Environmental Changes: The Futures of Nature

By Céline Granjou

This book addresses environmental changes and how they reconfigure society’s relationship to the future. It argues that Man does not build “his future alone: instead, environmental changes are also proof of the future-making capacity of non-human beings.

The author elaborates on the notion of the futures of Nature by drawing on theoretical contributions by recent ground-breaking literature in the field of environmental humanities. The book also builds on a sociological investigation into the practices implemented by environmental scientists, experts and managers confronted with environmental changes. Thinking of nature in terms of its futures requires us to overcome the rooted philosophical tradition that associates nature with permanence and society with creative change. This is a daunting task which can only be successful if we look beyond the long-lasting influence of the human-centered categories of innovation, development and civilization that social sciences have themselves contributed to coining. We need to consider the active capacities of change and transformation of living beings and matter itself.

This book is of academic interest, but is also for managers in different fields and areas affected by environmental changes.

• Featuring a focus on the notion of future and the aim to locate an approach for the future in sociology
• Elaborates on the notion of “more than human futures (drawing on S. Whatmore’s words)
• Offers grounded and detailed insights into three case-study examples

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Feb 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9780081010631

Céline Granjou

Céline Granjou is a Research Director at IRSTEA, the National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture, based in Grenoble, France, and research fellow at the CNRS (French national center for scientific research), Pacte.

Book preview

Environmental Changes

The Futures of Nature

Céline Granjou

Series Editor

André Mariotti

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I.1 The end of nature?

I.2 Shifting futures

I.3 Sociology of the future

I.4 Thinking with environmental sciences

1: The Time Beast

Abstract:

1.1 Historical insights into the nature/society partition

1.2 Nature as becoming

1.3 The return of the wolves

2: Mad Cows

Abstract:

2.1 Returning to the risk society

2.2 Experts, mad cow and prions

3: Anticipating the Futures of Biodiversity

Abstract:

3.1 From nature to biodiversity

3.2 Biodiversity scenarios

3.3 Securing nature

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

First published 2016 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Press Ltd and Elsevier Ltd

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Notices

Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

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© ISTE Press Ltd 2016

The rights of Celine Granjou to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-1-78548-026-3

Printed and bound in the UK and US

Acknowledgments

Céline Granjou

I would like to thank Lucien Sfez for his revisions and sound advice on an earlier version of this book.

I am particularly grateful to Jeremy Walker and more broadly to the at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, at the University of Technology, in Sydney, for welcoming me into a work environment that gave me the scientific freedom, stimulation and pleasure that fueled the writing of this book.

I thank Irstea, my research institute, and notably DTM (Irstea Grenoble) for the trust shown in me during the 2 years of my privileged scientific stay in Australia.

Finally, my gratitude goes to the Biopolitics of Science Network, at the University of Sydney, as well as to the Environmental Humanities Network, at the University of New South Wales, for the discovery of fascinating research and lectures that inspired me to revisit my work in a new publication.

November 2015

Introduction

Keywords: Actor–Network Theory, Biodiversity, Biopolitics, Dasein, Environmental changes, Humanization, Naturalism, Natureculture, Social sciences, Sociology

Time is not a stream flowing equably, constantly, from the beginning of all things to the end of all things, as Newton believed. Instead, time is an intricate web of is and was and will be, all coexisting (…) All times exist at one and the future, just like the past, is already there. [BRA 97]

I.1 The end of nature?

