"Forget ‘the environment’"—problems of geosemantics and ecopoetics

George Monbiot has a typically provocative new article on The Guardian today:

If Moses had promised the Israelites a land flowing with mammary secretions and insect vomit, would they have followed him into Canaan? Though this means milk and honey, I doubt it would have inspired them.

His point is that the words we use have a great deal of power in terms of carving up the world and affecting how we react to things. See 'migrant' versus 'immigrant' or, as per Monbiot, 'climate change' versus 'climate breakdown.'

It is a highly relevant dispatch for me, as my PhD thesis basically investigates how we all came to be so convinced that we live in an 'environment.' In other words, how did this term come to be part of our spatial, political, poetic and worldly common sense?

Well, strictly speaking, my thesis covers the emergence of 'environment' and its cognates, in particular the French 'milieu,' up to the start of the twentieth-century. (A thesis is unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, a finite thing.)

'The environment' came to be during the 1960s. I am not yet, therefore, able to give a detailed account of how that happened. However, the broad strokes are simple enough.

In a book called The Environmental Revolution: A Guide for the New Masters of the Earth in 1970, the ornithologist, conservationist and co-founder of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Edward Max Nicholson wrote that a "revolution in human affairs" was then taking place. The "obvious descriptive label" for this, he continued, "once so infrequent and now becoming so universal [is] 'environmental'" (p.5).

Until around that time, 'environment' was a rather dry, technical term. The word itself was coined a few times, probably independently. However, the person who made it catch on was Herbert Spencer, the social evolutionist and purveyor of the phrase "survival of the fittest."

In short, it was through evolutionary theory that 'environment' became an item of intellectual common sense. Darwin in fact didn't use the term until late in his career and was quite sceptical about it for a number of reasons. However, by the 1920s, the word was everywhere in its scientific (or seeming-to-be-scientific) sense.

It is unsurprising, then, that 'the environment,' while perhaps exciting to those preparing to be 'masters of the Earth' in the 1970s, has proved to be quite the ecopoetic sedative in the long term.

While, of course, there is much more to the world than words, Monbiot's call for creativity is therefore welcome:

Rather than arrogating naming rights to themselves, professional ecologists should recruit poets and cognitive linguists and amateur nature lovers to help them find the words for what they cherish. […]

If we called protected areas “places of natural wonder”, we would not only speak to people’s love of nature, but also establish an aspiration that conveys what they ought to be. Let’s stop using the word environment, and use terms such as “living planet” and “natural world” instead, as they allow us to form a picture of what we are describing.

I'm not convinced that 'natural world' is any less anodyne and affectless than 'environment,' although, off the top of my head, I have no bright ideas as regards alternatives.

However, one point that might be interesting comes from something I've just been researching in the past few weeks: the origins of the Italian and Spanish ambiente (the equivalent of environment in those languages – in Portuguese, it's meio ambiente).

One of the earliest uses of the adjective 'ambient' outside of Latin is found in the 1587 poem El Monserrate, by the Spanish poet Cristóbal de Virués:

Gozo divino, celestial aviso,
Lleno de sacra luz, claro desvelo,
Influye el rico clima eternamente
Del fértil y alto monte al ayre ambiente.

Translated (very literally) as:

Divine joy, heavenly warning,
Full of sacred light, clear sleeplessness,
Influence the rich climate eternally
From the fertile and high mountain to the ambient air. 

The development of 'ambient' and 'ambience,' it seems, is a largely poetic history. For example, in John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667):

How first began this Heav’n which we behold
Distant so high, with moving Fires adorn’d
Innumerable, and this which yields or fills
All Space, the ambient Air wide interfus’d
Embracing round this florid Earth, […]

Quite by contrast, the French 'milieu' that became the English 'environment' came originally as a translation of Isaac Newton's use of the word 'Medium,' then adopted in mechanistic nineteenth century biology before being taken up, in turn, by the rather nasty biosociology of Spencer.

So, long story short, the ambient has always had poetic qualities that the 'medium' and the 'environment' have not.

However, perhaps our problem is not just our combinations of words or their translations but the very worldviews or cosmologies that these vocabularies have been created to express?

As Keavy Martin writes in her book Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature, the Inuktitut word sila most commonly "refers to the environment, such as in the phrases silami qanuippa? (how’s the weather) or silaup asijjipallianinga (climate change)" but also "refers to wisdom, or cleverness, as in silatujuq (he/she/it is intelligent, sensible, or wise)."

Obviously, 'environment' is the go-to phrase for rendering anything like this into English. However, without her explanation, almost everything would be lost in translation.

And so, what kind of connection might we find here? What more might we need to do in order to transform the vocabularies with which we express – and not only express, feel – the worlds around us?

I have no great suggestions but we must stop complacently mouthing the same old stale slogans of yesteryear – of that I have no doubt.

