Environmental Science and Postmodernism

In Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality, the worldly Bear tells the intellectual Paul that his very intellectualism acts to destroy the high culture it seeks to propagate: “I experienced it with my own eyes and ears after the war, when intellectuals and artists rushed like a herd of cattle into the Communist Party, which soon proceeded to liquidate them systematically and with great pleasure. You are doing the same. You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers.”

A great line. What does it have to do with environmental science?

To answer, consider first the so-called “culture wars” between mainstream science and its postmodern critics. Oversimplifying, the latter holds that there are no “totalizing discourses,” no human belief structures that are fundamentally more valid than any others. Postmodernists thus argue that science has no more essential grasp on reality than English critics or shamans. Scientists, not surprisingly, reject this, noting among other things the history of human development since the Enlightenment, and the methodology of scientific advance, which requires validation of previous results. Commentators favorable to science argue that postmodernists are merely frustrated intellectuals who, having lost power in an increasingly technocratic society, seek to regain their intellectual authority by burying science.

This is a complex argument; one needn’t get bogged down in its details. It is sufficient to make several observations. First, science remains the dominant discourse, supported not only by market capitalism, which rewards technological innovation, but also by the cultural power of science. Consider global climate change negotiations, for example, which continue to pretend to be only about science when, in fact, they are profoundly about values. (Any response to climate change inevitably favors certain paths of human and biological evolution, and the values implied therein, over others.) It is the mark of a dominant discourse that its language is used even where inappropriate to the underlying subject matter.

The second and somewhat contrary point arises from the branch of environmental science that deals with highly complex systems that cannot be understood by replicable experiment, including climate change. In a previous column, I termed this “nonreductionist environmental science” and noted that in many cases the tools used to study such systems, such as large computer models, are neither transparent nor verifiably objective in the usual scientific sense.

Some environmental scientists have a tendency to conflate objective observation based on science with personal normative positions. These statements of concern are in turn picked up by powerful interest groups, especially environmental NGOs, and used to drive high levels of public concern about the environment (and continued funding for the NGOs). Historical examples include the predictions by ecologists in the 1970’s that human population growth would create worldwide starvation and disaster by the 1990’s. More recent examples include the new field of “sustainability science,” which by its title validates the existence of the very problem that it intends to research.

Does it matter if the normative and the objective are indistinguishable in nonreductionist environmental science? Note first that an inability to separate the normative and the objective does not mean the underlying phenomena are unreal. It just means we can’t rely on the data and statements as objective. But by ceding scientific objectivity and methodology, nonreductionist environmental science, and its partisan use by activists, risks undermining the validity and authority of the scientific discourse in environmental issues altogether. It thus changes the basis of environmental debates from relatively objective discussions of the state of “the real world,” to normative conflict between environmentalists and their critics – and risks positioning environmental science as just another transitory belief structure devoid of objective content. In this area at least, we seem perilously close to validating the critique of science as nothing more than another power play by special interests – and thus science allies with its own gravedigger.

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Brad Allenby is vice president of environment, health, and safety for AT&T, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, the University of Virginia’s Engineering School, and Princeton Theological Seminary, and Batten Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School. The views expressed herein are those of the author, and not any institution with which he is associated.