Transcript What is Medialogy? - Aalborg Universitet

Sustainability Science
and Research:
A Historical Introduction
Andrew Jamison
Based on:
The Making of Green Knowledge. Environmental Politics
and Cultural Transformation, by Andrew Jamison
(Cambridge University Press 2001)
Hubris and Hybrids. A Cultural History of Technology
and Science, by Mikael Hård and Andrew Jamison
(Routledge 2005)
A Brief History of Green Knowledge

The romantic critique of industrial hubris (e.g. Mary Shelley)

An emerging environmental sensibility (e.g. Thoreau)

The socialist critique of technology (e.g. Morris)

Conservation and nature protection (e.g. Muir)

Regionalism and urban reform (e.g. Mumford)

Environmentalism and green politics (e.g. Carson)
Long Waves of Industrialization
mechanization
industrialization
modernization
1850
1800
romanticism
cooperation
socialism
populism
scientification
1900
anticolonialism
fascism
1950
globalization
2000
environmentalism
feminism
Phases of Social Movements
The First Wave

”the industrial revolution” (ca 1780-1830)

Iron, textile machines, and steam engines

Technologies of mechanization

The factory as an organizational innovation

Social and cultural movements:
• ”machine-storming” and cooperation
• romantic art and literature, e.g. Frankenstein
”Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least
by my example, how dangerous is the
acquirement of knowledge, and how much
happier that man is who believed his native
town to be the world, than he who aspires to
become greater than his nature will allow...”
Mary Shelley:
Challenging the hubris
Henry David Thoreau (1817-62)
• a ”romantic” scientist, author of Walden
• one of the founders of environmentalism
• also wrote On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849)
Thoreau’s idea of science
”The true man of science will know nature better by
his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear,
feel better than other men. His will be a deeper and
finer experience. We do not learn by inference and
deduction, and the application of mathematics to
philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy...”
The Second Wave

”the age of capital” (ca 1830-1880)

Railroads, telegraph, and steel

Technologies of socialization

The rise of the corporation (Carnegie, Krupp)

Social and cultural movements:
• populism, communism and social-democracy
• science fiction and arts and crafts
William Morris (1834-1896)

A romantic poet turned designer

Combined artistry and business

Mixed tradition and innovation

A utopian who was also practical
From ”Useful Work versus Useless Toil”
”The factories might be centres of intellectual activity also, and
work in them might well be varied very much: the tending of
the necessary machinery might to each individual be but a
short part of the day’s work. The other might vary from raising
food from the surrounding country to the study and practice
of art and science.... Science duly applied would enable them
to get rid of refuse, to minimize, if not wholly to destroy, all
the inconveniences which at present attend the use of
elaborate machinery, such as smoke, stench and noise; nor
would they endure that the buildings in which they worked or
lived should be ugly blots on the fair face of the earth.”
A major influence on…

Arts and crafts movements, garden cities

Interior and industrial design

Architecture: Wright, Gehry, Utzon

Art Nouveau and functionalism

Socialist politics and fantasy literature

The ”education of desire”
John Muir, the founder o
the Sierra Club
with Theodore Roosevelt in 1903
Muir’s idea of conservation
“The tendency nowadays to wander in wilderness is
delightful to see. Thousands of tired, over-civilized
people are beginning to find out that going to the
mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity;
and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not
only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as
fountains of life.”
The Third Wave

”the age of empire” (ca 1880-1930)

Electricity, automobiles, chemicals and airplanes

Technologies of modernization

Research becomes a business (Edison, DuPont)

Social and cultural movements:
• anticolonialism and fascism
• modernism and human ecology
The Urban Reform Tradition

Ebenezer Howard: Garden Cities, 1898

Upton Sinclair: The Jungle, 1906

Jane Addams: Twenty Years at Hull-House, 1910

Patrick Geddes: Cities in Evolution, 1915

Robert Park, et al: The City, 1925

Lewis Mumford: The Culture of Cities, 1938
Lewis Mumford
(1895-1990)

American writer and social critic

a founder of urban planning

one of the last ”public intellectuals”

one of the first ”human ecologists”

a cultural perspective on technology

active in regional planning movements
From The Culture of Cities
”Today we begin to see that the improvement of cities is
no matter for one-sided reforms: the task of city design
involves the vaster task of rebuilding our civilization. We
must alter the parasitic and predatory modes of life that
now play so large a part, and we must create...an effective
symbiosis, or co-operative living together. ”
The Fourth Wave

the coming of technoscience (ca 1930-1980)

