognition. As a warning, this point does not easily fi t the confi nes of most sociological theoretical discussions, but it is crucial in understanding the role of environmental sociology in the exceptional present situation marked by global environmental change. Our main argument is that we need to construct new, negotiated stories that transcend both anthropocentric forms of creationism (as in Christianity) and naturalistic evolutionism (based on the idea of a single reality). The alternative is to encourage every socio- ecological agent to engage in the task of constructing their own existential story from their unique position in the world (i.e. their unique awareness about our ability to act upon socio- ecological structures and, in turn, be acted upon by them). The quality of these emerging individual stories is to be evaluated in the context of the evolutionary crossroads that humanity faces, rather than in terms of their (prophetic or natural) ‘Truth’. The role of science in general would be to facilitate communication, translation and coherence among these continuously forming narratives without impos- ing its own perspective, but ensuring that the dialogue does not become a cacophony of ‘voices’ all claiming to have got it right (Thompson et al., 2006). Social sciences would evaluate the consequences of the narratives in terms of equity, solidarity and power
146 The international handbook of environmental sociology relations, while environmental sociology would assess their implications for the making of nature–society interrelations. The daunting task of negotiating a pluriverse of existential stories constructed by single ‘socio- ecological agents’ may seem insurmountable and rather unfeasible at the present time. Nonetheless, for the task to commence, we fi rst need to have in place some kind of socio- ecological identity, a reasonable precondition for enacting socio- ecological agencies. One may speculate that the challenges posed by global environmental change may already be pushing in this direction. However, what we appear to have at the moment is a mosaic of traditional religious and cultural existential narratives barricaded in against the overwhelming progress of a Western- branded naturalism that has been caricatured as follows: [W]e all live under the same biological and physical laws and have the same fundamental bio- logical, social, and psychological makeup. This, you have not understood because you are pris- oners of your superfi cial worldviews, which are but representations of the reality to which we, through science, have privileged access. But science is not our property; it belongs to mankind universally! Here, partake – and with us you will be one. (Latour, 2004: 458). Independently of whether this naturalistic argument is right or wrong, we have to ask what it off ers in terms of fi nding ways of co- creating the planet sustainably. Does its uniform power preclude the kind of radical structural changes that the present global situation seems to be demanding? Is not the present situation precisely an outcome of the modernist notion of ‘fundamental biological, social, and psychological makeup’? What room does it leave for alternative existential narratives that are not based on fundamentalist divisions between human beings and nature? It is true that the negotiation of existential stories constructed by ‘socio- ecological agents’ might be easily dismissed as pure relativism. We admit that it is extremely radical in that it demands a blank slate and implies a highly problematic process of negotiation. However, it is not pure relativism. Instead, we would argue that it brings about a new form of constrained relativism (Thompson et al., 2006). In fact, it adds to the ‘structural voices’ proposed by Thompson et al. the meaning- making dynamics of human (socio- ecological) agency. That is, the constraint originates in the need to construct internally meaningful journeys in interaction with the socio- ecological realities of one’s own time. The notion of the personal journey of discovery played an important role in pre- modern cultures and religions. Before globalization, these journeys often consisted of meaning- ful interactions of the individual with the local socio- ecological reality of his/her group or country. Eventually the journey started increasingly to venture outside local realities in actuality (through travelling), or fi guratively (through narratives about the journeys of heroes and explorers). This has been one of the key mechanisms by which traditional (and modern) cultures, myths and religions have been constructed. Thus the novelty we are proposing is that the present circ*mstances demand that we expand this process and scale it upwards to the level of a global planet in peril. Conclusions Social science has tended to conceptualize human agents as either individualist/ calculative, or abiding by categorical moral rules. Accordingly, the social world is seen as the product of conf icting actions and decisions emanating from independent agents
Socio- ecological agency 147 pursuing their individual goals and preferences. Within this dominant perspective, institutions are often taken as a given, sent to the background, and reduced to sources of incentives or constraints for action. Following eff orts to reconcile the utilitarian – normative dichotomy, a more relational understanding emphasizing the co- creation between agency and sociocultural structures is emerging. The basic tenet of this rela- tional approach is that social structures condition agencies while individual agents may choose to either reproduce or transform these structures. In this chapter we have argued that sociology will require a far broader paradigm of human agency if it aspires to contribute with relevant insights to the challenges of the global environmental change era. The new socio- ecological agent departs from modern- ist agency as much as the latter departed from medieval conceptions. It entails a new creation story about where we come from, who we are as human beings, and what our future possibilities will be. Rethinking ‘where we come from’ in this era leads to conceiv- ing of individuals, society and the whole planetary system as co- created. Human beings are the product of, and are constrained by, the planet’s identity. The ‘miracle’ of cogni- tion is nothing other than an inevitable emergent property resulting from coevolution- ary dynamics within the earth. ‘Who we are’ is reformulated by the fact that through cognition we are now capable of dramatically altering and shaping these coevolutionary dynamics. Therefore global environmental change is forcing us to redefi ne our agency in terms of global stewardship. The transition from modern agency to socio- ecological agency is just starting as human beings’ identities rise beyond the constraints of specifi c social structures and boundaries. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to speculate about the future possibilities that this new form of agency will bring. Yet it is reasonable to expect future social structures to be based on co- responsibility rather than on ideologi- cal confrontations and the pursuit of individual privileges. The imminent collapse of the neoliberal global project suggested by the current fi nancial crisis argues for the construc- tion of alternative global narratives and social patterns that allow humanity to build new forms of coexistence, while at the same time facing up to the challenges of the global environmental crisis. This chapter has suggested that sticking to modernist conceptions of agency can only generate narratives and patterns that, while possibly buying some time, will eventually dig us deeper into the environmental crisis. Our only chance may be to emphasize narratives and patterns based on increased recognition of the bonds between human beings and the planet as a whole. The origin and possibility of these narratives and patterns entails embracing a socio- ecological sort of agency. References Bateson, G. (1987), ‘Men are grass: metaphor and the world of mental process’, in W.I. Thompson (ed.), Gaia: A Way of Knowing. Political Implications of the New Biology, Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Press, pp. 37–47. Beck, U., A. Giddens and S. Lash (1994), Refl exive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Cambridge: Polity Press. Boulding, K. (1978), Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Societal Evolution, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Bourdieu, P. (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castro- Laszlo, K. (2001), ‘Learning, design, and action: creating the conditions for evolutionary learning com- munity’, System Research and Behavioral Science, 18: 379–91. Catton, W.R. Jr and R.E. Dunlap (1978), ‘Environmental sociology: a new paradigm’, The American Sociologist, 13: 41–9. Emirbayer, M. and A. Mische (1998), ‘What is agency?’, American Journal of Sociology, 103: 962–1023. Farrell, K.N. (2007), ‘Living with living systems: the co- evolution of values and valuation’, International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology, 14: 14–26.
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Socio- ecological agency 149 Woodgate, G.R. and M.R. Redclift (1998), ‘From a “sociology of nature” to environmental sociology: beyond social construction’, Environmental Values, 7: 3–24. Young- Eisendrath, P. and M.E. Miller (2000), ‘Beyond enlightened self- interest’, in P. Young- Eisendrath and M.E. Miller (eds), The Psychology of Mature Spirituality: Integrity, Wisdom, and Transcendence, London and Philadelphia, PA: Routledge, pp. 11–20.
10 Ecological debt: an integrating concept for socio- environmental change Iñaki Barcena Hinojal and Rosa Lago Aurrekoetxea Seeking to defi ne the ecological debt The concept of ecological debt originated in the written literature and the contribu- tions made by the popular movements of the South, specifi cally the Institute of Political Ecology of Chile on the occasion of the Rio de Janeiro Summit (1992). Since then, it has come to be used in other geographical areas, and it has moved from the associative fi eld and the social movements to the academic and institutional spheres. Unlike other sister concepts, such as the ‘ecological footprint’ (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996) or ‘ecological space’ (Spangenberg, 1995), which emerged in university research circles and were later popularized through publications and the mass media, the concept of ecological debt has followed an inverse path, moving from the bottom to the top. Our aim is that ‘ecologi- cal debt’ should play a role as relevant as that of the concepts of ‘ecological footprint’ and ‘space’, since both were enthusiastically received by environmental activism (WWF and Friends of the Earth), and such indicators are now taken into account by govern- ments and institutions in public environmental policies from the local level to the United Nations. The prevailing economic system ‘externalizes’ the social and environmental impacts it provokes; it does not recognize them as its own or as something inherent in its economic model. The ecological debt is intended to help in developing new theories that argue for ‘internalizing’ these impacts, making them one of the basic axes of a new paradigm that will put a stop to the deterioration of the planet. Ecological debt is the debt contracted by the world’s wealthiest nations with the other countries of the planet as a result of the historical and present- day pillage of natural resources, exported environmental impacts and the free use of the global environmental space for waste disposal. It ref ects what the North owes the South because of that plun- dering, which originated in the colonial period and has continued to grow (Observatorio de la Dueda en la Globalización, 2003). Today its characteristics are not only economic but also social and environmental, making it perfectly objective. In any case, ecological debt is a concept whose defi nition is more complex and diffi cult than those of the ‘environmental footprint’ or ‘space’. In the last decade, several defi ni- tions have been proposed, some proceeding from the ecology movement and others from academic spheres. For example, Aurora Donoso (Acción Ecológica – Ecuador), at the Popular Forum in Bali, before the Johannesburg Summit, defi ned ecological debt as the responsibility held by the industrialised countries and their institutions, banks, political and economic corporations for the gradual appropriation and control of the natural resources, and for the destruction of the planet caused by their models of production and consumption . . . A debt that includes the appropriation of the absorption capacity of the planet and the atmos- phere, polluted by their greenhouse gases. (Donoso, 2002) 150
Ecological debt 151 Ecological debt, according to Martínez-Alier (2004), is the debt accumulated by the countries of the North towards the countries of the South in two ways: in the fi rst place, the export of primary products at very low prices, that is to say, prices that take no account of the environmental damage caused in the place of extraction and processing, nor of pollution at a global level; in the second place, by the free or very cheap occupa- tion of environmental space – the atmosphere, the water, the land – through the dumping of production wastes. Its conceptual foundation is based on the idea of environmental justice, since if all the inhabitants of the planet have the right to the same quantity of resources and to the same portion of environmental space, then those who use more resources or occupy more space have a debt towards the others. Other authors, searching for a broader defi nition, have argued that ecological debt is the debt accumulated by the wealthy countries of the North with respect to the countries of the Third World due to the pillage of resources, unfair trade, environmental damage and the free occupation of environmental space for depositing their wastes (Martínez- Alier et al., 2002). Everybody knows and understands what we are talking about, but, bearing in mind that intellectual and academic contributions on ecological debt have been scarce, it is especially important to off er an understandable and communicable defi nition – one that will be credible and deal with something signifi cant to people. Sharing this concern, and as part of an eff ort to calculate the ecological debt of their country, Belgium, a group of researchers at the Centre for Sustainable Development of the University of Ghent drew up the following defi nition: The ecological debt of a country consists of: (1) the environmental damage caused by a country X in other countries, or in areas of jurisdiction of other countries, as a result of its model of production and consumption; and/or (2) the ecological damage caused historically by a country X in ecosystems outside its national jurisdiction as a result of its model of production and con- sumption; and (3) the use or exploitation of ecosystems, or of goods and services of ecosystems, over the course of time by a country X, at the expense of the equitable rights over those ecosys- tems of other countries or individuals. (Paredis et al. 2004: 48–9) This defi nition is still in its initial phase and will continue to be developed, but it puts into relief a series of options and decisions that must be borne in mind when specifying the concept. ‘Who owes whom?’ is the leitmotiv used by the grassroots and ecologist movement to give sociopolitical expression to the economic and environmental inequali- ties that they denounce (Ekologistak Martxan, 2005). However, providing an answer to such an open question can turn out to be a hard task, one requiring a suitable, scientifi - cally verifi able methodology and a deep moral and political resolve. Ecological debt is no less a debt just because it is not ref ected in contracts. It is at the same time both public and private, but it seems more important to stress the public debt, in order to refer in the fi rst place to the responsibility of our countries and govern- ments, rather than to call normal citizens to account. This does not exclude the search for greater precision and depth in its development, whether in the category of ecological damage (pollution, exhaustion, degradation etc.), or in the specifi cation of its temporal and spatial dimension (global, continental, regional, local), or in the characterization of the debtors and creditors (states, present and future generations, social classes, trans- national companies etc.), or in its physical or monetary quantifi cation (see Box 10.1).
