By Richard Worthington, Loka Institute
A guest blog in the Alternative Perspectives on Technology Innovation series
My first scholarly engagement with environmental politics was an honor’s thesis written while I was an undergraduate at Berkeley in the early 1970s. Back then, the term “environmentalist” was frequently deployed to profile someone held to be a naïve, irresponsible and possibly dangerous enemy of the American Way of Life.
The simple fact, however, is that concerns about environmental decay and support for environmental improvement have been consistently voiced by most Americans since the 1970s. The strategy of branding environmentalists as extremists was therefore eroded by the enduring reality that most people who are active in this arena were and are ordinary folks who are confronted by extraordinary problems.
Seeing that they could not beat environmental sentiments, by the 1990s many industry leaders decided to embrace them. Their opponents quickly invented terms such as “greenwash” in order to frame industry’s new environmentalism as a cynical ploy, but in terms of actual outcomes, the polluters clearly won. More than moving toward ecological balance, the Clinton-Gore years were notable for privatization, deregulation, and revving up industrial growth and consumption. This despite the publication of Al Gore’s eloquent and even radical Earth in the Balance only a few months before his election as Vice-President. The Bush years only amplified the familiar refrain of growth and conquest (of nature and other countries).
The problem for growth-first advocates is that ecological disruption and its consequences won’t go away. Material circumstances thus continue to drive broad-based environmental concern, while the most powerful interests in global society have only begun to talk about action to address the imbalance between the technosphere and the ecosphere. I write this in Copenhagen, where the largest environmental convention in history is attempting to grapple with the real prospect that the quality of life everywhere is imperiled by a human-induced alteration of the climate. Practically no one here is questioning the legitimacy of climate concerns, and just about everyone is hailing a new green economy, yet expectations of significant progress toward this goal are low.
What’s nanotechnology got to do with this? As it turns out, nanotech is central in a discourse where a third framing of “environment” and “ecology” has evolved. In this version, the system of science-driven innovation that is now at the center of global economic growth strategies is itself considered an ecosystem, even though plants, animals (other than humans) and the other elements normally associated with the term “ecology” are nowhere to be found.
I first encountered this move to conflate new technology and ecology during the 1980s in the works of conservative political economist George Gilder. Gilder was enthralled with digital information technology, which he credited with delivering “a billion Asians” from penury (in “Telecosm: The Bandwidth Revolution”, Forbes ASAP, 1994, p. 117). Perhaps more noteworthy was Gilder’s rhetorical move to describe the digital world in ecological terms.
“More ecosystem than machine, cyberspace is a bioelectronic environment that is literally universal: It exists everywhere there are telephone wires, coaxial cables, fiber-optic lines or electromagnetic waves. This environment is ‘inhabited’ by knowledge…existing in electronic form” (Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, 1994, prepared for the Progress and Freedom Foundation).
Nano has now replaced digital in this genre. Here’s how no less a figure than Mihail C. Roco, Senior Advisor for Nanotechnology to the United States National Science Foundation, describes the system for governing nanotechnology:
“IRGC (International Risk Governance Council) views the stakeholder groups involved [in nanogovernance] as operating within a dynamic ecosystem of interlocking dependencies. The task is therefore to create an adaptive, collaborative environment enabling different parties to play their part in the ecosystem” (ISO Focus, “Guest View“, April 2007, p.6).
Here, a distinctively human artifice is represented as a natural system.
The narrative of ecology and society that now includes nanotech thus goes like this: at the dawn of the contemporary environmental movement, industry leaders equated environmentalism with extremism in an attempt to undermine its legitimacy. After this tactic had run its course, they proclaimed their own environmental concern in order to obfuscate a largely unchanged agenda of industrial growth at all costs. Now, the system of technology-driven economic growth that currently has nanotechnology as its poster child is depicted to actually be an ecosystem.
People and nature, of course, are inextricably interdependent, so there is a sound basis for including human society in a concept of ecology. But if the distinction between non-human nature and the product of human endeavors is erased from the idea of ecology, our ability to distinguish a manufactured human society from one in which people and nature exist in a dynamic balance will be undermined. Should it come to pass, this scenario could well make us wish for the good old days when “environmentalist” was an epithet.
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Rick Worthington is involved in nanotechnology issues by way of volunteer collaborations at the Loka Institute, whose mission is “Making research, science and technology responsive to democratically-decided social and environmental concerns” (for a summary of and links to Loka’s involvement in nanotech, visit http://www.loka.org/FedNanoPolicy.html). He is also Professor of Politics and chairs the Program in Public Policy Analysis at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Rick has written extensively on science, technology and the environment (including in a book, Rethinking Globalization: Production, Politics, Actions, Peter Lang Publishing, 2000), and currently is U.S. Coordinator of World Wide Views on Global Warming. WWViews is the first-ever global citizen policy consultation, held September 26, 2009. In it, nearly 4,000 citizens in 38 countries studied and debated the issues now on the table in Copenhagen (December 7 – 18, 2009) at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (www.wwviews.org).
I’ll have to read this post again, but it occurs to me that there are several points to be made in response to it. First and foremost is the fact that there were many quiet environmentalists as early as the 1960s, people who weren’t joining any movements but were thinking twice (and then some) after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published in 1962. My parents certainly weren’t hippies – but they were carpooling and composting, reusing and recycling for as long as I can remember. In fact, our first cottage was built almost entirely of reclaimed lumber because it was perfectly good wood once you pulled the nails out of it.
