Introduction: Technonatural time–spaces

Prologue

In this special issue of Science as Culture, we mull over the current state of our common environments and the politics of nature more generally. ‘The Death of Environmentalism’ has recently emerged as a provocative thesis circulating around the Internet and beyond. Whilst this thesis may well be generating more hot air than cool analysis, a growing range of voices are suggesting that environmentalism is in trouble and that there is a real need to open up the environmental debate in new ways. In this issue, we seek to engage with these debates but also to explore possible openings. We suggest that the notion of ‘Technonatures’ may provide a fruitful metaphor/myth for motivating discussion and reflection about changing relations between our ecologies, bodies, technologies and urban worlds. We hope readers will engage with the contributors to this issue, as debates progress about the possible contours of a new spatial/temporal politics of environmentalism for the new century.

Environmental debate in changing space–times?

The current state of the environmental debate is clearly in considerable flux at the beginning of the twenty-first century. From European Union countries to Brazil, from China to Canada, societies are gripped by controversies, dilemmas and disputes emerging from the incorporation and resistance of ecologies, bodies and landscapes into circuits of commodification, property regulation, innovation, patenting and enclosure. Disputes surrounding nanotechnology, biotechnology, global warming and concerns over biodiversity, water resources, or food, to name just a few issues, give credence to the perception that natures, societies and technologies are being jointly made and remade at dizzying speeds. According to many writers, a seemingly unbounded, technologically instilled, and ideologically renewed capitalism appears to be intensifying the process of creative destruction of diverse ecologies across the globe. Yet, the movements which have been at the centre of politicizing these processes of remaking—notably the diverse ecological and green social movements that exploded onto the political scene with such force in the last quarter of the twentieth century—seem politically and intellectually disorientated by such developments. Indeed, if we follow the recent thoughts of Bruno Latour, ‘the politics of nature’ is increasingly marked by a degree of stagnation (Latour, 2004, p. 1; Castree, 2006).

Latour is of course a ‘career subversive’, as Noel Castree notes in this issue. He is a leading provocateur whose similar pronouncements on the ‘death of critique’ (Latour, 2004) may indicate a penchant for the dramatic.Yet, his claim that the political project of environmentalism has lost much of its confidence, coherence and vigour has been reiterated recently by a much broader array of activist and academic voices, from different parts of the globe.1

The idea that the environmental movement has been experiencing a backlash will of course be news to few readers of this journal. Andrew Jamison (2004) recently documented how explicitly anti-environmental currents had reached into the institutional heart of Scandinavian societies where the project of ecological modernization had reached its most developed stage. Focusing on the rise of Danish eco-sceptic Bjorn Lomborg, Jamison demonstrated the extent to which anti-environmental or contrarian discourses had been successfully adopted by right-wing political forces in Denmark. As Jamison noted, Lomborg and his political allies attempted to dismantle some of the most developed forms of democratic decision-making and environmental policy-making in Europe.

Moreover, there are real signs of decline amongst mainstream environmental organizations. In the UK, there has been a plateauing of environmentalist attitudes, as well as a reduction in the likelihood of people engaging in conventional political environmental actions in support of established green or countryside organizations over the last decade (MacNaghten, 2003, p. 63). In Australia, the proportion of the population claiming to be concerned about environmental problems has declined in the period 1992–2004 from 75% to 57% (Davison, 2005), with the membership of environmental groups remaining relatively static. In the USA, social survey research that the number of Americans who agreed that: ‘Most of the people active in environmental movements are extremists, not reasonable people’, increased from 32% in 1996 to 41% in 2000 (Shellenberger and Nordhaus, 2005). Of course such surveys and longitudinal analyses can be problematized in a range of ways.

However, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus' (2005) recent provocative internal critique of the environmental movement, ‘The Death of Environmentalism’, has really crystallized concerns. They acknowledge that the US environmental movement has made fruitful regulatory gains over the last three decades in the fight for basic environmental protection: from the Endangered Species Act to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. However, Shellenberger and Nordhaus suggest over recent times—and with particular reference to global warming—that little further progress has been made. At the core of their critique though lies the claim that the dominant environmental groups in the US have failed to generate a credible vision of the future or the political alliances that could point to new strategies to resist such attacks, or to move beyond the battle between either market-led or Keynesian regulation approaches towards environments. Following this, they advocate ‘a collective step back to rethink everything’, to ‘let go of old identities, categories and assumptions’.2

