Computers, Society, and Nature

Discussion in 650 last week following the usual seminars turned into an examination of what I see as two major problems with environmental research: size of scale, and the generalizing tendency of multi-disciplinary studies. The first was discussed in class; the second is my own addition. Discussion was based on two seminars and subsequent articles by the seminar speakers: Dr. Soskolne, an epidemiologist concerned with human health as a result of environmental degradation, and Dr. Line Gordon, a researcher from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, pursuing work on agriculture and hydrology. Both researchers are working on projects of global-scale, and this is problematic – namely because the sample population, community, ecosystem, or other unit of study is actually too big to measure with detail or precision; focusing on a small-scale area and expanding the data to reach global proportions is not effective, either. Dr. Soskolne’s article (with others), “Toward Measuring the Impact of Ecological Disintegrity on Human Health” (Epidemiology 12 (1) 2001) most effectively demonstrated the near-impossibility of such endeavours, as the authors’ hypothesis did not match quantitative results, but was assumed to be proven true anyway.
This problem of scale also rears its ugly head in my own field of study: cultural anthropology. In fact, it has become a critical point in the field, and the subject of constant discussion and publication. It stems out of the difficulties with defining the boundaries of a specific culture or cultural group in an era of globalizing modernity. Some anthropologists turn instead to words like “flows,” “hybrids,” and “cosmopolitanism,” in order to explain the changes facing minority groups as a result of the extensive reach of a global economy and its political and social effects. But such words are metaphorical, tentative notions, and in the long-run, ambiguous, and thus open to contestation equal to that of “scale.”
The environmental justice movement is an example of the problem of scale. This movement was borne out of the idea of “environmental racism,” as coined by Reverend Benjamin Chavis, of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice in 1981. The term refers to the intentional or institutional racism expressed via the high tendency for toxic waste disposal sites and other polluting industries to be built in minority or coloured communities. The concept has expanded globally, but has taken on a different form, and more generally refers to the idea that neighbourhoods suffering the most intense pollution are the poorest areas. This now also includes the idea that countries of the global North frequently situate their industrial plants in the global South, thus forcing the developing world to bear the brunt of the developed world’s consumption. Concepts of environmental justice and injustice encompass different social processes, and can mean quite different things at different geographic scales. Such scalar ambiguity poses serious challenges for environmental justice theorists and activists working to solve social disparities which may be experienced in local pockets, small communities, but which may originate at larger scales of political and economic decision-making force.
The example of environmental justice plays aptly into the seminars which form the basis of this blog post, as both researchers were dealing directly with the effects of global issues on discrete communities and cities. But I pinpoint a second problem which is not as applicable: the problems with multi-disciplinary studies. This is a brief, albeit significant issue.
Advocates of multidisciplinary studies and collaborations argue that it is limiting to approach studies of global importance, such as environmental degradation, from only one perspective – that it is more productive and obviously beneficial to have anthropologists, ecologists, epidemiologists, and so on, to contribute to one body of knowledge; this ensures, supposedly, that no actors or factors are left out of an equation which could eventually equal formal and effective policy. I firmly believe that a number of varying voices can only lead to positive contributions to knowledge. But the problem I have noticed with this idea is that the people contributing to multi-disciplinary studies seem to possess a limited understanding of whatever field is not theirs; anthropologists tend to generalize about what ecology is, and epidemiologists tend not to understand the aims of anthropology. I realize this is a grandiose claim, but I am documenting a trend, not a rule. And indeed these are inevitable divisions and disparities, but important ones, as they can lead to erroneous research. Thus I posit that rather than encouraging multi-disciplinary studies, we should more actively promote trans-disciplinary studies – studies that supersede faculties, and therefore do away with the need to categorize specific departments or labeling contributors and risk classifying either incorrectly. Perhaps this boils down to a problem of semantics, but I think it a necessary distinction.