Atomic energy, genetics, and computers

Technologies of scientification

The rise of transnational corporations (IBM, Sony)

Social and cultural movements:
• civil rights and ”ban the bomb”
• environmentalism, feminism and postmodernism
Phases of Environmental Politics
1. awakening
pre-1968
public education, local protests
2. ”age of ecology”
1969-1974
organizational and policy development
3. politicization
1975-1979
social movements in relation to energy policy
4. differentiation
1980-1986
professionalization and party politics
5. internationalization global orientation, sustainable development
1987-1993
6. integration
1994-2000
Agenda 21, green business/critical ecology
7. contention
2000s
globalization and climate change conflicts
Awakening

public education and debate

protests about air and water pollution

part of critique of consumer society

”internal” critique within science
Rachel Carson (1907-64)
• a biologist turned nature writer
• combined science and politics
• inspired environmental movement
”The road we have long been
traveling is deceptively easy, a
smooth superhighway om which
we progress with great speed,
but at its end lies disaster.”
The Age of Ecology

new activist and expert organizations

national and international agencies

programmatic ambitions: political ecology

pollution control policy orientation
Politicization

broad-based alliances

media become central sites of debate

organized information campaigns

focus on energy production and use

Interest in alternative and ”utopian” technologies
The New Alchemy Institute Ark
Nordic Folkcenter for Renewable Energy
Differentiation

political parties, professional activism

beginnings of environmental management

lobbying, expertise, research

wide range of issue areas

emergence of anti-environmentalism
The Risk Society Thesis

a variant of post-industrialism

outgrowth of nuclear energy and biotech debates

from production of ”goods” to ”bads”

the ”manufacturing of uncertainties”

need for ”reflexivity”, risk assessment
Internationalization

transnational networks and alliances

key sites: intergovernmental meetings

link to socio-economic development

emphasis on global issues

sustainable development new policy doctrine
Integration

appropriation by other actors

market becomes key political arena

importance of discursive, or cultural politics

green business versus critical ecology
Dialectics of Sustainable
Development
Green business
Critical ecology
”Ecological modernization”
”Environmental justice”
Instrumental rationality
Communicative rationality
Technological innovation
Appropriate technology
Commercial orientation
Community emphasis
Expert solutions
Public engagement
The Growth of Green Business
natural
capitalism
green growth
ecological economics
environmental
management
environmental impact
assessment
sustainable
development
appropriate technology,
renewable energy
ecoefficiency
corporate social
responsibility
pollution prevention,
cleaner technologies
environmental
economics and policy
pollution control,
”end-of pipe”
Environmental awareness, or consciousness
Science and Green Business

Environmental issues and, more recently, climate change seen as
providing new opportunities for scientists and engineers

A transdisciplinary and transnational approach to research

An emphasis on commercial networks, or systems of innovation: the
”triple helix”

A tendency toward hubris: the myth of science-based progress and the
technical fix
Contention

other issues become important

regime shift in US, Denmark and other countries

the coming of environmental skepticism, e.g. Lomborg

increasing emphasis on global warming

media – and internet - as key political sites
Environmental Skepticism

outgrowth of neo-conservative, neo-nationalist movements

supported financially by ”big oil” and agro-business

skeptical about importance of environmental problems

an organized opposition to green business

mobilizing traditional modernist and nationalist values
The Broader Context:
Changing Modes of Knowledge Making
“Little Science” “Big Science” “Controversy”
Before WWII
1940s-50s
1960s-70s
main
orientation
industrial
type of disciplinary
knowledge
ideal, or
values
academic
atomic
societal
“Globalization”
1980s-
commercial
multidisciplinary interdisciplinary transdisciplinary
bureaucratic
collective
entrepreneurial
The Age of ”Big Science”,
1940s and 1950s

expansion in size, scale and resources

atomic orientation, both military and ”civilian”

university-government collaboration

bureaucratic norm, or value system

new role for the state and multistate alliances
The Age of Controversy,
1960s and 1970s

critiques of militarization and ”big science”

public debates esp. about atomic energy

interest in student-centered forms of education

”grass-roots” engineering (e.g. OVE)

emergence of technology assessment
The Age of Globalization,
from 1980s

change in range and scope

market orientation, ”privatization”

university-industry collaboration

entrepreneurial norm, or value system

the state as strategist: innovation policy

from assessment to promotion: ”foresight”
The Coming of
Technoscience

blurring discursive boundaries


breaking down institutional borders


between science (episteme) and technology (techne)
between public and private, economic and academic
transgressing cognitive barriers

between academic disciplines and societal domains
The Cultural Appropriation of
Technoscience