Accounting for the new mood of self-doubt

Such critical developments lend themselves to various responses, some more sanguine than others. It could immediately be pointed out that the environmental movement—ranging as it does from classic preservationist and conservationist currents to ecocentric, new age, environmental justice and peace groups—has long been a more shifting and complex set of coalitions than many of its critics have allowed. Much recent ‘Death of Environmentalism’ discussion is in reality a critique of the perceived limitations of the preservationist and conservationist movements that constitute the core institutions of developed world environmentalism. Dissatisfaction with this mainstream is nothing new. Indeed, the history of this movement over the last four decades could in part be defined by persistent battles between centre/mainstream and periphery. It was social ecologists and social justice activists, following Barry Commoner and Murray Bookchin, that sought to work tirelessly to unpick neo-Malthusian arguments in the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was eco-feminist and environmental justice activists that pointed out more general class, gender, and racial biases of the mainstream. Finally, it was developing world environmentalists, following the ‘Rio’ summit in the early 1990s, that additionally suggested that elite mainstream northern environmental groups had failed to capture the diverse social–ecological concerns of peasants, farmers and the urban poor of the less developed world (Agarwal and Narain, 1991; Guha and Martinez-Allier, 1997).

A focus on declining (or static) membership numbers of environmental organizations additionally needs to be treated cautiously. Firstly, and simply focusing on Europe, Ulrich Beck suggested some time ago that given the profoundly different manifestations of environmentalism it was very likely this movement would fragment in many ways. That is that new alliances would be sought by differing groups that had been—in the early throws of environmentalism—grouped together. As such, the declining environmental attitudes and membership figures may simply indicate this process of dissolution and reworking of alliances at work: environmental justice campaigners finding they have common cause with broader social justice advocates, classic conservationists with state agencies. Second, it could be observed—if we cast our net beyond the state of environmentalism to consider the current state of progressive politics—that many oppositional political currents now find themselves outflanked in a turbulent period when the twin forces of neo-liberal expansion and US uni-polarity seek to deliver a world where people must be made to think that everything is changing so that everything can remain the same.3 From the perspective of political economy, it could well be argued following this that within current global restructuring environmental regulations have come to represent ‘a substantial and growing constraint on capitalist accumulation strategies, and therefore ripe for neoliberal attacks’—just as much as social welfare and labour rights have been (McCarthy and Prudham, 2004, p. 278).

Yet, whilst these forms of explanation have some critical purchase on events, there seems more going on. The manner in which real concern and anxiety about the future of ‘the politics of nature’ now seems so widespread, emerging from so many different quarters, suggests that too quick a dismissal of the ‘death of environmentalism’ debate is equally mistaken and in danger of courting complacency.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus (2005) are clearly onto something when they suggest that part of the current problem is that much of the progressive environmental movement lacks a credible image of the future—especially in comparison to the powerful visions of the future championed by New Left environmentalists such as Bookchin and Gorz in previous times.4 Many mainstream environmental organizations in the US and in Europe such as Greenpeace, to be fair, have sought to address the question of alternatives over recent times. Yet, it could be observed that marked tendencies have emerged in many campaigning organizations to frame environmental issues as consumer questions in terms of recycling waste, or buying green energy, fair trade or organic produce; and therefore as problems solvable by multiple individual consumer actions. Strong tendencies have been present amongst many environmental organizations, governments, and some companies over recent years to frame ‘environmental subjects’ as critical or ethical consumers that echoes the reconfiguring of individuals as citizen consumers in the New Labour project. Green consumption many well have some value but it can additionally and often unwittingly contribute to the construction of broad but shallow constituencies which offer a somewhat ‘passive’ role to the public, set parameters to social change and limit discussion of the need for counter-institutions and alternative systems of production to the mainstream.5

An additional dimension to the current difficulties experienced by mainstream environmentalism is surely that the environmental sciences find themselves in changing times. Science as Culture has been one of the journals documenting ongoing controversies running through scientific ecology and the broader environmental sciences over the last decade. Yet, it would seem that it is not simply classic neo-Malthusian styles of environmental critique but also alarmist and romantic styles of critique favoured by many of the large, predominantly US environmental organizations, that seem to have exhausted themselves. It is now widely recognized in many green activist circles that undifferentiated ‘crisis talk’ and ‘risk rhetoric’, have now become as problematic as Bjorn Lomborg's Promethianism for grasping the complex politics at stake in current forms of socio–ecological–technological change (Lomborg, 2001).6

