Transcript A New Climate for Society - Science Studies Meet Climate Change

A New Climate for Society
Implications for the Social
Sciences
Sheila Jasanoff
Harvard University
Science Studies Meets Climate Change
Copenhagen, April 23-24, 2009
Why should science studies
meet climate change?
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The co-productionist response:
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Emergence or stabilization of new objects and
phenomena (ANT)
Controversy (SSK)
Intelligibility and portability of scientific ideas
and technological objects (SCOT)
Cultural practices of science and technology
(co-production)
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A Moment of Discontinuity?
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“In the middle of the 20th century, we saw our planet
from space for the first time. Historians may eventually
find that this vision had a greater impact on thought than
did the Copernican revolution of the 16th century, which
upset humans’ self-image by revealing that the Earth is
not the centre of the universe. From space, we see a
small and fragile ball dominated not by human activity
and edifice but by a pattern of clouds, oceans, greenery,
and soils” (WCED, 1987).
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What is the nature of the
discontinuity?
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Imagination of society
Paradigm shift in key components of that
imagination:
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Recalibration of the nation state and its
instrumental visions
Troubling of nature-culture boundary
Decentering of the human
Dialogue of ethics and social science
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Climate Change and Global Visions
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Rise of climate on the global environmental
agenda as charted through “Earth Summits”
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1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human
Environment
1992 Rio Summit: UN Conference on Environment
and Development (UNCED)
2002: Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable
Development
But what does this progression mean for our
conceptions of society (and how to study it)?
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Global Biopower: A Skeptic Speaks
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“You talk very little about life, you talk too much
about survival. It is very important to remember that
when the possibilities for life are over, the
possibilities for survival start. And there are peoples
here in Brazil, especially in the Amazon region, who
still live, and these people that still live don’t want to
reach down to the level of survival.”
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Brazilian witness, quoted in WCED, Our Common Future (1987), p. 40
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The Climate for Scale-Making
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Nature
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Space
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Transcending geopolitics (e.g., carbon emissions)
Time
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Making the planet (e.g., climate)
Projecting futures (e.g., future generations)
People
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Populating the Earth
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Discovering the Planet
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William Anders: “We
came all this way to
explore the moon,
and the most
important thing is that
we discovered the
earth.”
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Global Imaginaries
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ABB’s Copenhagen Come-on:
“Connect emission-free power to the grid?
Naturally.”
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“Naturally?”
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Two energy solutions for a single planet.
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Time for change: A Stern Report
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“If we don’t act, the
overall costs and risks of
climate change will be
equivalent to losing at
least 5% of global GDP]
each year, now and
forever. If a wider range
of risks and impacts is
taken into account, the
estimates of damage
could rise to 20% of GDP
or more.”
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Pushback: Nordhaus on Stern
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“Analyses are sometimes divided between the
‘descriptive approach,’ in which assumed discount rates
should conform to actual political and economic
decisions and prices, and the ‘prescriptive approach,’
where discount rates should conform to an ethical ideal,
sometimes taken to be very low or even zero.
Philosophers and economists have conducted vigorous
debates about how to apply discount rates in areas as
diverse as economic growth, climate change, energy,
nuclear waste, major infrastructure programs, hurricane
levees, and reparations for slavery. The Stern Review
takes the prescriptive approach in the extreme…”
Science 317, July 2007, p. 202
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Dreamtimes: “Live a thousand
years…”
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Citizens of the World
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World or Earth:
The Human Place in Nature
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India’s “ecosystem people”
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must scratch the earth and hope for rains in order to
grow their own food, must gather wood or dung to
cook it, must build their own huts with bamboo or
sticks of sorghum dabbed with mud and must try to
keep out mosquitoes by engulfing them with smoke
from the cooking hearth. Such people depend on the
natural environments of their own locality to meet
most of their material needs
M. Gadgil and R. Guha, 1995, p. 3.
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A climate for ethics?
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The gleefully frugal happily seek new ways to economize and take
pride in outsaving the Joneses. The mantra is cut, cut, cut —
magazine and cable subscriptions, credit cards, fancy coffee drinks
and your own hair.
In San Francisco, Cooper Marcus, 36, has started choosing recipes
based on the ingredients on sale at the market. Mr. Marcus canceled
the family’s subscription to Netflix, his premium cable package and a
wine club membership. He uses a program on his iPhone to find the
cheapest gas and drives out of his way to save 50 cents per gallon.
“It seems a little crazy,” he laughs, then adds: “I’m frugal and loving
it.”
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“Austere Times? Perfect,” New York Times, April 11, 2009
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End of Social Science
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We are too small and our statecraft too feeble
to be seen by a spacecraft between the Earth
and the Moon. From this vantage point, our
obsession with nationalism is nowhere in
evidence. The Apollo pictures of the whole
Earth conveyed to multitudes something well
known to astronomers: On the scale of
worlds…humans are inconsequential.
Carl Sagan 1994, pp. 5-6
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Or a new beginning?
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