Sustainability Science and Research: A Historical Introduction

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Sustainability Science and ResearchA Historical
Introduction

• Andrew Jamison

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Based on
The Making of Green Knowledge. Environmental
Politics and Cultural Transformation, by Andrew
Jamison (Cambridge University Press
2001) Hubris and Hybrids. A Cultural History of
Technology and Science, by Mikael Hård and
Andrew Jamison (Routledge 2005)
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A Brief History of Green Knowledge

• The romantic critique of industrial hubris (e.g.
  Mary Shelley)
• An emerging environmental sensibility (e.g.
  Thoreau)
• The socialist critique of technology (e.g.
  Morris)
• Conservation and nature protection (e.g. Muir)
• Regionalism and urban reform (e.g. Mumford)
• Environmentalism and green politics (e.g. Carson)

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Long Waves of Industrialization
mechanization


industrialization


modernization
globalization

scientification



1800
1850
2000
1950
1900
romanticism cooperation
socialism populism
anticolonialism fascism
environmentalism feminism




Phases of Social Movements

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The First Wave

• the industrial revolution (ca 1780-1830)
• Iron, textile machines, and steam engines
• Technologies of mechanization
• The factory as an organizational innovation
• Social and cultural movements
• machine-storming and cooperation
• romantic art and literature, e.g. Frankenstein

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Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least
by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement
of knowledge, and how much happier that man is
who believed his native town to be the world,
than he who aspires to become greater than his
nature will allow...
Mary Shelley Challenging the hubris
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Henry David Thoreau (1817-62)

• a romantic scientist, author of Walden
• one of the founders of environmentalism
• also wrote On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
  (1849)

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Thoreaus idea of science

• The true man of science will know nature
  better by his finer organization he will smell,
  taste, see, hear, feel better than other men. His
  will be a deeper and finer experience. We do not
  learn by inference and deduction, and the
  application of mathematics to philosophy, but by
  direct intercourse and sympathy...

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The Second Wave

• the age of capital (ca 1830-1880)
• Railroads, telegraph, and steel
• Technologies of socialization
• The rise of the corporation (Carnegie, Krupp)
• Social and cultural movements
• populism, communism and social-democracy
• science fiction and arts and crafts

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William Morris (1834-1896)

• A romantic poet turned designer
• Combined artistry and business
• Mixed tradition and innovation
• A utopian who was also practical

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From Useful Work versus Useless Toil

• The factories might be centres of
  intellectual activity also, and work in them
  might well be varied very much the tending of
  the necessary machinery might to each individual
  be but a short part of the days work. The other
  might vary from raising food from the surrounding
  country to the study and practice of art and
  science.... Science duly applied would enable
  them to get rid of refuse, to minimize, if not
  wholly to destroy, all the inconveniences which
  at present attend the use of elaborate machinery,
  such as smoke, stench and noise nor would they
  endure that the buildings in which they worked or
  lived should be ugly blots on the fair face of
  the earth.

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A major influence on

• Arts and crafts movements, garden cities
• Interior and industrial design
• Architecture Wright, Gehry, Utzon
• Art Nouveau and functionalism
• Socialist politics and fantasy literature
• The education of desire

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John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club
with Theodore Roosevelt in 1903
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Muirs idea of conservation
The tendency nowadays to wander in wilderness is
delightful to see. Thousands of tired,
over-civilized people are beginning to find out
that going to the mountains is going home that
wildness is a necessity and that mountain parks
and reservations are useful not only as fountains
of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains
of life.
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The Third Wave

• the age of empire (ca 1880-1930)
• Electricity, automobiles, chemicals and airplanes
• Technologies of modernization
• Research becomes a business (Edison, DuPont)
• Social and cultural movements
• anticolonialism and fascism
• modernism and human ecology

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The Urban Reform Tradition

• Ebenezer Howard Garden Cities, 1898
• Upton Sinclair The Jungle, 1906
• Jane Addams Twenty Years at Hull-House, 1910
• Patrick Geddes Cities in Evolution, 1915
• Robert Park, et al The City, 1925
• Lewis Mumford The Culture of Cities, 1938

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Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)

• American writer and social critic
• a founder of urban planning
• one of the last public intellectuals
• one of the first human ecologists
• a cultural perspective on technology
• active in regional planning movements

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From The Culture of Cities
Today we begin to see that the improvement of
cities is no matter for one-sided reforms the
task of city design involves the vaster task of
rebuilding our civilization. We must alter the
parasitic and predatory modes of life that now
play so large a part, and we must create...an
effective symbiosis, or co-operative living
together.