There are imaginative attempts to refocus environmentalist critique to offer both more complex accounts of what is at stake in environmental debates and more possibilities for more complex responses to contrarian and anti-environmental currents, but these accounts remain at the fringes. It is environmental justice activists and environmentalists in less-developed nations that are currently trying to redraw the environmental debate as political ecology (see Guha and Martinez-Allier, 1997; Agyeman, 2005; Agrawal, 2005).7 Moreover, one can point to a wide range of activity at a more grassroots level where a range of highly innovative, small-scale justice campaigns flourish: against the international trade in toxics, or for local control and use of agricultural biodiversity.8 Critics have often missed how much of this grassroots mobilization is inspired by, and inspires, political ecology and centres on attempts to formulate an environmentalism of the poor and a reflexive science-politics that is open to diverse knowledges.9

Yet, at the mainstream, such developments have had modest impacts on many of the most powerful environmental organizations in the developed world. Consider for example an observation made by Marie Cohen after nearly two decades of attempts by Environmental Justice activists in the USA to get US mainstream environmental movements to pay greater attention to urban environments and environmental justice issues—i.e. to consider the environments that the majority of Americans actually inhabit. Cohen (2006) notes that 90% of all so-called environmental organizations in the US are still overwhelmingly preoccupied by two major issues: wildlife protection and landscape conservation. As such, critiques may well have been issued time and again from the periphery—but it's not clear that anyone has been listening at the centre.

The ‘Death of Environmentalism’ debate is sure to run and run. Given the complexity of the issues involved, debates about the current malaise of environmentalism will surely evolve in many different ways over the coming years. In this special issue of Science as Culture we seek to explore this broad issue from a slightly different angle. Successful engagement with political life is rarely simply a matter of deploying the correct strategies and tactics. It is often a much more allusive affair—a search for metaphors, imagery and symbols that can be mobilized to effectively grasp the social imagination, a claim to represent ‘the future’. At the heart of the current stagnation of the politics of nature, perhaps the imaginative horizons of environmentalism have become more problematic.

For example, Aidan Davison (2005) has analysed how Australian environmental social movements are experiencing a similar loss of confidence, coherence and direction to those in the USA and Europe. His work is of particular interest for the manner in which he reports feelings of ‘bad faith’ and ‘guilty conscience’ amongst Australian environmental activists. Indeed, he suggests: ‘participants feel acutely the disjuncture between their discourse and the world they inhabit’. Such activists are increasingly aware of difficulties that are now involved in politically deploying the categories of pristine or pure natures to the complex, hybrid lifeworlds of their everyday lives.

In this issue we seek to explore this theme further. An underlying source of contemporary Green anxieties may be their basis in an implicit, if reluctant, recognition that critical discourses formulated around strong, power-laden oppositions and distinctions (of the organic versus the synthetic, the human versus the machine, the natural versus the technological, etc.) have become not just much harder to maintain in recent years, but also less politically desirable to maintain. There does seem to be a common structure of feeling emerging in diverse places and spaces that many people increasingly find themselves negotiating ‘technonatural forms of life’ (cf. Lash, 2001), that they have been doing so for some time, and that this needs to be effectively reflected in reworked political ecological practices and theories.

Technonatural time–spaces?

But why technonatures? What does this term mean? In this historical period, when technological determinism is still rife, an increasingly geneticized biology is so often invoked to provide the last word on the ‘natural’ facts of human variations (Franklin, 2000), and every few years new technologically-oriented epochs seem to be evoked, why use the ‘techno’ conjoined with ‘natures’?

The term ‘technonatures’ is deliberatively provocative. Moreover it is clearly in debt to a long line of discussions, from Raymond Williams onwards, that have persistently raised sharp question-marks over attempts to frame environmental politics in terms of the rhetoric of defending the pure, the authentic, and the past, solely in terms of the ecological or the natural.10 Yet, in deploying the term ‘technonatures’ as an organizing myth/metaphor for thinking about the politics of nature in contemporary times, we seek to give discussions about social nature an altered inflection.

Here the term ‘technonatures’ highlights a growing range of voices that are ruminating over the claim that not only is it the case that knowledge's of our worlds are ever more technologically mediated, produced, enacted, and contested but also that many modern peoples find themselves, or perceive themselves, as ever more entangled with things, with technological, cultural, urban, and ecological networks and diverse hybrid materialities. Moreover, it is not simply a growing range of philosophers, historians, geographers, sociologists and natural scientists but a growing range of activist currents that are taking seriously Donna Haraway's (1991) claim that our sensuous, embodied engagement with the world is marked not just by collisions or, better still, intra-actions between the organic and synthetic, but that there is no sense of nature, human subjectivity, the body, or even concepts of sustainability and ecology that can effectively be thought outside of, or separable from, ever more technologized societies and social relations. We deploy the term ‘technonatures’ then less to declare another Toffler-style ‘epoch shift’ (Barry, 2001), and more to name a new mood or sensibility, a shift in the imaginative horizons of the environmental debate. We seem to be increasingly dealing with a debate that is less about the return to pure nature and more concerned about the forms and power relations that are becoming embedded in what John Law (2004) calls ‘natureculturetechnics’. Moreover, it is the built environment that appears to be emerging, for a growing array of activists and academics, as the central terrain over the battle for the contours of future natures and new forms of environmentalism.

