SPHERE Blog
1977
Paul Warde
October 31 2022History can bring useful perspective on where we came from, and the reasons things currently are as they are. It also provides a means for comparison, in time as well as space: noting similarities and differences is a tool for sharpening our current thinking. Both of these are different from the idea of drawing 'lessons from history'. The latter is of course possible – although more usually history serves to legitimate a lesson the someone already wishes to convey, which is perhaps a different thing.
This essay is about looking at the roots of current thinking, but also comparison. We are going back to 1977, and two books that came out of debates around the idea of 'limits to growth' that was given such traction by the Club of Rome's report of that name in 1972. The two books are The Sustainable Society, edited by Denis Pirages, a futurist employed in a politics department who had worked closely with Paul Ehrlich; and The next two hundred years. A scenario for America and the World (1976), the lead author being Herman Kahn, another futurist, founder of the think-tank the Hudson Institute, and well-known for his work on strategy around nuclear weapons.
Broadly, these books represent the pro and anti- views on Limits to growth. The first work was an attempt to think through the political implications of that report. The second is a direct refutation of it. They are, however, very different books. Pirages' is an edited work, the proceedings of an academic conference with sixteen chapters. It is one of the very first books to use 'sustainable' in the title. The second book is aiming at a mass market, and is a polemic. The first seeks to investigate what kind of politics and government the transition to a world of limited growth might require. The second is an argument that such a politics is not required because limits are not a fundamental problem (at least in the long-run). Yet this too is, of course, an argument for a certain kind of politics.
Yet it's worth stating what the works also have in common. Both imply that democracy and individual liberty are generally desirable (although there can be a bit of ambiguity about this). And while the Pirages book is a call for 'social design' to enable transition, and Kahn et al are rather sceptical about some planning (even talking about "educated incapacity", which appears to be a thinly-disguised way of explaining why so many academics disagree with them; presumably this is not thought to be a problem for the CALTEC physicist Kahn), nevertheless in both, in Pirages' words, an 'emphasis is placed on expert leadership'.
More than this: there is a surprising degree of convergence on what constitutes the problem. 'The key element in future sustainable growth is an adequate energy supply'. Before the politics begins, The sustainable society has three chapters on energy supply, and a further by Hermann Daly on his idea of the 'steady-state economy', whose core argument is that such an economy is made necessary by the law of entropy applied to energy supplies. Similarly, The Next 200 Years opens with four chapters on Population, Energy, Raw Materials and Food. It is reminder how much the energy crisis overshadowed environmental debates in the mid-1970s. From the perspective of today, issues about deforestation, biodiversity, the oceans, are entirely absent. Pollution is certainly present, but largely on a local scale and seen as a function of material throughput. This is all about the nexus between energy, resources and population. Despite some quibbling over numbers, neither is there any dissent from the idea that oil and gas could well be scarce by the early twenty-first century or earlier. Nor do these volumes disagree on the idea that abundant energy is necessary for economic growth and high levels of income. Such a consensus has certainly not been maintained in subsequent decades and is a reminder again, for all their disagreements in how to interpret it, the energy crisis was a dominant 'fact' in these 1970s debates.
It is also striking how both books circle around particular visualizations and understandings of problems – being quantifiable, thus open to direct contestation and apparently technical resolution. Fossil fuel reserves and mineral reserves feature most prominently, but so do population curves, land devoted to agriculture, crop yields, and efficiency calculations. Here the past becomes a kind of laboratory from which the results of experiments are projected into the future. Kahn et al highlight the logistic S-shaped curve and its application to population, arguing that rapid rates of growth are slowing and will eventually flatten out to produce a world population of around 15 billion (this currently looks rather on the high side). Fitting an S-shaped curve to population data was precisely the technique used by a previous generation of pessimists, such as geneticist Raymond Pearl and the demographer Alexander Carr-Saunders in the 1920s, and followers such as 'peak oil' guru Marion King Hubbert and jeremiad-writers of the late 1940s. They simply placed the world on a different position on the curve and drew different conclusions.
In short, there was a surprising consensus around the framing of the world problematique, and that framing looks a lot more similar to the conceptualisations of post-war conservationists than it does to someone looking back from the situation of 2022, or perhaps even the 1990s. When we wonder whether things have 'progressed' or 'stagnated', we might first say: the terms of the debate are different. In 1977, we essentially find the neo-Malthusian debates of the 1940s and 1950s alive and well, and given a particular energy twist by the events of 1973.
Of course, Pirages et al and Kahn et al were still in opposite camps. But even then, with hindsight, there is much that they have in common. Not least, they articulate views we can now see to have been errors. Supporters of the Limits to growth were not arguing, by and large, that unrestrained growth was going to lead to disaster in the future. Rather, the position represented here is that growth was already slowing, a position particularly represented by Edward Renshaw who had also published The End of Progress in 1976. In other words, they gathered quantifiable evidence that the age of growth was already passed, and considered what kind of transition was required to achieve a steady state, rather than arguing that a runaway world of growth would run into ecological and economic buffers. Faced with this inevitability, it is perhaps not surprising that the overwhelming focus of the political discussion was on distribution – who would get what share of the ever-more-slowly growing pie, given that inequality could not be waved away by pointing to a rising tide lifting all in the future. These distributional questions existed both within the developed world (and there is really very little concern for the world beyond the United States, if any specific place is mentioned at all), and between the developed world and the developing world.