According to the storyline of Anthropocene, humans have become an Earth-changing force. Human technology has become so powerful that we need to rename the geological era in which we live with the name of man – anthropos – himself. The name Anthropocene suggests how strong our power of domesticating and actively transforming the world that we inhabit has become. To some extent, such re-labeling of a geological era under the auspices of anthropos resonates with a narrative of the end of nature. It is now possible to find traces of our activities and technologies even in the most remote sites and places of the planet, far removed from our plants, our cars and our cities' smoke and noise – as shown, for instance, by the presence of dioxin in the breast milk of Eskimo mothers. Even polar bears in the far North and packs of wolves in the mountains can no longer be considered as inhabitants of a pristine wild nature out of reach of human interventions. This includes farming animals and cultivated plants: they have been shaped and modified by centuries of agricultural breeding and selection. Storms, typhoons and droughts themselves are the outcome of our technologies, as the modification of the functioning and couplings of the atmosphere and oceans results from a myriad of our past and present industrial and agricultural activities. Nature has been completely made into techno-nature: there is no longer any site, object and dynamic devoid of the impact of human technologies. The end of nature is precisely the narrative proposed by the influential book by Bill McKibben on global warming, published in 1989. McKibben describes nature as a force previously independent of human beings, but which is now directly affected by the actions of people: If the waves crash up against the beach, eroding dunes and destroying homes, it is not the awesome power of Mother Nature. It is the awesome power of Mother Nature altered by the awesome power of man, who has, in a century, overpowered the processes that have been slowly evolving and changing of their own accord since the Earth was born [MCK 89].

Yet, for all the obvious effects of our technologies on the living conditions on the Earth, this book argues that the beginning of the 21st Century might not be as concerned with the end of nature as it is with the futures of nature. This book aims to elaborate the notion of the futures of nature.

There is a sense in which nature's futures are already present in our media, activities and projects – as well as movies dedicated to describing the catastrophic weather events by which mankind will be exterminated. Let us think for instance of the success of the movie The Day After Tomorrow that tells of a sudden extreme cold weather event hitting New York and the consequent overall destabilization and chaos in society. In the same way, it has become quite impossible to elude the iconic image of the polar bear on the melting ice sheet, striving for his imminent survival and facing a future deeply different from the past existence of his ancestors. We should not forget that environmental activism was fostered in the first instance by a number of pessimistic scenarios and prophecies in the 1960s, among which was the famous Silent Spring. The very book that has raised awareness of environmental issues in the United States, Rachel Carson's book [CAR 62], begins with a prophecy. It explains how a silent spring will occur in a once charming and flourishing village in the American countryside, and how the place will be deserted by birds and every wild animal: wildlife will be ill or dead, plants will be poisoned and agonizing¹. In the 1970s, debates on the conclusions of the Club de Rome's Limits to Growth report fostered the refinement of global forecasting methodologies including digital computation and mathematical modeling [DAH 06]. Soon after, with the implementation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the alarm was raised on species extinction and biodiversity loss which triggered the realignment of a range of academic fields and disciplines as well as public and private stakeholders and NGOs around new anticipatory agendas, technologies and politics dedicated to anticipating and preparing for global changes. Species migrations, rising temperatures, intensifying storms, extreme weather events and the acidification of oceans are now at the center of new anticipation practices in agriculture, economy and decision-making, drawing on the development of increasingly sophisticated technologies of modeling and forecasting aiming to assess the state and evolution of nature and the planet [HAS 13]. Contemporary society has probably never been as future-oriented as today: historians of science themselves recently experimented with writing a science fiction novel to tell the story of the collapse of Western Civilization, seen by a fictitious future historian in the year 2300. The novel aims to raise the awareness among people living at the turn of the 21st Century on a looming scenario of collapse that is only too likely to occur [ORE 14].

However, despite all the iconic images of deadly environmental futures in movies, novels and even the media, it remains quite uncomfortable and disturbing for us, who have inherited the traditions of the philosophy of Enlightenment and the epistemology of modern deterministic science, to think of the futures of nature. Environmental changes clearly challenge social scientists to pay more attention to how nature can instigate, foster and promote certain futures and how such futures, far from existing only as abstract views or esoteric prophecies, are currently re-organizing our present activities, commitments and communities in depth. Yet, in Western society, nature has long been conceived precisely as that which does not change. Nature has been viewed as the ahistorical, stable and fixed stage of the changes triggered by humans and societies. It is what remains identical, permanent, as opposed to the shifting movement of cultural creativity, political reform and technological invention. Our modern understanding defines nature as a pure, singular and stable domain removed from and defined in relation to a changing society. What is more, even when it comes to the Darwinian theory of the evolution of species, animals have mainly been associated not with a history of change, but instead with the first step of our history. They are considered our origins and they embody the first step of our dynamic of humanization and emancipation out of animality. The birth of anthropology in the 19th Century conveyed a narrative which humans have progressively extracted themselves from the status of animal through a range of steps toward humanity, including a step represented by primitive people considered as in between animals and real humans. In addition to a blatant disregard for indigenous cultures, it is worth noting that whatever we do, older dualisms stick: We change; they [animals] only change because of our changing representations; we have a quick and turbulent history, they have a much slower and simple evolution; we have culture and its many transformations, they have instinct and its invariants [DES 02]. If we really want animals to change, then it must have happened a long time ago: Animals' history is always a past history [DES 02].

