Sometimes it’s inspiring to imagine the future.

One such occasion was my recent visit to Alladale as Paul Lister’s guest. In this patch of Scottish Highland I could imagine Paul’s vision and that of his team at The European Nature Trust; a vision of how the future of this remote area could be developed. As it stands, it has that Scottish bare ruggedness with a charm all of its own. But, among the ruggedness, one can’t help but feel a further surge of warmth and pleasure when one looks at the scattered patches of woodland, the roaming wildlife, the birds and the occasional critter who scurries along – occasional though both the woodland and the animal life have become.

Paul’s vision is to create large patches of woodland, stock up a varied population of animal life – wildlife co-existing with livestock – and develop Alladale into a destination for both local people and those who will travel from afar. Standing there on a sunny but bracing morning, I could almost see the new landscape in my mind’s eye – and it looked better, more interesting, more varied, more mysterious and more entertaining than today.

It’s a huge undertaking but one that, when successful, will benefit local people and diversify the land and the local economy beyond the selling of hunting and fishing permits to the wealthy few. But, like all big developments, Paul and his team cannot do it alone. They need the support of the neighbours and the local community; of the bureaucrats in Whitehall and Edinburgh to remove obstacles based on outdated and limiting legal frameworks; and of others, like the local rambler’s associations, who in their narrow, self-focused perspectives cannot imagine a future other than just as it is today.

And the financial cost is substantial. It cannot reasonably be met through philanthropy and taxpayer money alone. Like all developments, this one needs to be a business that provides returns, albeit over a longer period than we have come to expect.

There are different ways we can use our limited patches of land. We are all familiar with the urban sprawl, the industrial estate, the manicured park, the farmland and, increasingly, the landscape taken over and blighted by windmills and solar panels. What I saw in my mind’s eye that day in Alladale was something different. A vision of our future environment that is not rooted in pessimism, gloom and doom and incipient misanthropy, but rather one that represents an inspirational and desirable economic development that deserves its place among all the other forms of development we are investing in.

The challenge now is to make it pay.

This visit, of course, never happened. It is unimaginable that a politician would lecture some of the world’s most eminent scientists on the details of their own fields of expertise. Such a stunt would have rightly been met with (no doubt polite) derision. Yet it seems that some scientists do not feel that things cannot work out the other way around.

Last month The Royal Society, Britain’s equivalent of the US National Academy of Sciences, published a report entitled People and the Planet. The result of a working group, the report addresses the issues related to population growth and consumption and focuses on the social and political issues that the Society feels need to be tackled. My questions: what is the RS with its motto “Excellence in Science” doing getting into complex issues of global politics? Does this enhance or diminish the reputation of such an eminent institution?

I argued in a previous blog entry that credible science is often incompatible with vocal activism. As a “Fellowship of the world’s most eminent scientists and..the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence”, the RS does not need to burnish its scientific credentials. But why does it decide to tread into waters that are not its area of expertise and still expect to be taken seriously.

In another blog entry I wrote: “The time is long gone when the words of the eminent scientist or the public letter signed by a collection of the Great and the Good actually got some attention. Today, it is more likely that such a public pronouncement will be the subject of debate and even derision throughout the blogosphere where everyone has an opinion and where every opinion seems equally valid“.

And sure enough that is the case with this report. “What an astonishingly weak, cliché ridden report this is” Chris Goodall, host of the Carbon Commentary was quoted as saying. And you can understand his perspective when the first recommendation from the report brings us the following astonishing insight: “The international community must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today.” The reader can judge for him/herself the level of wisdom and fresh insight to emerge from this report by watching the 5 minute video embedded at the end of this post.

Science and Politics

If science is to have any policy impact at all, it must be done and communicated by sound and credible scientists backed by credible institutions. It seems to me that the Royal Society has walked into political territory and found the solid scientific ground it is normally used to replaced with quicksand. The Fellowship has taken on areas which are not at the core of its mission and expertise and stands to lose credibility as a result.

Some time ago, the National Academy of Sciences published a comprehensive review of the science of climate change. Recognizing the dangers, it carefully avoided making any policy recommendations or getting into the politics – just a report about the state of current scientific knowledge. Yet, opponents immediately tried to politicize the report because they understood that that was the best way of undermining the credibility of the science. The Royal Society has, for reasons best known to itself, done its credibility reduction all on its own. Scientists are, of course, citizens like the rest of us; entitled to hold and express their political opinions. However, the fact that they are eminent in their scientific field does not endow them with any special authority on other matters.