In contrast, Kahn et al assume that over the next two centuries, the experience of scarcity will simply prompt technological innovation and an energy transition. Indeed, they actually have very little to say about the great majority of the period stretching out to their target date of 2176. Most of their focus is on the decades immediately ahead, and their tone is glowingly optimistic. Drawing their evidence from reports by advocates of particular technologies, they are (as we can see with hindsight) almost comically wrong about the rapid development of renewables, nuclear power, and falls in their prices. Of course, what are entrepreneurs and advocates if not optimistic? It is hardly surprising that these sources take them in a biased direction. History allows us to see that both pessimists and optimists were wrong, at least according to the terms they set themselves. The fact that they were wrong (along with pretty well every other body practicing prediction about future energy markets in the 1970s) is perhaps less interesting than our obdurate pursuit of the same practices today.
Politics in the Abstract
What did all this actually mean for governance? Who should govern what and how? In a project looking at the emergence of global environmental governance, we do well to remember that with the main issues raised here: population, energy, and resources (in which minerals are most prominent), there still remains no kind of international government worth the name, although there are bodies providing information, cartels, and doubtless behind-the-scenes bi- and multilateral negotiations and threats.Ecological economist Herman Daly believed, however, that governing institutions were required. One each should deal with population, resource depletion, and limiting inequality. The first would issue tradable licenses to have babies (an idea of the economist Kenneth Boulding); the second issue depletion licenses which would be auctioned (with the assumption that reduction of throughput will reduce pollution as the latter is a function of the former), a scheme not entirely unlike the idea of carbon credits; the third would operate by the setting of minimum and maximum incomes. This was essentially a model of a closed economy; there was no guide as to how it could be achieved internationally, or indeed how it would relate to current government functions in the United States.
In contrast, the political scientist William Ophuls offered two very different scenarios: a 'maximum-feasible sustainable state' which was perhaps not entirely unlike the vision of Hudson Institute authors, but that he felt would require too much global planning and co-ordination to be feasible, optimizing resource use through technology; and a 'frugal sustainable state' that encouraged localism (Rousseau and Jefferson are evoked), thrift, imposes limits and quotas on resource use, and reminds us again of the ideas of post-war conservationists like William Vogt and Samuel Ordway. Some global authority would be required to penalize cheating localities, but otherwise Ophuls argues this option maximises freedom because of lack of need for detailed planning in a frugal world would also 'demote the economic side of life to its proper place' to permit enough only for a 'dignified life and to provide a basis for a stimulating community life.'
What is striking about these ideas is the almost complete absence of actually existing political institutions in the discussion. This is a Year Zero politics. Even other essays that are rather more precise in formulating issues relating to property and international equity are, in the words of Madison political scientist Michael Kraft, 'almost totally uninformed by political realities…' His own chapter in the volume consisted of a series of questions pointing out paucity of discussion about the realism of 'transition' debates, but is at least conscious of what is missing.
The next 200 years is in many ways little different. The idea of 'limits to growth' is brushed away both with data on mineral reserves, and an account of a huge amount of likely technological solutions. Yet there is no discussion of how they might actually be achieved. Even if the analysis positions itself as observing from the midpoint of a four-century long trajectory beginning in 1776, neither is there any analysis of how technological solutions emerged in the previous period. So while the work clearly acknowledges problems, and the fact that problems now and in the future will trigger the need for change, as well as arguing for the likely success of that change, there is no account of who makes such judgement about the necessity of transition, by what means they make reasonable judgements, and how transition is achieved.
One can also note the lack of interest in the one major innovation in environmental regulation of the previous few years: the Environmental Impact Assessment. Perhaps all the authors considered its scope too limited to be relevant to the task in hand, despite its widespread use by activists and increasing emergence in the thinking of UNEP and other organisations. Kahn and his fellow authors come closest to addressing it in lamenting delays to infrastructure projects (such as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline), but in a way that is revealing of their view of environmental governance. They frame politics as a battle between generic environmentalists (viewed in a rather condescending and indeed ignorant way) and those who bear the costs of environmentalist objections. In other words, environmental governance is viewed largely as a courtroom struggle between activists and corporate interests. This is a very American vision, and there is no sense of, for example, a wider community of people who might suffer from environmental degradation or have an informed voice in the matter. This group of futurists might be aiming to raise people out of poverty, but the actual people remain an amorphous mass, not gifted any active voice of their own.
If one views these debates in terms of wider international politics, it should also be noted that the idea of a wider international regulation of energy and raw materials was not realistically on the agenda in 1977, given that one of the major policy agreements emerging out of the UN's Stockholm conference on the Human Environment was for all nations to assert their sovereignty over their own resources. Economists associated with the G77 had put forward ideas about how to ensure floor prices and avoid volatility in international commodity markets, but these were certainly not intended to restrain use. There was no means to come to an agreed long-term outcome about the distribution of benefits from resource use or resource depletion – even if Saudi ministers might argue that oil prices should be set at the (very high) cost of renewable substitutes to encourage the process of transition. Without any other metrics on factors aside from resource reserves, there was no tool envisioned for their management apart from a case-by-case planning approach understood as an issue of 'pollution'.
Looking from the other side of the rapid emergence of global warming as an international issue in the late 1980s, one might even wonder if Climate Change was actually the solution to an impasse around ideas of how to govern the global environment, an impasse in which post-war Malthusian still dominated the terms of debate. Of course climate change has also become The Problem, but framed in such a way – parts per million of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, emissions and temperature thresholds – in which issues of geographical and inter-generational equity and welfare could be more precisely discussed. This did not make them easy to solve of course, but at least it became clear what was being distributed in terms of both benefits and costs.
Values or Tastes?
