Rationality And The Environment

Environmental assessment and management involve the production of scientific knowledge and its use in decision-making processes. The result is that within these essentially rational, political assessment frameworks, experts are creating and applying scientific knowledge for decision and management purposes that actually have strong ethical and aesthetic dimensions. Yet these rational political frameworks lack the tools to provide guidance on ethical and aesthetic issues that affect the wider public.This revolutionary work argues that ethical and aesthetic dimensions can only be brought into environmental politics and policies by citizens actively taking a stand on the specific matters in question. The author draws on Habermas trisection of rationality as cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical and aesthetic-expressive, to suggest that truly effective environmental policy needs to activate all three approaches and not favour only the rational. To achieve this objective, the author argues that public participation in environmental policy and assessment is necessary to counteract the dictatorship of technical and economic instrumentality in environmental policy - the failure to take ethical and aesthetic rationalities into account - and, more importantly, how such policy is applied on the ground to shape our natural and material world.

Johnston unpacks and critiques the legal, economic, and scientific basis for precautionary climate policies pursued in the United States. In doing so, he reveals an alternative approach to climate change policy that would enable the US to efficiently adapt to a changing climate and radically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

"...the 'proof' of man's destruction of the environment isconsistently flawed.... the scientific method is being abused andignored. The errors are not random, however, but are systematicallybiased toward attempting to prove the guilt of man in the allegeddestruction of the planet. Objective science is disappearing and isbeing replaced by the pursuit of a philosophical agenda." --Richard F. Sanford in Environmentalism and theAssault on Reason Chapter 1 "The public has numerous misconceptions about the relationshipbetween environmental pollution and human cancer. Underlying thesemisconceptions is an erroneous belief that nature is benign." --Bruce N. Ames, Ph.D. and Lois Swirsky Gold, Ph.D inEnvironmental Pollution and Cancer: Some Misconceptions Chapter7 "Greenhouse gases have been increasing in the atmosphere,largely as a result of human activities. However, the climaterecord does not show the temperature increase and other telltalesigns of the expected greenhouse effect. The mathematical modelsused for predicting such effects are evidently not complete enoughto encompass all of the relevant physical processes in theatmosphere, thus throwing grave doubt on the drastic warminghypothesized for the next century." --S. Fred Singer in Global Climate Change: Facts andFiction Chapter 13 "...There is now no prima-facie case for any expensive policy ofsafeguarding species without more extensive analysis than has sofar been done." --Julian L. Simon in Disappearing Species,Deforestation and Data Chapter 26

Over the last two decades, the environmental cost of capital accumulation has emerged as a serious social and economic problem. Many are now aware that the ways we utilize our natural and cultural resources have had a range of negative consequences internationally--from the destabilization of ecosystems, the depletion of resources, and the degradation of our environment to the disintegration of cultural values and ethnic identity within local communities. Responses to this dilemma have varied, with traditional economists characterizing environmental issues as mere externalities and many ecologists focusing solely on protecting the environment. Offering a far more comprehensive view, Enrique Leff provides a Marxist approach to environment and development that focuses on the process of production, as well as implications of the environmental crisis on human values. To truly achieve a more rational and integrated use of our natural resources, he convincingly argues for a reorientation of science and technology towards the objectives of sustainable development, the decentralization of production, and the participatory management of natural resources.

Divergent beliefs about humanity's relationship to nature collide as the second millenium ends. One belief emphasizes that a distinctive characteristic of humans—reason—enables them to reshape and master nature. Another insists that nature is not so plastic, hence humans must adapt to nature and render development sustainable, or even limit growth. "Social ecology" asserts that environmental problems result from institutional hierarchies and suggests decentralized institutions and egalitarian ethics. According to "deep ecology" such problems originate in cultures assuming only humans are worthwhile, thus it stresses the intrinsic value of nature. Feminists are torn between values based on the equality of men and women and ecofeminist values postulating that women are inherently closer to nature than men. Rationality and Nature critically assesses these conflicting cultural tendencies. Waste has been the forgotten element of political economy. Western society has sophisticated methods of financial accounting but does little to account for the losses—financial and human—of waste. Raymond Murphy proposes in this book a theory of environmental debt as a source of capital accumulation. He develops a model of "environmental classes" that helps us to understand the political and economic basis of conflict over the environment. Environmental degradation did not occur on a vast scale until science and applied science were developed. Are they responsible for it and can they be reoriented toward a more symbiotic relationship with nature? Other ways of bringing about a symbiotic relationship are also explored in this book: compulsion, ecological values, ecological experience, and ecological knowledge.

"More information is always better, and full information is best. More computation is always better, and optimization is best." More-is-better ideals such as these have long shaped our vision of rationality. Yet humans and other animals typically rely on simple heuristics to solve adaptive problems, focusing on one or a few important cues and ignoring the rest, and shortcutting computation rather than striving for as much as possible. In this book, we argue that in an uncertain world, more information and computation are not always better, and we ask when, and why, less can be more. The answers to these questions constitute the idea of ecological rationality: how we are able to achieve intelligence in the world by using simple heuristics matched to the environments we face, exploiting the structures inherent in our physical, biological, social, and cultural surroundings.

We all now recognize the importance of talk today. In policy settings, there are more and more calls for consultation, collaboration, and deliberation. This is particularly the case in environmental planning, with its disputes over genetically modified organisms, power plants, and new roads. Rydin provides an in-depth and fully theorized account of the role of talk or discourse within environmental planning, combining theory, reported research, and original empirical case studies. She highlights the problem that planners and others face when trying to expand the space for talk within planning situations and provides a detailed assessment of the prospects for consensus-building and deliberative democracy. She also highlights the role that discourse plays in legitimizing institutions of planning and discusses how a rationality of sustainable development may be embedded within new institutional arrangements.