Monbiot on Britain's feudal present—an interesting case for agnotology

George Monbiot has been one of the most rigorous journalists in Britain for a long time now, if not the most (who else publishes footnotes with every article?). He's also surely one of the most diverse. Today's article on land ownership in Britain is a particular tour de force. (Entirely incidentally, apparently it's also the first he's written using voice recognition software. I don't know if it has affected his style, as he suggests, but there's certainly nothing wrong with it.)

The Scottish programme for government is the first serious attempt to address the nature of landholding in Britain since David Lloyd George’s budget of 1909. Some of its aims hardly sound radical until you understand the context. For example, it will seek to discover who owns the land. Big deal? Yes, in fact, it is. At the moment the owners of only 26% of the land in Scotland have been identified.

I've become interested in land politics in general recently and am going to be reading much more on it in the near future; however, it's this sort of agnotology (the study of ignorance or doubt) that really fascinates me. So much has been written on how knowledge is produced but relatively little on how it's prevented; so much on connection, so little on disconnection.

This also links very much to another issue Monbiot has written a lot about: tax havens. The production of ignorance and evasion of tax are closely linked—indeed, tax evasion/avoidance is largely to do with the production of ignorance with regard to who owns what where and when. It's all about having your cake and eating it too (paywalled article), as Ronen Palan has argued most ably—receiving the benefits of state protection without the responsibilities. And this is achieved largely by controlling access to information.

It's interesting that land ownership and taxation have risen together as issues here in Britain in the past few years, alongside the financial crises. Indeed, land and tax are tied closely together in Monbiot's article:

Consider Scotland’s determination to open up the question of property taxes, which might lead to the only system that is fair and comprehensive: land value taxation. Compare it with the fleabite of a mansion tax proposed by Ed Miliband, which, though it recoups only a tiny percentage of the unearned income of the richest owners, has so outraged the proprietorial class that some of them (yes, Griff Rhys Jones, I’m thinking of you) have threatened to leave the country. Good riddance.

Why is it that a tax on mansions can have such political purchase but one on land so little? Perhaps sprawling fields and woods turned into grouse hunting grounds don't scream opulence and wastefulness like the oversized and over-marbled pseudo-palaces of celebrity millionaires. But they probably should.

How wolves change rivers and whales change climate through trophic cascades

After the very popular How Wolves Change Rivers, now How Whales Change Climate, narrated by George Monbiot.

Monbiot on Boyd; The Tory government's censure of science

In the Guardian today George Monbiot does his best to eviscerate an article by Professor Ian Boyd, chief scientific adviser at the UK's Department for Environment:

Boyd's doctrine is a neat distillation of government policy in Britain, Canada and Australia. These governments have suppressed or misrepresented inconvenient findings on climate change, pollution, pesticides, fisheries and wildlife. They have shut down programmes that produce unwelcome findings and sought to muzzle scientists. This is a modern version of Soviet Lysenkoism: crushing academic dissent on behalf of bad science and corporate power.

Having read the article in question it perhaps isn't quite as dastardly as it's been portrayed, however I do strongly disagree with it and I do despair that someone like Boyd could represent the voice of science in this country, co-opted as he clearly is by one side of the relationship that he is supposed to mediate.

Some of what he said is valid.  E.g. in his conclusion he writes:

Policy-making is a messy, sometimes chaotic, process because it needs to include social, electoral, ethical, cultural, practical, legal and economic considerations in addition to scientific evidence.

Undoubtedly he is right.  And if there are any scientists who don't accept this democratic (as opposed to technocratic) political reality then they are in the wrong.  However, in the next and final paragraph Boyd goes on to say:

The scientific community needs to build a strong sense about how it fits in to this complex mixture to ensure that its contribution to future decisions can be maximised. This means sticking to the evidence and describing clearly what it does and does not say; expressing the balance of risk associated with one or other policy option and avoiding suggesting that policies are either right or wrong; and being willing to make the voice of science heard by engaging with the mechanisms already available through science advisory committees, by working with embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena.

In other words: The system works, don't you dare go outside of it.  Know your place.  Scientists should speak only when spoken to.

Just because technocracy cannot be substituted for democracy doesn't mean that scientists should just sit in their proscribed little boxes and do as they're told (what a technocratic, undemocratic, apolitical notion that is in its own way!).  They have every right to shout as loud as they wish.  Indeed, that is their duty.  It is the politician's burden to have to occasionally ignore them and to take the flak when they do - just as they do with every other part of the demos.  It is the scientist's role to argue their point with as much force and power as they can muster and the politician's role to adjudicate between that constituency and others.

Asking the scientist to pipe down because the politician has a headache isn't good enough.  If you can't stand the heat...

Politics is agonistic - it inevitably involves conflict and disagreement.  No conflict, no politics.  Scientists can't get their way all the time, nor should they.  However, this doesn't mean that they should shut up and get back in their labs.  You can't please all the people all the time but that mustn't stop the people (including scientists) having their say.  It doesn't make them any less scientists, any less objective, any less competent.  If some say argue the contrary then that is their fault, not that of the scientists.