Disputes over environmental questions, although played out over technical issues or questions of process, are often seen to be in truth battles over values. It's hardly original to point this out, and there is a lot of truth in it. But one can also be left wondering if values is too strong a term, given the weakness and lack of rigour with which values can be articulated in these works. If values are fundamental, authors do not seem very eager to state precisely what they are.What is common in both books, however, is a tendency to dichotomize the world. Kahn et al concede that environmentalists may have a point (sometimes) and hence presumably demonstrated their value, but deliver no further discussion of how the wisdom of their arguments might be determined. Instead we are left with the more frequent denunciation of, on one side, the unreasonable environmentalists (who may not even know why they are really doing what they are doing) in contrast to those who suffer 'costs' (and are thus, like the authors, apparently able to account precisely for what they are doing). In any case, there seem to be only two types of actors – those who understand costs and those who don't, probably facing each other in a regulatory hearing.
Rather like William Ophuls mentioned above, in Chapter 9 of The sustainable society Davis Bobrow also offers two visions of future development: 'restraint and moderation' vs 'technology and abundance'. This assumption, even as a stylistic device, seems so entrenched that one begins to wonder when it began to appear a self-fulfilling prophecy about two camps. It is not, in the end, very different from categorizations found in comic poems penned by Kenneth Boulding at the final plenary session of the Man's role in changing the face of the Earth conference in Princeton in 1955: 'A Conservationist's Lament' and 'A Technologist's reply', the former ending 'People have disgusting habits' and the latter opening with, 'Man's potential is quite terrific' as a rejoinder. Herman Daly's ideas, as well-demonstrated recently in a dissertation by Hester van Hensbergen, were developed out of a very abstract idea of entropy as the fundamental physical constraint on growth. Nevertheless, he evokes the 'emptiness' of growth society, just as many other authors before and since condemned consumerism and the world of goods, assuming it led to one-dimensional people. These views generally represented a philosophical rather than empirical position at best, and have recently been effectively and critically examined in Frank Trentmann's Empire of Things. More often they just seem like simple snobbery, and rather less to do with fundamental values than questions of taste; '… as numerous poets and other observers wise in the inner workings of man have pointed out, the ecological devastation and degradation without simply mirror the wasteland within.' [Ophuls].
If those writing about limits to growth often seem to equate this in practice with a degraded 'man', the Hudson Institute authors could prove their equals in attributing to people an entirely unevidenced taste for risk, a conscious calculus that the potential costs of technological development were worth paying. This is indicative of the application of a kind of ladder of proof, reaching from the solid ground that opponents were required to occupy, to a blue-sky aethereality of entirely different expectations at the top. Claims by opponents about mineral reserves or environmental damage, for example, should be accompanied with precise data and costings which can then be refuted. Claims about motivations and preferences of people, however, can be broadly inferred by those (i.e. the authors) who have not had common sense educated out of them. When it comes to the 'difficult long-term environment' and the possibility of catastrophic collapse – an issue given more attention by Kahn than in The sustainable society, well, there's just not enough information to know. Despite acknowledging the fact of rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and quantifying them quite precisely, Kahn et al state, 'it seems unlikely now that the carbon dioxide content will ever double unless mankind wants it to happen… consequences of such increases… cannot reliably be predicted. In any event, a carbon dioxide catastrophe does not appear to be imminent.' Yet these same authors are predicting world population, energy consumption, and world product two hundred years ahead. It would have not been very difficult to develop scenarios on global warming, had they felt it merited their attention. The issue was not one of information. And even if it were, having speculated that people could just move away from coastal areas if there was sea level rise (an uncosted policy suggestion) Kahn et al finish this chapter with the extraordinary statement, 'the earth has had catastrophes before… both the environment and most ecological systems must be tough and largely self-correcting or self-healing; otherwise, neither would have survived to date.' It is hard to discern a rigorous exposition of the trade-offs between values here.
At the same time, we should note other environmental concerns raised in The next two hundred years: the hazards of increased cloudiness from aircraft contrails; greater energy consumption simply heating the planet directly (this, and not carbon emissions, was seen as a potential cause of the Greenland ice sheet melting); upset to the balance of breathable oxygen in the atmosphere. That some of these now strike the reader as bizarre indicates that it was perhaps not so easy to perceive what was a serious potential hazard as we might expect.
The lax rigour with which evidence could be handled also allowed a position to be attributed to people when they had not stated it or even articulated the opposite. Pirages noted that there were 'few, if any, proponents of no growth', and being at the heart of the intellectual discussion around The Limits to growth, he might be in a position to know. But it would be hard to discern this from his opponents. This represents a version of that case so well-articulated (among many other things) by Daniel Kahneman – dealing with one question by answering a different question that appears similar. Thus the alleged 'limits to growth' position is converted into an attack on the neo-Malthusian belief in a 'fixed pie', despite the fact that neo-Malthusians, The Limits to growth, and indeed Malthus himself never argued for such a thing.
Comparison, with the benefit of cultural distance, allows us to note the prominence of 'taste' in academic arguments that appear similar to the divisions we face today. This might give us pause to reflect on our own motivations too. There were, of course, still very clearly articulated differences of opinion on economic questions. Daly stated that, 'the steady-state is a physical concept'. If there is a clear clash in values, it is between the idea of physical constraints (and this was part of the reason for focusing on energy as undeniably subject to entropy) and the idea that services provided by particular materials can almost certainly be substituted by new technology using different materials. Kahn is hazy about what mechanism will indicate that scarcity now requires such a transition; he is not explicit, as others would be, that the price mechanism would achieve this. Daly dismisses the very idea of non-physical 'value' in economics as being not possible to measure over the long-run. Only the physical facts count. Even so, he argued that the economy must be run on moral principles, not 'clever mechanistic technical solutions'. These principles are the idea of 'stewardship for all of creation', and the acknowledgement of limits which leads to humility and an idea of 'enoughness'. Physical facts leads to these moral imperatives – at least Daly argues it works that way round. But is 'enoughness' not really a kind of taste?