152 The international handbook of environmental sociology BOX 10.1 ELEMENTS FOR QUANTIFYING ECOLOGICAL DEBT Environmental damage: pollution, degradation, extinction Spatial level of damage: global, continental, national, regional, local Type of ecosystem and ecosystem services Equity rights: several interpretations for different types of ecosystems and services Actors (creditors and debtors): countries, present and future generations, social classes, enterprises Quantifi cation: physical units or monetary accounts Time: different time periods to be considered Source: Adapted and developed from Paredis et al. (2004). As can be seen in Figure 10.1, the emergence of the concept of ecological debt is linked to numerous disciplines and is based on previously established methodologies for meas- uring and calculating the factors that contribute to the debt. Hence, bearing in mind that ‘ecological debt’ is rooted in, and nourished by, diff erent disciplines, we can say that it ECOLOGICAL DEBT Ecological damage Use of equitable rights Monetary Monetary evaluation evaluation Indicators of pollution, Ecological footprint exhaustion and degradation Environmental space (DPSIR) † Analysis of material fows Note: † DPSIR (driving forces–pressures–state–impacts–responses) is a commonly employed framework for assessing and managing environmental problems. Source: Paredis et al. (2004). Figure 10.1 Calculating ecological debt
Ecological debt 153 Table 10.1 A comparison of ecological debt: Canada and Bangladesh Country Ecological Carrying National Sustainable footprint capacity defi cit defi cit (ha/person) (ha/person) (ha/person) (ha/person) Canada 8.84 14.24 −5.40 7.04 Bangladesh 0.53 0.30 0.23 −1.27 Source: Russi et al. (2006). has resulted from a series of contributions, or diff erent and diverse viewpoints, that are mutually complementary, and without which it would be unthinkable or inconceivable. That is, this concept is as much based on the idea of the ‘carrying capacity’ of Earth’s ecosystems and systems of biophysical accounting, such as the ecological ‘footprint’ or ‘space’, as on the analysis of material f ows. It is a new concept that is directly related to the critical viewpoint of ecological economics, which links the economic dynamics among countries with environmental interaction; to environmental justice and human rights and theories of historical injustices and restitution; to other fi elds such as political ecology, which Martínez-Alier defi nes as the study of distributive ecological conf icts; or to the ‘eco- colonialism’ of Agarwal and Narain (Paredis et al. 2004: 74). The ‘ecological footprint’ measures the quantity of land (and water) needed to sustain a specifi c mode of production and consumption, and this is compared with the carrying capacity of a specifi c territory and with the average carrying capacity of the planet, to provide a measure of the ecological defi cit between the ideal and the real: the ecological debt. A large and sparsely populated country like Canada, for example, had a carrying capacity of 14.24 ha/per capita in 2002, and although its ecological footprint was only 8.84 ha/person, the latter fi gure was far above the sustainable global average (1.8 ha/ person); even so, from this perspective, Canada can be considered an ecological creditor. The opposite occurs in a relatively small and overpopulated country like Bangladesh: although it has a footprint of only 0.53 ha/person and is a long way from the sustainable global average, its carrying capacity was only 0.30 ha/person (see Table 10.1). We thus fi nd an ecological debt of −5.40 ha/person in the Canadian case, and 0.23 in the Bangladeshi case, fi gures that express very diff erent and contradictory socio- ecological realities. The ecological debt, as Joan Martínez-Alier would put it, refers to the ‘carrying capacity expropriated’ by some countries and societies at the expense of others. In the case of environmental space, instead of combining all the parameters (agricul- tural land, pasture, forest, sea, built- up area and CO absorption capacity) into a single 2 factor, the area of land needed to sustain a given population, fi ve factors – energy, non- renewable raw materials, agricultural land, wood and water – are calculated for each country and compared with the global averages for each. This type of indicator, together with calculation methodologies like the analysis of material f ows (Naredo and Valero, 1999) or the DPSIR model (driving force–pressure– state–impact–response) utilized by the European Environment Agency or Eurostat, lays the foundations for a multidisciplinary approach to obtaining a complex calculation. In any case, the need for measurement can lead us to both a physical calculation and
154 The international handbook of environmental sociology the translation of such physical magnitudes into a monetary debt. Conscious that mon- etary quantifi cation is biased and that it is not a central concern of the social movements working for recognition of the ecological debt, the use of economic fi gures can on occa- sion serve, in a globally monetarized world, as a graphic form for representing environ- mental damage and, above all, as an evaluative element that counteracts the frequently paid foreign debt. As Joan Martínez-Alier explains for the Latin American case, if the region’s total foreign debt were $700 000 million dollars in 1991, that would be the equiva- lent to the costs of reducing the carbon debt of the industrialized countries in a mere 12 years, at a rate of $60 000 million dollars annually (Martínez-Alier, 2004: 293). Or for the case of Ecuador, if we consider an element such as unequal exchange, both ecological and economic, the ecological debt generated in favour of the country annually (approxi- mately $6500 million) is equivalent to a third of its total foreign debt (Villalba, 2008). How to quantify the ecological debt Giving a monetary value to the ecological debt as a whole is a complex question (Barcena et al., 2009). In the fi rst place, there are diffi culties due to the great quantity of environ- mental damage done from the colonial period up to the present, making it impossible to quantify and evaluate all of this. A fi rst attempt at clarifi cation would be to distinguish between the mechanisms generating that debt (pillage of resources, loss of sovereignty in food, unequal exchange in trade, unequal use of the global environmental space etc.) and its components (carbon debt, biopiracy, export of wastes, environmental liabilities and externalities etc.). In the second place, the complexity of relations between ecosystems and human society makes it diffi cult to determine exactly the consequences of environmental damage. The interactions between the elements of the natural and the social systems can greatly amplify a disturbance in the initial balance and lead to irreversible and unfore- seeable changes. Pollution is transmitted and accumulated throughout the food chain, and the risk is increased by many factors that at times interact and often have long- term eff ects. It is therefore very diffi cult to isolate the eff ect of each polluting element and to establish a linear relationship of cause and eff ect. In the third place, monetary evaluation can ref ect only a part of the losses associated with the ecological debt, while ignoring many other aspects of the losses. For instance, economists employ several methods to estimate the economic value of a human life, using for example the opportunity cost of work lost or the cost of life insurance policies. These evaluations ref ect only a part of the losses associated with a death, while many other aspects cannot be expressed in monetary language at all. Besides, these estimations are questionable as they depend on income (the death of a professional is more expensive than that of a labourer). For all these reasons, it is not possible to compensate for more than a minimal part of the ecological debt. In many cases, communities adversely aff ected by a company refuse to discuss the sum of money they should be off ered. However, in the business and institu- tional fi eld it can be more eff ective to talk in a quantitative and monetary language. For example, contrasting parts of the ecological debt, expressed in monetary values, with the foreign debt can be useful for demonstrating that the latter has been amply ‘paid’, and that it is the North that is indebted to the South and not vice versa. Besides, the monetary evaluation of environmental damage is useful in a judicial context: monetary compensa-
Ecological debt 155 tion for damage may be the only way for the victims to receive at least something and for the guilty party to be punished, as well as providing a deterrent eff ect that prompts companies to take precautions to reduce the risk of accidents. In any case, a debt is an acquired responsibility, an obligation towards others, which in our case proceeds from excess or overutilization of something belonging to others, or held in common with them. This takes us from the economy to the fi elds of philosophy and law, to the defi nitions of environmental justice, equitable rights and national sover- eignty over resources, and also to the natural sciences for determining the sustainable use of resources and the carrying capacity of ecosystems. Monetary compensation is therefore not the only way of evaluating the ecological debt: methods of physical quantifi cation should and must be preferentially employed. Some of the indicators that can be used are those obtained from the Analysis of Material Flows (e.g. Eurostat, 2001), a methodology that consists in calculating the weight of all the materials that enter and leave an economic system. The f ow of materials is not a direct indicator of pollution (a gram of mercury pollutes more than a ton of iron), but it can give an idea of the physical dimensions of an economy. Using this methodology, we can observe that while from the monetary point of view European imports are roughly equal to exports, in terms of weight Europe imports approximately four times more than it exports (Giljum and Hubacek, 2001, cited in Giljum, 2004). In Latin America, by contrast, as much as six tons is exported for each ton imported (Vallejo, 2006a, 2006b); hence it is abundantly clear that Latin America is situated among the ecological creditors and the EU is among the debtors. This means that European exports are much more expensive than its imports: the income obtained from the sale of a ton of exported goods can be used to buy four tons of imported goods. That is why the countries of the South, due to poverty and the foreign debt, fi nd themselves motivated to sell a growing volume of primary goods, such as fossil fuels, metals, minerals etc., which produce a great deal of pollution and little wealth at the site of extraction and processing, while the countries of the North specialize in fi nal products, which are more expensive and less polluting. Turning now to the fi eld of responsibilities, the ecological debt obliges us to talk of creditor and debtor agents. The latter can be public and/or private, state administrations and/or companies, as well as certain consumer classes in both the wealthy and impov- erished countries. Who are the creditors of the debt? In the ranks of those who should receive compensation, we fi nd states and social collectives – indigenous, farmers’ and women’s groups – as well as the future generations who will be deprived of resources or aff ected by ecological problems inherited from an inappropriate and selfi sh management of natural ecosystems by past generations. Such is the case of the debt acquired through the abusive use of the atmosphere for the dumping of greenhouse gases, which have led to climate change. Content of the ecological debt We now set out to explain some of the possible contents of the so- called ecological debt, concentrating, without any pretension to be exhaustive, on those elements that seem most relevant and on which most work has been done. At the same time, it must be recognized that there are other areas, such as the debt contracted through the loss of sovereignty in food, towards which attention should be directed. 1
156 The international handbook of environmental sociology Here, following in the steps of Acción Ecológica (Ecuador) and of Joan Martínez- Alier, we propose four elements, or domains, where the ecological debt can be evaluated. These are: carbon debt, biopiracy, waste export and environmental liabilities. Carbon debt Scientists, especially after the presentation in Paris (December 2006) of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are now agreed that the build- up of gases caused by the use of fossil fuels is causing an increase in global mean temperatures. This has potentially disastrous consequences, such as a rise in sea level, the melting of the glaciers, increase in desert areas, reduction of agricultural yield, loss of plant and animal species and an increase in extreme meteorological events (see Parks and Roberts, Chapter 19, and Murphy, Chapter 18, in Part II of this volume). 2 Recently, the report prepared by Lord Stern, Economic Adviser to the UK Government and former chief economist of the World Bank, has had a strong social and political impact through its affi rmation that the annual economic cost of climate change could be between 5 and 20 per cent of global GDP, and by comparing it to the economic costs of the two world wars and the subsequent reconstruction eff orts. These harmful eff ects will befall all inhabitants of the planet. But it is the countries of the South that will be most aff ected by anthropogenic climate change (Simms, 2005). This is for three reasons: fi rst, because the areas most subjected to hurricanes, f ood- ing and desertifi cation are located in the countries of the South; second, because the impoverished countries have less resources available for defending themselves against these phenomena; and, third, because their economies are based to a larger extent on the primary sector, which will be the most damaged. On the other hand, the causes of the greenhouse eff ect are to be found principally in the great consumption of fossil fuels by the rich countries (see Parks and Roberts, Chapter 19 in Part II of this volume). As a result, the countries of the North, whose eco- nomic development and welfare are based on a highly intensive use of the energy sources responsible for the emission of greenhouse gases, are debtors towards the countries of the South. That part of the ecological debt is called the carbon debt (Dillon, 2000). Calculation of the portion of the ecological debt corresponding to the carbon debt involves approximations and ambiguities for three reasons. First, there is no agreement among scientists on the quantity of anthropogenic greenhouse gases that might be con- sidered acceptable, due to the complexity of atmospheric phenomena. It is not known by how much the temperature of the earth will rise as a result of the increase in the concen- tration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Second, the increase in the temperature of the earth will have unforeseeable consequences because the network of interrelations and feedbacks among the diff erent components of the ecosystems could amplify the eff ects. Finally, a fi ctitious price must be used in estimating the monetary value of the carbon debt, and this fi gure will always be open to criticism, as there are diff erent methods for its calculation, each of which produces a diff erent result (Encina and Barcena, 2006). The IPCC calculates that, in the future, an increase of 2.5 °C in the temperature would mean a cost of between 1.5 per cent and 2 per cent of world GDP, as stated in the Third 3 4 Evaluation Report (2001). The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) has concluded that an increase in world temperature of only 1 °C would give rise to losses of over €1.5 trillion per year in the world economy from 2050 onwards, which would mean
Ecological debt 157 between €5 and €181 per tonne of CO emitted, with an average value of €58 per tonne 2 (tCO ). 2 The European Commission, which seeks to play the role of leader in global climate change policies, has made a proposal to place a value on each tonne of CO , with the aim 2 of penalizing at that cost those emitters who exceed the assigned quotas in the Internal Market of CO emissions – a cost that will be €100 per tCO . 5 2 2 According to the IPCC, in order to maintain stable levels of CO in the atmosphere, 2 emissions should be reduced to 3.33 Gigatonnes of carbon (GtC) per year. If we take 6 6 GtC, the baseline emissions level used in the Kyoto Protocol (1990), and calculate the excess emissions in that year, we can see that in 1990 the excess was 2.65 GtC, which is equivalent to 9.805 GtCO . 7 2 If carbon debt is simply calculated as the product of excess CO emissions and the 2 price per tonne of CO (tCO ) in Euros, then using the DIW average fi gure of €58/tCO , 2 2 2 the global carbon debt in 1990 would have been €568.7 billion, while using the European Commission price of €100/tCO it would have been only just short of one trillion euros: 2 €980.5 billion. This monetary measure enables us to compare the environmental footprint inf icted on the planet, the eff ects of which are felt disproportionately by the countries of the South, with the economic impact and profi ts that are generated in the North; the picture thus revealed is totally asymmetric. For example, the ecological debt fi gure calculated using the EU CO price is €980 billion for 1990 alone, which compares with a total accumu- 2 lated external debt for Latin America of around €700 billion in 1991 (Martínez-Alier, 2004). Thus, in just one year, the ecological debt incurred by the world’s wealthiest countries was suffi cient to repay the total accumulated external debt of Latin America, leaving a further €280 billion of ecological debt. Alternatively, we might calculate the carbon debt generated by a transnational company like the Spanish petroleum conglomerate Repsol. In 2001 alone, Repsol acquired a carbon debt of €650 million, with its total debt today standing at approximately €2 billion. 8 Finally, it can be seen that the logic underlying the concept of the ecological debt is dif- ferent from that which inspires the Kyoto Protocol. In fact, the Kyoto Protocol assigns quotas for the reduction of emissions on the basis of 1990 emissions: whoever polluted the most in 1990 will have more right to pollute in the future. As Lohmann (2001) has observed, ‘the Kyoto Protocol creates more monetary goods than any other treaty in history’. In contrast, the idea of ecological debt implies that all the inhabitants of the planet should have the right to the same quantity of emissions, irrespective of where they were born; hence whoever pollutes more than their corresponding quota is a debtor towards humanity. Biopiracy There is another part of the ecological debt that derives from the intellectual appro- priation and commercial utilization of ancestral knowledge relating to seeds, the use of medicinal plants and other knowledge of the peasantry and indigenous peoples, knowl- edge on which biotechnology and modern industrial agriculture are based. This is known as biopiracy. The characteristics of plant and animal species are the product of their continuing