My colleagues did a good job at critically reviewing David Orr talk; I will therefore try not to repeat what they already said by following a thread that Prof. Orr mentioned without developing it further. Near the end of his presentation, he mentioned Edward Bernays’ influence on the American society (and by now, on the world) as a piece of the puzzle explaining the ‘failures’ of the educational system and the ongoing ecological crisis he depicted through his talk.
Edward Bernays, for those who might not know, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He introduced his thought in the U.S., not to treat patients psychoanalytically, but to control and influence the masses by calling upon their powerful unconscious drives. He called this molding of opinion “engineering of consent.” He is the father of what we now call ‘public relation’, which was a new name for ‘domestic propaganda’ after the First World War, and one of the pioneers of a new kind of advertisement, which aimed at associating an image to a product. From then on, the advertising industry was all about changing the consumer of useful goods into a consumer of symbolic status, into a citizen whose identity was dependent upon (and formed by) what and how much he consumed. Contrary to the consumption of useful and lasting products, the consumption of symbols (also known as ‘positional goods’) can be endless. Promoting products as symbols of identities and ‘life styles’ (another concept of Bernays) became the motor of the American industry and it insured that the demand would always be there for what the industry could offer. Slowly, being a good American citizen became being a good consumer, since consuming an endless number of rapidly changing symbolic goods insured the vitality of the American industry.(1)
With this background in mind, let’s return to what David Orr said about Bernays. He basically said two things: 1) the advertising industry in the U.S. is half a trillion dollar industry; 2) to mold the citizen into a good consumer, it is in the interest of the advertising industry to try to prevent the full development of the self of its consumers.
1) The never ending consumption of symbolic goods, which are already waste the next day, is an extremely environmentally unfriendly behavior. With such a financial power promoting this behavior through advertising, one can wonder what we could do about it (and what would be the cost of doing something, since this behavior is an important economic driver). To say but one thing, the Americans could ask their representatives to stop financing, with their own taxes, the advertising industry which makes them feel unsatisfied with what they already have, since companies in the U.S. can count the cost of their advertisements as an expense to reduce their taxable profits. In other words, this means that public funds pay a part of their advertisements – an example of what has been called a ‘perverse subsidy’.
2) The second point ties in with the question of education. If the powerful advertising industries strive to prevent the development of the self, to maintain it to the level of infantile self-gratification through immediate material consumption, to a level easily influenced through the basic wants and fears of the ‘id’ (to use Freud’s jargon), then the educational system is directly opposed in its aim (when it aims at forming whole persons) to the aim of the advertising industry. There is probably no way of knowing what chances the educational system have of resisting or fighting the opposite tendency, but what we do know, however, is that we must be vigilant to fight and resist the ‘subtle corruption’ of the universities (as Prof. Orr called it) by corporate funding in order to preserve this island of personal development, cultural resistance and critical thinking.

(1) On this, see the very good BBC documentary: The Century of the Self.

I also attended the David Orr talk on October 25th, and was impressed by the majority of his presentation. I believe that the overarching purpose of Orr’s talk was to critique the failures of the dominant Western education system. He began his lecture with the following questions: How is the world where it is with all the education (knowledge) we have? Is education a ‘good’ (positive) force? Throughout the presentation, it became obvious that Orr thought that the world was in a dangerous place, and that education has not been an entirely positive force to date.
Orr chose to address why he thinks the world is where it is today, and why education has not been entirely a ‘good’ force, by arguing that there is a lack of environmental literacy among teachers and students alike (especially at the university level). Apparently, the lack of environmental literacy among teachers and students is a large reason for our current dangerous global position. I tend to agree. I believe Orr’s argument would have been stronger, however, if he spent less time on demonstrating our current ecological crisis, and more time on exploring the other shortcomings of the education system. For example, save environmental literacy, one might ask: in what other respects has the education system failed to educate? I can personally think of a number of instances where the system has failed me: from grade two onward I received a healthy dose of mathematics and science, but never a taste of philosophy; I learned the basics of neo-classical economics, but not its basic consequences for people and the environment; I learned snippets of political theory, but not how to question the powers that be. In reflection, I feel quite slighted. What was taught to me, and millions of young people before and after me, were the ‘facts’ of life, unquestioned. Luckily, I learned to be critical. How many people have lost the opportunity to learn to be critical?
Orr did point to further instances of educational failures when he presented a list of paradoxes that have yet to be solved by our current education system (I only recorded four of the five paradoxes he mentioned): as our knowledge base increases, our sense of purpose decreases (I believe Orr was referring to our spiritual decline in the West); as control of nature increases we move dangerously far from sustainability; as wealth increases, poverty increases and happiness decreases (supposedly there are indices that measure happiness); and as military spending increases our level of security decreases. The validity of any one of these paradoxes could be argued. However, I believe that Orr’s intention was not to debate these examples, but to demonstrate that education’s shortcomings do not stop at the environment. It puzzles me, therefore, that he would open this door and not explore it further (perhaps he ran out of time).
I think that Orr should have spent more time on explicitly addressing the questions he posed to frame his talk. This would have allotted more time to examining other failures of the education system as illustrated in his list of paradoxes. With all the emphasis on environmental illiteracy, Orr gave the impression that other educational shortcomings were less important, or less critical, to an understanding of where we are today, and how we got here. And since he asked at the outset how we arrived at this dangerous time with all that we know, it seems logical that he would explicitly recognize the other failures that led us here.