There's much else wrong with Boyd's article too.  His reading of the TB/badger issue is mealy mouthed and misleading.  He fixates on 'uncertainty,' suggesting that if the science is uncertain (as it almost always is) then scientists cannot legitimately make factual claims.  He suggests that scientists must simply provide politicians with 'the facts' and then shut up - as if it were that simple.

Worst of all, he takes the breakdown of that idealised, impossible relationship to be the fault of the scientists alone, placing all of the blame and the burden for reform on the scientists.

Boyd seems to yearn for science/politics to be a nice, polite, agreeable conversation - perhaps over a cup of tea - where scientists are courteous and dutiful and say 'thank you, sir' when they've been told 'no.'

In thrall to power.

Monbiot's Dilemma

George Monbiot: The day my inner anarchist lost out to the bourgeois me

A very enjoyable and well written story, however it seems to me that George and his friends were never anarchists in anything more than name to begin with.  George's anarchism didn't 'give way' to his bourgeois liberalism.  To be an anarchist means to take responsibility for oneself all the duties and otherwise performed by the state -- to stop recognising such authority but also to stop relying on such authorities.  These so called anarchists didn't do these things.  They were actually pacifist liberals; they thought they could do away with violence (or even confrontation) and simply reason with whoever they came into conflict with.  Turns out that doesn't work, so they needed the police to step in.

There can be no such thing as a pacifist anarchist.  Or, rather, a pacifist anarchist probably isn't going to live very long.  Or, a pacifist anarchist can only survive in a world of pacifists.  You can be a pacifist if you get other people to protect you (if you accept statist liberalism -- free of violence or the threat of violence because you get others to do it for you).  But without that 'outsourcing' you either have to grow a spine and do it yourself or pretend that good intentions and reason can overcome all divisions and obstacles (quite a delusion).

The moral of the story, I think, is that you can recognise that people such as this traveller have been abused, excluded, disenfranchised and still be faced with a very real problem with regard to how to deal with them.  Explaining how they are the way they are (by social factors not genetic predisposition or theological 'evil') tells us nothing about how to deal with them as they are.  They are no less a problem, despite all the explanation.  The old hippyish liberalism which would have everyone just being a bit nicer to each other comes crashing down the moment such bourgeois pretensions actually meet anyone genuinely downtrodden and disenfranchised and realises that some of these people would rather kick you in the head and steal your phone than listen to your self-involved bourgeois psycho-babble, which is literally meaningless to them.

Recognising that there are bad, broken people in the world who no amount of care or reasoning can reach doesn't mean that 'there are just evil people in the world who were born evil and that's that'.  That's a totally false deduction.  It means that, despite having a clear idea of how and why people turn out like this, we have no magic wand to wave to make people nice and friendly and non-violent.  Only a totally different upbringing is likely to do that.  And it's a bit late for grown men, who know only bitterness and violence and whose very personality is built from that world.

Nobody is 'born evil'.  Criminals are made, not born.  But that doesn't help us much when confronted with real, non-abstract, criminals, right there, in our faces, stealing our stuff and threatening to break our bodies.  It's not that the abstract ideas about what causes criminality are wrong or that they're not 'real', it's that they don't help us much in immediate situations.  In fact these ideas about criminality in the abstract are real and are important but they do not in themselves give us a course of action.  Why?  Well, because they won't stop people who don't share our ideas stealing from and attacking us.  If we are pacifist liberals we can pretend that we do no violence (because we've outsourced our violence to others).  But 'anarchists' very quickly realise that violence can't be so easily set aside -- that if it isn't outsourced it can't just be ignored, not without disregarding one's own safety and well-being.

It's all very well to have grown up avoiding confrontation and abhorring violence (I know I have) but that world can only exist because it is protected from the less fortunate, more violent worlds of others.  That's George's dilemma -- how to step outside the protections that liberal society have granted, given that one of these is protection from the violence of criminals.  (And, of course, quite often that very apparatus of 'protection' is the source of violence, but that doesn't change the fact that most of us rely on it for protection most of the time.)

Secrecy and Think Tanks

The public sector is now so transparent that we have a right to read the private emails of climate scientists working for a state-sponsored university. The private sector is so opaque that we have no idea on whose behalf the people who appear every day on the BBC, using arguments that look suspiciously like corporate propaganda, are speaking.

George Monbiot in the Guardian today.

What does political theory have to say about secrecy? It seems that a large part of power - be it with tax havens or lobby organisations as above - is vested in its secrecy. Yet secrecy isn't ignorance. Secrecy has to be maintained; it takes intensive legal and political enforcement, not to mention highly convenient delineation. Secrecy itself is something fundamental to power - the power to define privacy. Making something public and hence political certainly takes power and a lot of work but this is no less true of making something private. This 'liminal power' that decides the contours of 'the political' is decidedly interesting to me.