158 The international handbook of environmental sociology interaction over time with their physical surroundings, with each other and with human beings. For thousands of years indigenous and peasant communities have selected species for use as food, fi bre and medicinal products, and through that interaction they have changed the characteristics of the natural species, creating diff erent varieties with properties that are known to only a few. This knowledge is of great value to pharmaceu- tical, biotechnological and agricultural companies, which use it to obtain income. And in the majority of cases they do not pay, or pay very little, to the local populations that are the authentic owners of that knowledge. As Vandana Shiva says, biodiversity has always been a local communitarian resource: A resource is common property when there is a social system that assures its utilisation adapted to criteria of justice and sustainability. That implies combining the rights and responsibilities of the users, combining utilisation with conservation and the existence of a sense of cooperation with nature in productive activity and a spirit of mutual interchange amongst members of the community. (Shiva, 2001: 90–91) All the species that inhabit the earth carry information about themselves in their cells. Their characteristics have resulted from thousands of years of evolution. Human popu- lations and cultures have coevolved with plant and animal species (principally selecting species for their use), adapting their characteristics to suit their purposes and in the process adapting their cultures to accommodate the needs of the crop and livestock vari- eties they have bred. They are, thus, the de facto owners of the knowledge of the varieties they have created. Regrettably, there are numerous examples of biopiracy in the world. One involves the neem or nim tree (Azarichdita indica), which originates in India where it has been used for thousands of years to derive food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic products. Nonetheless, the products of the neem and the knowledge of its many properties have been patented by certain researchers and multinationals of the North, who obtain considerable income from this without any recompense for the people of India (see Ambrose- Oji, Chapter 20 in Part II of this volume). We fi nd another case of biopiracy in Peru, where the company Liofi lizadora del Pacífi co commercializes the Amazonia liana ‘cat’s claw’ (Uncaria tomentosa), tradition- ally used against arthritis, rheumatism and diabetes. The company envisages giving the indigenous community of the Ashaninkas a mere 0.2 per cent of the income, in payment for the work done cultivating the plants and not for the knowledge contributed, as the company itself recognizes: ‘For hundreds of years this remarkable herb has been used by the Indian Natives of the Peruvian Rain Forest to cure cancer, arthritis, gastritis, ulcers and female hormonal imbalances. Study has determined that this herb contains a wealth of benefi cial phytochemicals and alkaloids, proanthoncyanidins, polyphenols, triterpines, and plant sterols.’ 9 In this way, ‘intellectual property rights’ reward solely the creativity of the laborator- ies, that is, they are a further tool for extending the territory of the market economy. Is application of the logic of the market a guarantee of biodiversity? What is the just price that a community should receive for its contribution to the creation of a modern medi- cine derived from the natural resources of its ancestors and its present- day members? How much should a Mexican peasant pay a multinational for the seed of an ‘improved
Ecological debt 159 bean’ if the latter was discovered in his fi eld? Should price be related to ends? Is the end of seeking company profi ts the same as when a vaccine is bought by a humanitarian organization or a state for social ends? Waste export The industrial system produces a huge quantity of waste, with diff erent degrees of toxicity. Treatment of that waste is a very costly process, whose price depends on the environmental regulations of the country where this is carried out. For that reason, the companies of the North fi nd it convenient to export their toxic waste to countries where environmental legislation is less strict and where fewer safety measures are required, so that disposing of waste is less costly. One example is the transport of electric and electronic waste. In recent years, about 80 per cent of electric and electronic appliances collected in the USA for recycling have been exported to China, India and Pakistan, where they are treated in conditions that are highly dangerous to human health: open- air incineration, creation of acid- waste pools, uncontrolled dumping in rural areas. According to a study by the Environmental Protection Agency of the USA, it is ten times cheaper to send a VDU screen to Asia for recycling than for this to be done in the USA. In the opinion of Lawrence Summers, Vice President for Development, World Bank, President of Harvard University, US Secretary of the Treasury (1999–2000), and sub- sequently a member of Barack Obama’s government, this is something that we should consider only natural. In his own words: ‘I think that the economic logic of disposing of toxic waste in poorer areas is f awless, and it is necessary to recognize this’ (cited in Barcena, 2004). According to Filartiga and Agüero Wagner (2000), toxic garbage refers to any residue, waste, mud, liquid or any other disposable material that due to its quantity, con- centration or physical, chemical or infectious characteristics can cause, or signifi cantly contrib- ute to, an increase of serious and irreversible diseases, or temporary disability; or that presents an immediate or potential risk for the health of people and the environment when it is treated, stored, transported or disposed of in an inappropriate or inconvenient way. The wealthy nations generate an enormous quantity of toxic residues that it is either impossible or extremely expensive to recycle. In a generalized way, the solution adopted is to export this to countries with fewer economic resources that have ‘softer’ or ‘more f exible’ legislation. The ‘Basle Agreement for the control of transnational movements of dangerous toxic waste and its elimination’ was adopted in 1989 and came into eff ect in 1992; to date it has been signed by 149 countries. This Agreement was initially criticized by environmentalist groups that believed it would be incapable of imposing an eff ective prohibition on the massive exportation of waste to impoverished countries with much weaker environmen- tal legislation. In 1995, an amendment was passed that prohibited any type of export of polluting materials to those countries, but it came into eff ect with the signature of only 62 of the countries that had signed the Agreement at that time. The fact that the USA, the main producer of toxic garbage in the world, has still not signed the Agreement limits its scope appreciably. In spite of the agreements and, above all, because of the failure to sign the clause
160 The international handbook of environmental sociology categorically preventing the export of waste to impoverished countries, such practices continue to be carried out today. These practices include the scrapping of ships, the recycling of electric and electronic devices, the incineration of plastic, the creation of acid pools and uncontrolled dumping in the rural areas of countries with weaker legislation. The world’s wealthiest nations produce close to 80 per cent of the 400 million tonnes of toxic garbage generated in the world each year, and they export 10 per cent of this, the greater part of it to impoverished countries with great economic needs. Due to this export of waste, the wealthy countries have acquired a debt to the impoverished coun- tries that must be recognized and paid. It is diffi cult to quantify this debt, but the cost to a ‘developed’ economy for the recycling and disposal of solid residues and polluted water can be calculated, in both monetary and energy terms. However, we must realize that the f exibility of norms and restrictions of the countries with fewer economic resources, aimed at attracting foreign investment, also has to be explained by the interest of the polluting countries in maintaining their level of economic growth and increasing the profi tability of their productive processes. Environmental liabilities The term ‘environmental liability’ derives from economic language. In company accounting, liabilities are the set of debts and taxes that reduce assets. Used in environ- mental terms, the term refers to the set of uncompensated environmental damages trans- ferred to the collective by companies due to incidents during their everyday activities, as well as to the unsustainable use of resources. Thus we can defi ne environmental liabilities as ‘the set of environmental damages, in terms of contamination of the water, the soil, the air, the deterioration and exploitation of resources and ecosystems, produced by a fi rm, during its normal working or through unforeseen accidents, over the course of its history’. When a company causes damage to a collective, the moral responsibility is clear, but the legal responsibility depends on the legislative system. Often, the legal context of the countries of the South means that companies do not consider environmental damages as costs (or consider them to be low- order costs), they thus have little incentive to reduce such damages. That is why it is necessary to create eff ective international legislation on environmental responsibility, something that is still widely insuffi cient. In fact, the demand for responsibility is a strong incentive to reduce environmental damages, since it makes possible a partial internalization in company accounting of the costs and envi- ronmental risks, with the result that environmental resources are not considered as free goods. During 30 years of activity in Ecuador, the US transnational petroleum company Texaco extracted 1500 million barrels of crude oil from the country, built 22 petrol sta- tions and drilled 339 wells in an area of 442 965 ha. It dumped an (uncalculated) number of tonnes of toxic material and maintenance waste, derived from the extraction processes, and more than 19 000 million gallons of production water were polluted with hydrocar- bons and heavy metals. Accidental spillages were frequent, calculated at approximately 16.8 million gallons of liquid deriving from the production processes. At its 200 burners, it daily f ared off two million cubic metres of gas (producing acid rain, dioxins etc.) and it constructed 500 km of road and pipeline. The malnutrition resulting from the pollution and from the destruction of resources in
Ecological debt 161 the area is the highest in the country. The cases of cancer are the most numerous in the country and are increasing; besides, the construction of petrol towns meant the extinc- tion of the Tetete culture. Who owes whom? A very useful question A simple mathematical equation raises a highly alarming ethical issue. If all the people on the earth had a level of consumption similar to that of the ‘developed’ economies (using the same level of resources and generating the same waste), the global economy would need access to fi ve or six more earths. Ecological debt is a concept that can be very useful for understanding the underlying problems from a historical, political, social, eco- logical, economic and even cultural point of view. It enables graphic form to be given to the permanent state of conf ict and the increasing debts to humanity. Linking everyday habits – such as meals – with a global analysis can be educational. ‘The generation of an ecological debt and the loss of sovereignty in food are closely linked and often associated to monoculture exports . . . We must turn the spotlight on the analysis of importation in order to change the eff ects of exportation’ (Garcia, 2005). Ecological debt implicitly refers to other concepts, such as environmental justice, social ecology and the environmental space. That is why it is a concept that, in an inte- gral way, introduces, explains and responds to the model of capitalist globalization. It includes both equity and ecology, and confronts the dominant system in a geographical, transversal, intergenerational and multidisciplinary way. According to José Manuel Naredo, the unceasing search for that myth called eco- nomic growth is what is promoting the progressive exploitation and human use of the biosphere, the terrestrial crust, the hydrosphere and the atmosphere, together with the expansion of settlements and infrastructures, at rates far higher than that of demo- graphic growth. These are leaving their mark in obvious territorial deterioration, such as the occupation of better- quality agricultural land for extractive, urban–industrial uses and the provision of infrastructures, the reduction of the surface area of forests and other ecosystems of great biological diversity and landscape interest, the advance of erosion, fi res and the loss of vegetation cover etc. (Naredo, 2006). It can be seen that the concept of ecological debt leads to a multidisciplinary study in order to obtain a complex calculation that attempts to ref ect the imbalances and injustices deriving from a system of unlimited economic growth, which, besides being an irrational myth, produces inequalities and generates unacceptable socio- environmental risks for humanity. In summary, ecological debt is a synthetic and effi cient conceptual tool for speaking of the injustice in North–South relations and for trying to obtain: ● Recognition of the imbalance in the use of natural resources and the pollution produced, aided by indicators such as carrying capacity, environmental space and ecological footprint, which reproduce the unsustainability of our model of produc- tion and consumption in a concise and graphic way. ● Prevention, that is, a series of environmental and economic policies that would prevent the production of fresh debt; the issuing of regulations that would put a brake on the squandering of ecosystems and seek reparations for the social and ecological damages inf icted.
162 The international handbook of environmental sociology ● Reparation, both monetary and political, for the debt acquired, while accepting that a large part of the natural and social deterioration cannot be undone: it is irreversible and cannot be compensated for. ● Compensation (as far as this is possible) for the debt already incurred and abolition of the South’s foreign debt. This would mean a commitment to pay for recognized abusive and undue use, and a willingness to accept such compensation. Finally, while this new concept of ecological debt has potential, it also has problems. It is still not clear how legal principles such as ‘polluter pays’ or ‘common but diff erenti- ated responsibility’ will represent a suffi cient link or legal motive for there to be interna- tional recognition of this concept. It is a concept that, as well as considering the present, looks back on the economic and ecological relations of previous decades, which for many sociopolitical actors constitutes a hindrance, since the search for environmental sustainability tends basically to look to the future. Among its virtues, this new concept entails both a new instrument of political economy and a nexus of union that contributes solutions to both the problem of the South’s foreign debt and climate change, and to the ecological restructuring of our soci- eties in the search for sustainability. Attempting to observe energy f ows at the same time as those of international trade, and to be able to relate them to international cooperation for development, means a new attitude that could induce a change of behaviour. Notes 1. See ‘Deuda y Soberanía Alimentaria [Debt and Sovereignty in Food]’, in Ortega (2005), pp. 99–115. 2. Available at http://www.hm- treasury.gov.uk/sternreview_index.htm, last accessed 14 May 2009. 3. Available at http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/assessments- reports.htm, last accessed 15 May 2009. 4. Special dossier on climate change: ‘We either act now or we pay the consequences’, available at http:// ec.europa.eu/environment/news/efe/climate/index_en.htm, last accessed 15 May 2009. 5. ‘Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing a scheme for greenhouse gas emis- sion allowance trading within the Community and amending Council Directive 96/61/EC’, version pre- sented by the Commission 2001/0245 (COD). 6. 1 Gigatonne = 1 000 000 000 tonnes. 7. Each tonne of CO contains 0.27 tonnes of carbon. 2 8. Source: www.ecologistasenaccion.org. 9. http://www.perumarketplaces.com/esp/fi cha_producto0.asp?Prod=13294§or=298, last accessed 15 May 2009. References Barcena, I. (2004), Euskal Herria nora zoaz? Retos sociales y ambientales para la sostenibilidad, Bilbao: Ekologistak Martxan. Barcena, I., R. Lago and U. Villalba (2009), Energía y Deuda Ecológica. Transnacionales, cambio climático y alternativas, Barcelona: Icaria. Dillon, J. (2000), ‘Ecological debt: South tells North “time to pay up”’, Economic Justice Report, XI (3), September. Donoso, Aurora (2002), ‘An alliance to stop the destruction of Southern peoples’ livelihoods and sustainabil- ity’, speech delivered at the Indonesian People’s Forum, 24 May–05 June, Bali, Indonesia. Encina, J. and I. Barcena (2006), Democracia Ecológica. Formas y experiencias de participación en la crisis ambiental, Sevilla: UNILCO. Ekologistak Martxan (2005), La Deuda ecológica de Euskadi. Nuestro modelo energético y la Amazonía Ecuatoriana, Bilbao: Ekologistak Martxan. Eurostat (2001), Economy- wide Material Flow Accounts and Derived Indicators – A Methodological Guide, Luxembourg: Offi ce for Offi cial Publications of the European Communities. Filartiga Joel and Luis Agüero Wagner (2000), Apocalipsis Geo- Ambiental. El Imperialismo ecológico, available at: http://www.quanta.net.py/userweb/apocalipsis/index.html, last accessed 15 May 2009.