I suspect many readers today would be a little surprised by some of the contents of these books: the degree of consensus over necessity of energy transition; as late as 1977, the fundamentally technocratic framing of political decision-making. It is worth underlining the serious failure to come to pass of the predictions of the self-styled techno-optimists about energy transition and renewable technologies. One hears more frequently about the failed predictions of the doomsayers, even though by design every doomsaying prediction must be more likely to fail viewed in hindsight. Looking back over 45 years we can also appreciate how radically the idea of the environment and what its problems are has been re-imagined, re-cast and re-categorized since these works were written, so that much of the arguments seem more akin to those of the late 1940s than the 2020s or indeed the 1990s.And yet… this in turn raises questions of why, if the substance of what they were arguing about is so different, the 'sides' seem so utterly familiar?
Tactics and Strategy in the Environmental Revolution (Part II)
Paul Warde
March 2 2022In this piece I want to pick up the question of the importance of individual trajectories in environmental governance, considering its importance of part of a story that at a more abstract level appears to be of increasing integration, institutionalization, and aggregation. I want to do this briefly through considering an early direct reflection on these issues, written by someone right in the mix of developing post-war environmental governance: Max Nicholson, and the ideas expressed in a book with a telling title: The Environmental Revolution. A Guide for the New Masters of the Earth.
Max Nicholson was born in 1904 in Ireland’s County Clare, and he died in 2003. He read History at Oxford in the 1920s, where he established the Exploration Club with the leading animal ecologist Charles Elton. He was a keen and influential ornithologist. He helped set up Britain’s Nature Conservancy (the first official body in that country tasked with the protection of species and designations of protected habitats) in the late 40s and was its Director from 1952-66, also taking a leading role in UN and international conservation initiatives in the 1960s, from the WWF to the International Biological Program. He was very much the consummate conservationist insider moving from childhood enthusiasm and elite education into the management of international environmental programs. The Environmental Revolution, published in 1970 when he was 66,is a deliberately personal account of that trajectory.
Retrospectively, Nicholson found already in his boyhood birdwatching a ‘tension between passionate attachment and inquisitive non-attachment’. At least from the standpoint of 1970, this juxtaposition of emotion and calculation seems a tension at the heart of managing nature, (and doubtless many other kinds of activities). One might think he is describing the practice of natural history through a kind of anthropology of nature: ‘it demanded awareness, alertness and skill in its exploration and penetration… Its signs had to be mastered, above all the calls and songs of the birds, so full of information and so unfailingly pleasure-giving.’
However, by his 20s, work in in early bird censuses led to what he describes as, ‘increasing estrangement and remoteness from the intimate and dedicated relation to nature’ – including a ‘shift from the micro to the macro scale’. By the 1930s he was interested in planning and worked for the leftish think-tank Political and Economic Planning, but it was WWII that propelled him into administrative influence, and later the Directorship of the Nature Conservancy. His increasing role in directing programs taking inventories of nature and mapping biotic types, in his words, ‘compelled reconciliation between the highly personal experience of nature encountered at leisure in compact areas and the impersonal message of vast natural communities’. These two views he sought to integrate with a tellingly military metaphor, as a contrast between ‘tactical’ and ‘strategic’ insights.
For Nicholson, tactics included his own personal devotion to nature that developed his passion and focus. But he held little hope that this could be extended to either the wider population, or to what he called ‘technocratic masters’. His hope for a means of mass education about environmental matters was not in an extension of his own boyhood experience and passion, but through relatively novel technology: the TV. People were not to be brought out into the field, but the field, in all its potential intimacy, to them. Being a media free of dogma and traditions, he argued, TV ‘permit[ted] the public to see for themselves… messages direct from nature’. This characterization of the media might seem quaint to say the least. But who’s to say he’s been wrong about its tactical effect?
The strategic view was however utterly different, strongly inspired by the use of computing that he encountered during the International Geophysical Year of 1957-8. Management of nature explicitly rested on developing ‘complex models to be studied by systems analysis.’ This was preferably done by technocratic experts. He praised the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, for example, for being ‘drafted in the accurate language of scientists dealing with scientific matters… breaking away from the fallacies of the lawyers’; its virtue being that it ‘implements scientific principles of conservation’.
These views were consistent with Nicholson’s approach right across the 1940s and 1960s. As it happened, he had been private secretary to Herbert Morrison, the Labour minister who saw the creation of the Nature Conservancy in 1949. Stephen Bocking’s history of post-war conservation recounts how between 1945 and 1947, British ecologists were offered the opportunity to be part of the proposed National Parks administration and thus fall under the Ministry of Planning.1 Yet they strongly resisted this integration for fear of being sidelined. Ecologists preferred to set up small autonomous nature reserves creating ‘field laboratories for field research’, that would also allow the training of a new generation of applied personnel. This wish was realised, but it also meant that the British planning process and National Parks ended up incorporating no-one with ecological expertise. Later, Nicholson helped develop the International Biological Program to generate data from selected test sites that could be fed into computer modelling of nature as a ‘cybernetic machine’. This was precisely the term used, as David Coleman has shown, to secure funding for the project from the US Congress.2
Nicholson identified two sets of crucial interactions between what we might call small worlds and the planetary environment. One was of intimate experience that engendered passion and motivation, whether through a boyhood in the field, or even TV. The other was the scaling up of information from protected sites preserved as unsullied laboratories, to whole biomes. Nicholson’s strategic vision of an aggregated and global environmental expertise and its inventories was still built from the tactics of small places that had defined his earliest anthropology of nature. He was, of course, only one among many pioneers of environmental construction. Yet it’s clear that his own biography casts light on how spaces and resources were assigned in the emergence of ecological expertise; in turn iconic sites and indicators were strongly conditioned by the research agendas of post-war ecologists. Despite the clarion calls of widespread degradation and doom from post-war environmental writing, practical efforts towards institutionalised care focused on the production of indicators – itself a reflection of how little ecological research had actually been done. Reserves spaces had to be held free from other development not just for reasons of preservation – but rather more to provide unsullied laboratories for research. Over time, of course, the development of databanks of knowledge about nature would in turn mean that the study of small places would be converted into metrics (generally quantitative) that could be fitted into macro-models. Tactics, after all, must be shaped by the overall strategy, but those tactical manoeuvres remain essential.