As the work of Bruno Latour makes clear, there is no clean separation between science and politics. However, credible science and credible scientific institutions are an important part of our socio-political structures. Eminent institutions do no good by treading in waters where they cannot credibly swim and coming up with bland statements of the obvious. Maybe the Royal Society should take a leaf out of the book of another scientist – Joachim Sauer, Angela Merkel’s super discreet husband. During election campaigns he refuses to engage with the press on any questions other than those related to quantum chemistry. The Royal Society should similarly stick to its knitting.

Abstract

What do ‘things’ mean and how does meaning emerge? Meaning is a cultural construction based on multiple layers of input and interpretation. While science can help us understand the materiality, or physical reality, of things, language, artistic expression, stories, philosophical and public discourse are the elements that combine to create meaning. It is meaning, not materiality, that defines how we act. If the conservation and environmental worlds wish to be successful in influencing individual, collective and political action, we need to change our focus from an ever more detailed scientific description of materiality to ways of understanding and influencing meaning. In this process, the arts can play a fundamental role. To date artistic involvement in environmentalism has been marginal and has largely been limited to a regurgitation, through a different medium, of the established environmental narrative. The arts can play a much deeper role by helping us understand and give meaning to abstract concepts such as environmentalism itself.

pdf can be downloaded here

Original Email:

Hi all

I just got back from the International Polar Year (IPY) conference in Montreal–which was held in the same space as the 2011 AAA meeting. I was very happily surprised that this event (with about 3000 attendees) was certified as a “sustainable event” (http://www.ipy2012montreal.ca/organization/green_commitment.php), with waste per participant clocking in a 50grams/person/day. Of course we can look more closely at who does the certifying, what gets counted as waste, etc., but on the ground at the meeting I saw very little waste. Water was provided in large coolers rather than individual bottles, wherever canned drinks were offered there was recycling in position, lunches were provided with a preference for local suppliers, and the lunch containers and utensils were compostible, with compost bins in place. The waste areas were staffed during busy times by people who helped identify items as recyclable, compostable, or waste. There was very little in the way of paper; even the meeting program was essentially an outline, with most material online.

So, when do we do this at AAAs?

Ted Maclin, Center for Integrative Conservation Research University of Georgia

Response:

Dear Ted:

Thanks for sharing this info. It sounds as if the organizers of your polar conference thought hard about local forms of resource use.

You point out astutely that the conference’s certification as sustainable depends, in part, on which resources one chooses to measure. Jet fuel was surely not counted. This giant loophole has become commonplace in well-meaning professions ranging from tourism to entertainment to academia. We do more good – many of us believe – by traveling than by staying at home. Surprisingly few people appreciate the irony of spewing carbon dioxide en route to discuss the ecological and social catastrophe of the Artic.

I write all this – somewhat churlishly – because you suggest that we use compostable plates, etc. at the AAA annual meeting. To my mind, that proposal represents too little too late. It is time to abolish the AAA meetings as we have known them. The cost in carbon emissions outweighs the benefits, and most of the benefits would be achievable through regional meetings (accessible by train) or web-based meetings. The AAAs own Task Force on Climate Change, which includes members of this list, is now considering this and other recommendations. Our profession is at a turning point. If we continue with the status quo, then we become just another industry saying, “Climate change is important – so important that other people better cut their carbon emissions fast.”

Cheers,
David

David M. Hughes, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Undergraduate Program Director of Anthropology Rutgers University

After causing untold pain with very little to show for it, the backlash against austerity in the Eurozone is gaining ground. The diktats from Brussels and Berlin have pushed public tolerance to its limit. Politicians standing on an anti-austerity platform are making gains in the polls and at the ballot boxes. The message is clear – while most people understand that they have to correct the excesses of the past and get themselves on to an economic path that is more sustainable, they reject the idea of a sharp and prolonged austerity with no clarity of outcome and no promise of a future. The tide is turning and politicians are starting to embrace the need to add hope to discipline and asceticism.

And herein lies the lesson for the environmental movement. I have written in previous articles that the environmental movement “should be about aspirations and improvement more, much more, than about guilt and austerity”. And yet, as Bruno Latour remarks in a recent article, “green politics has succeeded in leaving citizens nothing but a gloomy asceticism, a terror of trespassing Nature”. It is not clear when the penny will drop that this is a dead end road.

Let us be clear. People (ie most of us) will not stop or significantly reduce their consumption. The billions in developing countries will not stop aspiring to first world standards of living and consumption. People will not embrace the mantra of guilt and austerity ‘for the sake of the planet’. Neither is the pursuit of a ‘no growth economy’ likely to be a viable option. An environmental movement built on the assumption that prolonged austerity can succeed will inevitably crumble.