David Orr’s highly-anticipated and eagerly-attended lecture at McGill caused me to question his utopian views of education and the environment. He spoke broadly about global change and environmental degradation, and posited that an ecological education should be a prerequisite for convocation from any university, no matter an individual’s area of specialization; the paper that certifies a degree of higher learning should not be obtained without an adequate demonstration of knowledge of macro- to micro-scale ecosystems and the role humans play in their transformations. The details of this prescribed ecological knowledge is more specifically outlined in Parasite Kid’s post below.

In attending similar seminars over the past three months, I have tried to grapple with the fact that the people I have listened to champion the same shift in worldview, necessary for avoiding environmental catastrophe and/or self-extinction as a human species. They fly around the world to speak to audiences like the filled auditorium at McGill, and address the need to turn rhetoric into action, consumption into compromise. And while I agree with the principles embodied by these presentations, I understand why some audiences may have trouble finding credence in a speech given by speakers who do not appear to practice what they preach – who spend more time in the air than they do on the ground.

Perhaps I am being unfair. Perhaps this is the process of my own ecological education: to filter the rhetoric, to take away the main values, and leave the inherent (and likely unintentional) hypocrisy behind. I do recognize the value of Orr’s words, and view such representative figures as necessary for shifting public opinion so that it embraces an environmentalist ethic, an intellectual humility in relation to other species. Perhaps the slight cynicism expressed above is the manifestation of a sort of compassion fatigue.

The term “compassion fatigue” first rose to prominence in the 1990’s in the United States. It refers generally to a saturation of ideas or images to which the public consequently develops a resistance and potential attitude of carelessness or cynicism. I am using the term in this post in both a euphemistic and hyperbolic sense. Demonstrations of the urgency with which environmental degradation must be addressed is preaching to the converted in my case, thus the fatigue I refer to is my own exhaustion at running in circles around the same question: how does one reach the non-converts? But this is the question that keeps figures such as David Orr so full of idealism, passion, perseverance, and fully-booked for speeches. This is, in my opinion, the question that remains unanswered, and the most important question there is today.

Orr’s ultimate ideal – solution, one could say – is universal education (at the post-secondary level). But this is a privileged and exclusive utopia. Further, switching worldviews is not as simplistic an option as Orr and others seem to suggest. Mentalities are ingrained, inherent to individual ways of conceptualizing the world and its systems and cycles. Appreciation of and understanding of the environment must therefore be a cultural prerogative, a Durkheimian “social fact,” in order to effect and ensure enthusiastic change. But I am still not sure where this cultural environmentalist habitus can or should start. Earlier than university, certainly. But at what age? At what scale? From what angle? Questions of such monstrosity are exhausting, as they keep asking for more and more, for answers I can’t find or create.

The recent public lecture by David Orr, a professor from Oberlin, Ohio got me thinking about the importance of language with respect to the environment: what we talk about, how we talk about it, and who says it. During his speech, Orr noted that we do not use the right language when we speak about global environmental issues (i.e. climate change). People who speak frankly about the forthcoming scenarios and challenges are seen as “doom and gloom” and therefore society does not realize the importance and magnitude of these future changes. We see the projected outcomes as possibilities instead of realities, which discourages action from being taken. He suggests that perhaps we feel that we can’t handle the realities. We keep people in the dark because it will avoid panic, despair and societal paralysis. Examples from history, he suggests, show that this is not true; if we talk realistically about what needs to be done (“Our Great Work”), people will rise to the challenge and rally to the cause.

I agree with Orr that what we say, and how we say it, is very important. I also agree as he suggests that education is the way forward. For the most part, the majority of the populous does not understand global weather cycles, where our energy comes from, how energy cycles, how much we consume, and how our actions lead to the impact we see. As individuals, we do not take the time to understand these concepts, which allows and encourages policymakers to waffle and be ambiguous in their policies and public statements. We cannot refute or challenge what they say, because we do not know better.