Ecological debt 163 Garcia, Ferrán (2005), ‘Nos comemos el mundo: Deuda Ecológica y soberanía alimentaría’, in Revista Pueblos, 15 September, available at http://www.revistapueblos.org/spip.php?article268, last accessed 15 May 2009. Giljum, S. (2004), Biophysical Dimensions of North–South Trade: Material fl ows and Land Use, Vienna: University of Vienna, PhD thesis. Lohmann, L. (2001), ‘Democracy or carbonocray? Intellectual corruption and the future of the climate debate’, Corner House Briefi ng No. 24, UK. Martínez- Alier, J., A. Simms and L. Rijnhout (2002), ‘Poverty, development, and ecological debt’, pamphlet. Martínez-Alier, J. (2004), El ecologismo de los pobres. Confl ictos ambientales y lenguajes de valoración, Barcelona: Icaria–FLACSO. Naredo, J.M. and A. Valero (eds) (1999), Desarrollo económico y deterioro ecológico, Madrid: F. Argentaria y Visor Distrib. Naredo, J.M. (2006), Raices económicas del deterioro ecológico y social. Más allá de los dogmas, Madrid: Siglo XXI. Observatorio de la Deuda en la Globalización (2003), Deuda ecológica: ¿quién debe a quién?, Barcelona: Colectivo de difusión de la deuda ecológica, ODG, Icaria editorial. Ortega M. (ed.) (2005), La Deuda Ecológica Española. Impactos ecológicos y sociales de la economía española en el extranjero, Colección Pensamiento Global, Llerena, Badajoz, España: Muñoz Moya Editores y Secretariado de publicaciones Universidad de Sevilla. Paredis, E. et al. (2004), Elaboration of the Concept of Ecological Debt. Center for Sustainable Development (CDO), Ghent University, Belgium. Russi, D., T. Kucharz and I. Barcena (2006), ‘Deuda ecológica: un concepto integral en la lucha contra la globalización capitalista’, in J. Encina and I. Barcena (eds) Democracia Ecológica. Formas y experiencias de participación en la crisis ambiental, Sevilla: UNILCO. Shiva, V. (2001), Biopiratería. El saqueo de la naturaleza y el conocimiento, Barcelona: Icaria. Simms A. (2005), Ecological Debt. The Health of the Planet and the Wealth of Nations, London: Pluto Press. Spangenberg, J.H. (1995), Towards Sustainable Europe. A Study from the Wuppertal Institute for Friends of the Earth Europe, Luton, UK and Brussels: FoE Publications Ltd. Vallejo, M.C. (2006a), La estructura biofísica de la economía ecuatoriana: el comercio exterior y los fl ujos ocultos del banano, Quito, Ecuador: Abya- Yala FLACSO Ecuador. Vallejo, M.C. (2006b), ‘Estructura biofísica de la economía ecuatoriana: un estudio de los f ujos directos de materiales’, Revista Iberoamericana de economía ecológica, 4: 55–72. Villalba, Unai (2008), El concepto de deuda ecológica y algunos ejemplos en Ecuador, Bilbao: Jornadas de Economía Crítica. Wackernagel, M. and W. Rees (1996), Our Ecological Footprint. Reducing Human Impact on the Earth, Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers.
11 The emergence model of environment and society John Hannigan Introduction In mid- September 2008, world fi nancial markets were rocked by a steady succession of shocks: the collapse of rescue attempts and subsequent fi ling for bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the fi re sale of Merrill Lynch & Co. to Bank of America Corp., the US government bailout of insurance giant American International Group Inc., and fi nally, a mortgage ‘bailout’ plan proposed by US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that could end up costing taxpayers $750 billion or more. Writing in the Canadian daily newspaper, The National Post, chief business correspondent Theresa Tedesco observed that old game plans had been rendered irrelevant and new standards of panic estab- lished. ‘Clearly’, Tedesco opined, ‘this is one fi nancial crisis that doesn’t come with a playbook.’ Tedesco’s comments apply equally well to the environmental challenges of the early twenty- fi rst century, whose ‘playbook’ is similarly missing in action. In this chapter, I propose a sociological approach to the society–environment rela- tionship that spotlights elements of novelty, uncertainty, emergence, improvisation and social learning. My goal here is neither to explain the origins of the environmental ‘crisis’, as did a critical mass of seminal thinking in environmental sociology in the 1970s and 1980s, nor to identify and assess the most eff ective mechanism of environmental reform or improvement, the object of much recent work (see Buttel, 2003). Rather, I aim to frame the study of nature, society and the environment within an interactionist tradi- tion in sociology, as it fi rst developed at the University of Chicago under the guidance of Herbert Blumer and Robert Park, and later f ourished in the 1960s in the work of Lewis Killian, Tamotsu Shibutani, Ralph Turner, Anselm Strauss and others. This ‘emergence’ approach further evolved in the 1970s and 1980s in a series of studies of community emergencies and collective behaviour at the Ohio State University Disaster Research 1 Center. More recent strands of emergence theory can be identifi ed in the literature on social movement identity formation, on social learning in an environmental context, in Beck’s ‘risk society’ thesis, in the construction of ‘social arenas’, and, most recently, in the ‘sociology of environmental f ows’. Nearly three decades ago, Dunlap and Catton (1979: 253–4) observed that the ‘discipli- nary traditions inherited from George Herbert Mead, W.I. Thomas and other symbolic interactionists predispose sociologists to recognize only the “symbolic” or “cognitive” level of interaction’. For their part, Dunlap and Catton were eager to emphasize the ‘non- symbolic’ levels of interaction, that is, the direct eff ects on human beings of harmful environmental conditions such as pollution and soil erosion. Given the nature of their mandate, an emphasis on meaning and perception was not to be encouraged. Later on, of course, these ‘levels of interaction’ were respectively represented in the ‘realist’ (non- symbolic) and ‘social constructionist’ (symbolic) approaches to environment and society. A quarter- century later, Riley Dunlap (2002) returned to and expanded on this 164
The emergence model of environment and society 165 point. Dunlap identifi es two major traditions in sociology that have contributed to the discipline’s tendency to ignore the biophysical environment. The fi rst of these is the ‘Durkheimian anti- reductionism taboo’, with its emphasis on social rather than psycho- logical facts and a concomitant ‘sociological rejection of biological and physical vari- ables as potential explanations of social phenomena’ (ibid.: 332). A second tradition, the ‘social defi nition perspective’, was inherited from Max Weber and elaborated by Mead, Cooley, Thomas and others. Dunlap cites the urbanist, Harvey Choldin, and Samuel Klausner, a sociologist and clinical psychologist who was one of the fi rst scholars to use the term ‘environmental sociology’, to the eff ect that this defi nitional approach rendered the physical properties of a situation largely irrelevant and unimportant for social life. One relatively recent attempt to reconcile the physical and the symbolic can be found in an article in The American Sociologist by Kroll- Smith et al. (2000). These authors begin by noting the ongoing debate in environmental sociology between ‘two ontologi- cally [italics in the original] distinct realities’ (p. 45). They point out that this dispute is generic to the discipline. Its core is between those ‘who believe in the sociological signifi - cance of things that exist independent of human perception and those who believe that the act of perception must be the starting point of sociology’ (p. 46). Kroll- Smith et al. suggest that sociologists think about environments in the course of their empirical work in very diff erent ways. Specifi cally, three diff erent ‘stances’ can be identifi ed: the legislative, the social subjectivist and the symbolic realist. The fi rst one of these ‘places the sociological investigator in the normative role of defi ning the qualities of environments and their relationships to social and cultural processes’ (p. 48). Allan Schnaiberg adopts this stance in his seminal book The Environment (1980), as does William Catton in Overshoot (1982), his apocalyptic warning about the consequences of exceeding our planet’s ‘carrying capacity’. The ‘social subjectivist stance’ requires the researcher to observe and record how groups and communities assign meanings to envi- ronmental risks and crises. Classic case studies undertaken from this perspective include Adeline Levine’s (1981) book Love Canal and Brown and Mikkelsen’s (1977) research on Woburn, Massachusetts. Kroll- Smith and his colleagues propose that we adopt a ‘symbolic realist’ stance that ‘encourages a simultaneous consideration of the physi- cal and symbolic properties of environments, attempting to avoid the seductive call to privilege one or the other’ (2000: 58). This position is most clearly discernible in some of Freudenburg and Gramling’s work from the mid- 1990s on off shore drilling around the Gulf Coast and off the coast of California (Freudenburg and Gramling, 1994; Gramling, 1996). Kroll- Smith et al. make a sound case for adopting this strategy; however, in the concluding paragraph of the article they acknowledge that ‘the legislative and subjectivist stances will continue to dominate the fi eld’ (2000: 59). In this chapter, my intent diff ers from that of Kroll- Smith and his co- authors. Rather than manifestly attempt to synthesize the physical and the symbolic, I argue that the interactionist perspective is far more useful in analysing the society–environment rela- tionship than most environmental sociologists have heretofore recognized. Emergence theory, as I develop it here, combines structure and action in a manner that classic sym- bolic interactionism did not always do. First of all, both individuals and collectivities are treated as capable of acting (see Maines, 1993: xiv). Second, emergence suggests a solu- tion to ‘Mead’s quest for an answer to the question of how order and change can occur simultaneously’ (Maines, 1977: 243).
166 The international handbook of environmental sociology In identifying this approach as ‘theory’, I mean to convey the idea of an overarching narrative–interpretive framework that revolves around the concept of emergence. This is consistent with Marshall’s (1998) defi nition of theory as ‘an account of the world which goes beyond what we can see or measure’ and ‘embraces a set of interrelated defi nitions and relationships that organizes our concepts of and understanding of the empirical world in a systematic way’. In its fi rst three decades, environmental sociology has recognized a handful of major accounts or narratives. One of these pivots on the notion that the unfettered forces of runaway capitalism and consumerism have seri- ously imperilled nature and the environment. Another divides the world into those who embrace forward- looking ‘ecological’ values and those who continue to cling to a selfi sh, traditional human- centred, worldview. A third retells the environmental story primarily in terms of institutional injustice and racism. An ‘emergent’ narrative, by contrast, visu- alizes a human odyssey to cope with an increasingly complex, uncertain and dangerous world through improvisation, boundary ordering and social learning. In this, it parallels the processes of collective redefi nition and organizational adaptation that characterize mass and group response to social crisis and disaster. Collective behaviour, social movements and emergence theory Within the disciplines of sociology and social psychology, the emergence of symbolic interactionism as a distinct perspective can be traced to the work of John Dewey, Charles Horton Cooley, William I. Thomas, Florian Znanieki and George Herbert Mead (Manis and Meltzer, 1972: xi). Most accounts name Mead as its chief architect, although Anselm Strauss (1993) recalls that Dewey’s writing was rather more inf uential. After the 1930s, symbolic interactionism split into two camps: the ‘Chicago School’ led by Herbert Blumer, and the Iowa School championed by Manford Kuhn. It is the former stream that is more relevant to the discussion of emergence and the environment that I have undertaken in this chapter. Standard to most interactionist explanations is the idea that the social situations in which we fi nd ourselves are both recurrent and predictable. In a theory text published before his environmental turn, Catton (1966: 235) attributes this to an ‘axiom of inertia’ which holds that ‘a pattern of social behavior will continue to manifest itself at unaltered rates unless some social force modifi es the pattern or rate’ (McPhail, 1969: 445). How we defi ne a situation and choose to act is determined by the socialization process, which instills a set of shared meanings and normative expectations. In some situations, of course, there may be competing defi nitions and potential courses of action, but these are drawn from a familiar repertoire. But what happens when we enter into a situation in which there are no fi rm normative and defi nitional guideposts or those that exist are ambiguous or contradictory? Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, a handful of American sociologists, most with backgrounds in Chicago School symbolic interactionism, began systematically to address this question with specifi c reference to those social phenomena classifi ed as ‘collective behaviour’. At that time, the orthodox explanation was that collective behaviour occurred outside the reach of established categories of social structure. For example, in their text Collective Dynamics (1961: 13), Kurt and Gladys Lang insist that ‘the spontaneous evolution of a collective system of behavior cannot be approached by studying its structure’. In any col- lective behaviour episode, they observe, the participants are ‘governed only by the barest
The emergence model of environment and society 167 elements of tradition and convention’, and lack any common goals, lines of authority, formal division of labour, or established ways of recruiting new members. Breaking with this view, Lewis Killian and Ralph Turner proposed an ‘emergent norm’ approach to collective behaviour. Emergent norm theories see collective behaviour ‘as regulated by a social norm which arises in a special situation’ (Turner, 1964: 384). Turner and Killian (1957) argued that people thrust into settings where traditional normative/ cultural directions or guidelines are confusing or silent collectively try to make sense of things and create meanings to guide their behaviour. Central to this is the role of ‘key- noters’, charismatic innovators who suggest a course of action that is enthusiastically taken up by the crowd or other collectivity and becomes the nucleus of a reformulated consensus. Rather than subscribe to the notions of ‘contagion’ and ‘collective excitement’ that inform Blumer’s model of crowd behaviour, the state of the art in collective behaviour theory at that time, Turner and Killian accounted for the tendency of crowds or publics to obediently fall into line behind the keynoter by turning to the classic studies of small group interaction by Asch (1951), Lewin (1958) and Sherif (1936). These researchers revealed the intensity of pressures towards uniformity that form in ambiguous situations. Just as experimental laboratory subjects fi nd it diffi cult to resist group pressures towards conformity, even where they clearly disagree with others’ assessments, members of a crowd often feel reluctant to oppose a suggested course of action. Dissenters soon realize that ‘they must either suppress their views or withdraw from the scene’ (Shibutani, 1966: 145). The revised patterns of coordinated behaviour that so emerge are neither totally new nor spontaneous, but rather comprise a new and diff erent sequencing of the compo- nent behaviours, whether they be ‘preparing and hurling a Molotov co*cktail, taking an item from a store and walking out with it [i.e. looting], or walking out of a classroom’ (McPhail, 1969: 447). Another inf uential contributor to this early version of emergence theory was Tamotsu Shibutani. As a young Japanese American during the Second World War, Shibutani, together with his family, had spent some time in a relocation centre (i.e. internment camp) in the San Francisco Bay Area. One thing that he noticed was the proliferation of rumours, both during and in the aftermath of the confi nement. In his aptly named book Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (1966), Shibutani argued that in situations such as this, when the normal channels of communication are disrupted or sus- pended, people utilize informal channels in order to make sense of what is going on. One popular alternative channel is the rumour. Rumours are especially prone to emerge ‘after environmental changes to describe related events that are not immediately visible, to provide details, to explain anything that is not obvious, and to predict other occurrences’ (Shibutani, 1966 p.37). Thus, rather than being uniformly dysfunctional or damaging, rumours are an important part of the process of collective defi nition (or redefi nition) and ‘result from a cognitive eff ort to order an unclear reality in an intelligible way’ (Marx and McAdam, 1994: 30). Initially, emergent norm theory was mainly concerned with social process rather than with structure, and featured the empirical prototype of the acting crowd. In subsequent versions, however, the scope of emergence was expanded to include other forms of collective behaviour, including fads and social movements. Sociological analysts now