Yet, it would be unfortunate, if not tragic, were the environmental movement to fail. To succeed, it must embrace the reality of human behavior rather than live in the fiction of the activist mind. We are much more likely to succeed by offering hope and aspiration; by basing our strategies on the assumption that societies will want to continue pursue a better quality of life for their citizens; and by coming up with ways of making that compatible with maintaining an environment that can continue to support us and help us meet our aspirations.

Some, of course, will argue that we can re-define what ‘quality of life’ means. It does not have to mean more consumption, more accumulated wealth, and so forth. Yes, maybe. But if that is so, then we need to turn our attention to defining this new ‘quality of life’ in terms that have some chance of appealing to large numbers of people in all walks of life – urban and rural, wealthy and poor, educated and not – not in terms that only appeal to the romantic nature lover or in terms that look good in some erudite technical analysis but have no meaning in the real world. This is no easy task but one that may be worth investing in – especially if such investment serves to displace the emphasis on guilt and austerity.

My question today is – why is anyone annoyed or even surprised about this?

In a recent email list I belong to, someone asked why there was this resistance to climate science when, for instance, nobody would think to deny the science associated with the health effects of smoking.

Well, I beg to differ.

As a teen I remember picking up out of curiosity an issue of my father’s British Medical Journal and reading an editorial which was an angry excoriation of the outrageous suggestion that smoking was harmful to health. It was described as ‘quack medicine’. This was a time when population based epidemiology was in its infancy. I’m not quite sure why this episode sticks in my mind but it does.

It has taken over 50 years to get a degree of acceptance of the science behind the health effects of smoking. And even then, I’m not quite sure how the individual smoker sees it even today. Many of those I speak to accept the abstraction of health effects at a population level but have reasons to keep believing that they do not apply to them. And how do policy makers see it even today in those countries where smoking rates keep increasing at rapid rates and where there are few or none of the policy initiatives we see in Western countries? So, in effect, there is still a substantial degree of ‘denialism’ (if we want to call it that) about smoking both at the individual and policy making levels.  And this over half a century later for a science that is much simpler than climate science and for effects that are much easier to understand and much more personally relevant to people than those of climate change.

Also bear in mind that the science behind smoking and the communication of that was happening in a different era. It was an era where the eminent scientist was highly respected. Today we live in a post-modern world. The time is long gone when the words of the eminent scientist or the public letter signed by a collection of the Great and the Good actually got some attention. Today, it is more likely that such a public pronouncement will be the subject of debate and even derision throughout the blogosphere where everyone has an opinion and where every opinion seems equally valid. New times call for new visions and new ways of acting and exercising influence.

Debate and denial of what is the scientific consensus is not something that has suddenly appeared with climate change. It is still the case today with smoking – 50 years on. So let’s get over it. There is nothing special about climate change denial. We need to focus on finding ways to be effective in what is the real world. We know that preaching from on high is not only ineffective, it has simply become an unacceptable annoyance in today’s world. While explaining the science is necessary, it is, and always will be, insufficient.  We need to explore ways to be effective in a fast moving, cyber-connected, post-modern world of many opinions. A world which refuses to bow to the received wisdom of ‘the expert’. To persist with attempts at imposing from on high while refusing to accept today’s reality constitutes what might reasonably be called ‘real world denialism’.

A short discussion paper comparing smoking and climate change issues can be downloaded here

It has become fashionable to talk about a fictitious condition called “Nature Deficit Disorder”. This habit is dangerous to children. Activists abusing this term should tread more carefully and with a greater sense of responsibility.

“Nature Deficit Disorder” was first coined by Robert Louv to describe the fact that children these days spend less time outdoors in ‘nature’, are less physically active and spend more time glued to their computers, TVs or game consoles. All this is reasonable and true.

However, the use of the term has recently fallen into abuse.

Yes, it is true that children today spend less time in ‘nature’. Some parents and many environmental activists would like this to change. But this may simply reflect the bias of those concerned (maybe rightly) with promoting ways for children to maintain a connection with ‘nature’; or the views of those who (mistakenly) believe that their own model of childhood remains the correct one for the 21st century. However, it is a big step from expressing a personal desire for children to spend more time outdoors to starting to bandy around terms that pathologize children and falsely burden them with the baggage of some kind of fictitious psychological ailment.

Having become involved in an online debate about this, I was pointed to some reviews of the literature about this ‘disorder’. The literature is utterly unconvincing that there is any such psychological ailment as ‘nature deficit disorder’. Rather the whole thing comes across as activism getting the better of common sense.