Although Orr points out the importance of educating people (he focuses on students in universities) I think he is a bit too optimistic that issues of global importance would be approached from a perspective like his own. That all professors will encourage students to understand the importance of reducing our energy and material consumption, that professors will highlight the ills of economic growth and current resource mismanagement. He also assumes that the students will gravitate towards the “right” perspective. These are huge assumptions to make. I feel that people are drawn towards others who affirm their beliefs – there will always be an academic that can tell me what I want to hear and have enough evidence to support it. If I would rather not acknowledge that climate change is a serious problem or that a low growth economy is a good idea, I will find someone who has data to support this. I will take classes that enforce my beliefs (heck, I am right now). This discourages us from changing our beliefs or educating ourselves about the real issues.

I appreciate that Orr puts forth solid suggestions about educational reform. The ideas however, seem to preach to the choir. I gravitate to his suggestions because I am attracted to these ideas to begin with. More importantly, how are these ideas received by those who are not attracted to them? If education is the key, how do we ensure students and society get the education needed to take on “Our Great Work”? When we are not encouraged to change our point of view, can Orr’s ideas actually gain footing?

On October 15th Marco Festa-Bianchet, from the Université De Sherbrooke and a member of COSEWIC (Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada), gave a talk entitled ‘Scientific assessment and political listing: the conservation of endangered species in Canada’. Previous posts by Merle and Culture Kid have succinctly described the main themes of Dr. Festa-Bianchet’s talk. There are two points, however, that I’d like to discuss.
First, Dr. Festa-Bianchet noted that the greatest threat to most species is habitat loss. He also noted that when a species is listed under COSEWIC and protected under SARA (Species at Risk Act) the habitat upon which that species depends is often not legally protected. Though SARA recovery plans have increasingly been taking a multi-species approach, Festa-Bianchet claimed more emphasis must be put on habitat protection. This call for a Leopoldian approach to species protection and recovery, where the ecosystem as a whole must be healthy for its component species to be healthy, seems commonsensical in theory, but may prove futile in practice. A number of issues immediately come to mind: for the numerous migratory bird species listed under COSEWIC, where important habitat is located across national borders, it is highly unlikely that the necessary habitat would be, or could be, protected, because any legislation implemented under SARA applies to Canada only; many threatened species have ranges outside protected areas such as national parks, where legal protection of their habitats would likely conflict with the rights of private landowners and with corporate or public interests. These examples illustrate how difficult it can be for politicians and policy-makers, who represent the interests of numerous stakeholders, to implement necessary measures aimed at a species’ protection.
Second, I’d like to add to the comment by Merle about the economic barriers to species protection, especially if that species happens to be an economically valuable marine species. The idea of discounting, as Merle suggests, is a probable explanation for continued exploitation of already over-exploited species. It is, however, only half of the explanation. Neo-classical economics presents another ‘rationale’ for over-exploitation and eventual stock extinction: infinite substitutability. Namely, it does not matter if a species is fished to economic, or biological extinction (though this form of extinction is rarely considered by economists), because another form of capital will replace the exhausted capital. If one fish species is fished to extinction, then another species will take its place. Herman Daly, in his book ‘Beyond Growth’, clearly demonstrates how ludicrous and irrational this position really is. As the easiest-to-fish and tastiest fish are fished first, more human-made capital (fishing boats, nets etc.) will have to be created to maintain catch yields when fish populations are exhausted, and when harder-to-fish species replace those exhausted populations. The inevitable outcome will be an ocean full of boats, but empty of fish. In an ‘empty’ world (a world with a small human population), the idea of substitutability seems coherent, but in a world full of people infinite substitutability is an impossibility. Thus discounting and substitutability create a thick wall of economic resistance to the legal protection of commercially valuable species, because not only is it more valuable to exploit the last remnants of a population today, some other species will take the place of the exhausted stock, so protection, from the economic perspective, is really a waste of effort.