168 The international handbook of environmental sociology began to consider the possibility of emergent relationships, structures and patterns of authority. For example, in analysing the dynamics of a student walkout from one of his undergraduate sociology classes, Clark McPhail (1969) concluded that participation in new lines of coordinated behaviour requires the emergence of new social relationships among the acting units. This expanded repertoire of emergent phenomena during collective behaviour episodes was systematically explored in the late 1960s and early 1970s at Ohio State University’s Disaster Research Center (DRC). Enrico (Henry) Quarantelli, one of the Center’s co- founders had done his doctoral work in sociology at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. His master’s thesis was on panic. One of Quarantelli’s articles from the mid- 1960s (Quarantelli and Cooper, 1966) was an attempt to apply a key Meadian notion on the relationship between self- conception and social others to an empirical case, the professionalization of dental students. At DRC, he joined forces with co- director Russell Dynes, whose interests lay more in the area of social organi- zation and social change. Together, they proposed a framework for studying human behaviour in the aftermath of community disasters such as f oods, tornadoes and hurricanes that combined organizational and collective behaviour perspectives and identifi ed emergent elements (Dynes and Quarantelli, 1968). In a typology that appears in his well- known book Organized Behavior in Disasters (1970), Dynes proposed that normatively guided responses during and in the aftermath of emergency situations can include changes in both tasks and structure. Where both of these are present, you have an ‘emergent organization’. In other situations, an organization might carry out the same tasks during the disaster period as it normally does but expand its structure (an expanding organization) or keep the same structure but engage in diff erent tasks (an extending organization). In 1973 Dynes and Quarantelli edited a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist that featured the empirical work of their doctoral students on organizational change and group emergence during the urban civil disturbances (riots) of the 1960s. Among the phenomena studied were rumour control centres, human relations commis- sions and interfaith emergency centres. Subsequently, several DRC alumni published articles that pushed the limits of emergence theory even further. Dennis Wenger (1978) identifi ed four emergent forms that characterized community structural adaptations in a disaster setting: emergent values and beliefs, emergent nor- mative structures, emergent organizational structures; and emergent power structures. Wenger’s article combines some theoretical perspectives from the collective behaviour literature with insights from the study of community integration and conf ict. In brief, he notes that disaster agents such as earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes have the capacity to cast the aff ected community into a ‘crisis’ condition or state. What permits this is the inability of the traditional, institutional structure to cope with and respond to the demands on the local system. As a result, an emergent disaster structure temporarily develops with new and revised values and beliefs, norms, organizations and organiza- tional linkages, and an altered resource base and loci of power. A disaster, therefore, creates a crisis condition ‘for which the traditional, institutionalized structure of the community is collectively defi ned as an inadequate guide to behavior’ (1978: 39). Wenger raises some provocative questions about the nature of emergence, crisis and the state. He argues that this suspension of routine structural patterns and activities
The emergence model of environment and society 169 in favour of emergent structures and solutions has some negative consequences in the long term. After the emergency period, the prior power structure is reinstated, often in strengthened form. Sometimes local autonomy has been eroded, as national and regional agencies and social actors gain a toehold. More pluralistic and democratic decision- making channels that thrived before the disaster crisis fi nd it diffi cult to re- emerge. The situation of New Orleans several years after the crisis created by Hurricane Katrina is one recent and dramatic illustration of this. This ‘emergence’ paradigm never found its way from the sociology of disasters into environmental sociology. While Dunlap and Catton (1979: 258–9) include ‘natural hazards and disasters’ as one of fi ve main areas of research in environmental sociology, they explicitly reject ‘disaster research’ of the type being conducted at DRC as unhelpful. Citing Quarantelli and Dynes’s (1977) review of the disaster fi eld that appeared in the same journal (Annual Review of Sociology) two years earlier (in which the authors discuss emergence), Dunlap and Catton (1979: 259) observe that ‘the focus of such research has been on the social impacts of disasters per se, and a consideration of physical causes (or physical consequences) has been eschewed’. While acknowledging that traditional disaster research ‘may serve to establish useful empirical generalizations about human response to “stressful situations”’, they complain (rather unfairly, I think) that ‘it has diverted sociological attention from human eff orts to avoid natural disasters’, some- thing research by environmental sociologists promises to set right. Whereas disaster researchers ‘examined responses to location and time- specifi c events that cause serious disruptions in social order’ (Omohundro, 2004: 7), environmental researchers took a longer- term view. While Turner and Killian’s treatment of emergence was originally directed towards the situation of the acting crowd, subsequently they began to consider the emergent dimensions of social movements and social movement organizations. The key element here is a revised sense of justice/injustice, which ‘is central to the dual and interrelated processes of reconceiving reality and revising social norms’ (Turner, 1981: 9) and con- tinuously ‘motivates and crystallizes with the development of the movement’ (Turner and Killian, 1987: 243). In one noted laboratory study from this same era, Gamson et al. (1982) explored how encounters with unjust authority produced an emergent sense of opposition. The researchers identifi ed four classes of protest activity: reframing; divesting acts; loyalty building; and internal conf ict management. Another important emergent element in social movements is collective identity formation, related to but conceptually and empirically diff erent from the formula- tion of personal identities. Turner and Killian’s treatment of the process of forging new collective movement identities is remarkably similar to that proposed a decade later by the French and Italian ‘new social movement’ theorists (Tarrow, 1988), most notably the Italian sociologist/psychotherapist Alberto Melucci (Hannigan, 1990). In conceptual language strongly evocative of symbolic interactionism, Melucci (1989) described a social movement as a composite action system wherein individuals act col- lectively to construct their action by defi ning in cognitive terms new possibilities and limits. Specifi cally addressing the formation of emergent identities, Melucci (ibid.: 25) concluded that constructing collective movements involves three interwoven activities: ‘formulating cognitive frameworks, activating interpersonal relationships, and making emotional investments’.
170 The international handbook of environmental sociology Emergence and the environment In his perceptive chapter for the fi rst edition of The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology (reprinted as Chapter 2 in the current volume), Fred Buttel (1997) wrote that environmental sociology’s most inf uential theories were those that demonstrated how societal institutions ‘contained intrinsic dynamics toward environ- mental degradation’ (ibid.: 43–4) and, accordingly, environmental change ‘came to be seen as being virtually coterminous with environmental destruction’ (ibid.: 44). In pro- posing an ‘emergent’ model of environment and society I neither intend to downplay the seriousness of that threat, nor to suggest that massive ‘environmental improvement’ is inevitably in the pipeline. Rather, I have tried to embrace Buttel’s suggestion that ‘environmental sociology must diversify its conception of the environment beyond the processes of scarcity and degradation’ (ibid.). In applying some useful insights from the collective behaviour and social movements literature to the sociology of the environment, several key concepts can be identifi ed: uncertainty, improvisation and social learning. Uncertainty In what has become a classic in the fi eld of economic forecasting, F.H. Knight (1921) distinguished between risk and uncertainty. The former, Knight observed, refers to randomness with knowable probabilities, while the latter describes randomness with unknowable probabilities. ‘A pervasive sense of uncertainty or indeterminacy is a crucial component of emergence theory because it strands people in a kind of twilight zone without the benefi t of a fi rm set of cognitive or interpretive guidelines’ (Hannigan, 2006: 149). One especially helpful discussion of the nature of uncertainty can be found in the literature on the sociology of organizations. In the 1970s and 1980s, an ‘organization– environment interaction’ perspective attracted considerable attention among organi- zational scholars. Environment here doesn’t denote the natural or built environment. Rather, it refers to the set of opportunities and constraints that surround an organi- zation and supply it with or deny it required resources. Organizational environments are classifi ed on the basis of being either placid (certain) or turbulent (uncertain). The former demands an organizational structure that is relatively simple, centralized and hierarchical, while the latter requires one that is complex, decentralized and f exible. This ‘contingency’ approach specifi es that an organization both mirrors its environment and strategically adapts to it (Collins 1988: 48–81). In his fi nal monograph, Continual Permutations of Action (1993), the symbolic interactionist Anselm Strauss identifi es two ‘classes’ of environmental uncertainties or contingencies. The most obvious, he says, con- sists of conditions ordinarily considered as ‘external’ to the course of action, in particular those that are economic, political, organizational, cultural, physiological, geological or climatic. A ‘less obvious source of powerful contingencies’, he observes, is ‘the course of action itself’, with its many unanticipated consequences (Strauss, 1993: 36). Working within this organization–environment interaction paradigm, Milliken (1987) proposed three types of perceived uncertainty about the external environment of the organization. In the case of ‘uncertainty about the state of the environment’, there is an incomplete understanding of how components of the environment may be changing, including the nature of their interrelationships. ‘Eff ect uncertainty’ refers to an inability to predict what the nature of the impact of a future state of the environment or envi-
The emergence model of environment and society 171 ronmental change will be on the focal organization. ‘Response uncertainty’ involves a lack of knowledge of possible response options and an inability to predict the likely consequences of a response choice. Milliken’s typology applies equally well to the environment–society nexus. As Wynne (2002: 471–2) observes, ‘the relationship between nature and the environment is becom- ing progressively more complex and indeterminate, especially as science steadily loses its traditional role as a reliable and trustworthy guide’. While it is true that our toolkit of basic and applied science has grown immeasurably, this has been ‘accompanied by massive growth in the contingencies resulting from this development’ (Richter et al., 2006: 3). Scientifi c uncertainty has become so pervasive, Freudenburg et al. (2008: 2) note, that ‘the outcomes of scientifi c/technological controversies may depend less on which side has “the best science” than on which side enjoys the benefi t of the doubt in the face of scientifi c ambiguity’. Improvisation Another important concept here is improvisation. As Shibutani (1966) pointed out many years ago, social actors who fi nd themselves in a situation where they are cut off from normal, everyday channels of communication spontaneously fi nd alternative ways of seeking out, assembling and passing on information. To underline this point, he labelled rumours as ‘improvised news’. Ray Murphy (2004 and Chapter 18 in this volume) makes a similar point in describing the human response to an ice storm that crippled parts of Eastern Canada and the USA in 1998. In a situation where the power grid had been knocked out, residents were forced to improvise in order to secure heat and light. Murphy characterizes the relationship between nature and society as resembling a dance where either partner may choose to take the lead. Extreme events such as the ice storm can be thought of as being ‘prompts’ from nature that compel us to improvise and cho- reograph a response. However, this improvisational process is by no means restricted to short- duration, high- impact emergencies such as f oods, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsuna- mis and fi res. Longer- term environmental threats – droughts, deforestation and global climate change – also require coping strategies that are both innovative and interactive. In an Internet essay entitled ‘Emergent improvisation’, Susan Sgorbati (2005) pro- vides an intriguing meditation on how this process operates. By emergent improvisation Sgorbati means ‘the ordering or structuring of forms in the present moment that does not involve an exterior agent or outside director’. Her inspiration here is the emergent property of self- organization in natural living systems, something that she applies to dance and music improvisation. According to Sgorbati, there are three key concepts that link emergent improvisation to the science of complex systems: ‘self- organization’ (the ordering and structuring of people or entities that do not have a choreographer); ‘emer- gence’ (the process by which some new form, ordering, pattern or ability arises to move something towards the creation of another idea; and ‘complexity’ (a structuring at the edge of chaos that leads to the creation of a new property or outcome) (ibid.). Social learning A third concept is ‘social learning’ – a process of collective ref ection that informs and directs collective action. As such, it echoes Habermas’s notion of ‘communicative action’ whereby social conf ict is resolved through negotiation and forging a consensus.