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The Fourth Wave

• the coming of technoscience (ca 1930-1980)
• Atomic energy, genetics, and computers
• Technologies of scientification
• The rise of transnational corporations (IBM,
  Sony)
• Social and cultural movements
• civil rights and ban the bomb
• environmentalism, feminism and postmodernism

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• Phases of Environmental Politics
• 1. awakening public education, local protests
• pre-1968
• 2. age of ecology organizational and policy
  development
• 1969-1974
• 3. politicization social movements in relation to
  energy policy
• 1975-1979
• 4. differentiation professionalization and party
  politics
• 1980-1986
• 5. internationalization global orientation,
  sustainable development
• 1987-1993

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Awakening

• public education and debate
• protests about air and water pollution
• part of critique of consumer society
• internal critique within science

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Rachel Carson (1907-64)

• a biologist turned nature writer
• combined science and politics
• inspired environmental movement

The road we have long been traveling is
deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway om which
we progress with great speed, but at its end lies
disaster.
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The Age of Ecology

• new activist and expert organizations
• national and international agencies
• programmatic ambitions political ecology
• pollution control policy orientation

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Politicization

• broad-based alliances
• media become central sites of debate
• organized information campaigns
• focus on energy production and use
• Interest in alternative and utopian
  technologies

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The New Alchemy Institute Ark
Nordic Folkcenter for Renewable Energy
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Differentiation

• political parties, professional activism
• beginnings of environmental management
• lobbying, expertise, research
• wide range of issue areas
• emergence of anti-environmentalism

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The Risk Society Thesis

• a variant of post-industrialism
• outgrowth of nuclear energy and biotech debates
• from production of goods to bads
• the manufacturing of uncertainties
• need for reflexivity, risk assessment

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Internationalization

• transnational networks and alliances
• key sites intergovernmental meetings
• link to socio-economic development
• emphasis on global issues
• sustainable development new policy doctrine

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Integration

• appropriation by other actors
• market becomes key political arena
• importance of discursive, or cultural politics
• green business versus critical ecology

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Dialectics of Sustainable Development

• Green business Critical ecology
• Ecological modernization Environmental
  justice
• Instrumental rationality Communicative
  rationality
• Technological innovation Appropriate technology
• Commercial orientation Community emphasis
• Expert solutions Public engagement

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The Growth of Green Business

ecoefficiency
natural capitalism
green growth
environ- mental management
corporate social responsibility
ecological economics
sustainable development
environmental impact assessment
pollution prevention, cleaner technologies
appropriate technology, renewable energy
environmental economics and policy
pollution control, end-of pipe
Environmental awareness, or consciousness
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Science and Green Business

• Environmental issues and, more recently, climate
  change seen as providing new opportunities for
  scientists and engineers
• A transdisciplinary and transnational approach to
  research
• An emphasis on commercial networks, or systems of
  innovation the triple helix
• A tendency toward hubris the myth of
  science-based progress and the technical fix

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Contention

• other issues become important
• regime shift in US, Denmark and other countries
• the coming of environmental skepticism, e.g.
  Lomborg
• increasing emphasis on global warming
• media and internet - as key political sites

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Environmental Skepticism

• outgrowth of neo-conservative, neo-nationalist
  movements
• supported financially by big oil and
  agro-business
• skeptical about importance of environmental
  problems
• an organized opposition to green business
• mobilizing traditional modernist and nationalist
  values

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The Broader Context Changing Modes of Knowledge
Making
Little Science Big
Science Controversy Globalization
Before WWII 1940s-50s 1960s-70s
1980s- main orientation
industrial atomic
societal commercial type of
disciplinary multidisciplinary
interdisciplinary transdisciplinary knowledge i
deal, or values academic bureaucratic
collective entrepreneurial
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The Age of Big Science,1940s and 1950s

• expansion in size, scale and resources
• atomic orientation, both military and civilian
• university-government collaboration
• bureaucratic norm, or value system
• new role for the state and multistate alliances

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The Age of Controversy,1960s and 1970s

• critiques of militarization and big science
• public debates esp. about atomic energy
• interest in student-centered forms of education
• grass-roots engineering (e.g. OVE)
• emergence of technology assessment