I also went to Dr. Festa-Bianchet talk titled Scientific Assessment and Political Listing: the conservation of endangered species of Canada. As Culture Kid explained in a previous post, the talk was mainly about the functioning of the COSEWIC and the political decision of putting the species it lists on the official list of endangered species ‘deserving’ protection under the SARA. In this post, I want to focus on two points Dr. Festa-Bianchet made: 1) Most species which are harvested by humans have a very low change of making it to the official list; 2) Since the creation of the SARA, when 233 species were included as a package under its protection, no marine species made it to the list despite being recommended by the COSEWIC.
1) Not making to the list means not being protected by the SARA, which implies increasing chances of extinction. That we do not strive to protect what we directly rely upon for food, revenues, etc. is strange, especially if we consider that we seem to find it easier to ‘mobilize’ in order to protect species we do not directly rely upon. What can explain such a paradox? Discounting is surely one reason: according to main stream economists, we value less the consumption of something in the future than the consumption of something today. Moreover, it might be worth it economically, in the short run, to sell all our natural capital, transforming it to ‘virtual’ money that grows at compound interest rates if its monetary value will increase faster this way (roughly, on average, doubling every 7 to 10 years) then by letting the species multiply while harvesting only the ‘income’ it produces, not the ‘capital’. Even if one could argue that within a very narrow view of value it does make sense to think and act this way, one can wonder what would happen if we all acted according to this framework? What will we be able to buy with our abundant money if there is no natural capital left? What good is a lot of money if the only thing left to buy is money? “Money”, as complex and elusive a concept it may be, can minimally be defined as a virtual currency used, in the end, to exchange material goods. We should not forget that the economy is not, despite the abstraction level of financial markets, independent of these material goods and the ecosystems that provide them in the first instance. Remembering this might help us finding a new path to avoid the above mentioned paradox.
2) Why marine species do not make it to the lists? What is so special about them that make them unworthy of being preserved? Dr. Festa-Bianchet did not say much about this. One reason could be that they are being harvested by humans and that there is hence a paradoxically good economical reason not to protect them. This could be a good hypothesis since Dr. Festa-Bianchet did not say if all endangered marine species were harvested species or not. However, he did imply that there was something else at stake: we, the majority, simply do not seem to care about a species (or ecosystem) when it is bellow water. For example, we care about clear cutting when it happens to forests, but not when it happens to ocean floors through bottom trawling. If this is true, then why is it the case? Is it because we, the public, are less aware of it, since we don’t get to see it? Is it because marine species appear to be less like us than a mammal on the land? Are we, consciously or not, afraid of what lives in deep water so that their extinctions could be wrongly perceived, consciously or not, as a step toward mastery of nature, a step toward making earth safer for humans?

Hi All,

I now realize the folly of posting my thoughts about The Muddled Middle too early: it is not with this section of posts and may be forgotten! If you haven’t seen it yet, it is further down the page. Cheers!

COSEWIC, or the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, determines annually the status of animals at risk, and provides the federal government with information about how to enact consequent conservation policies. Part of this entails the compilation of a list of animals strongly in need of the protection measures provided by SARA, or the Species at Risk Act (the Canadian version of the Endangered Species Act).

Dr. Festa-Bianchet is a biologist at the Université de Sherbrooke and a chair of COSEWIC. During his most recent seminar at McGill, he was wearing his professor hat rather than his more diplomatic COSEWIC hat, and thus he was able to be a bit more honest with his opinions. Festa-Bianchet briefly described COSEWIC’s mandate and composition before charting a critique of the ways in which the federal government makes decisions about which animals get on and which ones are left off “the list.”

Of the frustrations Festa-Bianchet described, I saw two central hurdles: bureaucracy and economics. He outlined three conspicuous hypocrisies or negligence(s) on the part of the federal government. One: all marine fish are left off the list; despite severe declines in population, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans will not sponsor the conservation of any species upon which people depend for economic livelihood. Second: any animal which Nunavut posits as endangered does not make the grade for conservation; this is because of sovereignty issues between the territory and the nation-state. This has strong implications for species such as polar bears. Third: once COSEWIC’s annual suggestion list is given to the federal government, there is no time-frame in which the government must act upon the information. If the government then waits ten years, their inevitable argument is that information from COSEWIC needs updating before anything can be done. And the cycle continues.

Sociologist Max Weber saw bureaucracy as inseparable from rationality. He emphasized that bureaucratic organizations were an attempt to address problems of size (or population) with rational solutions, to make it possible to conduct the business of the organization “according to calculable rules.” It seems the logistics of government conservation policies still operate in this vein. Festa-Bianchet’s exasperation with this bureaucracy was evident throughout his seminar, despite attempts to mute it. Obviously, the rationality behind COSEWIC does not match that of the federal government’s.

This seminar and subsequent discussions generated several questions about science methodology and objectivity. Publications on the decline of marine fish populations, for example, vary from one extreme to the other, depending on who the authors are, and for whom they are writing. People working for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans likely have different professional opinions from more independent ichthyologists who are part of COSEWIC. This reiterates the entrenched notion that, despite best intentions, science can be political and biased; individual worldviews inevitably enter the picture at some point.