172 The international handbook of environmental sociology The concept initially surfaced in social psychology, where it denoted individual learn- ing based on the imitation of role models (see Bandura, 1977). Subsequently, public policy analysts in the UK borrowed the term, bringing it to bear on a wide range of topics related to macroeconomic policy (Greener, 2001) and economic policy- making (Hall, 1993). The concept also found a nesting place in the literature on ‘communities of practice’ (Wegner, 1998; Van Wynsberghe, 2001). Social learning fi rst achieved currency in environmental studies through the eff orts of the American political scientist Lester Milbrath. Milbrath (1989) employed the term in an unabashedly normative fashion. Social learning (or ‘social re- learning’ as he pre- ferred to call it) was the means, he predicted, whereby human beings would inevitably make the transition from a value system based on the dominant social paradigm (DSP) to one rooted in the new ecological paradigm (NEP). Nature itself, especially global climate change, was likely to be ‘the most insistent and persistent teacher’ (1989: 376). A more contemporary proponent of the benefi ts of social environmental learning is Robert Brulle, a critical theorist in the mode of Habermas. Brulle argues that social learning about the environment has been stif ed as a result of interference from the institutions of capitalism and the bureaucratic state, and by the failure of mainstream American environmentalism to speak with a clear, unifi ed voice and democratically involve the citizenry. Social learning, he notes, depends on the creation both of alternative world- views and social institutions that can translate and convey these into the public sphere (Brulle, 2000). In recent years, much of the writing about social environmental learning has been more applied and policy specifi c. For example, Mostert et al. (2007) carried out ten case studies of participatory river- basin management in Western and Southern Europe that emphasize the importance of collaboration, organization and learning. The researchers identifi ed 71 factors fostering or hindering social learning which they grouped into eight themes: the role of stakeholder involvement; politics and institutions, opportunities for interaction, motivation and skills of leaders and facilitators, openness and transparency; representativeness, framing and reframing; and adequate resources. While they discov- ered ample evidence of social learning, Mostert and his co- researchers also found many instances in which it was limited or absent. Resistance was especially sharp in complex organizational settings and in controversial cases in which it does not occur naturally. In such cases, they caution, power diff erentials need to be addressed and strategies other than collaboration may be required, such as legal action or lobbying. Social learning, the collective acquisition of knowledge in the context of uncertainty, is an emergent process, just as rumours are in collective behaviour episodes. Lipschutz (1996: 64) underscores this, characterizing it as a ‘deliberate, incremental process of achieving consensual knowledge as it proceeds in the absence of absolute truth’. Inevitably, it is laden with arguments, uncertainties and contradictions. Wynne (1992: 293) makes much the same point when he observes that social learning ‘has no preor- dained or guaranteed direction; indeed, it needs recognition of the indeterminancy of values, identities, and knowledges in order to be possible’ (italics in the original). Emergent environmental forms In so far as we live in a world enveloped by an escalating environmental uncertainty that unconditionally demands a strong measure of emergence, improvisation and social
The emergence model of environment and society 173 learning, several questions immediately arise. What type of emergent phenomena can be identifi ed? Which of these is most likely to be associated with each of the three types of perceived uncertainty about the environment identifi ed by Milliken (1987)? In this section of the chapter, I focus specifi cally on two of these: emergent structures and associations, and the emergent framing of technological risks. Emergent structures and associations While there is no perfect consensus, most accounts of environmentalism begin in the late nineteenth century with the rise of the conservation movement. As Frank (1997) has documented, this initially assumed a ‘humanitarian’ form but over the course of the twentieth century increasingly took on a ‘scientifi c’ form. Consistent with the ‘contin- gency’ model of organizations, nature protection responded to macro- level changes in world politics and culture, passing through three main stages of global institutionaliza- tion: change in world culture; change in world organization; and change in nation- state politics. Many of these new organizations and structures were formal and ‘recipe- like’ (Frank, 2002: 49) and resided within the institutional boundaries of science, industry and government, but some displayed a more emergent character, ‘germinating and growing outside in civil society’ (Hannigan, 2006: 150). Within the institutional fi eld, one of the more interesting recent developments is the appearance of ‘emerging boundary organizations’. These thrive at the threshold between science and public policy, especially where this boundary is blurred. According to Guston (2001), emergent boundary organizations are distinguished by three criteria. First, they stabilize the relations between science and non- science through the creation of patents, model research agreements, computer models and other ‘boundary objects and standardized packages’. Second, boundary organizations require input from actors from both edges of the boundary as well as professionals who intervene in a mediating role. Third, boundary organizations are answerable to two relatively diff erent masters: the communities of science and politics. There is a rapidly expanding corpus of empirical studies of emergent boundary organizations. Agrawala et al. (2001) report on the history of the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction (IRI), a boundary organization created in 1996 to help coordinate, implement and evaluate research on seasonal climate variations and their impacts. The IRI operates in the boundary space between climate modelling and forecasting and global agriculture and politics. White et al. (2008) examine the problems and prospects associated with the boundary- ordering process among water managers in Phoenix, Arizona. Drawing on in- depth interviews, the researchers identify two perspectives: a traditional rational, linear model with distinctive boundaries between science and policy- making; and a perspective with more f uid boundaries that features the co- production of science and policy. In analys- ing this latter perspective, White and his colleagues specifi cally address several of the components of my emergence model of environment and society. One central topic in their interviews with water managers was ‘the identifi cation, communication, manage- ment and reduction of uncertainty’ (2008: 237). Uncertainty here derived from multiple sources: the inaccuracy and incompleteness of records measuring river f ows, precipita- tion levels and drought; the lack of knowledge about the long- term eff ects of climate change; and a host of doubts about various demographic, economic and political issues.
174 The international handbook of environmental sociology Nevertheless, managers described uncertainty as inescapable but manageable. Echoing Shackley and Wynne (1996), the authors observe that uncertainty serves as a boundary- ordering device and provides a bridge for communication. Another key concept is social learning, which together with social capital is deemed to be vital to reconciling science and policy priorities. As with Mostert et al.’s (2007) fi ndings on participatory river- basin management (see above), power diff erentials shape outcomes here, with political considerations associated with local economic growth and development being especially salient. Outside the institutional sphere, environmentalism has spawned a number of emer- gent structural and associational forms. While long- established conservationist groups (Sierra Club, Audubon Society) most closely resembled ‘extending organizations’ (Dynes, 1970), maintaining the same basic structure but embracing new issues and, sometimes, engaging in new tasks, a more recent generation of environmental organiza- tions (Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth) looked quite diff erent, with their activist teams boarding whaling ships or climbing toxic smokestacks, video camera in hand. This was even more evident with grassroots environmentalism. When Lois Gibbs fi rst mobilized her neighbours in the Love Canal Homeowners’ Association to seek answers and remed- ial action concerning the health eff ects of the chemical wastes buried 30 years before in their backyards, they were innovating by the seat of their pants, both organizationally and strategically. Later on, Gibbs diff used this model to hundreds of similar communi- ties through the Washington- based Citizens’ Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes. This same emergent organizational dimension characterized the experience of the grassroots groups that spontaneously arose to battle toxic landfi lls, garbage incinerators and the like in low- income, non- white rural and urban communities in the Southern and Western USA and which collectively became known as the environmental justice movement. Not only did these GEJOs (grassroots environment justice organizations) derive their discur- sive tone from a diff erent source, the civil rights movements of the 1960s (Kebede, 2005), they were also held together organizationally by a number of ‘decentralized, loosely- linked, networks of umbrella groups, newsletters and conferences’ (Higgins, 1993: 292) rather than the ‘top- down, professionalized confi guration typical of mainstream environmentalism’ (Hannigan, 2006: 50). Elsewhere in the world, grassroots citizens’ movements such as the Chipko Movement (India) and the Greenbelt Movement (Kenya) collectively reinvent new forms of oppositional structure. Emergent framing of new technological risks In an uncertain world in which the existing playbook has limited value, the process of assessing and prioritizing risk is necessarily unstable and emergent. This is especially the case when considering the public perception of risk. One arena in which this is especially evident is that of risk perceptions of new technologies such as carbon capture and storage, genetically modifi ed organisms, and food and nanotechnology. In Europe, a critical mass of social scientifi c studies has been undertaken that focus on public awareness of and engagement with ‘emergent’ sustainable energy technologies. Flynn et al. (2006) examine the case of hydrogen energy and the possibility of a hydro- gen economy, around which there is ‘considerable scientifi c uncertainty and relatively little public awareness’. The authors observe that hydrogen- based technologies currently exist only in the form of prototypes or at the laboratory stage. Although hydrogen’s
The emergence model of environment and society 175 chemical qualities are well known, its use as an energy carrier is largely untested and undeveloped. While its public health eff ects appear to be minimal, hydrogen’s safety and environmental impacts may be much greater, especially at the production stage. In cases such as this, the relationship between experts and the public is much like that described by Murphy (2004) as existing between nature and society – a type of interac- tive ‘dance’. Citing Wolfe et al. (2002), Flynn et al. (2006) caution readers that this must necessarily take the form of ‘a deliberative process of dialogue between experts and lay- people’. They conclude that the framing of risks associated with uncertain new technolo- gies cannot be divorced from their cultural and ideological context and are ‘subject to change as experience of the emergent technology unfolds’. On an everyday basis, the framing and perception of risk is a product of historical legacy and interpretive context (Heimer, 1998). Drawing on a case study of Flammable (its actual name), an Argentine shantytown, Auyero and Swistun (2008) explain the rather dismaying tendency of residents to remain confused about the sources and eff ects of health- threatening local pollution as being the product of two processes: the ‘rela- tional anchoring’ of risk perception and the ‘labour of confusion’ generated by powerful outside actors. The former refers to the tendency of locals selectively to screen out and downplay negative perceptions of risk when the toxic contamination is slow and gradual and doesn’t disrupt people’s daily routines. The latter has a decisive eff ect in creating shared (mis)understandings, in so far as it magnifi es the sense of ‘toxic uncertainty’. When petrochemical companies deny that a threat exists, state offi cials prevaricate and avert their gaze and local physicians give conf icting advice, uncertainty and confusion reign. These fi ndings are relevant to the collective framing and perception of new techno- logical risks. To begin with, these issues are usually technically diffi cult to understand and may appear remote from everyday routines. Furthermore, the ‘labour of confu- sion’ discussed by Auyero and Swiston is well documented in the risk society. Cable et al. (2008) point out that government, corporations and physicians frequently dispute citizens’ claims of illnesses caused by exposures to risky and complex production tech- nologies. Data from their study of contested illness claims by nuclear weapons workers at the federal Oak Ridge Nuclear Reservation in Tennessee indicate that authorities took advantage of their privileged access to institutional and organizational resources to gain tactical leverage and manufacture an ambiguous climate for public discourse. Concluding note Throughout the years, sociological criticisms of symbolic interactionism have period- ically touched on its alleged astructural bias, neglect of politics, and blindness to the con- straining characteristics of class hierarchies and power constellations (see Maines 1977: 236–7). Critics might well be expected to make a similar complaint about an emergence approach to environmentalism and the environment. Throughout this chapter, I have attempted to show that emergent structures and pro- cesses most certainly do not materialize in a power vacuum. In considering how techno- logical risks are framed and presented to the public, for example, I introduced Auyero and Swiston’s concept of the ‘labour of confusion’ to describe how powerful institutional actors sometimes deliberately fan the f ames of uncertainty and ambiguity. In several of the papers cited above, the authors caution that power diff erentials cannot be ignored, for
176 The international handbook of environmental sociology example in the potential for success of participatory river- basin management (Mostert et al., 2007) or the successful development of an emerging boundary organization in Phoenix, Arizona to deal with water supply issues (White et al., 2008). Bill Freudenburg and his colleagues recently introduced the concept of SCAMs (scientifi c certainty argu- mentation methods) to explain how organized industries and interest groups exploit the ambiguity or incompleteness of scientifi c evidence and derail attempts at regulation (Freudenburg et al., 2008). Our engagement with nature and the environment, then, may be characterized by emergent elements of improvisation, social learning and collective redefi nition, but this is always leavened by structures of power and control. Note 1. The Disaster Research Center was established at Ohio State University in 1963 and moved to the University of Delaware in 1985. References Agrawala, S., K. Broad and D.H. Guston (2001), ‘Integrating climate forecasts and societal decision making: challenges to an emergent boundary organization’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 26 (4): 454–77. Asch, S.E. (1951), ‘Eff ects of group pressure upon the modifi cation and distortion of judgement’, in H. Guetzkow (ed.), Groups, Leadership and Men, Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press, pp. 177–90. Auyero, Javier and Debora Swistun (2008), ‘The social production of toxic uncertainty’, American Sociological Review, 73: 357–79. Bandura, A. (1977), Social Learning Theory, Englewood Cliff s, NJ: Prentice- Hall. Brown, Phil and Edwin Mikkelsen (1977), No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia and Community Action, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Brulle, Robert J. (2000), Agency, Democracy and Nature: The US Environmental Movement from a Critical Theory Perspective, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Buttel, F.H. (1997), ‘Social institutions and environmental change’, in Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate (eds), The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, Chetenham, UK and Lyme, USA: Edward Elgar, pp. 40–54. Buttel, F.H. (2003), ‘Environmental sociology and the exploration of environmental reform’, Organization & Environment, 16 (3): 306–44. Cable, Sherry, Tamara Mix and Thomas E. Shriver (2008), ‘Risk society and contested illness: the case of nuclear weapons workers’, American Sociological Review, 73: 380–401. Catton, W.R. Jr (1966), From Animistic to Naturalistic Sociology, New York: McGraw- Hill. Catton, W.R. Jr (1980), Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Collins, Randall (1988), Theoretical Sociology, San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Dunlap, R.E. (2002), ‘Environmental sociology: a personal perspective on its fi rst quarter century’, Organization & Environment, 15 (1): 10–29. Dunlap, R.E. and W.R. Catton Jr (1979), ‘Environmental sociology’, Annual Review of Sociology, 5: 243–73. Dynes, R.R. (1970), Organized Behavior in Disasters, Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co. Dynes, R.R. and E.L. Quarantelli (1968), ‘Group behavior under stress: a required convergence of organiza- tional and collective behavior perspectives’, Sociology and Social Research, 52: 416–28. Flynn, Rob, Paul Bellaby and Mriam Ricci (2006), ‘Risk perception of an emergent technology: the case of hydrogen energy’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 7 (1): Article 19, January, http://nbn- resolving.de/ urn:nbn:de:0114- fqs0601194, 20 April 2009. Frank, D.J. (1997), ‘Science, nature and the globalization of the environment, 1870–1990’, Social Forces, 76: 409–35. Frank, D.J. (2002), ‘The origins question: building global institutions to protect nature’, in A.J. Hoff man and M.J. Ventresca (eds), Organizations, Policy and the Natural Environment, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 41–56. Freudenburg, William R. and Robert Gramling (1994), ‘Bureaucratic slippage and failures of agency vigilance: the case of the environmental studies program’, Social Problems, 94 (1): 89–114. Freudenburg, William R., Robert Gramling and Debra J. Davidson (2008), ‘Scientifi c certainty argumentation methods (SCAMs): science and the politics of doubt’, Sociological Inquiry, 78 (1): 2–38.
