Bronislaw Szerszynski is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, where he also works in the
Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) and the ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics
Body & SocietyReading and Writing the Weather
¶
Climate Technics and the Moment of
¶
Responsibility Theory Culture Society
2010 27: 9 Sage
In this section I want to start by briefly situating the range of climate¶ technics
under discussion today against the background of society’s metabolic ¶ relation with nature. The current range of climate technologies can be ¶ divided into two main categories. Firstly, there are approaches which try to¶ modulate the metabolism of the humantechnology ensemble with its¶ environment by reducing anthropogenic CO2 emissions, typically by either ¶ reducing the amount of energy used or reducing its carbon- intensity.
These¶ include
such diverse initatives as behaviour-change programmes, hydrogenpowered ¶ public transport systems, micro-generation technologies, wind¶ power, photovoltaic cells, carbon capture and storage
, biofuels
and nuclear¶ power.
The emerging dominant discourse around these climate technics is
¶ one that heralds (and tries to perform) the rise of a
new ‘green’ technoeconomic¶ paradigm
, in which venture capital will invest in start-up businesses
¶ specializing in low-carbon technology (e.g. Walsh, 2008; Krupp and
¶
Horn, 2008).
Within such a framing
, for example, Nicholas Stern in
The¶ Economics of Climate Change
(2007: Part IV) describes climate change as¶ market failure
, and proposes that states should utilize
governance and
¶ metagovernance processes
(Jessop, 2002) such as
carbon-trading schemes ¶ and other incentives to create the conditions within which
the selforganizing ¶ principles of markets and heterarchies will encourage green¶ technological innovation and behaviour change
.
¶ Secondly, a rather different set of climate technics work by intervening ¶ in the Earth’s wider metabolic processes. They seek in a more direct ¶ way to make the weather an object of technological control, in an echo of ¶ the cold-war, military origins of climate change science
(Kwa, 1994, 2000;
¶
Fleming, 2007). Such technocratic approaches, more favoured in the USA,
¶ are framed in terms of
‘geoengineering’ (Michaelson, 1998) or ‘global ¶ environmental management’ (Clark, 1989; Clark et al., 2005). A recent evaluation ¶ of such technologies by the Royal Society divides them into two ¶ classes. Carbon dioxide removal methods, including reforestation, biochar,
¶ the accelerated formation of carbonate rock, and fertilizing the ocean to
¶ increase CO2 fixation, are classed as relatively safe, although slow. Some ¶ also involve major land-use changes which could further perturb natural ¶ systems and affect the price and availability of food. By contrast, solar radiation management methods, such as reflective crops and roofs, cloudalbedo ¶ enhancement, stratospheric aerosols and space-based reflectors, ¶ work by increasing the albedo (reflectivity) of the planet to compensate for ¶ the heating effect of increased greenhouse gases, and thus modulating the ¶ energetic exhange between Earth and space. These methods are seen as ¶ relatively cheap and quick acting, but are far more uncertain in their side ¶ effects such as on regional weather systems, and would not prevent rising ¶ oceanic acidity (Royal Society, 2009).
¶ Of course, at one level it is extremely important to conduct such ¶ assessments of the effectiveness, feasibility, safety and ethical implications ¶ of different climate technics.
But there are also questions which lie at a¶ deeper level than whether each method will ‘work’
or whether it is ethically ¶ right – questions which concern
how they put us into relation with the ¶ weather and with the ethico-political demands of the moment
. Such questions ¶ do not need putting from outside, as it were; they are latent within the ¶ very story that society is telling itself, the story within which the ideas of ¶ ‘solving’ or ‘fixing’ climate change (Socolow et al., 2004; Kunzig and ¶ Broecker, 2008) are made intelligible. In the dominant reading of the ¶ climate story, scientific analysis has passed the baton firmly and legitimately ¶ to technological response. Yet, I will argue, this reading is rendered unstable ¶ by problematic relations of indistinction that obtain between its key ¶ elements – between problem, diagnosis and cure.
¶
Firstly, climate technics occupy an ambiguous role in the story,
¶ analagous to that of writing in Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Plato’s ¶ Phaedrus in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. In order to argue for the dangers of writing, ¶ Plato employed an Egyptian myth in which the god Thoth commends the ¶ art of writing to King Thamus of Egypt by saying it will act as a recipe
¶
(pharmakon) for memory and wisdom. However, Derrida points out that
¶ pharmakon in
Greek can mean remedy, recipe, and poison (Derrida, 1981b: ¶ 75, 71), and that all of those meanings can be seen as

operative in Plato’s
¶ text and as conditioning Thamus’s rejection of the gift. Derrida uses this to
¶ illustrate the way that the differantial archi-structure of language conditions ¶ Plato’s text, forcing him to say things that go against any intended meaning.
¶ Similarly aporetic relations can be seen in the way that climate technics are¶ offered as recipes for correcting our unwitting intervention into the environment¶ with a witting counterintervention. Such pre-emptive orientations
to ¶ futurity, developed most strikingly in American military strategy since 9/11, ¶ always involve an attempt to survive a feared future
by becoming ‘immersed ¶ in its conditions of emergence, to the point of actualizing it ourselves’ ¶ (Cooper, 2006: 125). Geoengineering technologies in particular echo this ¶ logic of pre-emption, committing us as they do to a deeper complicity in ¶ processes of anthropogenic climate change in the guise of promising to
¶ halt it.
¶
Secondly, even emission-reduction technologies, when framed as¶ means to ‘save the planet’ by helping to stabilize the climate, can be seen¶ as relying on a particular historical bringing-into-relation of the reading and¶ the writing of the weather
. A key assumption behind such strategies is the ¶ idea that a doubling of CO2 levels from the preindustrial level represents a ¶ limit of climate safety. Yet this is a conventional framing for climate change ¶ research that dates back to the work of Arrhenius in the 19th century and ¶ has little independent justification. Indeed, Boykoff, Frame and Randalls ¶ argue that the very concept of ‘climate stabilization’ became dominant in ¶ the 1980s for extra-scientific reasons, has outlived its initial usefulness, and ¶ in its promise of politically manageable long-term targets is diverting¶ political energy away from more radical responses
(Boykoff et al.,
2010).
¶ More generally, policymakers have seemed to favour those forms of climate ¶ science that do not overemphasize the probability of abrupt climate change,
¶ and that are thus more tractable within an incremental policy-response
¶ framework (Shackley and Wynne, 1995: 227). Similarly, the dominance in ¶ climate change science of the mathematical climate models known as
¶
General Circulation Models (GCMs) over other methods cannot be explained
¶ in purely scientific terms (Shackley and Wynne, 1995: 218, 225–6).
¶
However, such models fitted the particular rhetorical needs of a period when ¶ global warming was highly contested, by operating with what Lorraine ¶ Daston calls an aperspectival version of objectivity, which by focusing on
¶ the elimination of individual and group idiosyncracies in the description of
¶ natural phenomena may ‘sacrifice deeper or more accurate knowledge to the ¶ demands of communicability’ (Daston, 1992: 600).
¶
Contemporary global climate science is a classic case of a regulatory ¶ science – a mutual construction between scientific research and policy
¶ needs (Jasanoff, 1990; Shackley and Wynne, 1995). It is the way that it was
¶ increasingly oriented around a highly specific knowledge-constitutive ¶ interest in predicting and controlling the future that gave it its current power ¶ to orient action in certain kinds of ways (Habermas, 1971: 306). To put this ¶ another way, climate science’s action-orienting power derives not from its¶ objectivity, autonomy and disinterestedness, but from its always-already¶ presumption of application. Our relation with the weather has been pulled¶ towards a certain kind of reading that constitutes it as a code that can be¶ mastered and controlled. The metabolic relation of humanity and nature has¶ been undertood only in narrowly causal terms
, obscuring the disseminative
¶ drift of meaning and thus tilting us inexorably towards the idea of climate¶ change as a problem that can be solved rather than an opening to be¶ responded to
(Hulme,
2009).
¶
Thirdly, these relations of indistinction between science and technology
¶ were already prepared in the origins of modern meteorology. The relationship ¶ between science and technology is not simply the apparent truism ¶ that the prior acquisition of knowledge is a temporal precondition of its ¶ application. This particular epistemic and temporal mapping of the relationship
¶ serves a ‘constitutional’ role whereby both sides – the disinterestedness
¶ of science and the interestedness of technology – serve to legitimate ¶ the other. But as Heidegger argued, although, chronologically speaking, ¶ modern science precedes modern technology, metaphysically speaking technology is prior; technology beckons and shapes science, calls it into
¶ being in order to make nature ‘report’ in a technological way, as a ‘calculable
¶ coherence of forces’ (Heidegger, 2003[1954]: 258).
Climate science
, ¶ while alerting us to the disruption of our relations with our environment, at ¶ the same time also conditions our response in a way that means that the¶ baton has always already been passed to technology
.

Bronislaw Szerszynski is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, where he also works in the
Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) and the ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics
Body & SocietyReading and Writing the Weather ¶ Climate Technics and the Moment of ¶ Responsibility Theory Culture Society
2010 27: 9 Sage
Climate change is clearly an ethico-political challenge of an unprecedented ¶ scale, in terms of the demands it will make on individuals and collectivities ¶ as they to try to mitigate its severity, to adapt to the climatic change ¶ that will inevitably come, and to ensure that the burden is shared as ¶ equitably as possible. It represents a collision point between humanity’s ¶ civilizational ideals and its creaturely nature: between progress and extinction, ¶ between the linear time of history and the cyclical time of nature, ¶ between transcendence and metabolism, between spirit and mere exhalation.
¶ At such a time, what is it to act responsibly, to act with an awareness
¶ that we will surely be answerable for our actions? How should we relate the ¶ unfolding of this moment of responsibility, so that we can perceive what is ¶ being demanded of us at this time?
¶
On one level, these questions have already been answered. A story¶ took shape, and a corresponding understanding of climate responsibility
,¶ before we had even formulated the questions to which they are posing as¶ answers
. This story is one in which the diagnostic task of establishing the¶ truth of anthropogenic climate change naturally gives way to the practical¶ one of finding effective political and technical responses to it
.
It is a story¶ which moves
all too seamlessly
from reading to writing the weather, from¶ science to technology, an orderly transition of narrative power which has
all ¶ the signs of being constitutional in the way that the timeless truths of science¶ will legitimate technological interventions
, and the timely successes of the ¶ latter will confirm the science. It implies a version of climate responsibility ¶ in which, in the face of the all-but univocity of global climate science, ¶ society must abandon its earlier equivocation. And to a significant extent ¶ this is indeed happening.
In the face of projections of dramatic climate¶ change, a sense of urgency
(urgere) is growing in society, and is calling forth¶ the response of
work (ergon): the task of turning our growing understanding ¶ of the processes of anthropogenic climate change into practical techniques for mitigating them
, in the rapidly shrinking interval in which we might be ¶ able to effect a difference.
¶ Thus, for example, the United Nations and the
European Union have ¶ adopted the target of preventing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere ¶ rising above more than double that of pre-industrial concentrations, in order
¶ to avoid a ‘dangerous’ temperature rise of more than 2°C, and binding ¶ international agreements have been sought at Kyoto and Copenhagen.
We¶ are being presented with a series of proposals of how we can ‘fix’ climate¶ change
(Kunzig and Broecker, 2008), and a panoply of what we might term
¶
‘climate technics’ ranging from behaviour-change policies aimed at individual
¶ citizens, through calls for investment in and regulatory encouragement¶ of
renewable energy,
biofuels
, nuclear power, and carbon capture and ¶ storage technologies, to high-technology proposals such as synthetic biology¶ and the geoengineering of oceanic and atmospheric processes. It is too early to know if it is too late. But in principle there is at least ¶ a reassuring shape to the above narrative: first, we unknowingly marked the ¶ climate; then we learned to read those marks, to turn them into meaningful ¶ signs; through learning to read them we learned the laws governing our ¶ marking; and through learning to read the marks well, we are thereby ¶ learning to control our marking. The unruly perturbations of the climate that ¶ we have brought about, when subjected to the rigours of modern science, ¶ have, it seems, been forced to reveal to us how we might bring them under
¶ control. It is an all-too-perfect illustration of the logic of experimental
¶ science as expounded by Francis Bacon in 1605: ‘from the wonders of nature
¶ is the most clear and open passage to the wonders of art’, he wrote. ‘For you ¶ have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you ¶ will be able, when you like, to lead and drive her afterwards to the same ¶ place again’ (Bacon, 1963: 295).
Yet the very common-sense naturalness of this narrative ought to alert¶ our suspicions.
Indeed, I want to argue that the very way in which climate ¶ change has become reality for us, far from offering a firm basis for a taking ¶ of responsibility, for enlightenment-as-maturity, is in fact engendering its
¶ own forms of irresponsibility.
Climate change is being granted a very specific ¶ mode of existence, one which has embedded within it a technological¶ conatus which is likely to divert us away from the very possibility of appropriate¶ response . Against the dominant narrative of diagnosis and cure I will¶ develop a rather different account of our current predicament in relation to¶ the climate
. I first argue that an

