Download NATS 1840 Lecture 20 - summary

NATS 1840 Lecture 20 – Environmentalism and Science
- The failure of the environmental movement, popularity
- Some varieties of environmentalism:
o Preservation: defending the wilderness
o Conservation: maintaining natural resources for long-term use
o Pastoralism: living a more rustic, simple, or back-to-nature lifestyle
- Common core: concern about nature
- Nature is to be used for our benefit (pragmatic view), nature is valuable in and of
itself (essentialist view)
- Philosophical or aesthetic concern, beauty and inherent value, emotions, not
reason
- Modern concern, university experts, ecologists, management of the environment
- Ecologists separate from local, grassroots activists
- Ecologists provide scientific, quantitative analysis of nature
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, pesticides and chemicals in the environment,
well established statistics and quantitative analysis
- Science challenging industry and government on their own terms
- Ecologists “technicians” for nature, proper management on behalf of citizens
- Access to inaccessible areas, trust in environmental analysis, proper management
o “We must protect and/or wisely manage our natural resources, because if
we do not we may compromise our standard of living. Through such
arguments the new managerial form of environmental action attempts to
accomplish what decades of inspired prose and rhetoric could not.” (p 9)
- Environmental movement and self-interest
- Environmental impact assessment, development, minimizing environmental costs
(James Bay project)
o “… the question that society wants answered is not how to be right, but
how to be smart – how to go on doing what it has been doing, without
paying the price.” (p 11)
- “Humanist’s trap”, adopting quantitative standards to defend the worth of nature
when asked “what is it good for”, rather than stressing the inherent worth of
nature
- Scientists “deny life in order to study it”, analogy with cutting the vocal cords of
experimental animals
- Scientists and emotional detachment
- Experiencing or appreciating nature versus predicting and controlling it
(resourcism)
- reformist environmentalism (management, utility), deep ecology (changing
fundamental view of nature)