In this summary, you can find all important parts of the articles and chapters that need to be read for the exam. Furthermore, you can use this information for your assignment.
WEEK 1
RACHEL CARSON
Silent spring: the world is polluted. This pollution is seen as sprays, dusts and
aerosols to kill every insect, bad but also good ones. Therefore, it would be a silent
spring. There are however alternatives, but are not looked at. There is still very
limited awareness of the nature of the threat. As Rachel states, the people need to
decide if we want to continue on the present road, leading to death. Only by taking
into account life forces, such as pressure, and by turning them in a favourable thing
for us, a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves can
be achieved. Our alarming misfortune have got the scientists develop terrible
weapons, killing insects, but also everyone else.
THE ENVIRONMENT CHAPTER 1
Slow catastrophes are much harder to manage than crisis and emergencies,
because there is more negotiation between more parties needed and it requires
different types of expertise. The overall story within this book reveals that the
environment demanded interdisciplinary and multifaceted knowledge making and
understanding on many scales, as does managing and planning for the future.
Carson’s treatment around 1960 caused a shift in looking at things. The environment
in her eyes was a fragile ‘web of life’ subject to contamination and assault. So the
shift was determined by the fact that man could now also change the environment.
1948: It became clear that the ‘world was sick’, as Vogt wrote in his book ‘Road to
Survival’. Ecology became hereby an important concept: the strings of all the
environments that existed (mountain, forest etc.) became a subset of the whole. The
environment became therefore also an important concept, containing four
dimensions: future, expertise, trusts in numbers and scale & scalability. The natural
world, thus, became integrated and thereby those who measured and modeled it
became a voice of nature themselves.
1960: the environment became aware by the government, but was not
institutionalized until the end of the decade or later. The environment carried thereby
a lot of weight, because it is a very broad term with a lot of different aspects involved,
a range of scenarios, experts, global-spanning institutions. The revolution of ‘the
environment’ – the conceptual revolution, as distinct from the political transformation
connected with the environmental social movements and the struggles over
environment – was silent, unsought, and largely unheralded. Environment, however,
was an idea whose time had come.
THE ENVIRONMENT CHAPTER 7
1990s: ecological services – monetary value to the service of clean water and air,
whereby polluters can be charged. Now the focus became the absorptive capacity in
the face of the disturbance of large-scale systems (instead of localized).
Earth system evoked a planetary scale. Earth system science and thinking coexisted
with, and was indeed part of, the formation of the environment but was only realized
as an institutionalized body of expertise and calculation at a certain moment of
institutional and technical development, paralleled by new institutions for global
governance. Earth system thinkers formed a kind of collaborative expertise, whereby
they trusted numbers. They connected locally gathered data with geophysical and
geochemical models of all the Earth’s big systems, or environments. The complexity
of humans and society, however, was pretty much ignored. In order to make things
governable, they had to be visualized and provide sufficient information. The very
, first ‘code’ of Earth system science for the IGBP was a diagram presenting the
interconnections between systems – chemical, physical, biological – with a small box
for humans at the far end of the scheme. This was named the (Frank) ‘Bretherton
diagram’ after the chairperson of the IGBP planning committee that presented it. This
was a visions that appeared governable, precisely because of its use of expertise, its
sovereign trust in numbers, its obsession with the future and its projection, and its
confident assumption in scaling: that is, what is local is also global and the global
thus also tells the story of the local. It took many years until Earth system science
could translate the modeling into more concrete suggestions and how to think in
terms of policy tools. The Anthropocene is an argument that human influence – and
the traces of that influence – have now irreversibly altered the Earth system and will
continue to do so whether we humans exist or not. It is as much about what it means
to be human as about the changing planetary systems – a child of the environment.
In brief, the tasks for the environmental humanities are to situate the human in
geological terms and to situate the nonhuman in ethical terms. 3 approaches: begin
effective communicators (problems are resolved by more information), integrating
with environmental expertise in the form that already exists or explicitly
environmental humanities (alternative, experimental with a certain aversion to
traditional ‘disciplines). The environmental humanities seek out a diversity of ways to
speak on a human scale about our times of rapid environmental change to audiences
from within and beyond the academy, using the skills and tools of a range of
disciplines. It is in the human interest to save the planet from extremes of
anthropogenic change, but it is not obviously in the planet’s interests to save
humanity.
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