This is a story of its time, of course, a history of a particular set of concepts, and just one among many. Nicholson’s own trajectory changed; later he promoted urban ecology. Much has happened in developing environmental governance since 1970, not least at the global level. But it seems to me highly suggestive for the kinds of interaction between law, governance, science and environment. And one could argue that Nicholson’s strategic vision of an aggregated and global environmental expertise and inventory was still built from the tactics of small places that had defined his earliest anthropology of nature. Small places are nested into large scales, scales that are imaginaries, and embodied frames of experience themselves. And all these scales are constructed in part through technological possibilities.And what of the ‘fallacies of the lawyers’? Governance is so often made and framed through law. In a world of imaginaries, what is a fallacy? Or – put another way – what are the means by which certain people determine fallacy, in relation to nature? Can we be governing the wrong environment? Perhaps that very term, a category that it takes so much work to bring to life, admits the possibility of fallacy, of getting nature wrong – because nature does not by itself provide the answers we need.
1. Stephen Bocking, The Ecologists (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997)2. David C. Coleman. Big Ecology. The emergence of ecosystem science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
Tactics and Strategy in the Environmental Revolution (Part I)
Paul Warde
January 14 2022
What does it mean to govern the global environment? The question almost seems redundant, for to govern the global environment is surely to govern everything. One could argue – indeed, I and colleagues already have argued – that ‘the environment’ is a multi-scalar concept par excellence, that today incorporates the whole planet, and at the same time is pervasive and microscopic, observable with only the most sensitive of instruments, simultaneously pertaining to vast weather systems, pandemics, toxic bodies and bodies of toxins, and everything in between. 1 Arguably part of the success of the concept of ‘the environment’ is its striking capacity, in our minds, to transmute scales, by which extremely localised effects can be seen as indicative of general ones, and vice versa. Yet does this mean that if the global environment is governed, then so is everything that pertains to it? What kind of claim is being made? Because this, just as surely, is not quite the claim that people want to make when they talk about environmental governance.
So the question remains, but perhaps could be reframed: which effects count in constructing the environment (including a ‘global environment’ – is that an envelope or a subset of ‘the environment?)? What in practice gets examined in environmental thinking? For in practice, this process obviously involves selectivity, if only of our attention rather than necessarily in principle. Equally, when it comes to thinking about governance, certain features of the environment, and expectations of effects of human activities, stand out as areas of action, concern, and consequence.
Here Darwin provides some kind of guide, although he seldom used the word ‘environment’ himself.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
In this very famous quotation it is the law-like character of relations that turn the entangled bank into a comprehensible space subject to analysis, and arguably, it is the law-like character of relationships as defined by environmental experts that have defined things as relevantly ‘environmental’, and in turn allowed the entangled bank to operate as a synecdoche for the whole process of life. In this way the environment can operate as an idea that is universal and all-encompassing yet is combined in practice with a much narrower regard for what is actually significant.
Indeed, we can perhaps think of the practical definition of issues and objects as ‘environmental’ as being, in some cases, not the result of empirically founded likenesses in the world around us, butthe result of an ‘absence of attention to difference’. The environment is, after all, composed of very unlike things. To define it, to see it as in principle governable, one might say we have to see through or past those differences, but it might be more accurate to say that we choose not to give difference attention. This could be seen as another way of describing ‘reductionism’, often a bête noire for critics of various kinds of system building (economic, ecological, etc.) - but that might be unfair. System-building does not necessarily reduce or reject complexity. Ignoring difference might actually have the opposite effect; the world is more difficult to manage than you thought, because things are not as differentiated as previously understood. Ignoring differences to build a system might be a simplification in one sense, but not as you know it.
The thing that we do focus our attention on becomes, in a sense, iconic, standing for the whole: be it a metric of biodiversity, a whale, a polar bear, or an entangled bank. Biodiversity represents something of the necessary complexity of relations in ecosystems. A polar bear expresses both the power and vulnerability of an Arctic environment. Indexical connections – that is, mapping the law-like relations between unlike things - is where expertise comes in, deciding on and shaping the identification of ‘indicator’ species, significant metrics, and valued places. These are very partial visions, for sure, but without them, the vision of the whole might not exist at all.
So we can perhaps think of the history of environmental thought as a story of how expertise has been employed to focus our attention on things we consider iconically environmental, even though in principle everything is environmental. These environmental indicators provide information about what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’ calls ‘absent futures’, a chain of effects that can be read from the state of one environmental object into what is happening to the whole. 2 Kohn’s idea seems appropriate for understanding how the environment can work as a concept, given that environmental politics has been so fundamentally about the future.
Does this argument change our view of ‘environment’ and ‘environmental governance’ at all? After all, I and colleagues have also argued that associated with the rise of ‘the environment’ as a concept has been the development of ‘aggregated expertise’: thousands upon thousands of scientists, professional and citizen, gathering data, monitoring, measuring, processing, model-building, identifying change. Out of these normal processes of science, one hopes that the world collectively identifies the things that matter, the indicators that suggest and steer action, and in turn provide a normative logic for governance. The wisdom of an attentive crowd.