understanding of anthropogenic climate¶ change must be grounded in an analysis of the evolving human metabolism¶ with nature, one which attends to the role of signification in life processes
¶ in a way that incorporates Jacques Derrida’s notions of différance and ¶ dissemination. I then engage in a deconstructive reading of climate technics ¶ – an analysis which problematizes the distinction between the diagnosis¶ and solution of climate change
– and explore modern scientific practices of ¶ ‘reading’ the climate as already containing within themselves a notion of ¶ weather’s technological writability. I conclude by sketching out the lines of an ‘ethics’ of reading and writing the weather, one that takes place in the
¶
‘opening’ of climate change.
Bronislaw Szerszynski is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, where he also works in the
Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) and the ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics
Body & SocietyReading and Writing the Weather
¶
Climate Technics and the Moment of
¶
Responsibility Theory Culture Society
2010 27: 9 Sage
At this time of great peril it may seem scandalous to divert attention away ¶ from the task of a causal analysis of climate change, and instead to try to ¶ understand it in terms of semiosis and meaning. A fortiori, at such a crucial ¶ moment, can there really be a place for a thinker like Derrida, who is ¶ renowned for undermining notions of certainty and univocity, and whose
¶
central idea is deferral? It would surely be irresponsible to question the
¶
reality of climate change, to vacillate at the point of action. Yet, I want to ¶ argue, it is the dominant technological framing of climate change that ultimately
¶
constitutes a more radical evasion of responsibility
. Although the ¶ current ecopolitical moment seems to mark the end of the myth of human ¶ exceptionalism (Catton and Dunlap, 1978), the end of any lingering notion ¶ that homo sapiens as the historical animal is exempt from natural limits, it
¶ also threatens to be the commencement of an extraordinary hypertrophy of¶ hubris concerning the possibilities of predicting and controlling natural
¶
processes
. As Simon Critchley points out, the epoch of metaphysics is like ¶ a dying star: at its very point of exhaustion, it swells like a red giant, extending ¶ its domination and absorbing all resistance (Critchley, 1992: 89).
We
¶
need a reading of the weather appropriate for this time
, one in which the ¶ technological enframing of nature is at the same time exhausted and ¶ inescapable.
This would be
what Critchley calls a clôtural reading
, one ¶ which ‘arises only in relation to a specific and completed historical configuration ¶ which it ceaselessly seeks to repeat and interrupt’ (Critchley, 1992: ¶ 89). It would not deny the urgency of the current situation, but it would
¶
disrupt the logocentric metaphysics of presence in which terms it is
¶
currently being apprehended
.
¶ Our reading of the weather and its ‘errors’ has been purified through ¶ the technological framing of atmospheric science, as it developed in the ¶ 19th and 20th centuries, as sky was recoded as atmosphere, made calculable
¶
and reproducible, run in silico. Today, this ‘scientific weather’ is crucial
¶
to our experience of climate change; it is because the unruly, surd complexity ¶ of the weather is being tamed by being forced to pass through standardized ¶ forms of measurement, and through conventional practices of ¶ aggregation and modelling, that we are able to conceive of such abstractions
¶
as average global temperature or rainfall, let alone see them rising or falling.
¶ I have argued that such a reading works by ‘bringing the weather indoors’, and that it thereby tempts us to imagine that we can discern a ‘divine writing’ ¶ in nature which is immune from the dislocatory effects of fallen, empirical ¶ writing.
We cannot go back to a time before the technical mediation of the
¶
climate; the extension of our senses with instrumentation is just as much ¶ part of our contemporary biosemiotic metabolism with nature as is the ¶ extension of our material powers with technics. The Umwelt, the experiential ¶ environment, of modern humanity relies crucially on technological
¶
mediation; a technologically mediated metabolism implies a technologically
¶
mediated biosemiosis. Yet we should find ways of using the technical
¶
reading of the weather that free it from its logocentric enframing
, that ¶ profane it and free it for our own use (Agamben, 2007).
¶ Such a direction could be seen as simply delivering us into the hands ¶ of climate skeptics; yet the choice before us is not simply the binary one of
¶
accepting or denying the reality of climate change
, a choice that would then ¶ determine whether we need to fix the climate or not.
To frame our predicament
¶
in this way is already to approach the weather with a very narrow set
¶
of questions. Is it changing? How fast?
Are we to blame? Can we alter it?
¶
This way of reading propels us inexorably towards a calculative technological response
of which the hubris of geoengineering is only the most ¶ blatant, emblematic form. We are also being drawn to forms of mitigation
¶
that presume to calculate the weather and promise to

make it stable, and
¶
forms of adaptation which have at their heart a soteriological dream of
¶
security which can only ever be within the reach of the fortunate, and only ¶ then through its own forms of externalization.
We need to find different ways
¶
of reading the weather
, ones which recast the relationship between its being
¶
read and being writing.
¶
Firstly,
we need to read the changing climate in a way that is alive to
¶
the semiotic enfolding of inside and outside, of organism and environment
¶
– a reading of the weather that thus reads us in return
. In February 1884 ¶ the artist John Ruskin delivered two lectures at the London Institution, later ¶ published as ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’. In these lectures ¶ Ruskin described what he felt were new meteorological phenomena peculiar ¶ to that historical moment, in particular an uncanny form of wind that he ¶ called the ‘plague-wind’, and which he proceeded to describe in painterly ¶ detail. According to Ruskin, the plaguewind darkens the sky; it blows ¶ indifferently from any compass direction, ‘attaching its own bitterness and ¶ malice to the worst characters of the proper winds of each quarter’; it makes ¶ the leaves of the trees shudder ‘as if they were all aspens’ but with ‘an
¶ expression of anger as well as of fear and distress’; it ‘degrades, while it ¶ intensifies, ordinary storm’; and it
‘blanch[es] the sun instead of reddening
¶ it . . . [like] a bad half-crown [thrown] into a basin of soap and water’ ¶ (Ruskin,
1908: 23–9). He closed his first lecture by linking this deterioration ¶ of nature with the iniquity and injustice of late Victorian society.
¶ Ruskin’s mode of address is thus one that traces the fold between the inside ¶ and outside of society, and there are clues here for how we could read the ¶ weather today.
¶
Secondly, like Ruskin’s, our reading of the weather must be ineradicably ¶ historial: a reading that is simultaneously of the weather and of the ¶ time. Indeed, many European words for the weather (and for the tides) have ¶ their etymological roots in words for ‘time’. This is perhaps most well-known ¶ in relation to the Latin tempestas and its derivatives such as temps (French) ¶ or tempest (English) (see Serres, 1995: 27), but this pattern can be found ¶ in many other languages too, including Polish ( czas ), Irish ( aimsir ) and ¶ Greek ( kairos ). Weather was – and is
– experienced as an aspect of time ¶ perceived not chronologically but kairologically , as the quality of particular ¶ periods of time, typically a season. Yet traditional seasonal ‘weatherwising’ ¶ no longer works, for the simple reason that the weather is no longer ¶ sufficiently stable from one year to the next, let alone from one generation ¶ to the next.
To read our own weather kairologically
involves being alert to ¶ its new, unstable temporality, as the coiled cycles of annual weather patterns ¶ unravel into the irreversible time of the longue durée , and each storm and ¶ drought becomes unseasonable, unique, historical. Such a reading requires
¶ us
to weather-wise the moment of civilizational crisis at which we stand – ¶ to discern in our unruly weather
not just the future ruins of our past and ¶ present hubris, but also the global relations of power and inequality that
¶ have shaped our carbon metabolism
. (Indeed, perhaps we are already ¶ learning to read the weather in this kind of way. Once again, we are oriented ¶ not so much to the regularities of nature but to its ‘wanderings’: droughts, ¶ storms, floods, and extremes of heat and cold. Today, too, aerial prodigies ¶ are being seen as reprimands about the past and forewarnings of the future, ¶ now in terms of the fate that we have brought upon ourselves by our runaway ¶ ‘carbon metabolism’ with nature.) ¶ Thirdly, an adequately historial reading of this moment would be one ¶ that demands of us an even more exacting responsibility than the nostrums ¶ of climate technics. A fully ethical decision can never be determined by the ¶ calculations and other preparations we make for it; it is always a unique ¶ event that exceeds any empirical determination of the situation (Derrida, ¶ 1995[1992]). And such an ethical leap is implicit in the act of reading
¶ itself.
Reading, being the receiving of a legacy, can never determine
¶
response as if it were a cause. ‘If the legibility of a legacy were given,
¶
natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not simultaneously call for and defy ¶ interpretation, one would never have to inherit from it. One would be ¶ affected by it as by a cause. . . . One always inherits a secret, which says, ¶ “Read me, will you ever be up to it?”’ (Derrida, 1994: 16). Reading is thus ¶ not the receiving of a message; it is always a task, that of responding to the
¶
opening that reading represents (Bennington, 2000:
36). Thus a response to ¶ a text is both necessitated and free (Miller, 1987: 43); our duty to any text ¶ is not to be slavish but to read in inventive ways – there is an ‘ ethic of¶ reading’
.
If we approach weather as an opening, no decoding of it will tell us
¶ what we need to do, what level of emissions is safe, when we have ‘done our
¶ bit’, when we have ‘fixed the climate’
. An adequate response to the current ¶ situation would not be adequate, a just response not just. ‘Responsibility’ ¶ here can only mean that something radical, something extra ordinary has ¶ happened.
¶ Fourthly, reading the weather in the open, released from its technological
¶
incarceration, would
also be to recognize both reading and weather
¶
as aberrant.
Meteorology always involves meteorography – practices of ¶ inscription in which meaning and reference can never be finally stabilized.
¶ But the weather, too, has its continuous aberrance. The weather is pure ¶ medium, the region of mixing of earth and sky, the taking place of life, of ¶ metabolism. Life, animation, is being carried by the wind (anemos): ‘life is
¶
not in things; rather, things are in life, caught up in a current of continual
¶
generation’ (Ingold,
2007: S31). An opening up to that kind of reading of ¶ climate would involve embracing the notion that after all perhaps it was our ¶ long period of stable climate that was an aberration (see Clark, 2010). If so, ¶ then if the 20th century will have to have been the high point in our carbonmetabolic ¶ profligacy, maybe it will also have to be seen as the close of a ¶ particular model of civilization. We will have to develop new forms of ¶ solidarity and security, predicated not on closure and independence but on ¶ the recognition of vulnerability and exchange with nature. We will all, in a ¶ sense, be climate refugees, extradicted by our fugal weather.
Climate
¶
technics
would have their place, not as soteriological gestures; instead,
¶
they will have to be grounded in specific social projects that bind
¶
humanity

together in new relations of interdependence.
The weather will
¶
have reminded us of the openness of existence, and the impossibility of
¶
autonomy.
¶
If reading the weather has always been subject to the logic of writing,
¶
then it has always been subject to the dynamic that, when we start ¶ writing, we cannot know where it will end up. Such insights represent a ¶ move away from the root metaphor of the book towards that of the practice ¶ of writing. Derrida argues that the idea of the book has always been ‘the
¶
encyclopedic protection . . . of logocentrism against the disruption of
¶
writing’
(Derrida, 1976: 18), and thus that the passing of that idea, the ¶ passing of the book, would be of profound significance. If we came to understand ¶ climate itself as writing, this would indeed be the end of the book of ¶ nature, as its written being gives way to its being written. And, as Derrida
¶
points out, the death of the book would be ‘a new situation for speech, of
¶ its sub ordination within a structure of which it shall no longer be the archon’ ¶ (Derrida, 1976: 8). The human as archon of nature would indeed pass away ¶ as we found ourselves taking up a very different understanding of our ¶ relation with nature.

Bronislaw Szerszynski is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, where he also works in the
Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) and the ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics
Body & SocietyReading and Writing the Weather
¶
Climate Technics and the Moment of
¶
Responsibility Theory Culture Society
2010 27: 9 Sage
In this section I want to start by briefly situating the range of climate¶ technics
under discussion today against the background of society’s metabolic
¶ relation with nature. The current range of climate technologies can be¶ divided into two main categories. Firstly, there are approaches
which try to¶ modulate the metabolism of the human-technology ensemble with its¶ environment by reducing anthropogenic CO2 emissions,
typically by either ¶ reducing the amount of energy used or reducing its carbon- intensity.
These¶ include
such diverse initatives as behaviour-change programmes, hydrogenpowered ¶ public transport systems, microgeneration technologies, wind¶ power
, photovoltaic cells, carbon capture and storage, biofuels and nuclear¶ power.
The emerging dominant discourse around these climate technics is
¶ one that heralds (and tries to perform) the rise of a
new ‘green’ technoeconomic¶ paradigm
, in which venture capital will invest in start-up businesses ¶ specializing in low-carbon technology (e.g. Walsh, 2008; Krupp and ¶ Horn, 2008).
Within such a framing
, for example, Nicholas Stern in
The¶ Economics of Climate Change
(2007: Part IV) describes climate change as¶ market failure
, and proposes that states should utilize governance and ¶ metagovernance processes
(Jessop, 2002) such as
carbon-trading schemes ¶ and other incentives to create the conditions within which
the selforganizing ¶ principles of markets and heterarchies will encourage green¶ technological innovation and behaviour change
.
¶
Secondly, a rather different set of climate technics work by intervening ¶ in the Earth’s wider metabolic processes. They seek in a more direct
¶ way to make the weather an object of technological control, in an echo of
¶ the cold-war, military origins of climate change science (Kwa, 1994, 2000; ¶ Fleming, 2007). Such technocratic approaches, more favoured in the USA, ¶ are framed in terms of ‘geoengineering’ (Michaelson, 1998) or ‘global ¶ environmental management’ (Clark, 1989; Clark et al.,
2005). A recent evaluation
¶ of such technologies by the Royal Society divides them into two
¶ classes. Carbon dioxide removal methods, including reforestation, biochar, ¶ the accelerated formation of carbonate rock, and fertilizing the ocean to ¶ increase CO2 fixation, are classed as relatively safe, although slow. Some ¶ also involve major land-use changes which could further perturb natural
¶ systems and affect the price and availability of food. By contrast, solar radiation management methods, such as reflective crops and roofs, cloudalbedo ¶ enhancement, stratospheric aerosols and spacebased reflectors, ¶ work by increasing the albedo (reflectivity) of the planet to compensate for ¶ the heating effect of increased greenhouse gases, and thus modulating the
¶ energetic exhange between Earth and space. These methods are seen as ¶ relatively cheap and quick acting, but are far more uncertain in their side ¶ effects such as on regional weather systems, and would not prevent rising ¶ oceanic acidity (Royal Society, 2009).
¶ Of course, at one level it is extremely important to conduct such
¶ assessments of the effectiveness, feasibility, safety and ethical implications
¶ of different climate technics.
But there are also questions which lie at a¶ deeper level than whether each method will ‘work’
or whether it is ethically ¶ right – questions which concern
how they put us into relation with the ¶ weather and with the ethico-political demands of the moment
. Such questions ¶ do not need putting from outside, as it were; they are latent within the ¶ very story that society is telling itself, the story within which the ideas of
¶
‘solving’ or ‘fixing’ climate change (Socolow et al., 2004; Kunzig and
¶
Broecker, 2008) are made intelligible. In the dominant reading of the
¶ climate story, scientific analysis has passed the baton firmly and legitimately
¶ to technological response. Yet, I will argue, this reading is rendered unstable ¶ by problematic relations of indistinction that obtain between its key
¶ elements – between problem, diagnosis and cure.
¶
Firstly, climate technics occupy an ambiguous role in the story, ¶ analagous to that of writing in Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Plato’s ¶ Phaedrus in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’.
In order to argue for the dangers of writing, ¶ Plato employed an Egyptian myth in which the god Thoth commends the ¶ art

