Timescapes of Modernity

The Environment and Invisible Hazards

Barbara Adam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134715367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Ciencia medioambiental

Timescapes of Modernity explores the relationship between time and environmental and socio-cultural concerns. Using examples such as the BSE crisis, the Sea Empress oil pollution and the Chernobyl radiation Barbara Adam argues that environmental hazards are inescapably tied to the successes of the industrial way of life. Global markets and economic growth; large-scale production of food; the speed of transport and communication; the 24 hour society and even democratic politics are among the invisible hazards we face. With this unique 'timescape' perspective the author dislodges assumptions about environmental change, enables a rethinking of environmental problems and provides the potential for new strategies to deal with environmental hazards.

Part I
HABITS OF THE MIND
Environmental timescapes conceptualised

1
NATURE RE/CONSTITUTED AND RE/
CONCEPTUALISED
Mapping the scope of industrial traditions of thought

Introduction

Contemporary environmental hazards make it difficult to conceive of nature and culture as separate. Whether we think of the ozone hole, pollution, or food scares, nature is inescapably contaminated by human activity, that is, by a way of life that is practised and exported by industrial societies. This loss of clear distinction between nature and culture, however, is not only brought about by the industrialisation of nature but also by the hazards that endanger humans, animals and plants alike. That is to say, the common danger has a levelling effect that whittles away some of the painstakingly erected boundaries. It erodes the meticulously constructed and carefully guarded differences between humans and (the rest of) nature, between creators of culture and creatures of instinct, or to use an earlier distinction, between beings with and beings without a soul.

In the threat people have the experience that they breathe like plants, and live from water as the fish live in water. The toxic threat makes them sense that they participate with their bodies in things—’a metabolic process with consciousness and morality’—and consequently, that they can be eroded like the stones and the trees in the acid rain.

(Beck, 1992a:74)

Of course, the distinction between nature and culture could be upheld only on the basis of a strict separation of mind and body and the consignment of the latter to a lower level of existence. Whilst bodies and the dependence on birth and death remind humans of the inescapability of the earthly dimension of their being, cultural activities facilitate the belief in difference and a distancing from all things natural. Through mind-based culture, humans have sought to transcend their earth-bound condition and the limits set by nature: art and writing, ritual and exchange based on money are all ways to overcome earthly transience and human finitude. Technology has played a particularly pertinent role in this flight from nature. Technologies ranging from the axe to nuclear power are expressions of the human effort to extend the ‘natural’ powers of the body and the senses by artificial means: x-rays to extend vision, wheels and later machines to speed up movement across space, computers to expand the capacity of the brain, genotechnology to redesign and compress evolutionary processes. Collectively, these developments in technology have contributed to the ever-increasing distance between natural processes and cultural activity. In the light of this history, it is not surprising that (Western) industrial societies’ intellectual history is marked by an effort to put on ever firmer footings the difference between human culture and nature, as well as the distance between human mental activity and the physicality of being.

Some of the successes of this progressive dissociation, however, have developed into environmental hazards. Radiation from nuclear power, disruption of hormonal function from synthetic chemicals, and pollution from the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s), the burning of fossil fuels and motorised transport are just a few pertinent illustrations of where intended technological developments result in unforeseen, unwanted problems. As existential threats, these industrial achievements bring us once more face to face with our being rooted in and dependent upon nature. As two sides of the same coin, success and excess have brought us full circle to confront the basis of our existence and present us now with the opportunity to re-think the meaning of human being and finitude. This shifting ground of conception and knowledge presents an opening for seeking fresh answers to the question ‘How shall we live?’ (see also Adam, 1996a:99; Beck, 1992a: 28; Giddens, 1991:215, 223; Weber, 1919/1985:143, 152–3).

A first step towards such a re-vision, it seems to me, would be to break down the old boundaries and to reconfigure the nature—culture divide. There is, however, as yet little evidence that this is happening. It seems that the conceptual implications of the environmental threats have not yet penetrated everyday understandings of nature. That is to say, despite the permeation of nature by technology and irrespective of the recognition that environmental hazards do not discriminate between animals and humans, the nature— culture distinction continues unabated as the dominant everyday conception in (Western) industrial societies. In other words, lay understanding, especially among city dwellers, remains unchanged: nature means green fields and pretty countryside, existing ‘out there’ as a place for leisure and stress relief, aesthetic consumption and redemption.