Technonatural talk and praxis presently appear to be spilling out in many places. Some of these conversations to be sure are macro debates about how we can mark social change over the large scale and long durée. For example, there have been recent attempts to think through the environmental consequences of living in ‘technological societies’ (Barry, 2001) or informational/digital capitalism (Luke, 1999). Yet, one can also point to a range of brilliantly imaginative technonatural geographies and sociologies of everyday life (e.g. Michael, 2000; Clark, 2002) that seek to capture the phenomenological experience of how natures and modern built environments have become increasingly interwoven in the everyday experience of diverse peoples in such things as garden filled atrium buildings and malls, tourist resort developments, enhancements of ecological reserves, or in serious leisure activities like walking.

In contemporary culture, technonatural sensibilities seem also to be hovering in dystopian cinematic visions like Gattica and The Matrix, and in more hopeful gestures such as the ecological–technological art installations of Olafur Eliasson or the rather more controversial new aesthetic interventions in biotechnology debates provoked by Eduardo Kac. Moreover, such technonatural sensibilities seem to be seeping into activist circles. Consider the attempts by the Bioneers in California to draw together currents of Green activism with progressive engineering; or Brian Milani's eco-materials project in Toronto which seeks to draw together trade unionists with environmental activists and engineers to explore communalist and democratic expropriations of the diverse possibilities of the ‘new productive forces’ from industrial ecology and post-Fordist ecological technology. Or consider the ECO-TEC group, who propose not only an ecologically sustainable architecture but that this now needs to take the form of a ‘catalytic fusion’ between ‘ecology and technology’ (Marras, 1999, p. 3).

All these interventions indicate an increasing desire by many activist as well as academic currents to move environmental debates beyond stale dualisms and oppositions, such as that between technophobia and technophilia. In some senses, there is a structure of feeling in these ‘cyborg ecologies’ that there is now no going back to any kind of purism of the natural. What increasingly seems to be on the agenda, to echo William Chaloupka (2003, p. 147), is a desire to recapture the ‘irrepressible lightness and joy of being green’, a politics marked with a buoyant sense of possibility, a delight in intellectual speculation over openings.

Plan of the present

Here we use the metaphor ‘technonatures’ to name a moment where the environmental debate seems to be folding into a vastly more complex social–ecological–technological field of political discussion. ‘The Death of Environmentalism’ discourse focuses on a malaise, yet perhaps the nature of the ‘environment’ is being both contested, rendered plural and expanded. As such, the nature of environmental politics is necessarily becoming subject to extensive revisionism. All of the following contributions to this issue, in focusing on the city, the body, and the political realm, indicate these shifts.

The papers by Swyngedouw, and Hinchliffe and Whatmore demonstrate how the urban is being recovered as a social–ecological–technological artefact and site of socio-ecological struggle. Swyngedouw formulates a ‘cyborg urbanism’ for technonatural times. Drawing together central themes of historical–geographical materialism, political ecology and environmental history, he argues that grappling with the shifting nature of the contemporary environmental debate by necessity requires an engagement with the centrality of the city and the urban. We not only need to understand how nature is becoming urbanized but also how the urban and the city itself needs to be understood as a set of complex socio-ecological and socio-technological processes. Swyngedouw argues that metaphors of metabolism and circulation along with Haraway and Latour's focus on cyborgs and ‘hybridity’ can politicize the processes of making and remaking the city and the urbanization of nature, in a fashion that is highly complimentary to political projects of environmental justice.

A rather different route is taken in Hinchliffe and Whatmore's paper to exploring urban political ecologies. This paper begins with stories of the adaptation of some animals to the city—another aspect of becoming that is part of technonatural time–spaces—and that illustrates the heterogeneous form of the urban. In then focusing on the ‘doing’ of urban ecologies they point to how within heterogeneous cities, ecologists, social scientists, activists and others are involved in interventions in the making of realities rather than unveiling truths about the world. In this sense, they follow Bruno Latour in calling for new epistemological practices of doing research and politics founded on open and contestable ‘matters of concern’ rather than on closed, institutionally closed ‘matters of fact’. For Hinchliffe and Whatmore new forms of politics need to take seriously, engage, and invite into policy-making processes the different constituencies that make up the ‘more than human’ worlds we find ourselves enmeshed within. As such, drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers, they subtly point to rather different styles of environmental politics, notably a potential ‘politics of conviviality’ which might unfold from this.

