[Recommendation] Required Reading

With the Conservative budget likely to be brought down today by the opposition parties  it seems we are headed for a spring election. As we prepare for a new political reality in Ottawa, one required reading is a compilation of essays edited by Teresa Healy on behalf of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The 47 contributors detail Harper's numerous attacks on democratic governance, his shameful international record, and other negative spinoffs from his policy framework on energy, foreign investment, environment, safety, welfare, employment, etc.

I highly recommend this read - even a quick perusal will remind you of the many, many reasons why Harper is bad for Canada, and bad for Canadians. Recommend it to others too - it's the least you can do to ensure we don't experience another four years of Harperthoritarianism.

The best part is you don't even have to buy the book! It's FREE, and available online as a PDF document. Just click HERE to download.

[Strategizing] Fighting Sarah Palin's Conception of 'Sound Science'

In December 2009 Sarah Palin wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post titled "Sarah Palin on the Politicization of the Copenhagen Climate Conference", where she basically argued that the USA should boycott the international climate change negotiations because the science on climate change wasn't 'credible' (she doesn't deny the existence of climate change; she merely doesn't believe humans play any role in exacerbating these changes). She claims that we now have 'proof' that the science isn't credible because of the so-called 'Climategate' email scandal at the University of East Anglia.

Now, there are a number of ways to respond to Palin, aside from just tuning out and avoiding her annoying hypocritical political diatribes. For one, it's not difficult to demonstrate how insignificant the East Anglia email 'scandal' is in the context of the overall global scientific effort to understand the human contribution to climatological change (see the Huffington Post's article about this here). Nor it it difficult to identify numerous problems of logic within Palin's reasoning about why Copenhagen should be boycotted (a good response to Palin's op-ed can be found in Marc Ambinder's annotated rebuttal in The Atlantic Monthly).

However, some might say that a more successful critique lies in exposing Palin's understanding of science as some totally objective, apolitical monolithic 'truth' that exists out there devoid from prevailing social relations and politico-economic realities. In other words, the response to Palin should not be to bombard her (and her throngs of misguided followers) with more of the very scientific evidence that she's bound to find faulty regardless of its 'prestige'; rather, the best response to Palin is to acknowledge the obvious nature of her statement that the science is in many ways political, while at the same time making efforts to exemplify how this 'knowledge' about the anthropogenic influence on climate change, while imperfect, is still pretty darn good! It's actually the best we've got. It's good enough, we might add, to do something about it (including sending our political leaders to international conferences).

I believe this is what the constructivist geographer David Demeritt would argue. In a 2001 article in the Annals titled "The Construction of Global Warming and the Politics of Science," Demeritt calls for "a more reflexive politics of climate change and of scientific knowledge based on active trust" (307). He makes quite a complicated argument; at first he comes across as a skeptic as he highlights numerous flaws with the way climatic models provide numerous venues for scientists to hide the complicated web of social politics and relations that shape their very models.  But then he comes around, showcasing his broader purpose in exposing the political nature of climate science, and how he believes we should respond to skeptics who view science as solid gold (I quote at length from p. 329):

The proper response to public doubts is not to increase the public's technical knowledge about and therefore belief in the scientific facts of global warming. Rather, it should be to increase public understanding and therefore trust in the social process through which those facts are scientifically determined. Science does not offer the final word, and its public authority should not be based on the myth that it does, because such an understanding of science ignores the ongoing process of organized skepticism that is, in fact, the secret of its epistemic success. Instead scientific knowledge should be presented more conditionally as the best that we can do for the moment. Though perhaps less authoritative, such a reflexive understanding of science in the making provides an answer to the climate skeptics and their attempts to refute global warming as merely a social construction.

Had this advice (which it should be noted was available a whole 8 years before the so-called 'climategate' scandal) been followed, it is possible that we could be a whole lot more productive at these international negotiations. The science is never going to be perfect, and the scientists need to be blatant about this fact. And yet, after four assessments by the IPCC and other research units, some absolutely impressive work has been done. In the face of this impressive work (despite all its flaws and imperfections) there lies plenty of good reason to confront the issue of climate change and tackle some of the ways in which we know* that human activities are exacerbating/influencing some of the processes of the Earth system - even if, through democratic political negotiation, we decide that our confrontation efforts should be more reactive (through adaptation) than preemptive (through mitigation).


* Of course we'll never 'know' anything with 100% certainty, but for all intent and purpose, the certainty we do have is enough to warrant action.

[Video] Making sense for more than four decades...

The makers of Mad Men weigh in on the future of high-speed rail in America. Enjoy the clip!