A second step would be to bring the complex temporality of being to the forefront of understanding of that existential question. At present, a noteworthy feature of contemporary understandings of environmental hazards is their emphasis on space. At one level, of course, this is not surprising given the spatial reach of the problems and their noted disregard for boundaries. What is surprising, however, is the lack of focus on time, considering the striking temporal characteristics of contemporary environmental phenomena ranging from pollution and degradation of the environment to radiation and the disruption of the endocrine systems in all species. Gone is the simple world of linear causal links between input and output, of proportional relations between action and effect, of human time-scales for political planning horizons. Gone too is the comforting dependence on scientific certainty and accurate predictions. The incubation time of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE or mad cow disease), for example, is thought to be somewhere between five and twenty (possibly even fifty) years, whilst scientific predictions of the temporal boundaries of the effects of Chernobyl on Cumbrian sheep have expanded from three weeks to six weeks and more until, ten years on, the scientists have given up guessing. Today, they cannot even be certain that their initial distinction between Sellafield and Chernobyl radiation can be upheld (see Wynne, 1992, 1996). Oil disasters like the one in February 1996 off the coast of West Wales, where the Sea Empress discharged 70,000 tonnes of light crude oil into the coastal waters, have had a range of time-based effects: immediate and visible ones as well as quantifiable but open-ended ones, such as the decimation of the sea bird population and the contamination of marine life. By far the largest proportion of consequences, however, are invisible and, by the time they finally materialise as interconnected webs of symptoms, they will not be traceable with certainty to any particular causes. Given such extraordinary temporal features, one would have expected there to be a steeply rising interest in the time dimension of environmental processes among all who are concerned with and affected by such matters. There is, however, as yet no evidence of such change in focus, just as there is no significant shift in perspectives on nature. Instead, emphases remain firmly on space as the physical realm which is accessible to sense data and amenable to quantification. This book is a first sustained attempt to remedy that situation.

In this first chapter, I want to draw out some of the connections between the persistent nature-culture divide, the emphasis on visible spatiality and the Newtonian science tradition of thought, and to show how a timescape perspective can take us in directions and areas of inquiry that spatial analyses can’t reach. Having just argued for the need to reassess the nature— culture separation, I propose nevertheless that in this temporally charged context of evaporating distinctions it is important also to understand some of the time-based differences as a precondition to being able to seriously engage in existential questions about ways of life and responsibility. Moreover, focus on the temporalities of the industrial way of life, as distinct from the temporalities and rhythmicities of living nature, is crucial for grasping ‘ice-berg phenomena’, that is, for understanding hazards that defy the theories and methods of traditional science because they are both visible and invisible, material and immaterial. To express this particular quality of contemporary environmental phenomena, I shall refer to them as in/visible and im/material processes. The foregrounding of such temporal distinctions necessarily entails examination and some renewal of the conceptual tool kit. Thus, to engage with below-the-surface and beyond-the-present issues requires creative conceptual moves beyond the materialist, objectivist praxis of science and, as I argue in the next chapter, innovative socio-economic policies cognisant of the limitations of the Newtonian heritage in both science and economics, It necessitates the unsettling of some habits of mind and the strengthening of others.

Nature re/constituted

Animals grazing peacefully on a hillside, waves lapping gently up the pebble beach, a pine forest whistling in a storm, a river bursting its banks, a hurricane tossing houses and cars in the air like play-things, a bush fire raging out of control—all are images of nature, some idyllic others threatening. Can we be sure, however, that this is nature in the conventional meaning of the word, that is, the result of forces uncontaminated by human activity and production? What becomes of this understanding of nature when those grazing animals are contaminated with radiation or suffering from BSE, when the waves carry the residues of an oil spill or other forms of pollution, when the pine forest (a monoculture, likely to have been planted during the last century) is suffering from the effects of acid rain, when the flooding is due to agricultural practices that have led to over silting, when the extreme weather conditions are linked to global warming, and when the bush fire and the scale of its damage have been facilitated and exacerbated by human actions? During this century it has become increasingly difficult to sustain the division between nature and culture. When even the stratosphere is affected by the industrial way of life, when the sun is turned from source of health and well-being to health hazard and danger, when the foods we eat are as likely to poison as they are to nourish us, when the water that is to cleanse us is a potential source of skin diseases, when the air we breathe causes respiratory diseases and allergies, when the traditionally conceived untamed, raw power of nature is so extensively influenced by human action then the traditional separation between nature and human culture collapses. In such a context, as Giddens (1991:224) argues, nature is brought ‘to an end as a domain external to human knowledge and involvement’.