Second, the poster child for the environmental movement for the bulk of the last quarter of the 20th C was Greenpeace, an organization that adopted the radical tactics popularized by protests against the war in Vietnam. The consequences of this approach – which demonized pretty much all industry without providing any real or concrete solutions and was an anti- movement rather than a pro- movement – led to the polarization you describe between industry and environmentalists. As for greenwashing – I’m glad Walmart has cleaned up its act somewhat in terms of its carbon imprint. Now if only it would stop either hiring slave labour or treating its employees like slaves I might consider shopping there. But I am pretty sure the demonization finger was first pointed not by industry, but by radical environmentalists.
As for this sentence: ‘Now, the system of technology-driven economic growth that currently has nanotechnology as its poster child is depicted to actually be an ecosystem,’ – I don’t see any actual textual support for this argument in your blog post, nor can I say I’ve noticed it myself amongst the nanotech folks with whom I interact, some of whom are actually involved with the commercialization of nano ventures (and who continue to sound warning bells about how long it takes to get products to market and to quibble with the lofty $x trillion-dollar industry by 2012 statements). If you want to kill a fly you can burn down the house in which the fly resides or you can use a fly swatter (I’m thinking here of the amazing promise of nanomedicine to target only cancer cells, not the healthy ones that surround them).
Or have I read this piece before being sufficiently caffeinated?
What I find interesting in Rick’s piece is how the use of language potentially shifts – and even interferes with – dialogue and debate. There definitely is a move toward adopting environment-related language in talking about emerging technologies and technology-innovation. And the use of “ecosystems” to describe human-manufactured and driven complex systems is not uncommon in some circles. The question is – is this a naive use of language, is it people genuinely scrambling for metaphors in the face of new challenges, or is it a cynical attempt to dis-empower dialogues addressing human-environmental interactions?
I suspect it’s a bit of all three. But in the main my experience has been that people adopt terms like “ecosystem” in a desperate attempt to define and grapple with the unknown – rather than to control and obfuscate the discussion.
Nevertheless, it’s probably worth being aware than even well-intentioned co-opting of established terms comes at a price.
My thanks to both Ruth and Andrew for their comments.
First, a very important point of agreement with Ruth: I concur that people from all walks of life, diverse political perspectives, and varying action orientations, observe and act on environmental disruption, as she describes has been the case in her family going back to the 1960s. My expectation is that the imbalance between people and nature is likely to endure, and (sigh) probably worsen for the foreseeable future, so we can also expect that lots of people will continue to observe this disruption, and that many will act on their observations.
I hope and expect that this will continue to drive some people to contest corporate, government and other leaders on occasions when they dispense rhetoric that is designed to give the appearance of environmental action, when in fact they are charging full speed ahead with the agenda that got us into this mess in the first place. I also recognize that there is no stable “truth” about when this is and is not happenning, so vigorous debate of these issues is very important. That’s why I’m concerned about framings of the most industrial of human endeavors in ecological terms. I’m OK with with an open conceptualization of human production in general, and advanced scientific and technological activities in particular, that acknowledges the current existence and future possibility of ecologically beneficial endeavors within these institutions. But labeling the innovation system as ecological asserts its characteristics, rather than conceptualizing it in a neutral way that leaves an assessment of these characteristics up to empirical and normative inquiry.
The prescient observation about Wal Mart’s labor practices highlights how green rhetoric, and even green action, can obscure other unsavory corporate policies. Let me cite a specific example of the intellectual dynamics that can transpire when we get a little too excited about going green: earlier this year, the faculty and trustees of Pomona College took our biannual retreat, this one focused on sustainability. A distinguished environmental researcher and advocate, L. Hunter Lovins, was a guest for most of the retreat and in one lecture to the plenary provided extensive detail on Wal Mart’s progressive environmental practices. Of the many issues raised in the Q&A, from a pretty informed and very concerned audience of not just academics, but industry leaders and others who populate our board of trustees, only one person had the presence of mind (and I’m sorry to admit it wasn’t me) to ask about labor relations in the context of Wal Mart’s greening. Despite an active research agenda on Wal Mart, Ms. Lovins had to acknowledge that she had not thought about the issue, but would look into it. Were this an isolated incident, it would not be worth noting. But I see a pattern here.
Finally, here’s a quote from a different author who describes technological innovation in ecosystem terms: “…no one institution, sector or indeed country can go it alone: what will be required is a new level and era of open sourced collaboration; success in large part will depend on aligning an ecosystem of communities aligned by a framework of trust, protocols and incentives.” This is from the abstract of a talk by Romanus Berg of Ashoka given at the “Emerging Technologies/Emerging Economies” conference (organized by the UC Santa Barbara Center for Nanotechnology and Society and held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington in early November of this year), where I also heard Dr. Roco and others describe industrial innovation as an ecosystem.
I agree with Andrew that a range of motivations, rationales and interests are probably involved in “innovation as ecosystem” discourses. If the discussion on this blog directs some attention toward these issues, I’ll count the experience as a success.
People are more and more acting like animals because they are misinformed and told that they are animals. God created man and man refused to follow God. That’s why we die. Instead of avoiding those little difficulties of life, man should be curious about the big problem of humanity, there lack of relationship with God. Jesus Christ is God. He gave his life in an effort of salvation. Repent from your sin and receive faith. You’ll be forgiven and will have eternal life.