The dominant , or hegemonic strategy (mode 2):
commercialization, entrepreneurship, transdisciplinarity

The residual, or traditionalist strategy (mode 1):
academicization, expertise, multidisciplinarity

An emerging, or sustainable strategy (mode 3):
hybridization, empowerment, cross-disciplinarity
Transdisciplinarity, or ”mode 2”
”Knowledge which emerges from a particular
context of application with its own distinct
theoretical structures, research methods and
modes of practice but which may not be locatable
on the prevailing disciplinary map.”
Michael Gibbons et al, The New Production of Knowledge (1994)
The Forces of Habit(us)

Sustainability science seen as a matter of
restructuring or recombining established
scientific and engineering fields

A kind of academicization strategy:
subdisciplinary specialties in academic
departments or multidisciplinary centers

A continuing belief in separating scientific
knowledge from politics
The Discipline as Habitus
“A discipline is defined by possession of a collective capital
of specialized methods and concepts, mastery of which is
the tacit or implicit price of entry to the field. It produces a
‘historical transcendental,’ the disciplinary habitus, a
system of schemes of perception and appreciation (where
the incorporated discipline acts as a censorship).”
Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity (2004)
A Need for a ”Mode 3”,
or a Hybrid Imagination
At the discursive, or macro level

Sustainability engineering: connecting science and
engineering to sustainable community development
At the institutional, or meso level

Social responsibility: creating opportunities for
learning across faculties and social domains
At the personal, or micro level

Technoscientific citizenship: combining scientific and
technical competence with socio-cultural
understanding
For example:
Fritjof Capra
• physicist-turned-environmentalist
• author of many popular books
• founder of Center for Ecoliteracy
“Since the outstanding
characteristic of the biosphere is
its inherent ability to sustain life,
a sustainable human community
must be designed in such a
manner that its technologies and
social institutions honor,
support, and cooperate with
nature's inherent ability to
sustain life.”
For example:
The Centre for Science and
Environment (CSE) is a public
interest research and advocacy
organisation based in New Delhi.
CSE researches into, lobbies for
and communicates the urgency of
development that is both
sustainable and equitable.
Anil Agarwal, the founder of CSE, shown at work with one of the six State
of India reports that the centre has put out since the 1980s.
For example:
The Alley Flat Initiative
The Alley Flat Initiative is a joint collaboration between the
University of Texas Center for Sustainable Development,
the Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation,
and the Austin Community Design and Development Center.
The Alley Flat Initiative proposes a new sustainable, green
affordable housing alternative for Austin.
From the
website:
The initial goal of the project was to build two prototype alley
flats (aka granny flats)- one for each of two families in East
Austin - that would showcase both the innovative design and
environmental sustainability features of the alley flat designs.
These prototypes will demonstrate how sustainable housing
can support growing communities by being affordable and
adaptable. The first of these prototypes celebrated its house
warming with the community in June of 2008, and the second
prototype is slated to begin construction in early 2009.
The long-term objective of the Alley Flat Initiative is to create
an adaptive and self-perpetuating delivery system for
sustainable and affordable housing in Austin. The "delivery
system" would include not only efficient housing designs
constructed with sustainable technologies, but also
innovative methods of financing and home ownership that
benefit all neighborhoods in Austin.
http://www.thealleyflatinitiative.org/
Contending Modes of
Sustainability Research
sustainability
science
Forms of
activity
policy-driven
research
Types of
Knowledge
post-normal
interdisciplinary
Forms of
learning
traditional,
scholarly
sustainability
management
commercial
innovation
managerial/
transdisciplinary
professional,
instrumental
sustainability
engineering
contextual
appropriation
situated/
cross-disciplinary
engaged,
participatory
Researcher’s expert
role
entrepreneur
concerned citizen
Contexts of
application
companies
(”market”)
communities
(”civil society”)
governments
(”state”)