Recognition of the pervasive impact of human activity on the environment is, of course, not new to this century. During the middle of the last century Karl Marx was reflecting on the acculturation of nature when he wrote in The German Ideology (1968:59) that ‘the nature which preceded human history no longer exists anywhere’. Already at that time, there seemed few places left on this earth that could be said to be uncontaminated by human cultural activity. The Romantic movement too was responding to the technological encroachment on nature and its exploitation as an inanimate resource. Romantics were writing about a ‘return to nature’, and representing nature in its wild and untamed forms in their paintings. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, in America, the land of seemingly boundless wilderness, Henry David Thoreau was one of the first writers to identify the potential threats to unadulterated nature. A disciple of the Romantic writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, he proposed that areas of wilderness be preserved, that logging, settling and cultivation be practised in moderation and in harmony with nature. In his books, Thoreau contrasted the secular, materialist and commodified way of life with the natural principle of harmonious cohabitation and its redemptive spirit. The Romantic movement thus tends to be seen as a first response to industrialisation and the loss not just of untamed nature but its spirituality and soul. That is to say, it arose with the commercialisation of nature and the development of a mechanical science that conceived of nature as an inanimate resource for exploration and investigation, human consumption and economic development. Thus, Kate Soper writes,

Untamed nature begins to figure as a positive and redemptive power only at the point where human mastery over its forces is extensive enough to be experienced as itself a source of danger and alienation. It is only a culture which has begun to register the negative consequences of its industrial achievements that will be inclined to return to the wilderness, or to aestheticise its terrors as a form of foreboding against further advances against its territory.

(Soper, 1995:25)

The increase in environmental movements during the second half of this century further substantiates the thesis that the level of concern with nature and the environment stands in a direct relation to the degree of human alienation and the extent to which nature as uncontaminated nature is rapidly disappearing. In this context, it is the recognition of human endangerment through hazards arising from the industrial way of life that precipitates the increasing interest in nature and environmental issues. Stephan Heiland (1992a, 1992b), however, draws a pertinent distinction between existential threats and threats to the environment. A Nomadic tribe whose basis of existence is threatened by a combination of environmental degradation and ‘global development’ (see also Leckie, 1995 and The New Internationalist, April 1995) is not facing an environmental but an existential crisis. For members of such a tribe the threats constitute an ‘in here’, not an ‘out there’ problem in the same way as the beef crisis is conceived by cattle farmers as a threat to their existence and not as an environmental crisis. For the largest proportion of members of industrial societies, in contrast, the problems are still external; the hazards have not yet penetrated to bases of existence. Consequently, issues continue to be conceived in external terms, that is, detached from the Self and projected onto trees and animals, beaches and lakes, heaven and earth. The causes too are understood externally, one step removed from personal actions: chimneys belching out pollution, oil rigs and pipe lines, nuclear power stations and inappropriate animal feed stuffs are just some of the sources associated with out-there environmental hazards which, in turn, threaten us. According to Heiland, therefore, industrial societies are not just the causes of environmental problems they are also the source for conceiving of the dangers in environmental terms. This understanding, in turn, is rooted in a very specific conceptualisation of the nature—culture relation. As this book shows, especially in the first two chapters, it is tied to an emphasis on vision and space, linked to the successes and imperialistic tendencies of the sciences and their products during the past three to four hundred years and connected to structural features of the global economy.

With their intimate connection to power, we can think of the industrial— scientific—economic relation to nature in terms of a ‘Faustian bargain’. Rupert Sheldrake (1990:28–9) writes engagingly about this trade of the soul for magical, superhuman powers over life. He, like many others, links the stories of Faust and Frankenstein to the scientific quest for unlimited knowledge and to the products of a knowledge whose un/intended consequences have returned to haunt us. He suggests that members of the British government have talked about their country’s nuclear policy in terms of a Faustian bargain from which there is no turning back: a country can stop building nuclear weapons and power stations but the knowledge is irreversible—the genie is out of the bottle, in need of constant control, management and safeguarding. The British nuclear policy and other ‘bargains’ of this kind were not without consequences; they fundamentally altered the relation between human beings and nature: ‘instead of being concerned above all with what nature could do to us’, writes Giddens (1994a:102), ‘we have now to worry about what we have done to nature.’ In the light of this interpenetration and the history of mutual implication of nature and cultural activity, it is interesting to find that the nature—culture distinction in which nature is understood as culture’s external other is persisting in both lay and scientific discourse.

