Environmentalism

The View from Anthropology

Kay Milton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134868100
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Located in a wide spectrum of current research and practice, from analyses of green ideology and imagery, enviromental law and policy, and local enviromental activism in the West to ethnographic studies of relationships between humans and their enviroments in hunter/gatherer societies, Enviromentalism: The View from Anthropology offers an original perspective on what is probably the best-known issue of the late twentieth century. It will be particularly useful to all social scientists interested in environmentalism and human ecology, to environmental policy-makers and to undergraduates, lecturers and researchers in social anthropology, development studies and sociology.

Chapter 1
Environmentalism

A new moral discourse for technological society?

Robin Grove-White

The rise of ‘the environment’ as a social and cultural phenomenon was a striking feature of the 1970s and 1980s around the world. And if now, in 1993, it has begun to lose its sheen as the focus of an emergent social movement, that development too is a reflection of how widely its forms and perspectives have begun to penetrate into the common consciousness. Rhetorically at least, the problems of global climatic change, of waste and the motor car, of ozone holes and endangered species are now elements of the shared vocabulary in cultures like the UK’s. Communiqués on common environmental aspirations have become almost routine in the currency of summit gatherings of world leaders. We have entered an era in which not only marginal social groups but also political parties, industrialists, religious leaders, scientists of all descriptions, even the legal and accountancy professions, all seek to reflect a sensitivity to ‘environmental’ priorities, whatever the other commitments they may aver.

The concern of this chapter is to make a small contribution to helping explain the apparent social purchase of ‘environmental’ discourse in societies like that of the UK. As numerous sociologists (including Beck 1986, Lash and Urry 1987, Giddens 1990, Bauman 1991) have argued, we are in the throes of convulsive ‘post-modern’ social change on a number of fronts, with ‘risk’ a cultural theme of growing significance. It would be surprising if the rise of ‘the environment’ as a central problematic were not bound up in such developments. Yet there is little recognition of such a perspective in the official world or in the research circles from whom advice on such matters is usually sought. That fact too demands explanation.

The nub of the argument developed below is that the dominant version of what constitutes ‘environmentalism’ is seriously incomplete. This is because it omits to recognize key social and cultural dimensions of what has driven the discourse into public prominence. These are dimensions on which Mary Douglas first offered initial anthropological insight more than twenty years ago (1970). Nor is the omission fortuitous. The frequently overlooked social and cultural dimensions constitute some of the most distinctive features of ‘the environment’. They permit us to recognize in the arguments about it elements of a new form of moral discourse. However, such dimensions are extremely difficult for our social institutions to digest, because of their potential implications for a range of commitments, epistemological as well as institutional and economic, throughout society. So they have been sidelined, by and large. This calls into question whether ‘environmentalism’ can be thought of as a successful moral discourse.

To express the matter in this way may seem somewhat portentous. To keep the argument in bounds I consider the general problem through the experience of a specific culture, that of the UK.

The Emergence of an Orthodoxy

Most commentators on the development of environmental politics in Britain point to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s speech to the Royal Society of 22 September 1988 as a crucial watershed (Thatcher 1988). Given Britain’s highly centralized political institutions, the speech and the energy with which its contents were promoted in backstage media briefings and subsequent official initiatives were taken rightly to represent an official conversion to the reality of environmental problems. The effect of the speech was to unlock a new level of interest and commitment in officialdom and the media, legitimizing in Whitehall the depth of public concern which had been building up over the previous two decades. Following the publication of the UN-sponsored Brundtland Report, Our Common Future (Brundtland 1987), and in parallel with other initiatives in 1988 by senior political leaders in other countries—Gorbachev, Mitterrand, Bush and Kohl among them— the speech and the events it triggered helped vault environmental concerns into ‘that rarefied zone where national leaders are the principal players’ (Burke 1989). What had previously been seen politically in the UK as ‘minority’, or marginal, concerns were now affirmed as of central significance.

Rapidly, following the Prime Minister’s lead, the official environmental agenda began to consolidate around a cluster of major issues—the greenhouse effect, ozone depletion, toxic wastes, wildlife and habitat losses, pollution of sea and rivers among them. Overwhelmingly, such issues have come to command consensus amongst politicians, industry, the news media and key environmental pressure groups as the significant issues, to which all efforts need to be directed to find solutions.

What features have characterized this ‘orthodox’ consensus? First, and overwhelmingly, the most pressing problems have been seen as existing objectively in nature, mediated through the natural sciences. Environmental problems worthy of the name are thus regarded as physical problems, arising from specific human interventions in natural systems; their character and boundaries are, so to speak, given to us from nature, their authenticity guaranteed by natural scientific investigation and confirmation (with global population pressures adding a chronic extra dimension). This being the case, the argument continues, what are now needed are ‘solutions’, to mitigate these physically identified ‘problems’—solutions which may be found in persuasion or regulation, in technological innovation, in international agreements or in the application of economic instruments. In each of the international agreements so far established—on CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), on sea-dumping of industrial wastes, on sulphur dioxide emissions and so on—there are implicit commitments to beliefs about the physical limits of the ‘problems’, and about the restorative effects of the particular actions agreed for limiting the pollutants in question.