Yet at the same time, even as this enormous infrastructural and institutional body of ‘environmental science’ – and perhaps ‘environmental humanities’, and plain ‘conservationism’ and so on – is assembled, a historian can perhaps highlight that it was an extraordinarily small number of people who steered the whole process. A conference of the vanguard, perhaps of only a few dozen people, who appeared repeatedly at meetings across the 1950s and into the 1970s, driving forward an international agenda for action through an emerging framework of NGOs, and well-acronymed transnational institutions such as UNESCO, the IUCN, and the IBP. If this is the case (and there is plenty more historical work to be done, not least ‘from below’), it makes more pertinent to understand where they were coming from – because this might have a bearing on where we have ended up going. This is a question I’ll consider in part two of this blog – the tactics and strategies of one influential individual in environmental governance.
1. Warde, P., Robin, L., & Sörlin, S., The environment. A history of the idea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2018).
2. Kohn, E., How forests think. Toward an anthropology beyond the human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
How a warmer climate drives us to revalue the environment: an example from Argentina
Jasmin Höglund Hellgren
August 10 2021Employing shifting societal perceptions of glaciers in Argentina as an example, SPHERE PhD. candidate Jasmin Höglund Hellgren demonstrates how planetary dynamics of climate change alter and reframe discussions of what, why and how environmental objects should and need to be governed, revealing the complex and changing relationship between society and environment.
We are increasingly overwhelmed by news and alarming figures about the dramatic consequences of climate change. In this flood of information, melting glaciers have become a strong symbol of global warming around the world, which probably has multiple reasons. One may be the attention this phenomenon receives from scientists interested in documenting climate change, or how large corporations eagerly await access to new oil and mineral deposits that are revealed as the ice melts, or glaciers’ often majestic appearance and outstanding beauty. Whichever the strongest, the climate change context has brought about a new story about glaciers: a narrative of glaciers as fragile, disappearing and in need of urgent protection. What is dripping away is not just their beauty, a natural archive or a global climate indicator, but also important water resources and flow regulators crucial for future water supply in many regions and localities.
In a previous post on this blog, SPHERE PhD candidate Thomas Harbøll Schrøder examined some of the conflicts occurring as “the planetary view”, which could be seen as a pre-condition for global environmental governance, clashes with local perspectives. These conflicts certainly exist and reveal an inherent tension in planetary stewardship that perhaps is becoming even more common as the global environmental agenda advances. In addition to and alongside such conflicts, the planetary view and understanding also come with other implications. One aspect that I have come across in my research is how previously local entities in the material environment are being revalued and understood in new ways as they get increasingly drawn into, and conceptualized as parts of, a dynamic planetary system. In this post, I exemplify this through the case of Argentina focusing on one such entity that in connection to planetary scale dynamics is being transformed into an object of environmental governance and legislation, namely glaciers.
In Argentina, home to about 15% of South America’s glaciers, this new narrative of glaciers was institutionalized in October 2010 when the national congress adopted the world’s first glacier protection law. Glaciers, the law established, became from that point onwards formally conceptualized and valued as critical water resources and as a public good. The law explicitly prohibits “activities that may affect [glaciers’] natural condition” to be established in their vicinity, in particular mining and hydrocarbon exploitation. It came as a surprise to many, also Argentineans, that Argentina who is more known for its meat, wine and tango, were home to almost 17 000 glaciers, covering a total area of 8 484 km². Why did Argentina suddenly come to revalue a part of its material environment in this way? And how did this relatively unknown part of the Andean cryosphere get institutionalized as a natural resource in national politics? The answer, I would say, is twofold. First, the context of accelerating global warming enables glaciers to be re-conceptualized, paving the way for particular conflicts involving glaciers to scale beyond the local. Second, melting sea ice and glaciers open up new areas for economic activity, for example oil drilling in the Arctic or mining in the Andes, what geographer Jeffrey Bury has called “the frozen frontier.” Accompanying such developments, socio-environmental conflicts around mining projects in high-mountain areas have increasingly come to center on glaciers instead of water. In the beginning of the 2000s, two gold mining projects straddling the border between Chile and Argentina came to epitomize this kind of elemental conflict between ice and minerals eventually reaching all the way to top national politics in Argentina. Put together, these conditions made possible a novel multi-dimensional framing of Argentinean glaciers as critical water resources and objects of national governance.
But glaciers have not always been considered a resource. Throughout history, they have been ascribed value in a myriad of ways. For example, during the 18th and 19th century, as pointed out by historian Mark Carey, the dominating narratives described glaciers as dangerous, sublime or as symbols of wilderness, and they were frequently seen as scientific laboratories or places to be explored and conquered. It is later, in a climate change context, that they have become an “endangered species” and perhaps most recently, as the Argentinean glacier protection law exemplifies, a natural resource. This latest narratological change can perhaps be best understood if we turn to the field of geography where scholars for long have advanced and elaborated on the perspective of resources as socially constructed and produced in relation to societal, political and technological processes (and might we now also add environmental?). This would mean that in times of climate change with varying global, regional and local effects, the context in which glaciers obtain their value is rapidly changing, and as a result so are our efforts to control and govern them.