There is a strong sense that the dualism between stable nature and a changing society was made worse by the rise of environmentalism and social movements for nature conservation themselves. As Sarah Whatmore wrote, everyday understandings of the ‘wild’ place the creatures and spaces so called outside the compass of human society [WHA 02]. William Cronon also stressed how the constitution of institutions and policies of nature conservation (especially parks and reserves) in the United States framed nature as a pristine exterior, the touchstone of an original nature, that is outside the movement of human societies' history, at the antipodes of change – in the same way erasing the indigenous inhabitants of such wild nature from history [CRO 83]. Even today, proponents of naturalism hope that renouncing modern society's comforts – be they disposable nappies or pain-killers – will bring them closer to the true state of nature that, they believe, exists as a powerful and permanent reservoir of eternal values. By insisting on the importance of raising children in line with nature or promoting a return to the land, they assume that there is somewhere at the antipodes of society, a place where once enlightened by the perversion of society's constant will for improvement, we could come back and regenerate ourselves. Not least of all, in proposing to come back to older, more traditional ways of living supposedly in line with nature because they are attributed to the past or to people considered outside the course of consumer society, they still reinforce the view of a history in which the point of departure was nature – then humans instigated a long-lasting and perverted course of change, making them increasingly more remote and different from the primitive state of nature.

Thinking of the futures of nature requires us to overcome the old and powerful philosophical tradition that associates nature with permanence and society with change. It requires us to bring social change and environmental change much closer to each other, not only in the now relatively widely accepted sense that social change triggers and determines certain environmental changes, but also to the extent that the environment has its own potentialities of open-ended change fostering partly unpredictable futures. It requires us to think of living beings, ecological mechanisms and matter itself as embarking us toward futures that might not be more human, but instead more than human – to use Whatmore's words.

It is crucial not to consider environmental futures only as the outcome of human technologies and the human capacities of shaping and building the world they live in. Reducing environmental changes as side effects of the dynamic development of human technological power – as proposed by the Anthropocene narrative – does not recognize that nature changes: instead, such a narrative still denies non-human entities the capacity to change and impulse futures. Finally, nature might have never had less of a future than in the iconic image of the polar bear on the melting ice sheet. This image might not actually be representing the animal itself, but rather what is behind or beyond it and is actively changing its world: people at work in other places, imposing their own future on the rest of the world, leading to the rising of temperatures and the melting of the ice sheet. The bear no longer has any future – unless as a last move of human whim, which is what the image is calling for.