of writing to King Thamus of Egypt by saying it will act as a recipe
¶
(pharmakon) for memory and wisdom. However, Derrida points out that ¶ pharmakon in Greek can mean remedy, recipe, and poison (Derrida, 1981b: ¶ 75, 71), and that all of those meanings can be seen as operative in Plato’s ¶ text and as conditioning Thamus’s rejection of the gift. Derrida uses this to ¶ illustrate the way that the differantial archi-structure of language conditions
¶
Plato’s text, forcing him to say things that go against any intended meaning.
¶ Similarly aporetic relations can be seen in the way that climate technics are¶ offered as recipes for correcting our unwitting intervention into the environment¶ with a witting counter-intervention. Such pre-emptive orientations
to
¶ futurity, developed most strikingly in American military strategy since 9/11,
¶ always involve an attempt to survive a feared future by becoming ‘immersed
¶ in its conditions of emergence, to the point of actualizing it ourselves’
¶
(Cooper, 2006: 125).
Geoengineering technologies in particular echo this ¶ logic of pre-emption, committing us as they do to a deeper complicity in ¶ processes of anthropogenic climate change in the guise of promising to ¶ halt it.
¶ Secondly, even emissionreduction technologies, when framed as¶ means to ‘save the planet’ by helping to stabilize the climate, can be seen¶ as relying on a particular historical bringing-intorelation of the reading and¶ the writing of the weather
. A key assumption behind such strategies is the ¶ idea that a doubling of CO2 levels from the preindustrial level represents a ¶ limit of climate safety. Yet this is a conventional framing for climate change ¶ research that dates back to the work of Arrhenius in the 19th century and ¶ has little independent justification. Indeed, Boykoff, Frame and Randalls ¶ argue that the very concept of ‘climate stabilization’ became dominant in ¶ the 1980s for extra-scientific reasons, has outlived its initial usefulness, and ¶ in its promise of politically manageable long-term targets is diverting¶ political energy away from more radical responses
(Boykoff et al., 2010).
¶ More generally, policymakers have seemed to favour those forms of climate ¶ science that do not overemphasize the probability of abrupt climate change, ¶ and that are thus more tractable within an incremental policy-response
¶ framework (Shackley and Wynne, 1995: 227). Similarly, the dominance in
¶ climate change science of the mathematical climate models known as ¶ General Circulation Models (GCMs) over other methods cannot be explained ¶ in purely scientific terms (Shackley and Wynne, 1995: 218, 225–6).
¶ However, such models fitted the particular rhetorical needs of a period when
¶ global warming was highly contested, by operating with what Lorraine
¶
Daston calls an aperspectival version of objectivity, which by focusing on ¶ the elimination of individual and group idiosyncracies in the description of ¶ natural phenomena may ‘sacrifice deeper or more accurate knowledge to the ¶ demands of communicability’ (Daston, 1992: 600).
¶
Contemporary global climate science is a classic case of a regulatory
¶ science – a mutual construction between scientific research and policy ¶ needs (Jasanoff, 1990; Shackley and Wynne, 1995).
It is the way that it was ¶ increasingly oriented around a highly specific knowledge-constitutive ¶ interest in predicting and controlling the future that gave it its current power
¶ to orient action in certain kinds of ways (Habermas, 1971: 306). To put this ¶ another way, climate science’s action-orienting power derives not from its¶ objectivity, autonomy and disinterestedness, but from its always-already¶ presumption of application. Our relation with the weather has been pulled¶ towards a certain kind of reading that constitutes it as a code that can be¶ mastered and controlled. The metabolic relation of humanity and nature has¶ been undertood only in narrowly causal terms
, obscuring the disseminative
¶ drift of meaning and thus tilting us inexorably towards the idea of climate¶ change as a problem that can be solved rather than an opening to be¶ responded to
(Hulme, 2009).
¶ Thirdly, these relations of indistinction between science and technology ¶ were already prepared in the origins of modern meteorology. The relationship
¶ between science and technology is not simply the apparent truism ¶ that the prior acquisition of knowledge is a temporal precondition of its ¶ application. This particular epistemic and temporal mapping of the relationship ¶ serves a ‘constitutional’ role whereby both sides – the disinterestedness
¶ of science and the interestedness of technology – serve to legitimate
¶ the other. But as Heidegger argued, although, chronologically speaking, ¶ modern science precedes modern technology, metaphysically speaking technology is prior; technology beckons and shapes science, calls it into ¶ being in order to make nature ‘report’ in a technological way, as a ‘calculable
¶ coherence of forces’ (Heidegger, 2003[1954]: 258).
Climate science
,
¶ while alerting us to the disruption of our relations with our environment, at ¶ the same time also conditions our response in a way that means that the¶ baton has always already been passed to technology
.

Bronislaw Szerszynski is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, where he also works in the
Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) and the ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics
Body & SocietyReading and Writing the Weather ¶ Climate Technics and the Moment of ¶ Responsibility Theory Culture Society
2010 27: 9 Sage
Climate change is clearly an ethico-political challenge of an unprecedented ¶ scale, in terms of the demands it will make on individuals and collectivities ¶ as they to try to mitigate its severity, to adapt to the climatic change ¶ that will inevitably come, and to ensure that the burden is shared as ¶ equitably as possible. It represents a collision point between humanity’s ¶ civilizational ideals and its creaturely nature: between progress and extinction, ¶ between the linear time of history and the cyclical time of nature, ¶ between transcendence and metabolism, between spirit and mere exhalation.
¶ At such a time, what is it to act responsibly, to act with an awareness
¶ that we will surely be answerable for our actions? How should we relate the ¶ unfolding of this moment of responsibility, so that we can perceive what is ¶ being demanded of us at this time?
¶
On one level, these questions have already been answered.
A story¶ took shape
, and a corresponding understanding of climate responsibility
,¶ before we had even formulated the questions to which they are posing as¶ answers
.
This story is one in which the diagnostic task of establishing the¶ truth of anthropogenic climate change naturally gives way to the practical¶ one of finding effective political and technical responses to it
.
It is a story¶ which moves
all too seamlessly
from reading to writing the weather, from¶ science to technology, an orderly transition of narrative power which has
all ¶ the signs of being constitutional in the way that the timeless truths of science¶ will legitimate technological interventions
, and the timely successes of the ¶ latter will confirm the science. It implies a version of climate responsibility ¶ in which, in the face of the all-but univocity of global climate science,
¶ society must abandon its earlier equivocation. And to a significant extent
¶ this is indeed happening.
In the face of projections of dramatic climate¶ change, a sense of urgency
(urgere) is growing in society, and is calling forth¶ the response of
work (ergon): the task of turning our growing understanding ¶ of the processes of anthropogenic climate change into practical techniques for mitigating them
, in the rapidly shrinking interval in which we might be ¶ able to effect a difference.
¶ Thus, for example, the United Nations and the European Union have ¶ adopted the target of preventing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere ¶ rising above more than double that of pre-industrial concentrations, in order ¶ to avoid a ‘dangerous’ temperature rise of more than 2°C, and binding
¶ international agreements have been sought at Kyoto and Copenhagen.
We¶ are being presented with
a series of proposals of how we can ‘fix’ climate¶ change
(Kunzig and Broecker, 2008), and a panoply of what we might term ¶ ‘climate technics’ ranging from behaviour-change policies aimed at individual ¶ citizens, through calls for investment in
and regulatory encouragement ¶ of renewable energy
, biofuels, nuclear power, and carbon capture and ¶ storage technologies, to high-technology proposals such as synthetic biology
¶ and the geoengineering of oceanic and atmospheric processes. It is too early to know if it is too late. But in principle there is at least ¶ a reassuring shape to the above narrative: first, we unknowingly marked the ¶ climate; then we learned to read those marks, to turn them into meaningful ¶ signs; through learning to read them we learned the laws governing our
¶ marking; and through learning to read the marks well, we are thereby
¶ learning to control our marking. The unruly perturbations of the climate that ¶ we have brought about, when subjected to the rigours of modern science, ¶ have, it seems, been forced to reveal to us how we might bring them under ¶ control. It is an all-tooperfect illustration of the logic of experimental ¶ science as expounded by Francis Bacon in 1605: ‘from the wonders of nature ¶ is the most clear and open passage to the wonders of art’, he wrote. ‘For you ¶ have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you ¶ will be able, when you like, to lead and drive her afterwards to the same ¶ place again’ (Bacon, 1963: 295).
Yet the very common-sense naturalness of this narrative ought to alert¶ our suspicions.
Indeed, I want to argue that the very way in which climate
¶ change has become reality for us, far from offering a firm basis for a taking
¶ of responsibility, for enlightenment-as-maturity, is in fact engendering its
¶ own forms of irresponsibility.
Climate change
is being granted a very specific ¶ mode of existence, one which has embedded within it a technological¶ conatus which is likely to divert us away from the very possibility of appropriate¶ response . Against the dominant narrative of diagnosis

and cure I will¶ develop a rather different account of our current predicament in relation to¶ the climate
. I first argue that an understanding of anthropogenic climate¶ change must be grounded in an analysis of the evolving human metabolism¶ with nature, one which attends to the role of signification in life processes
¶ in a way that incorporates Jacques Derrida’s notions of différance and ¶ dissemination. I then engage in a deconstructive reading of climate technics ¶ – an analysis which problematizes the distinction between the diagnosis¶ and solution of climate change
– and explore modern scientific practices of ¶ ‘reading’ the climate as already containing within themselves a notion of ¶ weather’s technological writability. I conclude by sketching out the lines of an
‘ethics’ of reading and writing the weather, one that takes place in the
¶
‘opening’ of climate change.
Bronislaw Szerszynski is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, where he also works in the
Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) and the ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics
Body & SocietyReading and Writing the Weather
¶
Climate Technics and the Moment of
¶
Responsibility Theory Culture Society
2010 27: 9 Sage
At this time of great peril it may seem scandalous to divert attention away ¶ from the task of a causal analysis of climate change, and instead to try to
¶
understand it in terms of semiosis and meaning. A fortiori, at such a crucial
¶
moment, can there really be a place for a thinker like Derrida, who is ¶ renowned for undermining notions of certainty and univocity, and whose ¶ central idea is deferral? It would surely be irresponsible to question the ¶ reality of climate change, to vacillate at the point of action. Yet, I want to ¶ argue, it is the dominant technological framing of climate change that ultimately
¶
constitutes a more radical evasion of responsibility
. Although the ¶ current ecopolitical moment seems to mark the end of the myth of human ¶ exceptionalism (Catton and Dunlap, 1978), the end of any lingering notion ¶ that homo sapiens as the historical animal is exempt from natural limits, it
¶ also threatens to be the commencement of an extraordinary hypertrophy of¶ hubris concerning the possibilities of predicting and controlling natural
¶
processes
. As Simon Critchley points out, the epoch of metaphysics is like ¶ a dying star: at its very point of exhaustion, it swells like a red giant, extending ¶ its domination and absorbing all resistance (Critchley, 1992: 89).
We
¶
need a reading of the weather appropriate for this time
, one in which the ¶ technological enframing of nature is at the same time exhausted and ¶ inescapable.
This would be
what Critchley calls a clôtural reading
, one ¶ which ‘arises only in relation to a specific and completed historical configuration ¶ which it ceaselessly seeks to repeat and interrupt’ (Critchley, 1992: ¶ 89). It would not deny the urgency of the current situation, but it would
¶
disrupt the logocentric metaphysics of presence in which terms it is
¶
currently being apprehended
.
¶ Our reading of the weather and its ‘errors’ has been purified through ¶ the technological framing of atmospheric science, as it developed in the ¶ 19th and 20th centuries, as sky was recoded as atmosphere, made calculable ¶ and reproducible, run in silico. Today, this ‘scientific weather’ is crucial ¶ to our experience of climate change; it is because the unruly, surd complexity
¶
of the weather is being tamed by being forced to pass through standardized ¶ forms of measurement, and through conventional practices of ¶ aggregation and modelling, that we are able to conceive of such abstractions
¶
as average global temperature or rainfall, let alone see them rising or falling.
¶ I have argued that such a reading works by ‘bringing the weather indoors’, and that it thereby tempts us to imagine that we can discern a ‘divine writing’ ¶ in nature which is immune from the dislocatory effects of fallen, empirical ¶ writing.
We cannot go back to a time before the technical mediation of the
¶
climate; the extension of our senses with instrumentation is just as much ¶ part of our contemporary biosemiotic metabolism with nature as is the ¶ extension of our material powers with technics. The Umwelt, the experiential ¶ environment, of modern humanity relies crucially on technological ¶ mediation; a technologically mediated metabolism implies a technologically ¶ mediated biosemiosis. Yet we should find ways of using the technical
¶
reading of the weather that free it from its logocentric enframing
, that ¶ profane it and free it for our own use (Agamben, 2007).
¶ Such a direction could be seen as simply delivering us into the hands ¶ of climate skeptics; yet the choice before us is not simply the binary one of
¶
accepting or denying the reality of climate change
, a choice that would then ¶ determine whether we need to fix the climate or not.
To frame our predicament
¶
in this way is already to approach the weather with a very narrow set
¶
of questions. Is it changing? How fast?
Are we to blame? Can we alter it?
¶
This way of reading propels us inexorably towards a