For Argentina’s glacier protection law, the triggering factor was thus not climate change per se but a local conflict arising when the company Barrick Gold revealed its plans to remove several glaciers in close vicinity to their planned mining projects. The company was accused of speeding up glacier melt and local opponents equated glaciers with water – the symbol of life – and framed them as crucial for local livelihoods. At this point glaciers were simultaneously valued as an economic, social, symbolic and cultural resource. When not listened to by local authorities, local communities used the strategy of jumping scales and turned to the national level. In their efforts, they started to emphasize the hydrological function of glaciers on a national scale rather than aspects related to community rights or glaciers’ social and cultural value. This proved a successful strategy and the drafting of a national glacier protection law started. At this stage, as glaciologists got increasingly involved, the climate change context became more important as the reason for protecting glaciers. This may seem paradoxical as climate change is everywhere and national legislation can only do so much but glaciologists reasoned that national legislation at least would lessen the damage. After a lengthy process of political conflict and negotiation, glaciers in Argentina eventually became institutionalized as a multi-scale and multi-dimensional resource.
The changing value and status of glaciers resulting in Argentina’s glacier protection law should not be seen as a particular case or isolated phenomenon. I believe we can place this development as part of an encompassing trend where a number of objects that previously were perceived primarily as local or part of a background “nature” separate from society, now increasingly are being targeted by environmental legislation and legal processes. What this shows us is how planetary dynamics of climate change enter into, alter and reframe the discussions of what, why and how environmental objects should and need to be governed, revealing the complex and changing relationship between society and environment.
Seeing Like a Planet
Thomas Harbøll Schrøder
June 8 2021Using a local wind energy project in Taiwan that environmental NGOs accuse of posing a threat to endangered dolphins as an example, SPHERE PhD. candidate Thomas Harbøll Schrøder reflects on the inevitable tensions associated with the idea of planetary stewardship..
In the previous blogpost, Erik Isberg pointed to how ice core drilling has made possible a meeting between history of the planet and human history – history of the globe. Ice core drilling is one method that scientists have based their ideas on when describing the planet as a system in motion and a system that has been influenced by human activity. In this post, with a focus on the development of renewable energy, I will critically reflect on some of the implications of having a planetary-scale view of the world.
A key idea behind the SPHERE project is that planetary Earth system science has played a particularly important role for the emergence of global environmental governance. This type of science presents Earth as a set of systems that may be in balance or, perhaps due to human influence, be out of balance. Such an understanding also opens up for the idea that humans can keep or restore balance of Earth systems. In this way, Earth system science has enacted the planet as a governable object – an object that can actually be governed. Such an idea of the planet as being responsive to planetary stewardship is, historically, relatively new.
While the planetary view is a foundation for global cooperation around environmental issues, the planetary view has in some cases also become an element in conflicts. One reason for this may be that such a view can stand in contrast to more local perspectives. In this way, the planetary view brings to mind James Scott’s classic book “Seeing like a state” that shows how states throughout history have relied on rough simplifications of the world in order to perceive themselves. Rulers of states often knew very little about what lied within their territories, and simplifications enabled those rulers to collect and organise data about the state and thereby to rule. At the same time, though, simplifications were according to Scott often at odds with local concerns and local social orders. Similar to ruling a state, governing the planet may perhaps also rely on simplifications.
That the planetary view has been an element in conflicts is something I have become increasingly aware of through my ongoing work on wind energy. Wind is an energy source often supported on the grounds that it is renewable/sustainable/green/clean. This has in recent years often been due to the low greenhouse gas emissions associated with it. Other forms of renewable energy such as solar energy are also often supported on similar grounds. Since the perception of global climate change involves a planetary view of the world, such a view is also present when judging energy sources based on greenhouse gas emissions. However, labelling an energy source as renewable or sustainable mainly based on such judgement is a simplification. This becomes visible when concerns about climate change clash with other concerns. It is thus common that some local people oppose particular renewable energy projects because of those projects’ perceived damage to the local environment or the local way of life. In a recent online talk, Sheila Jasanoff thus critically examines the imaginary of renewable energy and the term “renewable” itself. She points out how a particular large solar park in India was unpopular among local farmers because it had occupied farmland and consequently damaged local livelihoods. Similarly, in the book “Ecologics – Wind and Power in the Anthropocene” (2019), Cymene Howe describes how what should have been Mexico’s largest wind farm was cancelled due to strong protests from locals. Many people saw the wind farm as part of central and foreign oppression and as a sign of disrespect for local and indigenous ways of life.
The development of wind energy in Taiwan will be an important part of my thesis, and while this development appears smother than in the two previous examples, the tension between the planetary view and other views can also be found in this context. One example is related to the protection of the Taiwanese white dolphin. This dolphin type lives along Taiwan’s West coast and is according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature extremely endangered. Environmental NGOs have therefore been protesting against the construction of offshore wind farms close to dolphin habitat, worrying that such construction might push the dolphins to extinction. In an article from 2020, Po-Yi Hung argues that the development of green energy can overrule other environmental concerns. He gives the example of previous wider public protests against industrial development in Taiwan’s intertidal zones. In this, environmental NGOs effectively used the dolphin as a symbol. However, in protests against offshore wind energy, the NGOs have been less successful. Hung explains this by pointing to wind energy as being perceived as green thereby neutralising the dolphin as a symbol for environmental protection. Another perspective on this could be that the build-up of wind energy comes with a planetary-scale aim of cutting greenhouse gas emissions while the protection of the Taiwanese white dolphin seems to be a more local issue. Both concerns are placed in an environmental frame, but the planetary view apparently overrules the local.