Upholding difference and distance: images of nature as culture’s ‘other’

Wildlife, animals and plants, countryside and fields, woodlands and mountains, rivers, lakes and the sea, earth, wind and fire, these are some of the most popular images of nature that emerged from my short interviews with young adults. Almost invariably, these images were developed in sharp contrast and great distance to their own city lives. Nature was defined as ‘other’ —from Self, humans and culture—and away from the hassle and traffic of the city, its smells and built-up areas, its people and its social structures of control. Nature as the countryside and its inhabitants, moreover, was associated with pleasant feelings, a romantic vision of a wholesome world beyond the corrupting influences of the city. As such, my findings overlap with those of Trommer’s (1988) investigation of conceptualisations of nature in pupils of a German city school. These young people also thought of nature as external to themselves and associated it with countryside, wildlife and positive, romantic feelings. In both cases, the city-based images of nature have a strangely atemporal, universal and abstract quality. They portray a pleasant but rather unfamiliar, almost alien world of picture postcards and holidays, television programmes and school outings. Finally, Kate Soper, in her book What is Nature? summarises lay concepts of nature along very similar lines.

‘nature’ is used in reference to ordinarily observable features of theworld: the ‘natural’ as opposed to the urban or industrial environment (‘landscape’, ‘wilderness’, ‘countryside’, ‘rurality’), animals, domestic and wild, the physical body in space and raw materials.This is the nature of immediate experience and aesthetic appreciation; the nature we have destroyed and polluted and are asked toconserve and preserve.

(Soper, 1995:156)

While my small investigation confirmed the ‘ideal types’ presented in the literature, it also pointed to an extensive potential and capacity for making distinctions. First, as one might expect, I found a substantial difference between urban and rural conceptions and, second, I discovered marked discriminations being made between images of nature and those of the environment.

I learned that members of rural farming communities credit nature with active powers and with what could almost be described as a ‘personality’. Nature was widely thought of as something that functions without and despite of human activity: a tree sprouting from the base after it has been cut down, the acorn growing into an oak, the heifer that knows what to do with her newly born calf, the lamb that recognises its mother in a field of other lambs and ewes. There was recognition that humans can destroy parts and aspects of nature, can affect it, manipulate and adapt it to human need and desire, and to some extent even repair it. In the rural conception of nature, however, this influence was distinguished from control since humans were considered to have no control over nature—over tides and seasons, wind and weather, the changing lengths of night and day.

It is interesting to note that such differences in understanding nature have been expressed as early as the Middle Ages when they were formulated as a distinction between natura naturata and natura naturans (see also Sheldrake, 1990:61 and Chapter 4 more generally). Natura naturata was thought of as natured nature, that is, nature’s products: mountains, lakes, trees and animals. It is that which we can observe with our senses. Natura naturans, in contrast, was understood as the temporally constituted dimension, the force that gives rise to those observable phenomena, the invisible energy that is recognisable only through its products. Even though we might say that we can intuit or ‘sense’ this force, its processes work unseen below the surface, beyond the reach of our senses. At its inception, natura naturans was considered the soul of nature. Rupert Sheldrake explains what happened to natura naturans with the development of the physical sciences.

When the founders of mechanistic science expelled souls from nature, leaving only passive matter of motion, they placed all active powers in God. Nature was only natura naturata. The invisible productive power, natura naturans, was divine rather than physical, supernatural rather than natural.
But this attempt to remove all traces of spontaneous organising activity from nature ran into grave difficulties from the outset. The ghost of the invisible souls remained, in form of invisible forces. Gravitational attraction, acting at a distance, showed that there was more to the physical world than mere passive matter in motion. The nature of light remained mysterious, and so did chemical, electrical and magnetic phenomena.

(Sheldrake, 1990:61–2)

From the rural conceptions by members of the farming community, we can see that the force beyond the senses has been retained as an integral part of understanding. Her...