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The Age of Globalization,from 1980s

• change in range and scope
• market orientation, privatization
• university-industry collaboration
• entrepreneurial norm, or value system
• the state as strategist innovation policy
• from assessment to promotion foresight

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The Coming of Technoscience

• blurring discursive boundaries
• between science (episteme) and technology
  (techne)
• breaking down institutional borders
• between public and private, economic and academic
  
• transgressing cognitive barriers
• between academic disciplines and societal domains

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The Cultural Appropriation of Technoscience

• The dominant , or hegemonic strategy (mode 2)
• commercialization, entrepreneurship,
  transdisciplinarity
• The residual, or traditionalist strategy (mode
  1)
• academicization, expertise, multidisciplinarity
  
• An emerging, or sustainable strategy (mode 3)
• hybridization, empowerment, cross-disciplinarity
  

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Transdisciplinarity, or mode 2

• Knowledge which emerges from a particular
  context of application with its own distinct
  theoretical structures, research methods and
  modes of practice but which may not be locatable
  on the prevailing disciplinary map.
• Michael Gibbons et al, The New Production of
  Knowledge (1994)

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The Forces of Habit(us)

• Sustainability science seen as a matter of
  restructuring or recombining established
  scientific and engineering fields
• A kind of academicization strategy
  subdisciplinary specialties in academic
  departments or multidisciplinary centers
• A continuing belief in separating scientific
  knowledge from politics

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The Discipline as Habitus
A discipline is defined by possession of a
collective capital of specialized methods and
concepts, mastery of which is the tacit or
implicit price of entry to the field. It produces
a historical transcendental, the disciplinary
habitus, a system of schemes of perception and
appreciation (where the incorporated discipline
acts as a censorship).
Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and
Reflexivity (2004)
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A Need for a Mode 3, or a Hybrid Imagination

• At the discursive, or macro level
• Sustainability engineering connecting science
  and engineering to sustainable community
  development
• At the institutional, or meso level
• Social responsibility creating opportunities for
  learning across faculties and social domains
• At the personal, or micro level
• Technoscientific citizenship combining
  scientific and technical competence with
  socio-cultural understanding

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For example Fritjof Capra

• physicist-turned-environmentalist
• author of many popular books
• founder of Center for Ecoliteracy

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Since the outstanding characteristic of the
biosphere is its inherent ability to sustain
life, a sustainable human community must be
designed in such a manner that its technologies
and social institutions honor, support, and
cooperate with nature's inherent ability to
sustain life.
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For example
The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) is a
public interest research and advocacy
organisation based in New Delhi. CSE researches
into, lobbies for and communicates the urgency of
development that is both sustainable and
equitable.
Anil Agarwal, the founder of CSE, shown at work
with one of the six State of India reports that
the centre has put out since the 1980s.
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For example The Alley Flat Initiative
The Alley Flat Initiative is a joint
collaboration between the University of Texas
Center for Sustainable Development, the Guadalupe
Neighborhood Development Corporation, and the
Austin Community Design and Development Center.
The Alley Flat Initiative proposes a new
sustainable, green affordable housing alternative
for Austin.
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From the website
  The initial goal of the project was to build
two prototype alley flats (aka granny flats)- one
for each of two families in East Austin - that
would showcase both the innovative design and
environmental sustainability features of the
alley flat designs. These prototypes will
demonstrate how sustainable housing can support
growing communities by being affordable and
adaptable.   The first of these prototypes
celebrated its house warming with the community
in June of 2008, and the second prototype is
slated to begin construction in early 2009.
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The long-term objective of the Alley Flat
Initiative is to create an adaptive and
self-perpetuating delivery system for sustainable
and affordable housing in Austin. The "delivery
system" would include not only efficient housing
designs constructed with sustainable
technologies, but also innovative methods of
financing and home ownership that benefit all
neighborhoods in Austin.
http//www.thealleyflatinitiative.org/
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Contending Modes of Sustainability Research
sustainability
sustainability sustainability
science
management engineering Forms
of policy-driven commercial
contextual activity research
innovation
appropriation Types of post-normal
managerial/
situated/ Knowledge interdisciplinary
transdisciplinary cross-disciplinary
Forms of traditional,
professional, engaged, learning scholarl
y instrumental participatory Rese
archers expert entrepreneur
concerned citizen role Co
ntexts of governments companies
communities application (state)
(market) (civil society)