Examining the consequences of having a planetary view is also inspired by a recent summer school I participated in at the STEPS centre at Sussex University. Particularly the lecturer Amber Huff actively criticised the planetary view. The summer school took place online and focused on what was called pathways to sustainability. One of the main points on the course was that while aiming towards the goal of sustainability, societies may take multiple different pathways, but very often the pathway that is chosen - and often the only one that is recognised as an option - is closely associated with the interest of those with power, money and technoscientific knowledge. This could in some situations be related to taking a planetary view. While a planetary view is necessary for grasping many environmental problems, it comes with the danger of neglecting other ways of perceiving the world. With the science and the power that sometimes is related to dominating views and perhaps to a planetary view, this way of seeing may perhaps be perceived as what Donna Haraway calls a view from nowhere – a view that presents itself as being omniscient but ultimately is impossible because knowledge is always situated.
While the SPHERE project is gradually revealing the many ways in which global environmental governance has emerged, it is also revealing some of the tensions that come along with the idea of planetary stewardship.
Ice Cores and Planetary Encounters
Erik Isberg
May 26 2021In this inaugural post for the SPHERE blog, PhD. candidate Erik Isberg provides an icy explanation of the intertwined histories of glaciology and geological time, and how ice cores extracted in 1966 at Camp Century in Greenland—and recently discovered in a forgotten freezer in Copenhagen—point to a past, and potentially future, green Greenland.
In 2019, a group of Danish and U.S researchers made a startling discovery in a freezer stored away in a Copenhagen laboratory: ice core samples from Greenland containing pristine pieces of leaves and twigs. Greenland, these findings indicate, has been ice free in the recent geological past and is therefore more sensitive to climatic shifts than what has previously been known. When the news about this landmark discovery broke, another question arose to the surface as well: what were these samples doing in a forgotten Copenhagen freezer? The samples, it turned out, originate from ice core drillings that took place in 1966, at the US army base Camp Century, which was located in northwestern Greenland. After being recovered from the ice sheet, they were transported to the University of Buffalo and, in the 1990’s, to the University of Copenhagen, where they were forgotten until the researchers stumbled upon them by chance in 2019. The curious story of these ice core samples points to the longer history of using ice to understand the past and increasingly also to predict the future. In this sense, the leaves and twigs found in the ice core samples are part of two histories at once: the geological history of the planet and the scientific history of ice core drilling and environmental knowledge production.
Time has been an important category for glaciological research since at least the 19th century, but the relation between the time found in the ice and Western historical consciousness has changed considerably over time. For most of the the 19th and 20th centuries the timelines of history did not intersect with the timelines of ice sheets and glaciers. Early 20th century adventurers saw the Arctic and Antarctica as timeless spaces, frozen in a state of hazardous cold and inhospitable living conditions. In the interwar period, Swedish glaciologist Hans Ahlmann took interest in the growth and shrinkage of glaciers in northern Sweden and can be seen as an emblematic example of early interest in tracing environmental change through ice. He made annual measurements and kept track of the glaciers in real time and used the calendar as a metaphor to describe how the glaciers changed as the days went by. His horizontal outlook, in which the glaciers in their entirety were studied as parts of the landscape, was challenged in the postwar era by a vertical approach rendered possible through ice core drilling technology.
Early ice core scientists, like the ones who drilled at Camp Century in 1966, recovered long, cylinder-shaped cut-outs of the ice sheets, through which the stratigraphy of the ice was suddenly made visible. New isotope dating technologies allowed them to date and study each layer in great detail. Another temporal metaphor became increasingly commonplace to describe ice: the archive. In comparison to Ahlmann’s calendar, the ice-as-archive metaphor pointed to the vast timescales made visible through the new drilling technology and the notion that ice could be used to learn about the deep planetary past.
The rise of the ice core – and the ice-as-archive imaginary – coincided with a broader rise of global environmental politics in the 1960’s and 1970’s. New questions arose for the ice core scientists: Could the historical data derived from the ice cores help make sense of human impact on the global environment? Ice core data from the Camp Century drillings would, for example, provide an empirical basis for geochemist Wallace Broecker in his influential article “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” published in Science in 1975. By drawing on climate data derived from the ice cores, Broecker could make a general argument about the future of the Earth’s climate and the role of fossil fuel combustion in future climatic changes.
As the future appeared as a new domain that could be studied through the ice, neither the ice-as-calendar nor the ice-as-archive imaginary was sufficient to describe the work of the ice core. A different temporal metaphor began to appear: ice-as-time machine. Compared to Ahlmann’s calendars, which were oriented towards the present and near past, and the early ice core scientists archives, which were oriented towards the deep past, the time machine implies a temporal multiplicity: through the ice, we can move back as well as forward in time. The title of ice core scientist Richard B. Alley’s 2000 book sums up this new future oriented approach: The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change and Our Future. Perhaps, the recent finds in the Copenhagen freezer can be seen as yet another example of how ice can bring together planetary histories and the political present. The frozen plant structures provide a snapshot from the geological past, but also, potentially, a snapshot of a future in which human impact has rendered Greenland ice free once again.
But the the odd history of the ice core samples, travelling from a Greenland army base to Buffalo to Copenhagen, also shows that neat temporal metaphors tend to obscure the laborious processes that make time legible through ice. Even though the pristine condition of the leaves and twigs in the Copenhagen samples seems to provide unmediated access to a different time, they can only be made to make sense through intense scientific work and pre-existing infrastructures and material conditions.
The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, in his recent book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, that the geophysical history of the planet has encountered the “humanocentric” history of the globe. Perhaps, ice core samples can be understood as a medium in which these encounters can take place. The history of ice core drilling can point us towards the specific historical contexts where the history of the planet could meet the history of the globe. Even though the knowledge is planetary in its scope, the ways it gets produced is still bound to particular geographies. The planetary encounters Chakrabarty describes becomes known not all at once, not everywhere, but in specific sites with histories of their own: in research stations, laboratories, vast datasets, and, sometimes, in a forgotten freezer in Copenhagen.