calculative technological response
of which the hubris of geoengineering is only the most ¶ blatant, emblematic form. We are also being drawn to forms of mitigation ¶ that presume to calculate the weather and promise to make it stable, and ¶ forms of adaptation which have at their heart a soteriological dream of ¶ security which can only ever be within the reach of the fortunate, and only ¶ then through its own forms of externalization.
We need to find different ways
¶
of reading the weather
, ones which recast the relationship between its being ¶ read and being writing.
¶ Firstly,
we need to read the changing climate in a way that is alive to
¶
the semiotic enfolding of inside and outside, of organism and environment
¶
– a reading of the weather that thus reads us in return
. In February 1884 ¶ the artist John Ruskin delivered two lectures at the London Institution, later ¶ published as ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’. In these lectures ¶ Ruskin described what he felt were new meteorological phenomena peculiar ¶ to that historical moment, in particular an uncanny form of wind that he ¶ called the ‘plague-wind’, and which he proceeded to describe in painterly ¶ detail. According to Ruskin, the plaguewind darkens the sky; it blows ¶ indifferently from any compass direction, ‘attaching its own bitterness and ¶ malice to the worst characters of the proper winds of each quarter’; it makes
¶ the leaves of the trees shudder ‘as if they were all aspens’ but with ‘an
¶ expression of anger as well as of fear and distress’; it ‘degrades, while it ¶ intensifies, ordinary storm’; and it
‘blanch[es] the sun instead of reddening
¶ it . . . [like] a bad half-crown [thrown] into a basin of soap and water’ ¶ (Ruskin,
1908: 23–9). He closed his first lecture by linking this deterioration ¶ of nature with the iniquity and injustice of late Victorian society.
¶ Ruskin’s mode of address is thus one that traces the fold between the inside ¶ and outside of society, and there are clues here for how we could read the ¶ weather today.
¶
Secondly, like Ruskin’s, our reading of the weather must be ineradicably ¶ historial: a reading that is simultaneously of the weather and of the ¶ time. Indeed, many European words for the weather (and for the tides) have ¶ their etymological roots in words for ‘time’. This is perhaps most well-known ¶ in relation to the Latin tempestas and its derivatives such as temps (French) ¶ or tempest (English) (see Serres, 1995: 27), but this pattern can be found ¶ in many other languages too, including Polish ( czas ), Irish ( aimsir ) and ¶ Greek ( kairos ). Weather was – and is
– experienced as an aspect of time
¶ perceived not chronologically but kairologically , as the quality of particular ¶ periods of time, typically a season. Yet traditional seasonal ‘weatherwising’ ¶ no longer works, for the simple reason that the weather is no longer ¶ sufficiently stable from one year to the next, let alone from one generation ¶ to the next.
To read our own weather kairologically
involves being alert to ¶ its new, unstable temporality, as the coiled cycles of annual weather patterns ¶ unravel into the irreversible time of the longue durée
, and each storm and ¶ drought becomes unseasonable, unique, historical. Such a reading requires
¶ us
to weather-wise the moment of civilizational crisis at which we stand – ¶ to discern in our unruly weather
not just the future ruins of our past and ¶ present hubris, but also the global relations of power and inequality that
¶ have shaped our carbon metabolism
. (Indeed, perhaps we are already ¶ learning to read the weather in this kind of way. Once again, we are oriented ¶ not so much to the regularities of nature but to its ‘wanderings’: droughts,
¶ storms, floods, and extremes of heat and cold. Today, too, aerial prodigies ¶ are being seen as reprimands about the past and forewarnings of the future, ¶ now in terms of the fate that we have brought upon ourselves by our runaway ¶ ‘carbon metabolism’ with nature.) ¶ Thirdly, an adequately historial reading of this moment would be one ¶ that demands of us an even more exacting responsibility than the nostrums ¶ of climate technics. A fully ethical decision can never be determined by the
¶
calculations and other preparations we make for it; it is always a unique
¶
event that exceeds any empirical determination of the situation (Derrida, ¶ 1995[1992]). And such an ethical leap is implicit in the act of reading
¶ itself.
Reading, being the receiving of a legacy, can never determine ¶ response as if it were a cause. ‘If the legibility of a legacy were given, ¶ natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not simultaneously call for and defy ¶ interpretation, one would never have to inherit from it. One would be ¶ affected by it as by a cause. . . . One always inherits a secret, which says,
¶
“Read me, will you ever be up to it?”’ (Derrida, 1994: 16). Reading is thus
¶
not the receiving of a message; it is always a task, that of responding to the ¶ opening that reading represents (Bennington, 2000:
36). Thus a response to ¶ a text is both necessitated and free (Miller, 1987: 43); our duty to any text ¶ is not to be slavish but to read in inventive ways – there is an ‘ ethic of¶ reading’
.
If we approach weather as an opening, no decoding of it will tell us
¶ what we need to do, what level of emissions is safe, when we have ‘done our
¶ bit’, when we have ‘fixed the climate’
. An adequate response to the current
¶
situation would not be adequate, a just response not just. ‘Responsibility’
¶
here can only mean that something radical, something extra ordinary has ¶ happened.
¶ Fourthly, reading the weather in the open, released from its technological
¶
incarceration, would
also be to recognize both reading and weather
¶
as aberrant.
Meteorology always involves meteorography – practices of
¶
inscription in which meaning and reference can never be finally stabilized.
¶ But the weather, too, has its continuous aberrance. The weather is pure ¶ medium, the region of mixing of earth and sky, the taking place of life, of ¶ metabolism. Life, animation, is being carried by the wind (anemos): ‘life is ¶ not in things; rather, things are in life, caught up in a current of continual ¶ generation’ (Ingold,
2007: S31). An opening up to that kind of reading of
¶
climate would involve embracing the notion that after all perhaps it was our ¶ long period of stable climate that was an aberration (see Clark, 2010). If so, ¶ then if the 20th century will have to have been the high point in our carbonmetabolic ¶ profligacy, maybe it will also have to be seen as the close of a ¶ particular model of civilization. We will have to develop new forms of
¶
solidarity and security, predicated not on closure and independence but on ¶ the recognition of vulnerability and exchange with nature. We will all, in a ¶ sense, be climate

refugees, extradicted by our fugal weather.
Climate
¶
technics
would have their place, not as soteriological gestures; instead, ¶ they will have to be grounded in specific social projects that bind
¶
humanity together in new relations of interdependence.
The weather will ¶ have reminded us of the openness of existence, and the impossibility of ¶ autonomy.
¶ If reading the weather has always been subject to the logic of writing, ¶ then it has always been subject to the dynamic that, when we start
¶
writing, we cannot know where it will end up. Such insights represent a ¶ move away from the root metaphor of the book towards that of the practice ¶ of writing. Derrida argues that the idea of the book has always been ‘the ¶ encyclopedic protection . . . of logocentrism against the disruption of ¶ writing’
(Derrida, 1976: 18), and thus that the passing of that idea, the
¶
passing of the book, would be of profound significance. If we came to understand ¶ climate itself as writing, this would indeed be the end of the book of ¶ nature, as its written being gives way to its being written. And, as Derrida ¶ points out, the death of the book would be ‘a new situation for speech, of ¶ its sub ordination within a structure of which it shall no longer be the archon’
¶
(Derrida, 1976: 8). The human as archon of nature would indeed pass away ¶ as we found ourselves taking up a very different understanding of our ¶ relation with nature.

Bronislaw Szerszynski is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University,
UK, where he also works in the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) and the
ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics Body & Society Special Issue
Extra: Interview with Bron Szerszynski http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/default.aspx?page=interviewee27
Bron Szerszynski: There are at least two ways to answer that question. Taking it at face value would involve treating it as an instrumental question – how social theory might be able to make itself useful in the common task of mitigating and/or adapting to climate change. And of course social theory can be immensely helpful here, in offering sophisticated understandings of the nature of society and its material dimensions, of history and progress, of socio-technical change and so on. For example, the articles in the collection show how theoretical reflection
about capitalism,
(anti)reflexivity, socio-metabolic analysis and so on can help us to understand the social dynamics that are driving anthropogenic climate change
and are making a meaningful response so difficult to achieve. ¶ But I think Changing Climates also shows how social theory can also
do something quite different, and I think quite remarkable, in that it can be used to defamiliarise our dominant ways of thinking about climate change, and to offer radically different perspectives.
In this, of course, it shares some characteristics with the arts, which at their best can also disrupt familiar ways of seeing and open us up to new perceptions and new insights. I think that it’s in those moments that the real possibility of meaningful action lies
. Of course, the highly politicised nature of climate change policy means that it’s hard to get this kind of intellectual
and cultural labour to be given credence in policy debates
, because its truth value is so different from that of the ‘hard sciences’. All too often both the social sciences and the arts are relegated to under-labourer roles – as sources of information about human behaviour on the one hand, as more effective forms of communication on ¶ the other – leaving the natural sciences as the place where all the important action happens. I hope this collection can help to alter that balance.
¶
SD: How new is climate change as a focus of inquiry for social scientists, and why do you think economics got there before the social theorists?
¶ BS: It’s certainly true that climate change hasn’t had the attention it deserves from social scientists, and I don’t think there’s one single reason for that. There is of course the perennial problem of social-scientific anti-naturalism, an intellectual habit that goes back to the disciplinary roots of sociology and tends to downplay the influence of nature on society. In environmental sociology and science studies there were a few people who started looking seriously at climate change early on – Simon Shackley, Brian
Wynne, Steve Rayner and Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, for example. But generally even both of those sociological subdisciplines have had their own rather different preoccupations. The science of climate change is very complex, of course, but that hasn’t stopped sociologists studying other equally challenging areas. ¶ One might say that economists have had a certain advantage because of the specific way that climate science has evolved, with the emergence of the Global
Climate Model as the technique of choice. The use of powerful computers to try to model the behaviour of massively complex, far-from-equilibrium systems is something that doesn’t have many obvious resonance points in the social sciences, other than in macroeconomics. The Stern Review took basically ‘as read’ the contemporary neoliberal global economic situation, in which nation states generally do not own or command large parts of the economy, but instead have a narrow range of policy levers to try to influence flows of goods and labour, and the behaviour of transnational economic actors and citizens. If one doesn’t question the inevitability of this too much, then economic instruments can seem the obvious way to go to try to avoid the catastrophic climate change predicted by the modellers. I think social theory can get us to ask more interesting questions.
¶
SD: In your own article in the issue, you approach climate change by problematising the fundamental relationship between humans and nature through the metaphor of the ‘weather’. To do this, you draw on

Derrida, Bernard Stiegler and biosemiotics. Could you briefly explain the significance of biosemiotics to our understanding of climate change? And how would you convince an economist, natural scientist or politician that this was worthwhile? ¶
BS: I’d been wanting for some time to engage with biosemiotics, and this seemed a perfect opportunity. Its premise, that life is a semiotic phenomenon, is so simple but has immense ramifications. It challenges any simple dualism between the inside and outside of living beings and systems, between nature and culture. It means you can’t simply understand living things in material terms, as subject to mechanical laws and operating according to cause and effect. Combine this with a
Derridean insistence on différance, dissemination and so on and I think you have an extremely powerful way to think about ecological relations and dynamics.
¶ Much of the science of how natural processes are changing given the altering climate is consistent with this way of thinking. But more important for me was the fact that I wanted to see how you could approach weather and by extension climate change as a biotic phenomenon – as all about life, but no less about culture and meaning for that. That gave me a way of exploring the idea that climate crisis is also a kind of existential crisis for the human being.
¶
My article wasn’t written to be easily inserted into the business-as-usual of climate change policymaking. If it were, it would have failed, because the article’s starting point is the idea that we are rushing from climate diagnosis to climate cure unaware of how we have become trapped into certain narrow ways of thinking about the meaning of climate change. I wanted to jam the wheels of the conceptual machine that’s driving that headlong rush – not because I don’t think climate change is a significant political challenge, but because I think it’s far too significant a political moment to be left to the naïve realist registers of ‘sound science
’.
Ingolfur Blühdorn
¶ is Associate Professor in Politics / Political Sociology at the Department of
European Studies at the University of Bath Locked into the politics of unsustainability http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-10-30-bluhdorn-en.html
One reason is that in functionally differentiated and rapidly internationalising societies, the existing political institutions lack the structural ability to formulate and implement coordinated and effective policy approaches. Yet there is more to it than this. In order to see the arguably most powerful obstacle to major ecological progress, we need to focus on the values and paradigms governing national as well as international environmental policy-making. ¶ Since the mid-1980s, environmental politics has incrementally come to be dominated by a policy paradigm that is inherently incapable of organising the category of change that the IPCC targets necessitate. This is the paradigm of sustainability, ecological modernisation and, in its most recent appearances, "ecological industrial politics" and the "Green New Deal".[1] For all the good they have done in terms of turning environmentalism into a "new ideological masterframe" and a "non-controversial collective concern",[2] the concept of sustainability as well as the strategy of ecological modernisation have proved unable to deliver the "break with traditional models of economic development"[3] which are now widely recognised as indispensable for the effective mitigation of climate change. This is even more applicable to the latest addition to the lexicon of green-speak, the Green
New Deal.
¶
Sustainability is interpreted by national governments as well as transnational bodies such as the EU first and foremost as sustained economic growth and competitiveness securing the continuation of established lifestyles and patterns of societal development. Its fundamental weakness is that as a purely formal concept (do not use up more resources than can be reproduced) it does not contain any inherent specification of what is to be counted as a resource (do polar bears count or not?), at which level an equilibrium between use and reproduction is to be achieved (before or after the destruction of Indonesian rain forests?) and which political values or principles are to be implemented in the envisaged society (authoritarian or democratic; decentralised or centralised; egalitarian or polarised).[4]
¶
Ecological modernisation
(EM), in turn, is a market and technology-oriented policy strategy fraught with inherent limitations. For key environmental problems (e.g. habitat destruction, soil erosion, bio-diversity loss), marketable technological fixes are simply not available
; environmental efficiency gains are persistently over-compensated by rebound effects and ongoing processes of growth; and all ecological modernisation depends on targets that are circumscribed by the ability to generate political legitimation and public support. Perhaps most importantly, though,
EM ultimately just renews and extends the logic of growth and consumption which political ecologists
as well as the much more moderate UN
Brundtland Report[5] once identified as the underlying cause of industrial society's unsustainability.
¶
More explicitly even than EM approaches, the new ecological industrial politics
and the Green New Deal aim
first and foremost to spur technological innovation
, increase consumer demand, create new jobs
, open up new export markets, enhance
the international competitiveness
of national economies and so forth.
In other words, they reframe
global warming and the environmental crisis as

