Normalizing catastrophe: sustainability and scientism

Abstract

Making an adequate response to our deteriorating environmental situation is a matter of ever increasing urgency. It is argued that a central obstacle to achieving this is the way that scientism has become normalized in our thinking about environmental issues. This is taken to reflect on an underlying ‘metaphysics of mastery’ that vitiates proper engagement with the natural environment, in particular, by subverting sensitivity to its own normative and purposive character. It is argued that the dominance of scientism can be exposed and disrupted by attending to understandings of nature that are intimate, embodied and emplaced, and that these need to be heeded in public debate of environmental issues.

Keywords:

• environmental awareness
• framing
• place
• scientism
• sustainability
• transcendent nature

Notes

1. Space permits only that this position be stated baldly here. For elucidation see Bonnett (2009a).

2. It should be noted that none of these descriptions should be taken as denying the essential alterity of the tree, rock, river, etc. They await us as something other, as what cannot be fully comprehended.

3. For a recent discussion of how current framing effaces or dismisses the bodied and the sensuous, and the educational significance of this, see Barnacle (2009).

4. See Barrett (2006) for a short but interesting discussion of the significance for environmental education of the way in which intimate experience of nature is mediated by the stories we have access to. As will be seen from points made later in the current paper regarding the social construction of the world, important qualifications need to be made concerning her claim that these stories ‘produce our experience’.