Bronwyn Parry and Cathy Gere explore the manner in which people's bodily environments seem to be increasingly, and sometimes more-or-less inadvertently, technologically colonized through the ‘mining’, digitization, and subsequent uses of voluntarily donated body parts in medicine. Such body parts subsequently worked up by medical researchers into ‘new’ artefacts have given rise to concerns about ownership, rights, and ethics. But, like Hinchliffe and Whatmore, they draw on Latour to seek to keep the debate, or conversation, on the status and politics of these body artefacts open. Avoiding closure both in legal and ontological senses of what these objects are is a way to keep open other possibilities of their status and uses. They avoid an institutional closure of what such artefacts are or who owns them. Instead, Parry and Gere also see such issues of bodily artefacts as political ‘matters of concern’. As such, supposed ‘matters of fact’ have become ‘matters of concern’ to many people outside the usual circuit of the sciences, and the sciences need to recognize this in their practices.

Finally, in reviewing Latour's recent work The Politics of Nature, Noel Castree probes some genuine difficulties that emerge with attempts to formulate a political horizon for technonatural times that is credible, viable and attractive. All of the papers in this collection seek to support a democratic politics for technonatural times. Yet, as Castree demonstrates, there remains much work to consider how this politics could be institutionalized and conceptualized.

Acknowledgements

This issue is the product of dialogue and debate that emerged out of several recent conferences: Technonatures I: Environments, Technologies, Spaces in the Twenty First Century, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 26 June 2003; Technonatures II: Department of Geography, University of Oxford, June 2004; Technonatures III: ISA Research Committee 24 Environment and Society Interim Mini-Conference, International Institute of Sociology, Stockholm, Sweden, July 2005.

The authors would like to thank Miike Michael, Erik Swyngedouw, Arthur Mol, Alan Rudy, Fletcher Linder and all the contributors to these events for making them such enjoyable conferences and for stirring their thoughts. For future information on ‘Technonatures’ events, please email Damian White at: http://[email protected] or Chris Wilbert at: [email protected].

Notes

1. We recognize that there are different environmentalisms to be addressed here, not just in terms of the problematical notions of an environmentalism of the ‘South’ as against the ‘North’. Such geopolitical spatializations of global North and South do not capture the differences and similarities of environmentalisms, or compulsion for global dominance of some. But we are speaking from our positions in developed world societies where mainstream environmentalism takes particular institutional forms that are both national and often seek to be global—with all the problems this involves.

2. For on-going reflection on the death of environmentalism discussion, see The Grist online magazine, 15 January, available at: http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/01/13/doe-reprint/ and the symposium in Organization and Environment, March 2006.

3. To use the phrasing of Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1960).

4. Indeed it is striking how in recent times, most of the serious attempts to go through the possibilities of alternative infrastructures and productive systems that could facilitate a shift to more sustainable patterns have primarily emerged from either a-political engineering currents—such as the literature on industrial ecology—or defenders of market or even corporate environmentalism [see Hawkins et al. (1999) and for a critical review see White (2002)]. The ecological left in contrast seems to have increasingly become gripped by apocalyptic despair (see Kovel, 2002). For one of the few exceptions to this, see Milani (2002).

5. Andrew Jamison's (2004) recent reading of the green backlash in Denmark suggests that this can, in part, be explained in terms of a failure of environmental social movements to build popular institutions in civil society that could survive the ebb and flow of public interest in environmental debates. For another detailed discussion of the making of environmental subjects in Kumaon, northern India, see Agrawal (2005).

6. For a critique of undifferentiated crisis theory from progressive environmentalists see, for example, Harvey (1998) and Boucher et al. (2003).

7. Consider the remarkably subtle political analysis of environmental justice issues provided by The Corner House, available at: http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/index.shtml

8. For example, the magazine Seedling from GRAIN (www.grain.org), regularly draws attention to many of the struggles over agricultural patents, seed laws, or GM crop testing throughout the world. The Basel Action Network (http://www.ban.org/) gives details on many struggles over international ‘free trade’ in toxic waste.

9. Friends of the Earth UK have sought to embrace environmental justice through linking poorer areas of England with polluting industry, but this campaign has been somewhat limited and low-key.

10. Most obviously this conversation is hugely in debt to the work of Raymond Williams (1973) and latterly Neil Smith on the production of nature (1984). More recently, though, the definite statement of social nature has emerged from Braun and Castree's (1998) now classic collection ‘Remaking Reality’. Our thinking here is clearly considerably in debt to all these thinkers but to Braun and Castree in particular.