an opportunity, a tool, for a new round of innovation
and growth. They are supposed to provide a double, or even triple, dividend (economic, environmental, social), yet they entirely reverse the relation between means and ends that had once been envisaged by those proposing the use of economic or market based instruments for the achievement of ecological goals. In practice they are primarily an attempt to prolong the life expectancy of what is known to be unsustainable. Even Europe's leading Green Party, the once fairly radical German Greens, have fully embraced this rhetoric.
It should not be forgotten that war is a function of techno-economic progress
.
Despite all the evidence, humanists still refuse to admit it
. They argue that only totalitarian regimes misuse science and technology. They act as if, since the Enlightenment, an ethical imperative dominates politi- cal systems as well as institutional and legislative tools, which requires the peaceful settlement of conflicts.
But war is a formidable instrument of production and techno-scientific innovation
.23
It is not only a violent confrontation between peoples
(war being as old as their presence on earth); since the invention of artillery, it also has been part of the endless process of scientific invention
.
It is a pawn of power, because it is com- mitted to the creation of more effective means of killing, of destroying what took centuries to build
.
This scientificity of war has erased ancient notions of courage and bravery and replaced them with industrial con- cepts that promote an ever-growing need for new arms, new munitions, new buildings better able to resist gunfire
, etc., i.e., a programmatic calculus.24 Today, the power of mobilized human masses has been substi- tuted by the production of “intelligent” weapons and of more sophisticated tools in general. This implies new needs, new management, and a multi- tude of ever more rationalized means of transportation. It also implies an unprecedented progress in medicine, surgery, psychiatry, etc.25
War constantly innovates
,26 and within this process of mass destruction there are even more gigantic plans for reconstruction. War (or its preparation, as in the case of the Cold War, which lasted 45 years) has become a decisive factor in the deployment of techno-science and capital. In other words, war requires a rationalization similar to that involved in the most complex kinds of industrial production
. To consider war the result of a degenerated use of science or as some kind of social pathology, as humanist philistines do, is metaphysical tomfoolery. When all is said and done, it is an escape without any consideration of reality, as if the latter was nothing but another illusion. As for “realist” strategists, they proclaim the end of metaphysics. Consider the following, written in 1961 by Herman Kahn, an American expert on nuclear war: “Objective examinations show that human trage- dies (sic) would enormously increase in the world [after nuclear war] but that this increase would not exclude normal and happy existence for the majority of the survivors and their descendents. The embryonic deaths would not have but relative importance . . . . It is probable that, in the first generation, there would be around five million of these cases and about a hundred million in the next generations. I consider this last figure as not weighing too much in the balance . . . . Nonetheless, humanity is so fecund that even a small diminution of its fertility is not a reason to be taken particularly seriously, not even by the individual affected.”27

It should not be forgotten that war is a function of techno-economic progress
.
Despite all the evidence, humanists still refuse to admit it
. They argue that only totalitarian regimes misuse science and technology. They act as if, since the Enlightenment, an ethical imperative dominates politi- cal systems as well as institutional and legislative tools, which requires the peaceful settlement of conflicts.
But war is a formidable instrument of production and techno-scientific innovation
.23
It is not only a violent confrontation between peoples
(war being as old as their presence on earth); since the invention of artillery, it also has been part of the endless process of scientific invention
.
It is a pawn of power, because it is com- mitted to the creation of more effective means of killing, of destroying what took centuries to build
.
This scientificity of war has erased ancient notions of courage and bravery and replaced them with industrial con- cepts that promote an ever-growing need for new arms, new munitions, new buildings better able to resist gunfire
, etc., i.e., a programmatic calculus.24 Today, the power of mobilized human masses has been substi- tuted by the production of “intelligent” weapons and of more sophisticated tools in general. This implies new needs, new management, and a multi- tude of ever more rationalized means of transportation. It also implies an unprecedented progress in medicine, surgery, psychiatry, etc.25
War constantly innovates
,26 and within this process of mass destruction there are even more gigantic plans for reconstruction. War (or its preparation, as in the case of the Cold War, which lasted 45 years) has become a decisive factor in the deployment of techno-science and capital. In other words, war requires a rationalization similar to that involved in the most complex kinds of industrial production
. To consider war the result of a degenerated use of science or as some kind of social pathology, as humanist philistines do, is metaphysical tomfoolery. When all is said and done, it is an escape without any consideration of reality, as if the latter was nothing but another illusion. As for “realist” strategists, they proclaim the end of metaphysics. Consider the following, written in 1961 by Herman Kahn, an American expert on nuclear war: “Objective examinations show that human trage- dies (sic) would enormously increase in the world [after nuclear war] but that this increase would not exclude normal and happy existence for the majority of the survivors and their descendents. The embryonic deaths would not have but relative importance . . . . It is probable that, in the first generation, there would be around five million of these cases and about a hundred million in the next generations. I consider this last figure as not weighing too much in the balance . . . . Nonetheless, humanity is so fecund that even a small diminution of its fertility is not a reason to be taken particularly seriously, not even by the individual affected.”27
[ALLEN, “BATAILLE’S PEAK: ENERGY, WASTE, AND POSTSUSTAINABILITY” P. 131]
Nature has lost what we might call its autonomy; its model is no longer the bringing-forth of the flower bud, or the energy of the windmill (which “does not unlock energy from the wind currents in order to store it” [14]), but the violent, commandeering, ordering, and stockpiling of energy by the human as challenging-forth. The human, now revealed as a sort of martial monster, is opposed, in its actions, to the bringing-forth that best characterized poeisis (a causal model in which the human plays only a part). And, Heidegger makes clear in another essay, “The Age of the World Picture,” reality itself in and through technology can only be grasped as a standing reserve
, ripe for quantification, stockpiling, use, and disposal, if it is isolated in an objective “picture,” a coherent, passive, inert totality whose only aspect is that it can be brought-forth, by man, violently, in techned. “To represent” objectively (as the Rhine is represented by those who would harness its energy
) is “to set out before oneself and to set forth in relation to oneself”
(Heidegger 1977, 132). “That the world becomes picture is one and the same even with the event of man’s becoming suiectum in the midst of that which is” (132). The rise of subjectivity, of the isolated, active self, conquering nature, storing its energy, is inseparable from the appearance of an “anthropology” through which “observation and teaching about the

world change into a doctrine of man” (133). Or, we might say, observation and teaching about the world become observation and teaching about man: the measurement of nature’s resources and their stockpiling
—and wanton expenditure— are inseparable from the stockpiling and wastage of the human
in techno-scientific methods. Man the subject for whom the objective world exists as a resource is quickly reversed and becomes
man the object who
, under the right conditions, is examined, marshaled, and then releases a specific amount of energy before he himself is definitively depleted
. Although Heidegger does not stress this point in “The Age of the World Picture,” he does make this point elsewhere, noting what for him is t he inevitable link between the transformation of the world into a giant energy reserve and the transformation of man into a resource to be exploited in
, for example, concentration camps
.8
[ALLEN, “BATAILLE’S PEAK: ENERGY, WASTE, AND POSTSUSTAINABILITY” P. 131-3]
Subject/object; this is the infernal duo that, for Heidegger, characterizes modernity. The world is quantified in order to be exploited by “man,” but man himself is a consequence of this mode of expenditure.
The man who
hoards, who works to preserve his individual existence and protect it from all threats, is inseparable from a natural world completely transformed and rendered “monstrous” by a
kind of instrumental mania
. Man himself becomes a resource to be scientifically investigated, frilly known, perfected, made fully human (with an identity and consciousness) and put to use.9 This brief excursion through Heidegger on technology is useful, I think, to put the work of ideologists of suburbia and car culture, like Lomasky and Brooks, in perspective. We could argue, following Heidegger, that their version of car culture inevitably entails a subjectivity; one that, as in Heidegger, is both produced by their model and in turn produces it. The illusion “Man” derives his “freedom” from the quantification and commodification of natural resources: oil, to be sure, but also the steel, plastics, and other materials that go to make up the
“autonomist” lifestyle. Utility as the autonomists conceive it is inseparable from a freedom that wastes, though they are notably reticent when it comes to discussing the consumption of resources on which their favorite lifestyle depends.
Heidegger, although he does not explicitly pose the question of waste, certainly implies it: the Rhine, ruined by all those who exploit it, is a “resource” that has been squandered for the self-satisfied pleasures of domestic life and tourism. I have discussed the analyses of Lomasky and Brooks at such length because they are the most articulate and coherent defenders of the current culture in which we (attempt to) live. These proponents of the ideology of the current American fossil fuel regime valorize a lavish and ruinous wastage but do so in a way that masks it, invoking as they do utility: the squandering of vast amounts of wealth is necessary, indeed is a given, because we are challenged in developing to the fullest our nature as autonomous, free, individuals. As those free individuals we are the highest being on the earth (as Aristotle would remind us), the most developed. And as such we can be expected to reject any calls to conservation or sustainability. Heidegger, however, would note that our being, our subjectivity, is a quantifiable term that is a function of the very same movement, the very same bringing forth as techné that renders the world a quantifiable mass ripe for exploitation. And such a subject, immediately transformed into an object, a stàñding reserve
, warehoused in an institution (concentration camp, prison, army, hospital, school, freeway, suburb), is itself ripe for use and disposal
.

John Byrne is director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy and distinguished professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Delaware. He shares the 2007 Nobel
Peace Prize
¶
Noah Toly is a research associate and Ph.D. candidate in the Center for Energy and
Environmental Policy at the University of Delaware.
¶ ¶
Leigh Glover is policy fellow and assistant professor in the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Delaware
¶
TRANSFORMING POWER
¶
ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, AND SOCIETY IN CONFLICT
¶ http://seedconsortium.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/45925604/Byrne_etal.pdf
¶ What are the characteristics of this success? One envied feature is the ¶ remarkable decline in the price of wind-generated electricity, from $0.46 per ¶ kWh in 1980 to $0.03 to $0.07 per kWh today (Sawin, 2004), very close to ¶ conventionallyfueled utility generating costs in many countries, even before ¶ environmental impacts are included. Jubilant over wind’s winning market ¶ performance, advocates of sustainable energy foresee a new era that is ¶ ecologically much greener and, yet, in which electricity remains (comparatively) ¶ cheap. Lester Brown (2003: 159) notes that wind satisfies seemingly ¶ equally weighted criteria of environmental benefit, social gain, and economic ¶ efficiency: ¶ Wind is...clean.
Wind energy
does not produce sulfur dioxide emissions or nitrous ¶ oxides to cause acid rain. Nor are there any emissions of health-threatening mercury ¶ that come from coal-fired power plants. No mountains are leveled, no streams are ¶ polluted, and there are no deaths from black lung disease. Wind does not disrupt the
¶ earth’s climate...[I]t is inexhaustible...[and] cheap.
¶
This would certainly satisfy the canon of economic rationalism.
¶
It is
also consistent with the ideology of modern consumerism.
Its politics
¶ bestow sovereignty on consumers not unlike the formula of Pareto optimality,
¶ a situation in which additional consumption of a good or service is warranted
¶ until it cannot improve the circumstance of one person (or group) without ¶ decreasing the welfare of another person (or group).17 How would one know ¶ “better off” from “worse off” in the wind-rich sustainable energy era? Interestingly, ¶ proponents
seem to apply a logic that leaves valuation of “better” and¶ “worse” devoid of explicit content.
In a manner reminiscent of modern economic¶ thinking, cheap-and-green enthusiasts appear willing to set wind to¶ the task of making “whatever”—whether that is the manufacture of low-cost¶ teeth whitening toothpaste or lower cost SUVs.
In economic accounting, all
¶ of these applications potentially make some in society “better off” (if one
¶ accepts that economic growth and higher incomes are signs of improvement).
¶ Possible detrimental side effects or externalities (an economic term for potential ¶ harm) could be rehabilitated by the possession of more purchasing power, ¶ which could enable society to invent environmentally friendly toothpaste ¶ ¶ and make affordable, energy-efficient SUVs.
Sustainable energy in this construct¶ cooperates in the abstraction of consumption and production. Consumption-
¶ of-what, -by-whom, and -for-what-purpose, and, relatedly,¶ production-of-what, -bywhom, and -for-what-purpose are not issues. The¶ construct altogether ignores the possibility that “more-is-better” consumption-¶ production relations may actually reinforce middle class ideology and¶ capitalist political economy, as well as contribute to environmental crises¶ such as climate change
. In the celebration of its coming market victory, the
¶ cheap-and-green wind version of sustainable energy development may not
¶ readily distinguish the economic/class underpinnings of its victory from those
¶ of the conventional energy regime.
¶
Wind enthusiasts
also appear to be largely untroubled by trends toward¶ larger and larger turbines and farms, the necessity of more exotic materials to¶ achieve results, and the advancing complications of catching the wind.
There ¶ is nothing new about these sorts of trends in the modern period. The trajectory ¶ of change in a myriad of human activities follows this pattern. Nor is a ¶ critique per se intended in an observation of this trend.
Rather, the question we wish to raise is whether another feature in this pattern will likewise be
¶ replicated—namely, a
“technological mystique”
(Bazin, 1986) in which social¶ life finds its inspiration and hope in technical acumen and searches for¶ fulfillment in the ideals of technique
(Mumford, 1934;
Ellul, 1964; Marcuse, ¶ 1964; Winner, 1977, 1986; Vanderburg, 2005).