[Sympathy] A Very Sad Day for Wisconsin

It's an extremely sad day for Wisconsin. The Republicans have used slimy and insidious tricks to take away the rights of people to bargain collectively with their fellow workers. A very sad day indeed:

The New York Times article by Monica Davey is quite informative in this regard:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/us/10wisconsin.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

Let's wish the people Wisconsin all the best on their uphill political struggle against reactionary tyranny.

Ryan

[Redefinition] Rethinking Resilience

The word 'resilience' sounded like a fluffy term the first time I heard it... and in fact it still has a cotton candy texture. But I've been rethinking resilience this last week, and now I'm wondering whether it's a concept that critical geographers and social nature theorists can use as an operative goal, perhaps even a replacement for the overused and increasingly meaningless "sustainable development".

It's an idea that I once argued against in The Leveller (Vol.2, No. 2, p. 12). I lamented the way that new terms such as "environmental responsibility" and "ecological resilience" were being employed by 'green' thinkers across the political spectrum as a replacement for "sustainability", mostly because they realized the genuine difficulties inherent in the latter concept. At a general level Brundtland's idea of meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations is certainly an ideal toward which we should strive - how could anyone argue against the idea of forbidding future generations from achieving their needs?

However, I'm willing to admit that this definition of sustainability, as it's commonly interpreted, carries little context about what our present (or future) political economy constructs as a 'need'. Nor does it make the necessary normative commitment towards changing our conceptualization of needs and wants. The concept of sustainability does not reflect the real discrepancy between human needs (which are still not being met in many parts of the world) and social desires (those things that we rich people mislabel as 'needs' - e.g. "I need a snow blower" [Answer: No, you want a snow blower]). Perhaps this is why Marxists in the early 1980s considered sustainability to be a "bourgeois" concept - in some ways it's an ahistorical term that presumes our contemporary mode of production can be transformed into its less voracious sister - capitalism lite?

Resilience is a term that came out of the environmental change literature (see Peter Timmerman's Vulnerability, Resilience and the Collapse of Society, 1981). The idea of resilience, applied in a socio-ecological context, refers to the adaptive capacity of a system in the face of changes. As Carl Folke et. al. explained:

More resilient social-ecological systems are able to absorb larger shocks without changing in fundamental ways. When massive transformation is inevitable, resilient systems contain the components needed for renewal and reorganization. In other words, they can cope, adapt, or reorganize without sacrificing the provision of ecosystem services (Folke et al, 2002, 438).

There is something in this concept that evades the problems associated with "sustainability" by not making any assumptions about needs and wants, and by placing humans in a reactive role as opposed to positing them as an omnipotent shaping force. With a resilient system, the needs of future generations is up for discussion - we may have good guesses about what might be needed, but we always assume scenarios in which our ability to fulfill those needs are made vulnerable. Resilience causes us to dig down and prioritize our needs and wants.

However - and here's the fence-sitter in me - there's also something fundamentally conservative about resilience (and sustainability too). Both ideas stem conceptually from a fear of change. What exactly is it that we are trying to sustain in sustainability? Is it really worth trying to make a system resilient to external forces of change when the original system in itself is socially and ecologically corrupt in other multifaceted ways?

Let me use Easter Island as an example. We've all heard the story of how that civilization collapsed - ultimately resulting from excessive deforestation (see Jared Diamond's book Collapse). The downed trees were needed for firewood, but also to move the heavy stone statues that have now made the island famous. As a thought exercise, let us pretend that the people of Easter Island had adopted a 'sustainable development' model (a policy of trying to meet contemporary needs without compromising needs of the future). Would they have been able to foresee the role that deforestation played in their unsustainable political economy? Moving statues was a social need at the time. Even if they had understood the importance of trees to their long-term subsistence, would they have been able to curb their excessive levels of deforestation before irreversible runaway socio-ecological damage? In other words, would an understanding of sustainable development have enabled them to change their way of life, or would it have lulled them into a false sense of hope that their existing practices could somehow be made "sustainable"? The same could be said of resilience: Would the people of Easter Island have been building a straw house in trying to build adaptive capacity? Even if they had built a system that was temporarily resilient to the sudden and total lack of trees, would it have been worth it (or even possible) to pursue life on a treeless island in the long term?

I don't know the answers to these questions. It's just a thought exercise I'm employing to question the usefulness of resilience and sustainability to our present socio-ecological problems. On the one hand, the idea of building societies resilient to changing material realities (on account of climate change, pollution, ecosystem damage, etc.) just seems like common sense. On the other, I worry that we're trying to make the wrong system resilient - maybe we need social change before trying to improve our adaptive capacity, so that the system we try to sustain is worth sustaining?!