Debating Sustainability

1
Debating Sustainability

• Doug Russell

2
Sustainability

• Preface
• The sustainable koala
• An energy miser with a reduced brain
  (Flannery, p. 86)
  
• Introduction
• The concept of sustainable development entered
  debate of environmental issues in the 1990s
  
• Following the trend discussed in the last two
  lectures, the concept represents a new level of
  integration of the natural, the technological
  and, now, the economic, in popular debate
• In this lecture we will examine two different
  approaches to debate of sustainability the
  following popular texts
  
• A radio talk Change and Our Future from the
  early 1990s, by current President of the ACF Ian
  Lowe (he has taken over from Peter Garrett), in
  which he puts forward his definition of
  sustainable development
• Zoologist Tim Flannerys book The Future Eaters,
  and the ABC documentary based on it, in which he
  puts forward an ecologically determinist argument
  for sustainable use of Australias biotic
  resources

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Sustainability

• Ian Lowe was Director of the Science Policy
  Research Centre at Griffith University
  
• We can place Ian Lowes text in a tradition that
  stretches back to the 1930s
  
• Planning
• Physical chemist J. D. Bernals influential book
  The Social Function of Science (1939)
  consolidated the view of science as a social
  institution. The idea had been developing during
  the decade among a group of activist scientists
• Bernal wrote that the connection between science
  and industry had turned science into an
  institution comparable with and even more
  important than that of the Church or the Law (p.
  11)
• Bernal and others argued that this important
  institution needed to be organised in the
  national interest and in order to play its
  leading part in improving the lot of humanity.
  This argument was based on their observations of
  the central role given to science in the Soviet
  Union

4
Sustainability

• Planning (contd)
• Much of the work of Bernal and company was aimed
  at developing social and administrative
  structures linking science and government, so
  that science could be properly planned and
  directed, and that science could have the
  influence they thought it should have
• So we could say that Bernal and company
  reconstituted science as a social entity, an
  important institution that influenced, and was
  influenced by, others
• Similarly, Lowes text advocates an organised,
  institutionally based cooperative process for
  planning ahead in relation to ecological issues
  like energy use and global warming

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Sustainability

• Planning (contd.)
• Lowe emphasises that the direction of science and
  technology in relation to these ecological issues
  is a matter of social choice
  
• debate about contentious proposals . . . like
  the Franklin dam . . . is often a surrogate
  debate about what sort of society we want to be
  in the future (p. 85)
• The limits of our knowledge of complex ecosystems
  of which we are a part
  

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Sustainability

• The role of popular science
• If planning for the future requires cooperation
  between scientific disciplines, government,
  interest groups, and the general public, it
  follows that methods of communication between
  these disparate groups are of utmost importance
• The 1930s scientists recognised this. There was a
  proliferation of popular texts (magazine
  articles, books, speeches, radio broadcasts,
  films) by scientists like Bernal, J. B. S.
  Haldane (whose style is comparable to Lowes),
  Lancelot Hogben, Julian Huxley, Enid Charles,
  Hyman Levy, P. M. S. Blackett, and others,
  addressing the social interrelations of the
  sciences

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Sustainability

• The role of popular science (contd.)
• Lowe recognises the role of popular science. He
  is included in this section of the course partly
  because he has been successful at adapting to the
  demands of addressing a range of audiences,
  particularly on policy to do with ecological
  issues of energy use and sources, global warming,
  and population, including
• Reports for government departments
• Column in the Australian edition of New
  Scientist
  
• Radio broadcasts
• You might be interested to look at the
  similarities and differences between Lowes 1991
  radio talk and a version of it, Science,
  Technology and the Future, in a textbook for
  university students

8
Sustainability

• The role of popular science (contd.)
• Like the prolific 1930s scientist-writer J. B. S.
  Haldane, Lowe is adept at techniques of
  communication that work to challenge existing
  ways of seeing the world, opening up new
  perspectives
• Analogy
• A means of using the familiar to get people to
  think about more abstract ideas
  
• The unplanned holiday analogy (p. 85)

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Eating the Future 1

• Tim Flannery
• Disciplinary trajectory
• BA (English)
• MSc (Earth Sciences)
• PhD (Zoology)
• Authority on Australian marsupials
• The Future Eaters An Ecological History of the
  Australasian Lands and People, Reed New Holland,
  Sydney, 1994.
  
• Three waves of future eaters
• The Aboriginal people 40, 000 60, 000 years
  ago
  
• European colonisation
• Enhanced technological dominance and exploitation
  of the land
  
• Argues that we are at the end of the period of a
  purely European view of land (p. 16)

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Eating the Future 2

• Ecological determinism
• Examining how the land has . . . shaped its
  people (p. 17)
  
• Colonisation, a pattern of optimism, disillusion,
  and conciliation, during which the land
  increasingly shapes its new inhabitants (p.
  145)
• Argues in the last chapter, Adapting Culture to
  Biological Reality, that our culture is
  maladapted to the environment (pp. 389-90)
  
• Flannerys views are overtly polemical, and have
  drawn fire from various quarters, including
  cultural critic Imre Saluzinsky who rejects the
  idea that culture is determined by the physical
  environment (see his comment in Stick to the Lab
  Coats and Pond Scum, Tim)
• This can be seen as a version of the two
  cultures controversy between C. P. Snow and the
  cultural critic F. R. Leavis in the late 1950s
  and early 1960s (see Snows The Two Cultures
  1959)

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Eating the Future 2

• Sustainability
• Proposes a policy which encourages exploitation
  of all of our biotic heritage, . . . in a
  sustainable manner (p. 402) in a way that
  parallels the Aboriginal peoples use of the
  land
• This would mean harvesting kangaroos, emus,
  crocodiles, and other native animals, rather than
  ecologically unsustainable sheep and cattle, as
  the mainstays of our diet
• Eating the Future, Episode 3, Future Eaters,
  ABC, Sydney, 1998.
  
• Three-part TV documentary based on the book
• Challenging our conventional view of the
  society-nature relationship
  
• Farming described as mining
• Analogy of European culture as a foreign heart
  transplanted in Australian environment and now
  suffering a massive rejection

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Works Consulted

• Lowe, Ian, Science, Technology and the Future,
  in Martin Bridgstock, et al, eds., Science,
  Technology and Society An Introduction,
  Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 232-56.
• Saluzinsky, Imre, Stick to the Lab Coats and
  Pond Scum, Tim, Australian, 25 Jan. 2002, p. 9.