Relocating Energy in the Social Commons
¶
Ideas for a Sustainable Energy Utility
¶
John Byrne
¶
Cecilia Martinez
¶
Colin Ruggero
¶
University of Delaware
¶
Bulletin of Science,
¶
Technology &
Society
¶
Volume 29 Number 2
¶
April 2009 81-94
¶
© 2009 Sage Publications
Reminiscent of the institutional alliances that led to the creation of the industrial mega-energy systems that have dominated modernity, the call for public
and private investment in renewable energy has the political ring and economic ka-ching normally reserved for the overlords of the modern energy scheme
.
¶
The corporate renewable energy movement has studied the tactics of its competitors and adapted them to their needs. Appropriating the symbols of technology triumphalism of nuclear power (Byrne, Glover, & Alroe, 2006, p. 16-17), corporate renewable energy has launched a campaign for
, fittingly, a “Manhattan Project” that can vault Big
Wind
and other renewables with extra-large size ambitions to a new level (Wilson, 2008).
The new order is visualized with imagery suggesting the benign nature of giant wind turbines in pastoral settings
. To secure the support of technologically minded moderns, these same turbines are applauded for their complexity and scale—far larger than the Statue of Liberty, built with the exotic chemistry of composites, and aerodynamically designed with highly sophisticated computer models, the technology readily earns hi-tech status (Parfit,
2005).
¶ Contesting the imagery is difficult. Big Wind resisters cite noise, bird mortality, and the industrialization of heretofore largely untrammeled land and seascapes in their arguments against Big Wind farms. But supporters counter with scientific evidence offered by experts ranging from ornithologists to acoustics specialists and underscore the larger threat of global warming in defense of these carbon-free alternatives. Importantly, the green energy case pits one set of environmental values against another, and depends on the priority of climate change to win out. But equally important, the environmental case for green energy fails to challenge the affluence-based development path secured by earlier energy systems. Rather than questioning the underlying premise of modern society to produce and consume without constraint, contemporary green energy advocates warmly embrace creating “bigger and more complex machines to spur and sate an endlessly increasing world energy demand
” (Byrne
& Toly, 2006, p. 3) Marketing slogans originally justifying fossil energy-based obesity can be revamped to suit the new green energy agenda: choosier mothers choose renewables and better living through green energy will motivate the postclimate change consumer to do the right thing.
Yet the green energy agenda will not change the cause of the global warming threat (and so many other environmental harms), namely, unlimited consumption and production. In
this sense, large renewable energy systems, touted as saviors of the planet, actually appear mainly to save modernity
.
John Byrne is director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy and distinguished professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Delaware. He shares the 2007 Nobel
Peace Prize
¶
Noah Toly is a research associate and Ph.D. candidate in the Center for Energy and
Environmental Policy at the University of Delaware.
¶ ¶
Leigh Glover is policy fellow and assistant professor in the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Delaware
¶
TRANSFORMING POWER
¶
ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, AND SOCIETY IN CONFLICT
¶ http://seedconsortium.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/45925604/Byrne_etal.pdf

Obviously, wind energy
has a long way to go before it can claim to have
¶ dethroned conventional energy’s
“technological cathedrals” (Weinberg,
¶
1985). But its mission seems largely to supplant other spectacular methods of
¶ generating electricity with its own. The politics supporting its rapid rise
¶ express no qualms about endorsing the inevitability of its victories on technical grounds
. In fact, Big Wind appears to seek monumental status in the
¶ psyche of ecologically modern society. A recent alliance of the American
¶
Wind Energy Association and the
U.S. electric utility industry to champion ¶ national (subsidized) investment in higher voltage transmission lines (to ¶ deliver green-and-cheap electricity), illustrates the desire of Big Wind to ¶ plug into Giant Power’s hardware and, correspondingly, its ideology (see
¶
American Wind Energy Association, 2005, supporting “Transmission Infrastructure
¶
Modernization”). The transformative features of such a politics are
¶ unclear. Indeed, wind power
—if it can continue to be harvested by everlarger ¶ machines— may penetrate the conventional energy order so successfully¶ that it will diffuse, without perceptible disruption, to the regime.
The air
¶ will be cleaner but the source of this achievement will be duly noted: science
¶ will have triumphed still again in wresting from stingy nature the resources
¶ that a wealthy life has grown to expect. Social transformation to achieve ¶ sustainability may actually be unnecessary by this political view of things, as¶ middle-class existence is assured via clean, low-cost and easy-toplug-in wind¶ power
.
¶
Commission (U.S.), 2005).

John Byrne is director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy and distinguished professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Delaware. He shares the 2007 Nobel
Peace Prize
¶
Noah Toly is a research associate and Ph.D. candidate in the Center for Energy and
Environmental Policy at the University of Delaware.
¶ ¶
Leigh Glover is policy fellow and assistant professor in the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Delaware
¶
TRANSFORMING POWER
¶
ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, AND SOCIETY IN CONFLICT
¶ http://seedconsortium.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/45925604/Byrne_etal.pdf
While the discussion here of sustainable energy advocacy has concentrated¶ on its wind- and solar-animated versions, we believe that strategies¶ anticipating significant roles for
geothermal, biomass, micro-hydro, and hydrogen¶ harvested from factories fueled by renewables anticipate variants of¶ the social narratives depicted for the two currently most prominent renewable¶ energy options. The aim of producing more with advancing ecological efficiency¶ in order to consume more with equally advancing consumerist satisfaction¶ underpins the sustainable energy future in a way that would seamlessly¶ tie it to the modernization project
.20

D'Arcy Hande is a retired archivist and historian, living in Saskatoon. Dr Mark Bigland-Pritchard is a Saskatoon-based applied physicist August 27, 2012
¶
"Green Bitumen?!"
¶
Nuclear reactors in the tar sands http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4570
¶
The brainchild of the nuclear industry, this novel concept of deploying small modular nuclear
reactors (SMRs) to replace natural gas is being sold as a solution to the tar sands' reputation for producing the largest carbon footprint on the planet. Nuclear is being touted as an
environmentally friendly, "clean" energy source for the extraction process. But in order to make that claim, one must overlook the substantial carbon emissions in the nuclear "fuel
cycle," from mining to ultimate disposal; the risks of weapons proliferation; the toxic radioactive footprint; and the legacy of highly radioactive waste left behind for many
generations to come.
http://www.heraldonline.com/2012/07/01/4085457/mini-nuclear-reactors.html#storylink=cpy
The mini-reactors – also dubbed small modular reactors or SMRs – have been hailed as the
nuclear technology of the future. About the size of a double-wide mobile home, the reactors could be used to power a small city or remote rural areas.
¶
They can be built at a fraction of the cost of a large reactor and can be put together at a central location and shipped to wherever they are needed. Promoters say winning the grant would create thousands of jobs in the state and put South Carolina at the cutting edge of what could be a new $100 billion industry.
¶
Minireactors, as with their larger counterparts, also could help reduce dependence on foreign oil while also lowering the nation’s carbon footprint. But just like large reactors, these mini-nuclear
plants also can generate substantial amounts of deadly nuclear waste.
¶
While the U.S. nuclear industry boasts an admirable safety record, waste is the problem it still hasn’t solved. Without a federally approved nuclear waste depository, spent fuel rods and other reactor waste languish at nuclear plants or at other temporary storage sites.
¶
The federal government had designated the Yucca Mountain area in central Nevada as the destination for the nation’s nuclear waste.
But the Energy Department, on orders from President Barack Obama, halted work on that site, and even if work were to resume immediately, the storage area would not be ready to receive shipments for years.
¶
In the interim, South Carolina undoubtedly would be stuck storing any waste from mini-reactors inside the state. And if the technology is licensed by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission and the mini-reactors use spent nuclear rods from power plants as a source for fuel, then waste could be shipped into the state from other areas.
¶
South Carolina once again could become the nuclear dumping ground for the nation.
¶
The technology for the mini-reactors still is in its infancy. If South Carolina gets the green light to develop them, the

state would be the testing ground for the rest of the nation.
¶
While that would give the state a head start in nurturing a new industry that could create thousands of jobs, the project is not without substantial risk. Before South Carolina fully embraces this untested technology, we need answers to questions about possible accidents and their consequences, the potential for a terrorist strike or theft of nuclear material – but mostly about the waste.
¶
Namely, where would it end up?
¶

Helena Norberg-Hodge, is recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the alternative
Nobel Prize. She is founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture an internationally renowned environmentalist. www.cbaa.org.au/.../Alternative%20Radio_programs_April2010.doc
The current economic system, with its almost total disregard for nature, is steamrolling both people and the planet.
Profits uber alles inevitably will lead to social and ecological breakdowns
. Bold innovative ideas are needed to repair and nurture the earth. The traditional path of growth for growth's sake and conventional notions of development require urgent reexamination. Years ago consumption was another name for tuberculosis. Today it is a lifestyle. It is something desirable and is heavily promoted by corporate advertising. To paraphrase Descartes, We consume, therefore we are. But look at the real costs.
Environmental degradation is accelerating. The scale of the crises demands replacing the dominant fragmented techno-economic worldview with a more holistic perspective embracing the interdependence of the natural world. More and more communities around the globe are discovering the value of self-reliance and exploring alternative models.

Relocating Energy in the Social Commons
¶
Ideas for a Sustainable Energy Utility
¶
John Byrne
¶
Cecilia Martinez
¶
Colin Ruggero
¶
University of Delaware
¶
Bulletin of Science,
¶
Technology &
Society
¶
Volume 29 Number 2
¶
April 2009 81-94
¶
© 2009 Sage Publications
The SEU emphasizes governance by community rather than technocratic institutions and values. Shared use of and collective responsibility for the health of renewable energy and other ecosystems defines the politics of the new energy commons.
This definition conforms with two critical elements of a commons regime. First, the SEU offers a means by which energy decisions are based on streams of common benefits for the community; secondly, the SEU emphasizes the social governance of energy in order to protect the community’s interest rather than the interests of energy producers (as obese energy utilities are designed to do).
The SEU can recalibrate society’s energy diet and balance energy consumption to serve qualities of life sought by communities. In this way, community values, instead of commodity values, determine policy direction. A community using an SEU to govern energy-society relations evolves differently from its modern counterpart
. It must earn the trust of members that sharing costs will improve their collective condition; that borrowing from future benefits will result in equitable and sustainable future development. Unlike the producer’s utility, the SEU operates without mandate for social participation. Members decide whether to enter the sustainability space of the SEU. In essence, an SEU is at the mercy of its community’s judgment.
This
naturally leads to an emphasis on social, not technical or economic , evaluation of the energy regime.
An SEU confronts the energy challenge by embedding decision making in the community itself
. Uses of the commonwealth are decided by community members, who govern the SEU in the institutional sense of setting goals, monitoring performance, and enforcing rules. But there is also the personal and interpersonal sense of governance in which the meaning and practice of sustainability and equity are created and continually revised. A relationship based on reciprocity is made available in which the interest of individual and community are symbiotic, not competitive, and embodies community responsibility for members individually and collectively. Members’ efforts to secure commonwealth commitments lead to the interplay of the institution, the individual and groups around practical problems of how to use less and how to match social needs and renewable energy availability. When this interplay expands sustainability and equity as practical outcomes, interest in contributing to the SEU grows. When the reverse occurs, that is, when sustainability and equity are threatened, the SEU loses the trust of the community and, therewith, its ability to remain viable as an institution.
Relocating Energy in the Social Commons
¶
Ideas for a Sustainable Energy Utility
¶
John Byrne
¶
Cecilia Martinez
¶
Colin Ruggero
¶
University of Delaware
¶
Bulletin of Science,
¶
Technology &
Society
¶
Volume 29 Number 2
¶
April 2009 81-94
¶
© 2009 Sage Publications
Rather than elixirs, even carbon-free ones, we suggest the onset of human-induced climate change wrought by 200 years of modern energy practice should spur us to try earnestly to shift the paradigm.
Tools such as the SEU have the potential to dismantle energy obesity. Through a resurgent community voice seeking to govern energy-ecology-society relations
, it may be possible to render a very different energy future.
Choosing community governance over technocratic orders, we have the chance to do something impossible in the era of energy obesity: relocate energy-ecology-society relations in a commons space
. Learning from the tragedy of globalization, and the poisonous politics of obesity, communities can build antithetical energy schemes from the modern point of view, namely, sustainable energy utilities.
Using commons tools such as the commonwealth economy and the community trust, we can place new values above speed, quantity, extra large and growth; energy

sustainability and energy justice can be secured as the proper outcomes of energyecology-society relations
.
Relocating Energy in the Social Commons
¶
Ideas for a Sustainable Energy Utility
¶
John Byrne
¶
Cecilia Martinez
¶
Colin Ruggero
¶
University of Delaware
¶
Bulletin of Science,
¶
Technology &
Society
¶
Volume 29 Number 2
¶
April 2009 81-94
¶
© 2009 Sage Publications
To realize this antithetical context, the SEU creates the conditions for a commonwealth economy that can prosper only by investing in the sustainability of a community and its
lifeweb. The commonwealth arises from an ongoing mutual promise to share the costs of building an energy scheme that uses less; and, when use is desired, it supplies energy from
renewable sources organized locally by and for the community. The economic benefits of needing less to fulfill social purposes can be directly valorized and shared in the form of lower community costs deriving from less use. In this manner, shared benefits pay for shared costs.
The choice of renewable supplies enables preservation of local resources and ecosystem services. By paying together to promote sustainability, collective gains ensue: from improved public health and biodiversity to recovered natural experience. Using the same basic method as the case of conservation, the renewable energy case borrows from the benefits it brings in order to build an enduring commonwealth.
¶
The infrastructure of energy sustainability is thereby built practically, in the everyday of SEU shared savings/shared benefits transactions. The utility in the new regime invests in less use, for example, by funding the entire difference in community costs between waste and conservation. If it costs more to conserve (which is not always the case, by any means), the community’s utility (again in contrast to the producers’ utility of the obese energy regime) draws from the commonwealth, composed of pledged community shared future savings, to cover the higher cost. Investments in renewable resources are likewise drawn from the commonwealth, which in this case can be in the form of pledged community-wide obligations to purchase renewable attributes.

