With regard to my last post, Hywel Arnold on Twitter raises an important question: how does the project of Bonneuil and Fressoz – specifically, to look for precedents to what they call "environmental reflexivity" prior to the past 50 years, for example in the works of the Georges-Louis Leclerc (Comte de Buffon) – differ to that of the likes of Nigel Lawson, a climate cynic (undeserving of label "sceptic"), who also identify Buffon and others as precursors to current understandings of climate change?
It must be made very clear that Bonneuil and Fressoz are in no way, shape or form establishing this genealogy in order to suggest that there is nothing new in the current situation – "move along, nothing to see here." Rather, they very much emphasise the ways in which environmental reflexivity has been played down, demeaned, discouraged and erased from public discourse over the past two centuries. Lawson, for his part, is merely one of the latest in a long line of liberal/neoliberal economists who abstract economic relations from the world they supposedly organise to such a degree that all pretensions to "market correction" make very little sense. In other words, Lawson et al are precisely the people who have been scrubbing out this capacity of people to pay attention. This argument is directed against them.
It is perfectly possible for two people to look at the same set of facts and to derive opposite conclusions – this is what the climate cynics do, with intellectual history no less than with climate data. The correct response is not to say the opposite and therefore allow them to dictate the terms of their own criticism. I think we must be quite vulgar historical realists on this point.
One limitation of Bonneuil and Fressoz's argument, as I think I at least suggested in my brief review, is the question of scale – is not the sheer magnitude of present transformations, and our scientifically-mediated awareness thereof, all out of keeping with these prior examples? Perhaps, I think that this is an open question at this point (at least with regard to where this book ends up).
The point that I find valuable, for my own work but also generally, is that we must be more historically nuanced with regard to our understandings of these world historical transformations.