Why is it that social sciences have paid so little attention to the way environmental changes reconfigure our views of the future and our engagements into present practices, politics and ethics in order to anticipate environmental futures²? For all the environmental prophecies and scenarios that have become part of our present, the in-depth reconfiguration of social temporalities and futures associated with the rise of environmental concerns might have remained partly hidden behind the attention paid, both by sciences and humanities, to the extension of the mixed geographies of nature and society. Environment was indeed thought of in terms of the reconfiguration of our spatialities and the stretching of ecological connections, fluxes and new proximities in a now global world. While the rise of ecological activism has to do with a spatial extension of our concerns to places and beings connected in far-reaching networks in a globalized world where nothing can be considered as remote and separated from the rest of the world any longer. Ecological couplings and interactions extend their interconnections between sites, communities and beings, distant as they can be. On the other hand, social sciences and humanities have integrated environment at the core of their concerns by scrutinizing the extension of the mixed and hybrid geographies of nature and society. Human geographers have made key contributions to the new interest in nature and environment, not only in terms of geography but also within the rest of a field more traditionally occupied with only-human issues of existence and society. Geographer Sarah Whatmore, for instance, made key contributions to the new emphasis put on multi-species proximities and topologies that complicate the webs of more-than-human existence. What is more, outside geography, social science research on nature and environment was often inspired by geographical reflection, imagination and metaphors. It seems that influential thinkers and theorists of society interested in the role of objects, animals and matter tended to favor a geographical view of the deployment of situated networks of natureculture performance. While the Actor–Network Theory has depicted the progressive extension of links and alliances along socio-technical pathways and networks, other influential authors have focused on a variety of embodied sites, companion species itineraries and hybrid fluidities associating humans and non-humans – whether they are animals, plants, landscapes or objects – in the webbing of more than human complicated topologies³. When it comes to thinking of time and temporalities, the metaphor and notion of a landscape is still not very far away – as shown, for instance, in the neat neologism of a timescape (a landscape of time) used by Barbara Adam. In line with recent contributions (partly by the same authors) focused on issues of becoming⁴, we need to pay more attention to the fact that the environment does not only refer to our surrounding but also to our future. Obviously, historians of the environment have elaborated the notion of a shared historicity driving societies and places for quite a long time. However, I think that we need to go a step further in order to understand how environmental changes challenge the relationships of (post)modern societies with their futures and trigger new ways of engaging with more than human futures.

The importance of spatial and geographical approaches has contributed to overlooking the way environmental changes are challenging us to revisit the way we conceive the future and how we engage in it. Addressing the destabilization and reconfiguration of temporalities triggered by environmental changes requires us to look not beyond, but rather beside the geographical or topological extension of our connections along hybrid networks, in order to grasp the reconfiguration of our engagement with futures at a time of global changes.

I.2 Shifting futures

Clearly, our way of viewing futures and engaging with them has changed over time. Let us briefly recall which genealogies of the futures we are inheriting today. Such genealogy will be helpful, not only to throw light on the mixed imaginaries shaping our views of environmental futures, but also to show how ways of knowing, forecasting and actively anticipating future events are crucial elements of social organization.

According to Barbara Adam, a theorist of society and futures, the future once existed as destiny and fate: it was then open to the divination arts exercised by experts who had a privileged access to divine ways. In this first paradigm, the future was written in advance: it pre-existed in an already written book so that the future was entirely a matter of predestination. This way of viewing and engaging into futures has been progressively replaced by the modern notion that we make our future. Futures are the outcome of our decisions, projects and activities. At the same time futures become calculated on the basis of the projection of past data: futures can be known and managed as a series of events affecting people, which experts calculate by drawing on the constitution of collective data and statistics, described by Michel Foucault, as characteristics of the rise of biopolitics [FOU 78].

A third paradigm emerges with the more rapid pace of changes in the 20th Century. Changes become more unpredictable so that foresight and calculations are no longer valid. The world is marked by the increasing complexity of people's agency and interactions, still reinforced by the Internet and by the couplings of social and ecological processes and temporalities. Modeled predictions tend to be replaced by more open prospective exercises and the creation of different possible qualitative scenarios. Yet this paradigm is still about an empty future that remains to be filled and shaped by human realizations and projects: the recent development of science and technologies has been drawing on the circulation of promises of a better future – filled with more efficient medicine, more convenient technologies, etc. [JOL 10] – even though futures are actually increasingly opaque and more difficult to predict. The future is increasingly incorporated into the present (including present promises for instance) as it becomes unpredictable and uncontrollable. For Helga Nowotny, the future tends to disappear as it is reintegrated into an extended present⁵.

Finally, according to Barbara Adam, the present paradigm of the future is deeply marked by the irruption of environmental futures. With climate change, biodiversity erosion and extended pollution, today's generations are realizing that their present is actually the empty and pliable future of the past generations. Our present their future, open to their dreams, desires, discoveries, innovations and claims. In the environmental paradigm, it becomes barely possible to consider the future as a blank and empty page that is to be used and shaped following our