Ingolfur Blühdorn
¶ is Associate Professor in Politics / Political Sociology at the Department of
European Studies at the University of Bath Locked into the politics of unsustainability http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-10-30-bluhdorn-en.html
This is a depressing message, but those who find it unduly pessimistic may be reminded that the task of understanding why contemporary consumer democracies are so firmly locked into the politics of unsustainability must not be confused with the task of spreading hope. The latter is the mission of religion and its secular counterpart, ideology – as the prevalent narratives of self-delusion richly illustrate. Critical sociology, on the other hand, has always sought to reveal the contradictions and irrationality of the prevalent social values, practices and structures, and to mobilise the norms of consistency and reason against this irrationality.
If there is any hope at all for breaking the politics of unsustainability
, it is to this project that we must revert.
¶
This would entail, for example, shifting the emphasis from trying to resolve
supposedly objective environmental problems towards exploring in much more detail exactly how the perception of these problems is being socially
(culturally) constructed and reconstructed . Rather than understanding itself as an agent of any particular eco-political agenda
, a critical theory of the politics of unsustainability would embrace the entirely new task of investigating the ways in which the paradoxes of the post-ecologist project to sustain the unsustainable are unfolding. It would analyse the strategies, mechanisms and narratives by means of which the social and ecological consequences of this politics of unsustainability are processed and managed at different societal levels. Beyond that, the renewal of the critical project would aim to repoliticise those key concepts that were once at the very centre of political ecology but have meanwhile been crowded out by the hegemonic discourses of technological innovation,
resource efficiency and "green" economic growth: emancipation, integrity, identity, self-realisation, prosperity, democracy.
[Nicole Detraz, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Colorado State University, and Michele Betsill, Associate Professor of Political
Science at Colorado State University, 2008, “Climate Change and Environmental Security: For Whom the Discourse Shifts,” Paper
Presented At The 49th Annual Meeting Of The International Studies Association, March 26th, Available Online athttp://www.allacademic.com/meta/p252596_index.html, Accessed 03-18-2009, p. 1-2
A discourse-analytic approach is appropriate in that discourses are powerful forces within policy debates.
Discourses can be thought of as “specific ensembles of ideas, concepts and categorization that are produced, reproduced and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities
” (Hajer 1995: 45). This definition suggests that discourses typically involve agency, meaning that individuals can actively shape discourses .
It also suggests that discourses are constantly-evolving entities that can be shaped over time
. Additionally, examining discourses can shed light on various power relations within an issue area. We can understand power relations as struggles “over interests, which are exercised, reflected,

maintained and resisted through a variety of modalities, extents and degrees of explicitness
”
(Lazar 2005: 9). For example, dominant discourses are those that are most likely to be in line with the interests of powerful factions of society.
It is unlikely that a discourse that is not in the interest of the powerful will actually be used in policy debates on salient issues. We can use discourse analysis to understand which discourses have made it to the level of policy- making for an issue like environmental change, and what this means for both the powerful and less-powerful in society
. Litfin (1999) argues that discourses play an important role in shaping which policies are likely to emerge for a given issue area. According to Haas (2002: 1),
Discourses impart meaning to an ambiguous policy domain.
Discourses are important because they institutionalize cognitive frames.
They identify issues as problems, set agendas, and define the salient aspects of issues as problems for decision-makers. Each discourse or perspective rests on different assumptions, goals and values… and suggests different policy solutions. They have the effect of defining provocations or crises. As this suggests, the use of one discourse over another has important implications, both theoretically and practically.

Testimony of Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, Ph.D.
¶
Research Associate
¶
American Council for an
Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE)
¶
Before the United States House Committee on
¶
Science and
Technology,
¶
Subcommittee on Energy and Environment http://opower.com/uploads/library/file/11/ehrhardt_martinez_testimony.pdf
Most efforts to date have approached the challenge of maximizing potential energy savings exclusively through a technoeconomic framework of change (Parnell and Popovic Larsen 2005). Since 1970, both theoretical and practical models of energy-related behavior have focused on reducing energy use as a function of developing the right technologies, making them available at the right price and then promoting them to consumers by espousing their “rational” economic benefits.2
Underlying the techno-economic model are the assumptions that growth in energy consumption is best solved through the application of new technologies and that energy consumption and technology adoption behaviors are best understood in terms of
a set of economic calculations involving
the price of energy, the cost of technologies, and the level of disposable income. In this context, people are portrayed as rational economic decision makers who will behave in predictable ways when confronted with changes in energy prices within a given market setting. Moreover, the model also suggests that the prevalence of energy-efficient behaviors and choices may be enhanced most effectively through the introduction of carefully crafted economic incentives
and disincentives (Archer et al 1987). Finally, the model suggests that consumers, when presented with information about the economically-desirable package, will act to increase their net benefit.
John Byrne is director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy and distinguished professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Delaware. He shares the 2007 Nobel
Peace Prize
¶
Noah Toly is a research associate and Ph.D. candidate in the Center for Energy and
Environmental Policy at the University of Delaware.
¶ ¶
Leigh Glover is policy fellow and assistant professor in the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Delaware
¶
TRANSFORMING POWER
¶
ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, AND SOCIETY IN CONFLICT
¶ http://seedconsortium.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/45925604/Byrne_etal.pdf
When measured in social and political-economic terms, the current energy¶ discourse appears impoverished
. Many of its leading voices proclaim great¶ things will issue from the adoption of their strategies (conventional or sustainable),¶ yet inquiry into the social and political-economic interests that¶ power promises of greatness by either camp is mostly absent. In reply, some participants may petition for a progressive middle ground, acknowledging ¶ that energy regimes are only part of larger institutional formations that organize ¶ political and economic power. It is true that the political economy of ¶ energy is only a component of systemic power in the modern order, but it¶ hardly follows that pragmatism toward energy policy and politics is the reasonable¶ social response. Advocates of energy strategies associate their contributions¶ with distinct pathways of social development and define the choice¶ of energy strategy as central to the types of future(s) that can unfold. Therefore,¶

acceptance of appeals for pragmatist assessments of energy proposals
, ¶ that hardly envision incremental consequences, would indulge a form of self deception ¶ rather than represent a serious discursive position
.

Tsunami Warning Systems
¶ and the Last Mile
¶ ¶
Towards Community Based and ICT Enabled
Disaster Response Systems
¶ ¶
Michael Gurstein
¶
New Jersey Institute of Technology
¶ http://cijournal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/229/183
The problem
here was not
, I think a "the Digital Divide" that is, it wasnt because of a lack of “access“ to information,
although apparently that too was a problem overall; rather, it seemed to me to be another example of what I've referred to elsewhere as the gap between "access" and "effective use" http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_12/gurstein/index.html. From what I can gather many if not most of the communities impacted had Internet "access" in one form or another. What they (and here I would include those with the knowledge who couldn't use it as well as those without knowledge) lacked rather, was the social infrastructure which could have turned Internet access into an "effectively usable" early warning system.
¶
Some had the information—the scientists who detected the earthquake and could understand how that could result in a Tsunami
and those who felt the early impact either of the earthquake or the Tsunami—but couldn't use it.
Others needed the information—the coastal villages around the Indian Ocean
—but couldn't or weren’t able to "get it" at least in a timely and usable form. The
"degrees of separation" imposed by nationality, language and perhaps most important, domains of knowledge and profession (and the related lack of social linkages, network based trust relationships, communication pathways and so on) impeded the communication between the two groups and one wonders whether this was simply a matter of it still being early days in our
Internetted world or something more profound and permanent.
¶ It seems likely that some sort of Tsunami Early
Warning System
(TEWS) will be set up in the region probably with an ICT base (I seem to recall something similar being in place for the Pacific Islands, for hurricanes as well as Tsunami's I would assume), but
given the infrequency of these events, how useful it will be seems questionable
. So I'm wondering now whether, rather than spending a huge amount of money creating a dedicated TEWS, the governments in the region (or better yet the affected communities
) wouldn't be better advised to think about how to use the “access“ to information that they already have available to them in their communities in ways that will allow them to have some warning in the future.
That is how can they develop local means for scanning the information universe to find the information concerning possible local threats and then the create the social means for linking the knowledge that results from this scanning into local structures that can translate that knowledge into effective uses such as early warnings and from there into active (and immediate) disaster response.
¶ Here I'm not thinking just of what are almost singular events like Tsunamis but also of more recurrent weather events and even more common social, economic and political events in the larger world that will have a short term but disastrous (or in some cases positive)impact on community well-being. (dam breaks, rapidly spreading viruses, marauding armies or bandits and so on, on the negative side and opportunities for economic advance, resource exchange, external funds and so on, on the positive side).
Lets call this the “Last Mile
Warning System
’ (LMWS).
¶ What then might an effective LMWS look like? That is how do we cover the missing links—the last mile—from the ¨´professional¨ early warning system that governments can do best with high tech (TEWS), and which seems to be the outcome of the recent Kobe meeting on Disaster Planning, to the ’effective use’ of the output of those systems by local communities for early warning (LMWS)?. ¶ Just after, the Tsunami events I happened to be in Peru and in the community that is at the base of Macchu Piccu. This community—Aguas Calientes--had an avalanche during the rainy season last year which came down without warning with 10 people killed. I became aware of this when I saw bands of marching school children, banging drums and sounding horns. I followed up on what events were happening and learned that the national government had been slow to react to the event so it seems that the local municipality have taken it upon themselves to set up an early warning observatory (they posted someone permanently in the hills above the village to observe the possible beginnings of an avalanche), a local warning system (he has a horn that he can sound), local safe zones (the village is in a very steep valley so it was necessary to reconnoitre and determine what might be safe and what might not), evacuation techniques (complicated because half the residents at anyone time are transient tourists) and all planned, funded and executed by local community resources. Not very high tech (local knowledge and local direct observation) and not much ICT I think, (I’m not really sure), but this seems to me to be a fantastic example of an LMWS i.e. how emergency preparedness and disaster management could/should be done from the

community up, using relatively low cost local resources and local knowledge and something that could be propagated quite widely for example through some applied internet activity, on-line networking
etc.etc.
¶
And in the larger and interconnected world of Tsunamis
and incipient killer flu’s such a low cost approach supplemented by hi tech connectivity could (and in fact did) work wonders. The remarkable story from the
Indian newspaper the Hindu of 01/01/2005
¶
http://www.thehindu.com/2005/01/01/stories/2005010107320100.htm presents how the village Nallavadu, whose entire population of 3,600 was saved by a phone call (and not incidentally by a local knowledge centre
(telecentre)) ’One of the former volunteers of this (the Swaminathan Teleccentre) programme, Vijayakumar, who now works in
Singapore, saw the tsunami warning there. He immediately phoned the village knowledge centre, setting off instant reaction. A warning was repeatedly announced over the public address system and a siren set off. As a result, the tsunami claimed no victims there.’ This evidently was one of the only coastal villages in all of the Indian Ocean that emerged without a loss of life!
¶ In the context of an ’effective use’ approach—Vijaykumar, armed with the knowledge (from a TEWS as mediated by the public broadcasting system) had access to a physical infrastructure (the cell and telephone network) to distribute his information but most importantly he had a direct means to link that information in a useful and usable fashion directly into the local community (an
LMWS). Also, as a former member of the community and presumably as an acknowledged ’knowledge worker’ the information that he was passing on had the necessary authority and authenticity to be taken seriously. Also, there was someone at the other end with whom he had a previously established trusted relationship to take the information, and a local social and organizational structure to universally disseminate and translate that information into usable activity (moving to higher ground).
¶
The fact that there was a ’community’ linkage between the source of the information, Mr. Vijakumar and his counterpart in Nallavadu meant that issues of verification and authenticity of information were immediately overcome. Contrast that to the parallel and sad stories of existing TEWS’, the Ocean Scientists in Hawaii who saw the earthquake, knew that a Tsunami was likely and then didn’t know who to call (didn’t have the social network--LMWS) that would have allowed him to play a similar role to Mr. Vijakumar or the Chief of the Research Bureau in Thailand who also had the information but when he tried to pass it along found that the lines that he was calling were always busy and apparently then gave up.
¶
What is particularly important here and is the significance not simply of the availability of information but also of the capacity to identify what information is important, who the information would be important to, and how to bring that information to the attention of those for whom it will be important and useful.
In this, there are clearly roles for enabling instruments such as ICTs at each stage of the process, but what is even more important is the significance of the individual capability to "manage and use" information and the role of
(trusted) social/community networks as non-mechanical instruments for distributing the information once received
in a form in which it will be immediately responded to. ¶ As something of an aside it might be useful to consider the role of cell phones in this context. In those few instances in the Tsunami disaster where information was transmitted in a sufficiently timely matter and in a form in which it could be used it was invariably transmitted person to person via a cell phone link. The question to ask though, especially given the very widespread distribution of cell phones particularly among the tourist population, is why there was so little direct and beneficial use in this instance either of voice or SMS messaging and what procedures might rectify this for the future particularly since a number of schemes have been proposed which use cell phones as their primary delivery system. In the Nallavadu example, while the transmission was via the cell phone, the key element in saving the community was the local social infrastructure which was available for assimilating, transmitting and using the information in an effective way. The simple act of the transmission via the cell phone would not have been as successful had these not been in place as evidenced by another example where an Australian diving instructor was able to pass a message along to a friend in Thailand who was then able to inform and warn a small number of those immediately in contact with him but where there was no mechanism in place to more widely authenticate and disseminate the information which had been transmitted. Here as elsewhere it is the
“social“ organization
of the Last Mile which will mean whether the information is used or not and whether lives are or are not saved
.
¶
The case of the Moken tribe in Thailand who, using traditional knowledge, were also able to survive serves rather to reinforce this position. As a relatively isolated tribe adhering to traditional ways and steeped in traditional knowledge they were able to recognize the signs of the ocean and draw on traditional knowledge for an appropriate response. Having a continuity with traditional knowledge meant that they were able and willing to respond to this without further verification or authentication, something that communities more acculturated to science based knowledge systems might have greater difficulty in doing
.
¶ I think the lessons from the above break down into two areas: first the need to figure out ways of translating the outputs of what are likely to be hi tech warnings systems into messages that can be interpreted and used effectively at the local level (the need for a LMD strategy) and secondly the need to support the kind of bottom-up socially-based local emergency/disaster early warning systems and preparedness that would allow local communities to absorb and adapt such information into ways that could be locally useful (the need for a LMD system).
¶ Equally, following the Aguas Calientes case there is the need to find ways for integrating the capacity to ’hear’ and make sense of locally meaningful knowledge and strategies into local social environments ... I would guess that no government anywhere could find sufficient resources to create and sustain in every local community of whatever size the kind of local system that the folks in Aguas Calientes are introducing themselves using their local resources (and local cost structures) and one really can´t expect that national governments in most countries except