It may be true that some structured outdoor activities may, for instance, help some children who have attention deficit disorder (as does the latest pharmaceutical technology). But that’s a long way from implying that it is their lack of contact with nature that gave them that disorder in the first place. Similarly, some of today’s children may be inactive and overweight – things that can be helped by better diets and playing more soccer in the school playground. They are no evidence of a ‘nature deficit’.

Yet, this idea of nature deficit disorder still gets abused – from reports written by the UK’s National Trust to articles everywhere there is a danger that this fiction simply becomes an activist tool at children’s expense. Wendy Russell in a response to an online article expresses her concern “at the increasing trend towards pathologizing children. There may be a problem with children not being outdoors enough and not getting enough exercise, and there may be some relationships between this and playing (but they are not the same thing), but please, it is not a medical condition.” (her whole commentary is worth reading here). Dr David Pencheon, who heads the UK National Health Service’s sustainable development unit agrees: “we don’t want to medicalise it” and turn it into a burden for today’s children.

Let us not get carried away with activism that ends up burdening children with the language of a medical condition that doesn’t exist. There are much better, more productive and more responsible ways of arguing for our environment. According to Fiona Reynolds, the Director General of the National Trust, “we need to do everything we can to make it easy and safe for our children to get outdoors.” That’s a reasonable aim that many would buy into. But not at the cost of creating a false pathology and burdening children with it. So next time someone mentions ‘nature deficit disorder’ ask them whether they should get themselves checked out for ‘nature obsessive syndrome’.

The most recent environmental community ‘scandal’ arose when Pacific Institute President Peter Gleick falsified his identity to gain access to confidential internal documents from The Heartland Institute – a climate skeptic organization. Predictably his actions ignited a vigorous public debate.

Much of the environmental community rallied behind Gleick presenting the case in the most superficial way as a battle between good and evil. The lionization of Gleick by some ran to this sort of comment: “we have a long and rich tradition in this country of individuals who break the law so that all others living under that law may benefit. The proper word to describe those individuals is ‘heroes.’ ”. The same piece described Gleick’s own admission of poor judgment as ‘disappointingly obsequious’. Others described Gleick as someone who ‘puts truth before self-interest’.

Andrew Revkin took a different view, suggesting that that the episode left Gleick’s “reputation in ruins and threatens to undercut the cause he spent so much time pursuing”. He was pressured by some climate campaigners to retract this opinion.

I believe this debate reflects a number of worrying trends in the environmental movement – trends that will undermine its ability to succeed.

Peter Gleick is not a crook. His tactics are no more than those that might be used by an aggressive investigative journalist. Neither is he a saintly hero saving the world. To my mind, Gleick made a simple choice (albeit probably unconsciously). In choosing to pursue a degree of deceit as the route of getting information, he firmly chose to be an activist first and a scientist second. Gleick no doubt has strong views on climate science. That he would willingly use deceit in order to support his views does not make him evil but it does raise legitimate questions about how much of his science can be fully trusted. If a scientist is willing to deceive once, would she also be willing to do so in how she compiles her scientific data? I am not suggesting that Gleick did or would, but that doubt will remain.

The activist, like the advertiser, is not expected to be unbiased. He is expected to present the most aggressive case for his product and the information presented in this way is rightly taken by the rest of us with a few pinches of salt. But eminent scientists are held to much higher standards. Their behaviors must be seen to be unimpeachable if we are to believe that their science has been conducted and presented as objectively as possible. Gleick gave up the right to be perceived in this way. His decision makes him an activist – no doubt an honest and well-meaning one – rather than a scientist.

And here’s the rub. Scientists involved in climate and other environmental issues are becoming increasingly vocal in their activist views. As a result, the vital boundary between science and activism is slowly being eroded. This does no good whatsoever to the environmental cause and its chances of success. If the general population is to see the science as a trustworthy input to public policy decisions, then we need to work harder to build a firewall between science and activism. In terms of credibility, there is no difference between science funded by a climate skeptic think-tank and science funded by an activist environmental NGO or Foundation. Both can be suspect as being under the influence of vested interest. Similarly a scientist who is vocally activist in arguing against policies that might mitigate climate change can be perceived as being just as subject to bias as one who is vocally activist in arguing for such policies.

I suggest that there may be two questions that could usefully be discussed following the Peter Gleick episode. The first is whether turning the environmental debate into a childish, unthinking battle between good and evil will simply lose public interest and delay or eliminate the possibility of progress. Those who want to halt progress will be the ones to benefit. Secondly, environmentalism must take seriously the need to guard the credibility of its scientific base. We cannot afford to conflate science with activism. Efforts need to be made to build an effective firewall between the two – something that currently does not exist.  We desperately need a body of scientists who are not seen to be ‘in the pocket’ of one side or the other. Scientists who can be trusted to generate clear and unbiased science and who leave the political fights about policy choices to others.