Clearly, the problems captured by this overall description are immensely important. They have huge implications for equity between North and South, as well as for the quality of life in East and West. The scientific consensus on issues like global climate change and ozone depletion is impressive and alarming; so too is the evidence of accumulations of toxic wastes and other pollutants in our soil and water. Public opinion and the environmental pressure groups (nongovernmental organizations—NGOs) are also seen as having a significant potential role: while the ‘rationality’ and ‘responsibility’ of the NGOs may be seen as suspect, because of their supposedly myopic partisanship, nevertheless ‘solutions’ to the principal problems will not come without their cooperation, in helping shape and mobilize public opinion.

This characterization of the prevailing orthodoxy is drawn most immediately from UK experience—the recent White Paper, This Common Inheritance (HMSO 1990), embodies broadly this view—but variants of it are now influential in most Western countries. The environmental problematic is now becoming defined and understood as a set of discretely identifiable physical problems with human ramifications, some of them acknowledged as deeprooted in our economic practice and very difficult to address. ‘Solving’ the most intractable of them, it is suggested, will require major achievements of regulation, fiscal innovation and international diplomacy, as well as goodwill of a kind almost without precedent. There is no time to be lost: partnerships of industrialists, politicians, NGOs and scientists are vitally needed to help develop realistic instruments to this end.

This description seems so self-evidently true, I suspect, that it may seem odd to question it at a fundamental level. However, it is far from adequate as an account of what has been going on. Here are four of its shortcomings.

Trivialization of the public’s role

The orthodoxy—with its assumption that the key problems are those identifiable by natural scientific investigation—fails to account convincingly for the startling fact that almost all of the most significant environmental issues, global or domestic, were crystallized first not by governments reponding to or using ‘science’, but by poorly resourced NGOs and sundry individual environmentalists in the period between the late 1960s and early 1980s. Indeed, too often over this period, the role of scientists and official scientific institutions was to patronize so-called ‘emotional’ and ‘irrational’ expressions of public environmental concern—on issues much later acknowledged by official scientific bodies and institutions to be indeed genuine and serious problems. Almost all of the arguments, and most of the solutions, now advocated by environment ministries and agencies have a long history—whether in the fields of energy, transport, agricultural policy or even industrial policy. In most of their outlines and much of their detail, the analyses and prescriptions which now increasingly underpin official thinking focus on much the range of issues on which environmental groups have been banging the drum since the early 1970s—physical excesses of trajectories of industrial society, the inadequacy of present regulatory processes for controlling such ‘externalities’, and the need for new approaches which recognize and take advantage of the inherently malleable nature of such concepts as ‘economic growth’ and ‘consumer demand’. To a striking extent, the 1970s analyses of UK NGOs like Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) and others have been vindicated—down to such diverse and specific causes cèlèbres as the economics of nuclear power; the need for, and feasibility of, major programmes of energy conservation and improved end-use efficiencies; the arguments against ever-increasing proliferation of the private car; the links between environmental degradation in Third World countries and poverty and famine; and the impacts on vegetation and wildlife of modern agriculture.

The point of this observation is not to score points by demonstrating the prescience of NGOs compared with governments and their advisers. Rather, it is to ask how a plausible account of this social reality can be derived from the ‘orthodox’ description of the environmental phenomenon given above. That model sees NGOs and ‘public opinion’ as essentially captious and irrational, given to ‘unscientific’ outbursts. These organizations are acknowledged to have had social importance, in having helped bring issues to political attention (Ashby 1978); but according to the orthodoxy, it has been science, particularly scientific enquiry conducted within an official framework, which has provided the true litmus test for whether or not issues are indeed issues.

The oddity remains. How and why ‘the public’ (reflected in the NGOs) understood the issues in advance of the arrival of official ‘science’, or why their ‘intuitions’ should have resonated so powerfully with wider social attitudes, is not considered a matter of significance, and these days tends to be set to one side in official circles.

Inflation of the role of science

A second shortcoming of the prevailing orthodoxy concerns precisely its view of the authority of the natural sciences, in providing the criteria for what constitutes ‘fact’ in the most significant areas of the environmental domain. Though the 1990 White Paper and recent international agreements on issues like North Sea pollution have laid new emphasis on the occasional need for action ahead of scientific ‘proof’ of damage, the so-called precautionary principle, the implicit underlying official conception of science remains a positivistic one. That is to say, scientific procedures are held up publicly as providing ‘proof’ and as therefore able to define and identify ‘fact’ in this field.

However, growing understanding by sociologists (in the wake of Popper, Kuhn, et al.) of the ways in which scientists actually conduct their business continues to undermine this reassuringly solid picture. Far from providing a fixed, objectively verifiable body of knowledge of nature’s workings—through privileged access to essential physical reality—science itself exists as a social construct, in which doctrines of ‘objective’ practice rest on a web of conventions, practices, understandings and ‘negotiated’ indeterminacies (Wynne 1987).