perhaps the very wealthiest are going to have the resources even to sponsor and co-ordinate these...
What we need to be looking for are
the means to enable and support the creation of a multitude of locally based “social“ systems
like the one I stumbled across that morning in Aguas Calientes.
¶ But what of Community Informatics (CI)? Is this something to be left to a later stage when other matters have been dealt with and as has been suggested, there are resources and time available for what some regard as "recreational pursuits", or is it the case, as I have a sense, that CI is something more important than that and should be built into the communities directly as they are being re-constructed. ¶ Certainly, the "Community" side of the equation will be of immense importance since much of the reconstruction will of necessity be done by and through existing local communities.
However, what of the Informatics side? Some skepticism has been expressed concerning the value of ICTs in this context where the need for water, shelter and food are so pressing. Certainly, there is a need for Management/Organizational Informatics at least from the perspective of managing aid and a considerable degree of infrastructure reconstruction. But I'm thinking also for example, of the need for communities to be able to self-organize and self-manage their reconstruction, to access external resources but to manage the deployment of these locally themselves. I'm also thinking of the probably increased need to create and maintain links with a globally distributed diaspora and well-wishers who can act as sources of support as for example, through remittances. Additionally,
I'm thinking of the, as yet largely unrealized, potential for leap-frogging into community based ICT enabled health service, linkages for local economic development, supports to re-building local school systems and so on.
¶
And perhaps most important, what about the creation of the kind of information and knowledge networks that would bind these communities, many of which appear to be extremely isolated and with little "communication" linkage into the larger world as ways of providing early warnings of future such events. In this sense, central to the creation of an effective LDWS is the
information/ communication linkage into the various globally available TEW systems.
Without this linkage being effectively developed and maintained locally, communities will remain as vulnerable tomorrow as they have always been
.
¶ In fact, given much of the recent discussion, I´m really concerned that ICT for disaster management will end up resulting in “bigger toys for bigger boys“
(a lot of evidence of that in the apparent outcome from the Kobe meeting)—large scale heavy science based sensors, analysers and communicators and not including precisely the kind of socially-based last mile bottom-up component that can actually be (and was) effective at the local level and can be sustainable given local resources
(and requirements) once the media blitz has evaporated.

Stephen Eric Bronner, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, 2004, Reclaiming the
Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, p. 160
Critics of the Enlightenment may have correctly emphasized the price of progress , the costs of alienation and reification, and the dangers posed by technology and scientific expertise for nature and a democratic society. Even so, this does not justify romantic attempts to roll back technology. They conflate far too easily with ideological justifications for rolling back the interventionist state and progressive legislation for cleaning up the environment. Such a stance also pits the Enlightenment against environmentalism : technology, instrumental rationality, and progress are often seen as inimical to preserving the planet. Nevertheless, this is to misconstrue the problem. Technology is crucial for dealing with the ecological devastation brought about by modernity. A redirection of technology will undoubtedly have to take place: but seeking to confront the decay of the environment without it is like using an umbrella to defend against a hurricane. Institutional action informed by instrumental rationality and guided by scientific specialists is unavoidable . Investigations are necessary into the ways government can influence ecologically sound production , provide subsidies or tax-benefits for particular industries, fund particular forms of knowledge creation, and make “risks” a matter of public debate . It is completely correct to note that: “neither controversial social issues nor cultural concerns can be settled simply by scientific fiat, particularly in a world where experts usually disagree and where science can be compromised by institutional sponsors. No laboratory can dictate what industrial practices are tolerable or what degree of industrialization is permissible. These questions transcend the crude categories of technical criteria and slide-rule measurements.”7
-the impact is the case
Frank Fischer, Professor of Political Science, Citizens Experts, and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge, pg. 22-23
With respect to the political process more generally, it is no longer enough for its leaders to rely on the strategic exercise of their political influence. For those seeking to extend their political influence, the complexity of modern policy issues necessitates attention
to policy arguments. Regardless of their political strength, interest groups and social movements without access to expertise can scarcely participate in the policy process,

certainly not effectively. One sign of this has been the great proliferation of think tanks and the politics of oppositional expertise or counterexpertise, a theme to which we return
(Fischer 1991a}. The lack of access to policy-relevant knowledge hinders the possibilities of an active and meaningful involvement in the political decision processes for the large
majority of the public. Similarly, others have identified the appearance of "policy discourse coalitions'* that form among experts and political leaders (Ilajer 1995). Such
discourse coalitions formulate and advance policy strategies very differently than do traditional party coalitions. Even while party elites retain their formal authority, they
must increasingly justify their decisions by appeal to the technical analyses of their coalition experts. With regard to the public, it becomes increasingly clear that in many policy domains, politics more and more becomes a struggle between those who have expertise and those who do not. This is especially the case in technically based fields
such as environmental policy. Indeed, access to technical knowledge and skill has
allowed those with the power to legitimate their political decisions in these areas.
Conversely, as we shall see in later chapters, the lack of access to such knowledge-hinders the possibility of an active and meaningful involvement on the part of the large majority of the public. One of the most important contemporary functions of technocratic politics, it can be argued, rests not as much on its ascent to power (in the traditional sense of the term) as on the fact that its growing influence shields the elites from political pressure from below (Laird 1990). Not only are experts socially situated between the elites and the public, but their technical languages provide an intimidating barrier for lay citizens seeking to express their disagreements in the language of everyday life. Speaking the language of science, as well as the jargon of particular policy communities, becomes an
essential credential for participation. Indeed, in the cases of highly developed professions such as medicine and law, the credential is formally conferred and regulated by the state.
Martin Lewis professor in the School of the Environment and the Center for International
Studies at Duke University. Green Delusions, 1992 p135-136
The eco-radical attack on the reductionism and specialization inherent in science is environmentally threatening in its own right. If we were to abandon scientific methodology we would have to relinquish our hopes that environmentally benign tech nologies might be developed. Advances in solar power will not come about through holistic inquiries into the meaning of nature . The scientific method also must be applied in environmental monitoring. Had it not been for highly specialized measuring techniques, we would not have known about the CFC threat until it was too late . Moreover, the requisite devices would never have been made were it not for the organization of the scientific community into distinct specialties, each framing its inquiries in a reductionistic manner .
To avoid environmental catastrophe we need as much specific knowledge of environmental processes as possible, although it is also true that we must improve our abilities to combine insights derived from separate specialities. Much greater emphasis must be placed on basic environmental science, in both its reductive and synthetic forms, a project that would be greatly hindered if we insist that only vague and spiritually oriented forms of holistic analysis are appropriate. Eco-radicals can be expected to counter that

environmental monitoring is only necessary in the first place because of industrial poisoning; dismantle industry, and environmental science will cease to be useful.
Although seemingly cogent, this argument fails on historical grounds. As discussed previously, toxins can be produced by nature as well as by humanity . For centuries
Europeans attributed the delusions they suffered after eating ergot-infected bread to evil spirits . Thousands of women were burned at the stake because of the fearful reactions of a patriarchal, religiously fundamentalist society to the psychological effects of an unknown, natural, environmental toxin. Once scientists, using special -ized techniques, isolated the agent, ergotism and its associated social pathologies began to disappear (Matossian 1989).
In many different fields specialized scientific techniques are now proving invaluable for the efforts to control pollution and preserve natural diversity For example, the development of biosensors—mechanisms that “combine biological membranes or cells with microelectronic sensors” (Elkington and Shopley 1988:14)—promises vastly improved means of pollution detection. Similarly the development of Geographic
Information Systems (GIs), based on the construction of spatialized computer data bases, has allowed geographers and planners to predict the ecological consequences of specific human activities and thus minimize deleterious impacts on critical ecosystems. Nature
Conservancy field agents, for example, have found cis a useful tool in devising conservation strategies for Ohio’s Big Darby Creek, one of the Midwest’s few remaining clear-flowing streams (Allan i 991). Geographers have also repeatedly proved the utility of satellite image interpretation for developing and implementing conservation plans at the national level (Elkington and Shopley 1988). We may expect eco-extremists to have little patience with such philosophically impure forms of environmental work. Yet rejecting such techniques outright would only intensify environmental destruction.
Jeffrey Mazo, Managing Editor, Survival and Research Fellow for Environmental Security and
Science Policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, 3-2010, “Climate
Conflict: How global warming threatens security and what to do about it,” pg. 19
A more recent survey found that 82% of Earth scientists and 97.4% of climatologists agreed human activity was a significant contributing factor in changing global
temperatures. The authors concluded 'the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who
understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes'. Whether that consensus is correct is a separate question, which cannot be addressed by criticism or falsification of individual studies or data sets. Climate science, and hence the current consensus on anthropogenic global warming, is firmly grounded in a consilience of
method, evidence and theory.
Reitan 98
Eric Reitan (Seattle University Writer for the Electronic Green Journal) Pragmatism,
Environmental World Views, and Sustainability. December 1998

With the urgency of the current environmental crisis, we cannot afford to get bogged
down in theoretic disputes that mask a common mission and get in the way of making the practical changes that are so pressing. Pragmatic Mediation of Deep Ecology and
Christian Stewardship The example I have chosen to discuss is the theoretic debate between two environmental philosophies that have emerged in the last few decades: the philosophy of stewardship that has evolved in Christian communities, and the philosophy of deep ecology. I choose these two not on the basis of any special status they have, but rather because they are the two environmental perspectives with which I have the most personal acquaintance, and because the nature of the debate between them usefully illustrates the value of using pragmatic principles to guide theoretic environmental discourse. Before applying pragmatic principles to this example, some preliminary comments may be helpful. First, it is important to keep in mind that complex worldviews or philosophical systems may impact more than one domain of human life, and that they may have radically opposing pragmatic implications in one or more of those domains while implying substantially the same behaviors in the domain of the human-nature relationship. In such a case, we can say that while the worldviews do not have the same pragmatic meaning overall, they have the same environmental meaning. As such, it is
important not to let the real differences in other areas mask the genuine agreement in
the environmental domain. Second, it is worth noting that there is almost certainly more than one human social arrangement that harmonizes sustainable with the natural environment. Put another way, there is more than one set of human practices that works in terms of promoting a healthy human-natural system. And it follows from this observation that more than one worldview can be pragmatically true: while two worldviews may imply environmental behaviors that are different , and hence have a different pragmatic meaning, insofar as they both promote sustainable behaviors they are both true from a pragmatic standpoint .
Pragmatic truth is not monistic, but pluralistic. Given the urgent pragmatic goals of environmental philosophy , sustained theoretic debates about meaning differences of this sort appear to be unwarranted , and should be put aside in favor of the task of finding practical ways of integrating and accommodating those alternative social arrangements which serve the common goal of sustainable human-natural systems.
Bryant and Goodman 4 - * PhD in Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies,
**Professor of Communication Studies
Raymond and Michael, “Consuming Narratives: The Political Ecology of 'Alternative'
Consumption,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 29, No. 3
The consumption practices of the conservation- and solidarity-seeking commodity cultures described here offer one alternative to the call for a politics of redistribution . In the end, these cultures offer a privileged notion of transnational 'commun- ity' given the relatively high cost of purchasing commodities such as organic cereal and fair trade coffee. True, commodities that 'speak' to 'altern- ative' consumers can possibly make them more aware of what is happening to tropical environ- ments and small-scale producers. And yet, only those that can afford to pay the economic premium can take part in this form of
'resistance'. Thus, 'moral' commodities may become 'alternative' in the larger sense by

eschewing more progressive re- constructions of 'moral economy'. The creation of niche markets gives the North, albeit in geographi- cally variable ways, the ability to 'tune in but drop out' of both conventional global economies and more demanding forms of resistance to social injus- tice and environmental degradation. A field of political ecology oriented towards the conceptual- ization of production and consumption dynamics is uniquely situated to explore the ambiguities of North/South connections evinced by alternative consumption-related politics . Third, this paper builds on work that challenges dualistic thinking that has bedevilled human geo- graphy for some time. Examples of these schisms (and authors that challenge them) include those of nature/society (e.g. Murdoch
1997; Whatmore 2002), discursive/material (e.g. Cook and Crang 1996) and cultural/economic (e.g. Jackson 2002b; Sayer 2001). Considering together consumption and the commoditization of political ecology narrat- ives further complicates the 'hybrid' or 'mutant' notions of landscape change and development (Escobar 1999; Arce and Long
2000; Bebbington 2000). Breaking down the dualisms of production and consumption thus should provide critical space from which to examine the political ecologies of
(alternative) development .9 In some ways, starting from processes of commoditization and associated narratives of development allows the researcher to go 'forward' into the processes and meanings of consumption as well as 'backwards' along the powerful socioeconomic and ecological networks of production and development.

– PhD in Psychology, Professor @ Whitman
Deborah, “The Psychology of Environmental Problems,” Google Book
Giving up comforts and conveniences may be more than we can fathom, and reverting to preindustrial culture is probably impossible anyway. Even if we could scale down consumption to preindustrial levels, most people would not want to. However, many preindustrial cultures have sustained themselves for centuries, demonstrating that sustainable culture is possible. While copying preindustrial cultures may not be feasible, selecting certain features might be useful. In addition, sustainable cultures may offer some benefits to human psychological needs that are not well provided for by industrialized cultures. The modern Western tradition of emphasizing the individual has given us both unsustainable technology and increasing social alienation. Embedded in the modern Western worldview, we try to use the former to mitigate the latter. It may not even be necessary to "give anything up" in order to ac-complish a reduction or reversal of environmental degradation. Improving efficiency or productivity is typically much more effective than significantly reducing overall use, and much relevant technology is
already available . For example, it would be far easier to find an automobile with twice the fuel efficiency of our present cars than to cut our driving in half, and buying an efficient water heater is a lot easier than reducing our use of hot water (Stern, 2000).