Are you a scientist or are you an activist? In resigning from key positions and admitting an error of judgment, Peter Gleick clearly didn’t kid himself that he could be both and still persuade the public to take his science seriously. Others need to be just as clear as to which choice they are making.

Essay in response to

“Calling All Carnivores” competition

at the New York Times, 2012

Download pdf of this essay here

Finalists in the competition can be found here

“Is it ethical to eat meat?”

This is the question posed. And it is the wrong question.

I am attracted to the idea of vegetarianism but, in our Western societies, the concept still remains marginal. The question as posed implies an acceptance of meat eating as an issue for debate in the ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’ realm. For mainstream Western society this is, today, simply not the case.

Peter Singer and Tom Regan have been at the forefront of attempts to turn meat eating into an ethical question. Nobody has made the case as thoughtfully or as cogently as they have. Have they been successful?

Buying into Peter Singer’s views on the use of animals implies acceptance of the totality of his utilitarian philosophy. We therefore have to be willing to buy into the full implications of such a philosophical position including, for instance, the acceptability, in certain circumstances, of human infanticide. The same is true if we are to follow Tom Regan’s rights-based philosophy. Regan ‘moves the line’ by expanding the concept of ‘rights’ to incorporate sentient animals while choosing to strip all non-sentient beings of any rights (and we won’t even get into the issues with the definition of ‘sentience’). Regan therefore argues non-sentient beings do not even have the right to survival. In this view, the Human may be entitled to wipe all non-sentient beings off the face of the Earth.

I suggest that neither of these philosophies taken in its totality is likely to find widespread resonance in our societies. Thomas Scanlon suggests that we should judge those moral principles that we would like to see widely accepted not by whether we judge them as being reasonable to accept (that is a matter of personal inclination that others may, reasonably, not share), but rather by whether such principles seem unreasonable to reject. I submit that most people, including many animal lovers and animal rights activists, would not find it unreasonable to reject the totality of Singer’s and Regan’s philosophical positions. Their support for Singer and Regan rests on cherry picking those aspects that confirm positions already reached, while expediently ignoring the less convenient implications of the very foundations on which these philosophies are based.

Meat eating is embedded in many cultures and is the social norm in a large proportion of human societies. Meat eating fits the values that most people feel they should live by and that, in itself, makes it ethical behavior in today’s world. The case that whether or not to eat meat (as opposed to which meat to eat) is even a question for discussion in the ‘ethical’ realm has not yet been convincingly made.

Frances Kamm suggests that we cannot construct morality. Ethics and morality represent the values that we should live by. These values are fluid; a function of the interaction of many factors – many emotional, others socio-cultural and a few rational. Values bubble up. Except under totalitarian regimes they cannot be constructed and imposed. For our societies today, meat eating is not an ethical issue and will not become one by cherry picking parts of this or that philosophy and attempting to impose them on others. Cultural behaviors do not become ethical questions simply because some individuals or pressure groups will them to be so. In today’s world, it has become a habit for groups too readily to label as ‘unethical’ behavior with which they personally do not agree – seemingly in an attempt to insulate the issues from further discussion or disagreement. Animal rights activists, environmentalists and others are all guilty of this, using terms like “ethical living” to describe what may be values shared only by tiny proportions of the population.

To my mind, the absolutist position that tries to position meat eating as socially unethical (rather than as a matter of individuals’ personal choice) is a distraction and potentially harmful to the cause of animals in our society. It takes attention away from other issues – such as animal welfare in commercial farming, the health effects of commercially farmed food, etc. – that are more likely to find resonance among broader sections of society, where progress is more likely to be made and which are more likely to be widely seen as issues deserving of debate in the ethical realm.

Conclusion

Is it ethical to eat meat?

Yes. Socially, meat eating is the norm that (with some exceptions based on religious ritual) fits with societies’ current values. Nobody has made a convincing case that meat eating is even a question that belongs in the ethical realm. The philosophical positions fall down because most would reject them when the implications are evaluated in their entirety.

And if you care about animals, as I do, then stop asking the question of whether it is ethical to eat meat. It is a harmful distraction to more productive debates that could significantly improve animals’ lives.

“In the build-up to the IUCN Congress, a landmark event for conservation, Dr Joe Zammit-Lucia argues that the environmental community needs to re-think its approach.”

View and download an expanded version of the article here.