The corollary is that scientific ‘proof’ or ‘certainty’, in the real world of non-laboratory circumstances in which environmental science has to be conducted, is a chimera. Uncertainty and indeterminacy in this arena are not simply provisional; they are all but endemic. Most scientists are responsible to institutions (industry, government, research councils). They are necessarily as selective in their identification of ‘problems’, and the relevant parameters that need to be considered, as are individuals or institutions using other modes of perception or understanding. What is more, society’s concerns and the actions of an infinity of other actors are in constant, and unpredictable, flux. This helps explain why it is that controversy is so recurrent in politically sensitive fields in which science is used by official environmental agencies to underwrite inaction or to provide political reassurance. Quite simply, the scope for redefining issues ‘scientifically’, to embrace ever more new, real-world variables, or to refocus the significance attached to those already acknowledged, is to all intents and purposes infinite. It follows that the same is true also of the scope for criticism and disagreement, over much more fundamental matters than simply whether any specific scientific claim is ‘accurate’ or not.

So here too the prevailing orthodoxy is far less robust than it purports to be.

The perverse dominance of ‘interests’

A third failing of the orthodoxy lies in its distorted reliance on the notion of ‘interests’ as the central tool for explaining environmental concern or value, and justifying corrective measures. This tendency flows from the conception of the sovereign individual, which has been at the centre of the British liberal political tradition since Locke; the picturing of most human motivation in terms of interests has been a natural corollary. It now dominates public political discussion of environmental matters in Britain, whether in the form of argument about straightforward conflicts involving individual ‘interests’, or talk of ‘interests’ of generations as yet unborn, or advocacy of the ‘interests’ of other (non-human) species.

There are two objections to this tendency. In the first place, it is simply not true that all environmental concern can be characterized appropriately in terms of interests. In my own experience, and contrary to appearances, individuals who have most shaped the environmental movement have been drawn together quite as much by openness and a groping sense of shared, or potentially shared, identity—forged against the prevailing social orthodoxy—as by the pursuit of predefined policy objectives. As continental sociologists like Melucci (1989) have recognized, such individuals have been seeking and perhaps finding a better, more fruitful collective engagement with, and exploration of, reality, discovering it through simple human interaction with one another, against a background of tension and argument with the prevailing social ethos. Such processes are of their nature open-ended and indeterminate. They cannot be represented usefully in terms of interests, other than ex post facto, since even the individuals concerned are by definition unable to articulate fully what they are seeking. Indeed, part of their inspiration has lain in discomfort at, and the wish to find alternatives to, precisely the manipulation of political discourse entailed by the dominance of the ‘interests’ mentality.

This points to the second objection. While obviously in many circumstances environmental concerns do involve interests, the present dominance of this way of looking at questions of value has developed a manipulatively self-fulfilling dynamic of its own. NGOs, recognizing that this is the discourse in which our political and legal culture now frames issues most comfortably, have tended to reduce what are frequently more inchoate concerns into terms consistent with the discourse, in their pursuit of advantage in controversies over issues as different as nuclear safety, global climate change, habitat protection or green belts. But necessary though this may be, its effect is further to reinforce the vocabulary’s worst procrustean tendencies. Like all specialist discourses, it has difficulty in bringing to light or representing perspectives on reality which do not readily fit its own particular framing.

All of this points to a striking irony—that the supposedly detached and objective language of interests embodies crucially important normative commitments. And in environmental controversies, in practice, it is frequently encountered, and resented, as a moral rather than a neutrally descriptive discourse—and a thoroughly inadequate one at that.

No place for mystery

A fourth respect in which the present orthodoxy on environmental questions is inad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Editor’s preface
• Introduction: Environmentalism and anthropology
• 1 Environmentalism: a new moral discourse for technological society?
• 2 Globes and spheres: the topology of environmentalism
• 3 Between science and shamanism: the advocacy of environmentalism in Toronto
• 4 Standing in for nature: the practicalities of environmental organizations’ use of science
• 5 All animals are equal but some are cetaceans: conservation and culture conflict
• 6 The making of an environmental doctrine: public trust and American shellfishermen
• 7 The precautionary principle: use with caution!
• 8 Tribal metaphorization of human-nature relatedness: a comparative analysis
• 9 Rhetoric, practice and incentive in the face of the changing times: a case study in Nuaulu attitudes to conservation and deforestation
• 10 Natural symbols and natural history: chimpanzees, elephants and experiments in Mende thought
• 11 Local awareness of the soil environment in the Papua New Guinea highlands
• 12 Political decision-making: environmentalism, ethics and popular participation in Italy
• 13 Environmental protest, bureaucratic closure: the politics of discourse in rural Ireland
• 14 Eating green(s): discourses of organic food
• 15 The resurgence of romanticism: contemporary neopaganism, feminist spirituality and the divinity of nature
• Index