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12 Peering into the abyss: environment, research and absurdity in the ‘age of stupid’ Raymond L. Bryant Introduction In a world of runaway climate change, apocalyptic capitalism and endemic political hand- wringing, scholars need new concepts to make sense of the contemporary human predicament. In doing so, they must endeavour to grasp the sheer oddity of that predica- ment. How even to begin to comprehend, for example, the logical yet illogical thinking behind such things as green munitions (bombs that harm people, not the environment), celebrity conservationism (the rich and famous ‘save’ nature from a global political economy that they helped to create), the public bailout of banking bosses in the latest global recession (taxpayers reward bankers for catastrophic failure) or food neocolonial- ism (wealthy oil- rich countries safeguard food supplies by depriving poor farmers of pro- ductive land in the South)? Or what of the relationship between the ever- more strident scientifi c and environmentalist calls for immediate action to avert climate catastrophe on the one hand, and the more or less business- as- usual approach to the issue shown by most politicians and publics alike? This chapter argues that an approach based on a theory of absurdity might just do the trick here. That theory situates the current human predicament in a wider perspec- tive, seeing it not so much as the absence and/or presence of ‘rational’ thought per se, but rather as the manifestation of a more fundamental (and hence less ‘fi xable’) lack of coherence and reasonableness in human thought and its ability to grasp an elusively alien world. In this view, the human fate is one indelibly shaped by illogical, ludicrous and grotesque behaviour. Absurdity emerges in the dawning consciousness of humanity that successive crises and predicaments can never be resolved via ‘knowledge fi xes’, let alone via baseless mantras of hope. The following discussion aims to introduce the reader to an approach based on absurdity theory providing at least an initial sense of what this might mean for research in what has been dubbed by fi lmmaker Franny Armstrong the ‘age of stupid’. It fi rst brief y sets out a theory of absurdity drawn from the work of Franz Kafka, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett. Next, it adapts that theory to better address the ‘slow collec- tive suicide’ of humanity under fast capitalism, providing a short case study of the role of Christmas in that act of violence. The oddity of contemporary academic life and the need for ‘ref exive absurdity’ as a basis for research is canvassed. The conclusion summarizes the core argument. We have never been logical We have certainly been forewarned. Eff orts to dramatize worsening human–environment relations become ever- more intensive as scientists and artists beg, plead, scold, cajole, shame, condemn, harangue and reason with politicians and public alike in an attempt to 179
180 The international handbook of environmental sociology eff ect a paradigm shift in social practice. Warnings of climate catastrophe appear on a daily basis even as apocalyptical activism seems to have less and less social traction. Take the recent case of the well- publicized docudrama The Age of Stupid, made on a shoestring budget by Franny Armstrong, best known for working on the classic docu- mentary McLibel. The new fi lm is explicitly designed to shock the human species out of its ‘suicidal’ state of being, notably through a stinging post- apocalypse lament by an elderly survivor (played by Pete Postlethwaite), who wonders why humanity had not acted when it still had the chance to avert climate catastrophe. The fi lm was showcased through a ‘people’s premiere’, with its London showing beamed to 65 cinemas around the world. Armstrong hoped the fi lm would be seen by at least 250 million people in the lead- up to the crucial UN climate meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009 – as part of the campaign to force the world’s leaders into adopting a radical new course of urgent action (Vidal, 2009). While there is much that is commendably refreshing about the fi lm and its making, it is most unlikely to achieve its highly ambitious aim: to eff ect urgent and dramatic change. After all, what grounds are there for success when the fi lm’s illustrious predecessor – Davis Guggenheim’s award- winning fi lm An Inconvenient Truth featuring the former US Vice President Al Gore (and the associated best- selling book, Gore, 2006) – caused barely a ripple in the way in which politics and economics have happened around the world over the past few years? Meanwhile, a parallel gathering of the world’s leading climate scientists in March 2009 in Copenhagen (designed to update the science before the December 2009 UN meeting) served only to highlight how climate catastrophe is now all but unavoidable, given the existing build- up in emissions – raising the spectre of a self- fulfi lling prophecy (Monbiot, 2009). A big part of the problem with this sort of campaigning seems to be an underlying expectation of ‘rational’ behaviour whereby appeals put reason on to a supreme pedestal and hence might be construed by some as ‘disingenuous attempts to keep something like God alive in the midst of a secular culture’ (Rorty, 1999: xxix). If only people are con- fronted at every turn with the ‘facts’ of climate science, if only people can be shaken from their stupor via hard- hitting ‘infotainment’, if only people can be brought to personal and collective ref ection on the links between their behaviour and climate catastrophe, then things will improve as positive change occurs. Yet such great expectations collide with the seemingly perverse illogic of human–environmental interaction that defi es easy explanation let alone remedy. The monstrosity of it all is ultimately overwhelming. This is where a theory of absurdity comes in. In origin, it is a theory of alienation steeped in European philosophy going back to Descartes, if not before, combining three key elements: (1) an inquiry into the meaning of existence; (2) an ontology based on a subject–object dualism; and (3) a rejection of belief in ultimate certainties, notably those based on an affi rmation of God. Following a nineteenth century in which philo- sophical ref ection (Nietzsche), economic transformation (Marx) and scientifi c advance (Darwin) chipped away at faith- based certainties underpinning social life, the stage was set for a twentieth- century f orescence of theorizing about the absurd (Sagi, 2002). Two world wars featuring mass murder on an unprecedented scale provided more immediate inspiration; these wars revealed the rotten fruit of modernism – ‘rational’ principles of management and production led both to the Model- T Ford and the Nazi concentration camps. Such grotesquery prompted a group of European thinkers, writers and playwrights to
Environment, research and absurdity in the ‘age of stupid’ 181 investigate and, in some cases, to embrace the absurd. For some, philosophical inquiry dissected the problematic bases of understanding ‘being’ in a purportedly rational and modern world (Husserl, Heidegger) even while shying away, ultimately, from the ‘abyss’ of the absurd. In contrast, the writing of Franz Kafka revelled in that abyss, describ- ing an unknowable world in which isolated individuals experience existential anguish, confusion and despair before succumbing to their inevitable and meaningless death (Preece, 2002). For example, in The Trial, the main character, Joseph K, is arrested, tried and convicted for a crime of which he has no knowledge, and which the authorities never explain to him. Hope, incomprehension, then consciousness and tragedy all come together in the fi nal terrifying passage of the book: With a f icker as of a light going up, the casem*nts of a window were suddenly f ew open; a human fi gure, faint and insubstantial at that distance and that height, leaned abruptly far forward and stretched both arms still farther . . . Was help at hand? Were there arguments in his favor that had been overlooked? Of course there must be. Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living. Where was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where was the High Court, to which he had never penetrated? He raised his hands and spread out all his fi ngers. But the hands of one of the partners were already at K’s throat, while the other thrust the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes K could still see the two of them immediately before him, cheek leaning against cheek, watching the fi nal act. ‘Like a dog!’ he said; it was as if the shame of it must outlive him. (Kafka, 1969: 286) The characteristic strangeness and enigmatic qualities of such writing are captured in the expression that became posthumously associated with his name: Kafkaesque (Preece, 2002). To describe some situation as Kafkaesque is to evoke a world that is unknowable despite the best eff orts of the individual to do so, a world without reason in which causal- ity can never be known, and a world where uncertainty and futility go hand in hand unto a person’s inevitable death. Yet for Albert Camus, the French novelist and essayist, Kafka’s brilliant dissection of the absurdity of life was nonetheless f awed inasmuch as it retained a will to live based on hope – neatly illustrated in the above quote from The Trial. Hope was an unwel- come guest in the world of the absurd, as Camus sought to demonstrate in his theory of absurdity set out in a landmark essay, ‘The myth of Sisyphus’, fi rst published in French in 1942 and in English in 1955 (Camus, 1955). In that essay, Camus paints a bleak picture of a futile human quest for reason in an unintelligible world devoid of eternal truth, with absurdity arising precisely from the incompatibility of the two (Hanna, 1958). It follows from this that there can be no hope of a better future in this world: he is indeed a ‘witness of decline’ (Braun, 1974). Nor can there be any meaningful ethics. It is an isolated and lonely vision of humanity based on the individual as ‘the sole ontological and epistemic foundation of existence’ (Sagi, 2002: 1). Making a comparison between the plight of Sisyphus and the common working man of his day, Camus sees the pointless toil of the former – condemned by the gods to roll a rock to the top of a mountain only to see it tumble down the slope again so that Sisyphus must repeat his labour for eternity – as an apt metaphor for the futility of everyday modern life. Interestingly, being conscious of this cruel fate is not a recipe for suicide. Instead, the essential contradiction of life must be lived, without hope, with a recompense of sorts coming in the form of freedom, passion and perhaps even joy. As Sisyphus trudges down the mountain, behind his
182 The international handbook of environmental sociology falling rock, he is supremely conscious of his situation via a lucidity that is simultane- ously ‘his torture’ as well as ‘his victory’ – a descent thus performed often ‘in sorrow’ but also sometimes ‘in joy’ because whatever the torment, he knows that ‘his fate belongs to him’. It is indeed his rock (Camus, 1955; Sagi, 2002). The theory of the absurd received its most famous airing in the context of the Theatre of the Absurd, an avant- garde arts movement that burst on to the international stage in the 1950s led by the likes of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco (Esslin, 1973). As with Kafka and Camus before them, these dramatists painted a strange world of purposeless existence, grotesque, irrational and even funny behaviour, as well as deep pessimism borne of an inability ultimately ever to understand the human predicament (Demastes, 1998). Plays such as Rhinoceros and The Bald Soprano by Ionesco, and Waiting for Godot and Endgame by Beckett baffl ed and (initially) alienated audiences with their lack of a plot and anything resembling ‘substance’. Having generated much media and scholarly attention in the 1950s and 1960s, the theory of the absurd fell from grace thereafter (Braun, 1974), albeit the ‘absurd hero’ continued to f ourish in some literary sectors (Galloway, 1981; Cornwell, 2006). For some, the rejection of ethics and hope in favour of a tryst with death and despair posed an insurmountable problem to purposive action designed to change the world (Hochberg, 1965; Trundle and Puligandla, 1986). Indeed, the rise of social movements and NGOs in the West from the early 1960s – notably addressing environmental, racial and feminist issues – can be thought of as one sustained institutional rejection of the apparent message of gloom associated with the absurdist school of thought (Wapner, 1996; Bryant, 2009). Seemingly, this struggle would not have been mounted in the absence of hope wed to belief in change for the better: civil rights, gender equality, or environmental improvement. If these activists could speak to Beckett et al., they would probably say in the now legendary phrase of Barack Obama: ‘yes, we can!’ The rejection of pessimism was unevenly paralleled in the arts, as dramatists such as Tom Stoppard through plays such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead were seen to articulate a ‘post- absurdity’ philosophy (Freeman, 1996). Of late, though, optimism seems to have largely run out. The institutionalization of hope via social movements and NGOs appears to be crumbling, as activist warnings of impending catastrophe go unheeded: ‘the continued marginalisation of environmental considerations by policy elites fuels the rumblings of discontent and disappointment within the movement’ (Carter, 2007: 169). Which activist today could fail to see the parallels between their endless campaigning for fundamental social change and poor old Sisyphus trudging up and down the mountain for eternity? Who can fail to spot the parallels between the ashen- faced men and women who congregate ineff ectually at inter national summits (notably at Stockholm in 1972, Rio de Janiero in 1992, and Johannesburg in 2002: for contrasting analyses, see Middleton and O’Keefe, 2003; Kjellen, 2008) and Beckett’s two characters milling aimlessly around the stage in Waiting for Godot? If ever there was a time for the re- emergence of a theory of absurdity in order to ‘make sense’ of what was happening in the world, then arguably that time is now. Revisiting Camus: slow collective suicide under fast capitalism Building on Nietzsche, Camus described a human fate that was indelibly shaped by illogical, ludicrous and grotesque behaviour in the absence of a world shaped by a unifi ed
Environment, research and absurdity in the ‘age of stupid’ 183 religious or metaphysical meaning. At the same time, Camus suggests that absurdity arises precisely from the disjuncture between a human being and the outside world, and his/her recognition of an ultimate inability to know that world with any certainty – and hence, not so much because that outside world is itself absurd. Absurdity is thus based in the very subject–object dualism that is said to reside at the heart of the human condition (Camus, 1955; Trundle and Puligandla, 1986). Yet this theory of absurdity, which is borne of the human- engineered cataclysm of the mid- twentieth century, is in some respects dated (partly acknowledged in late Camus, see Sagi, 2002). It is not so much that the will to engineer things and people (based on a quest to know and control) has gone out of humankind. To the contrary, it has advanced to such an extent that today it is busy re- engineering the very bases of life – from the tiniest molecules to entire life- support systems on Earth (Haraway, 1991). In the process, new uncertainties have joined the old – as a whole host of threats and dangers work their way through the hybrid ‘socionatures’ and ‘actor networks’ of the contemporary era (Braun and Castree, 1998; Hinchliff e, 2007). At the same time, there is increased popular aware- ness of the unseen dangers posed by the ‘risk society’ in an era of ‘ref exive modernity’ (Beck, 1992). From such insights, emerging notably from poststructural thinking since the 1980s, two observations can be made in relation to a theory of absurdity. First, and to modify Camus, absurdity is also embedded today in the ‘outside world’ in so far as old dualisms crumble or their borders become blurred in both thought and practice (Latour, 1993). However, such a rapprochement leads to more, not less, incomprehensibility, as the gro- tesque and illogical become pervasive. In a sense, and as a result of the cumulative eff ects of human actions, the whole world is ‘on trial’ alongside Joseph K. Absurdity thus needs to be recast as being simultaneously a matter about the limits of human knowledge in a world shorn of metaphysical truth and the outcome of human actions that transform the very basis of life on this planet but in unpredictable ways: ‘attempts to order will provide conditions for disorder’ (Hinchliff e, 2007: 122). Second, the question of suicide explored by Camus needs to be reconsidered in light of the previous point about the ‘escape’ of absurdity from the confi nes of Cartesian dualism (‘I’ versus ‘the world’) and outwards to ‘the world’. In ‘The myth of Sisyphus’, Camus rejects the option of suicide in the face of a hopeless and frustratingly unknowable world (at least concerning the ‘big’ questions that shape human existence and life in general), insisting that the individual, like Sisyphus, must continue to live his or her life within the narrow confi nes of what little can be known and accept the inevitability of limits on the human desire to know (Camus, 1955). Reconcile yourself to life as it is and you may fi nd peace, even happiness. And yet the breakdown of the dualism noted above as a result of human action and thought – with ever- more dire consequences for life on Earth – alerts us to an unintended set of consequences that suggests, in turn, that humanity as a collec- tive enterprise is ignoring the admonition of Camus that we should all ‘live life’. Indeed, and based on mounting evidence all around us (climate change being the most vivid example nowadays), it becomes possible to describe the present human trajectory as one characterized by ‘slow collective suicide’. Further, this trajectory is perfectly visible to most people today thanks to saturated media coverage of the world’s growing ‘environ- mental crisis’ – everyday life now takes place against the backdrop of Arctic/Antarctic ice sheets crashing into the ocean as glacier retreat becomes a proxy ‘measure’ for impending
