Talking Environmental Imperatives to Death

Summary

How is it that the universal environmental imperative, the urge to save the world from ourselves, has so lost its purchase? What does this say about the nature of the environmental imperative itself, and what implications does this have for the way we understand and deal with issues of environmental risk in contemporary society? Why has this happened despite the fact that scientific and technological development is thought by most analysts to be a key force behind the rapid changes in our societies, and despite the fact that the conflicts and controversies surrounding environmental and other risks seem only to be rising? And what does this mean for the politics of the environment and risk more generally in the future?

The view to be argued in this article is that an often underestimated conflict of values lies behind the great divergences in attitudes to environmental and health risks, both within and between societies, and between and even within individuals. I will argue that the idea of a universal environmental imperative is undermined, both in principle and in practice, by this plurality of values. It is undermined in principle by the argument for the incommensurability of values coupled with the argument that the environmental imperative itself represents a value position. The idea of a universal environmental imperative is undermined in practice by the very existence of divergent values and priorities, because whereas the environmental imperative suggests there should be growing convergence at least on the presence of a threat that requires our immediate and full attention, if not on the means by which to deal with it, there is evidence to suggest that such convergence is not forthcoming.

Ecological thinkers have often claimed implicitly that ecologism is necessarily a democratic ideology (Dobson, 1996b, p. 132). However, the tension between democratic procedures and ecological outcomes is well recognized, and much effort over the last decade has gone into attempts to analyse and resolve it (Doherty and de Geus, 1996; Dobson and Lucardie, 1993; Barry and Wissenburg, 2001; Meadowcroft and Lafferty, 1996). Starting not from an ecological viewpoint, but rather from an analysis of concepts of risk in modern society, I hope to make some contribution to these debates. My approach in this essay will be interdisciplinary, bringing the political philosophy of value pluralism and sociological models of risk to bear on a key problem in ecological thought: that of the relation of democracy to ecology.

I will begin with a brief look at some evidence for the claim that environmental imperatives are losing their purchase. After that I shall explain what I mean by risk, what I mean by radical uncertainty, and why risk issues are inherently value-laden. This idea will be clarified with the help of a couple of examples, one of a classic environmental risk, global warming, and another of a controversial health risk, the case of the MMR vaccine, both of which fall squarely into the category of ‘new risks’ of the risk society, as defined by Ulrich Beck some years ago. Finally, I will consider the consequences of this analysis for some common responses in social and political theory to the problem of risk, and this will entail an examination of what value pluralism in the politics of risk means for the idea of introducing democracy and openness into risk definitions, and also for the idea of promoting institutional reflexivity and learning.