184 The international handbook of environmental sociology doom (Orlove et al., 2008). This condition of slow collective suicide, which is the f ipside of ‘fast capitalism’ (Agger, 2004) and ‘turbo consumerism’ (Honore, 2004), sets up a paradox: people individually continue to live their lives in a ‘normal’ manner despite the anxiety and uncertainty that surrounds and threatens to engulf them (thereby accepting Camus’ enjoinder to the individual to reject suicide), but in doing so, and via the ‘unseen hand of the market’, they embark inexorably and perhaps inevitably on the path to collective suicide (an unforeseen situation that ultimately seems to undermine the very foundations of Camus’s position on suicide; see also Lovelock, 2009). Let me now provide a short example to illustrate these arguments and thereby put some empirical f esh on the bones. At the same time, this is an opportunity to demon- strate how analysis based on a theory of absurdity can proceed, and with what eff ects. That example is the problem of Christmas and its curious role as the world’s greatest annual environmental disaster. Kamikaze Christmas At the heart of fast capitalism is a phenomenon called ‘Christmas’ – an annual event that profoundly shapes the rhythm of both production and consumption around the world. Since the mid- nineteenth century, the staging of Christmas has become an ever- more elaborate aff air, thereby creating a powerful combination of public faith- based assertive- ness and carefully honed commercial enterprise (Miller, 1993; Horsley and Tracy, 2001). On the one hand, the elevation of Christmas to a status as the major Western religious event can be seen as one way in which the church sought to see off the multifaceted threat to its authority arising from philosophy (Nietzsche), economic transformation (Marx) and natural science (Darwin) noted above, even as it went on the off ensive harvesting new souls for God’s purpose under the rubric of an advancing colonialism. Emerging doubts about the traditional place of humanity in the world and the ultimate meaning of life were to be quashed via a strategy in which Christianity would hitch its fate to the growing power of economic capitalism, albeit with contradictory results (Comaroff and Comaroff , 1986). The consumption of religion and the consumption of objects in everyday life would thus be entwined (Miller, 1993). On the other hand, embedding Christmas at the heart of capitalism was a key profi t- boosting means by which capitalists sought to stabilize conditions of production in what seemed to be an inherently unstable economic system (what Joseph Schumpeter, [1942] 1975 later described as ‘creative destruction’). While not eliminating in the least the booms and busts that have continued to plague capitalism to the present day, the strat- egy did serve to make that economic system increasingly dependent on the Christmas season. Good economic times became closely associated (albeit not synonymous) with a successful Christmas season comprising of three main parts: the long build- up stretching through the autumn and early winter; the immediate Christmas holiday; and the post- Christmas sales (Basker, 2005). The consumption of objects in everyday life thus came to revolve around rituals of purchase, gift- giving and consumption, notably concentrated in a late December hyper- festival that was cloaked in religious garb (Connelly, 1999; Horsley and Tracy, 2001; Whiteley, 2008). Here, then, we have a hitherto rather modest seasonal festival turned into a criti- cal worldwide event at the interface of capitalism and Christianity. In its own way, Christmas, too, ref ects an institutionalization of hope – albeit a multifaceted hope
Environment, research and absurdity in the ‘age of stupid’ 185 ref ecting a wide array of individual circ*mstances (including love, desire, guilt, self- esteem), economic imperatives (notably to make a profi t or to keep one’s job), and faith- (as well as non- faith- ) based aspirations. Its success can thus be ‘measured’ variously in terms of the ‘quiet’ humming of machines producing millions of items for Christmas purchase, the not- so- quiet unwrapping of gifts and associated ‘Christmas cheer’, and extra- ordinary levels of attendance at Christmas mass. And yet, if hope springs eternal from the midst of Christmas, it has but a hollow and ephemeral ring to it. Manufactured good cheer is, in the end, manufactured after all. Disappointment soon follows: gifts are put to one aside or thrown away, fast follows feast in the business world, and many churches resume their (usually lower) normal attendance levels. Indeed, and following Camus, the entire Christmas experience does not seem to fi ll the terrifying void of a world in which old certainties are gone. Just as consumption is a weak political tool in battles against global injustice (Bryant and Goodman, 2004), so too it is not up to the even larger task of mending the rupture in traditional metaphysical certainties that notably followed the publication in 1883 of Nietzsche’s radical thesis that ‘God is dead’. To the contrary, the orgy of consump- tion that is Christmas further undermines the quest for certainty by the ‘truth- seeking’ individual by socially validating and prioritizing mindless and trivial action instead of deeper and more sustained ref ective thought (Pollay, 1987). Sermons at Christmas Mass scarcely succeed in this latter endeavour either and, in any event, are a mere blip on the scale of time compared with that devoted to preparing for, enacting and clearing up after consumption (Horsley and Tracy, 2001). Worse still, Christmas is at the centre of human eff orts that have radically and irrevo- cably transformed the ‘outside world’. When viewed from the vast expanse of time, the event we call Christmas is best understood as the world’s greatest annual environmen- tal disaster (Bryant, 2008). If fast capitalism has been the key driving force behind the increasingly severe environmental catastrophes that scientists and activists alike warn that we face on Earth, then Christmas is the focal point – a benchmark event that is ultimately productive of the grotesque, illogical and monstrous ingredients that make up our con- temporary absurd world. On the one hand, it is the lodestar of conspicuous consumption – an annual invitation to excess (Pollay, 1987; Horsley and Tracy, 2001) and distinction making (Bourdieu, 1984). On the other hand, it is a powerful stimulus package for year- round environmentally damaging inconspicuous consumption in the form of enhanced everyday use of energy, water and other ecological services (Shove and Warde, 2002), as well as heightened waste disposal (Redclift, 1996; Dauvergne, 2008). At the same time, Christmas is also at the heart of the paradox mentioned earlier: it is simultaneously a global celebration of the individual will to live and a global enactment of the slow collec- tive suicide that is killing the human species along with many other species on Earth. Scholarship and ref exive absurdity The scholar faces a diffi cult task in a world thus understood. As with Camus’s Sisyphus, he or she must navigate life without religious or metaphysical certainty, without hope, and (perhaps most cruelly) with clear but unknown limits to his or her ability to know. Yet the work of the scholar is no less important for its loss of the romanticisms of the academy – such as the currently hegemonic idea that all research must be readily identifi - able as ‘useful’, and typically only then in an applied policy sense.
186 The international handbook of environmental sociology Instead, the scholar needs to become engaged in what might be termed ‘ref exive absurdity’ – a situation whereby a researcher is conscious of the absurdity of the human predicament, seeks to carefully analyse the conditions of such absurdity, and ref ects on his or her part in living under while contributing to conditions of absurdity. To embark on this task is to begin by recognizing how absurd the academic life is – typically unref ective, ceaseless, and ultimately meaningless. This condition is particularly acute at the present juncture given the pre- eminence of an audit culture comprising ever- higher and arbitrary numerical targets (students taught, publications achieved, income generated, forms completed), individualized performance evaluations, information processing rather than intellectual ref ection, and the measurement of everything coupled with the understanding of virtually nothing except perhaps the process of measurement itself (Castree, 2006; Shore, 2008). Yet the absurd academic life is not completely reduc- ible to an outcome of the neoliberalization of the university sector. There is too, for instance, the deployment of modern technology – above all the personal com puter – in academic life that has enabled a rapid leap in the ‘productivity’ of the individual scholar via cut- and- paste writing and salami- slice publishing (Luey 2002). The result is the rapid bloating of CV publication lists, thereby providing even more fertile ground for the com- petitive quest for distinction by hom*o academicus (Bourdieu, 1990). There is also a need to recognize how academic life makes its own important contri- bution to the transformation of the ‘outside world’ and the associated slow collective suicide discussed above. For one thing, the research endeavour often directly contributes to environmental degradation. This impact is not negligible – involving, as it usually does, much travel to and from fi eldwork sites scattered around the world, much produc- tion of paper, more travel to and from conferences and workshops, and so on (Upham and Jakubowicz, 2008). Moves to introduce carbon- off setting schemes (such as through the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment initiative) are hardly a comprehensive solution either (Buytaert, 2007) and are, at best, a ‘last resort’ (Milmo, 2008). For another thing, success in academia (like in a number of other profes- sions) is seemingly positively correlated with the size of one’s CO footprint. Famous 2 professors thus criss- cross the world at 39 000 feet like leading celebrities, entrepreneurs and politicians – ever tempted by that new distinguished international speaking invita- tion or research project – with nary even a thought usually given to alternatives such as video conferencing (Hobson, 2007). Systemic pressures thus tend to reward relative envi- ronmental failure (the ‘migratory’ academic) even as they usually punish relative envi- ronmental ‘sustainability’ (the ‘sedentary’ academic). This situation is fundamentally at odds with the root- and- branch rethink of both professional and personal lives that many are now saying is essential (Hobson, 2008). It is not that the academic does not ref ect, from time to time, on some or even many of these processes, or how they might connect him or her to the very processes sometimes described in their work. Yet, pace Camus’s Sisyphus, academic moments of realization are as profound as they are usually f eeting, before ‘normal’ mechanical life resumes with its targets, its logistics and its distinctions. Conclusion This chapter has explored an approach to understanding the current human predicament based on a theory of absurdity. It was suggested that such an approach aff ords impor-
Environment, research and absurdity in the ‘age of stupid’ 187 tant insights into that predicament and the perverse illogic of human–environmental interaction that underpins it. Shorn of the cruel false promise of hope, and misguided discourses of ‘positive’ thinking, absurdity theory holds out instead the stark promise of discomfi ting but nonetheless lucid consciousness about the absurd life that human beings live. Like Kafka’s Joseph K, being is to be endured in a world without reason until the ultimate and terrifying end. Yet in such endurance resides the kernel of something else, something precious. As Camus suggests, it is not the residual glimmer of hope that Joseph K mistakenly believed in. Instead, it is a freedom borne of a mind no longer fettered by hopes for a better future, including his or her place in eternity. Indeed, being conscious of the cruel fate awaiting every individual is not a recipe for personal suicide – which, after all, is an act partly ref ective of crushed hope. Instead, the essential contradiction of life must be lived, without the comforting myth of hope, with a possible recompense of sorts coming in the form of freedom, passion and perhaps even joy. As Sagi (2002: 2) notes, ‘para- doxically, the person who embraces the absurd is the one who attains self- acceptance . . . the individual who lives the absurd realizes human existence to the full, and is therefore happy’. That freedom is precious precisely because it ref ects a hard- won and painful realiza- tion of the limits of knowledge and hence of the limits of what humanity can do in an absurd world. Yet there is an ultimate paradox here: armed with a freedom from hope and the associated knowledge fi x, the individual can go forth and seek to live his or her life in a manner that can begin to unravel some (but not all) of the damage that the human species has done to the planet as part of a life that fi rmly rejects suicide, including the path of slow collective suicide that our species has embarked on. It will probably not be enough, but it is better than nothing. References Agger, B. (2004), Speeding Up Fast Capitalism, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Basker, E. (2005), ’Twas four weeks before Christmas: retail sales and the length of the Christmas shopping season’, Economics Letters, 89 (3): 317–22. Beck, U. (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. M. Ritter, London: Sage. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990), hom*o Academicus, Oxford: Polity Press. Braun, B. and N. Castree (eds) (1998), Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium, London: Routledge. Braun, L. (1974), Witness of Decline: Albert Camus, Moralist of the Absurd, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Bryant, R.L. (2008), ‘Christmas as the world’s greatest annual environmental disaster: geographies of sea- sonal consumption’, paper presented at the Arts and Humanities Research Council workshop ‘Not Just for Christmas’, Glasgow School of Art, 17 July. Bryant, R.L. (2009), ‘Born to be wild? Nongovernmental organisations, politics and the environment’, Geography Compass, 4 (3): 1540–58. Bryant, R.L. and M. Goodman (2004), ‘Consuming narratives: the political ecology of “alternative” consump- tion’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 29 (3): 344–66. Buytaert, W. (2007), ‘Carbon off set schemes are of questionable value’, http://environmentalresearchweb.org/ cws/article/opinion/30246, accessed 10 April 2009. Camus, A. (1955), The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays, New York: Knopf. Carter, N. (2007), The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Comaroff , J. and J. Comaroff (1986), ‘Christianity and colonialism in South Africa’, American Ethnologist, 13 (1): 1–22. Connelly, M. (1999), Christmas: A Social History, London: I.B. Tauris.
