Cultures of Environmentalism

Cultures of Environmentalism Empirical Studies in Environmental Sociology Steven Yearley Cultures of Environmentalism Also by Steven Yearley MAKING SENSE OF SCIENCE: Understanding the Social Study of Science SOCIOLOGY, ENVIRONMENTALISM, GLOBALIZATION THE GREEN CASE: A Sociology of Environmental Arguments, Issues & Politics PROTECTING THE PERIPHERY: Environmental Policy in Peripheral Regions of the European Union (edited with Susan Baker and Kay Milton) THE NEW REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES (edited with Maureen McNeil and Ian Varcoe) DECIPHERING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: The Social Relations of Expertise (edited with Ian Varcoe and Maureen McNeil) SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL CHANGE SCIENCE AND SOCIOLOGICAL PRACTICE Cultures of Environmentalism Empirical Studies in Environmental Sociology Steven Yearley University of York Chapter 3 © Steven Yearley and John Forrester 2005 All remaining material © Steven Yearley 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–0120–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yearley, Steven. Cultures of environmentalism : empirical studies in environmental sociology / Steven Yearley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–0120–1 (cloth) 1. Environmentalism—Social aspects. 2. Environmental policy. I. Title. GE195.Y43 2005 333.72—dc22 2004051672 10987654321 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne Contents List of Figure and Tables vii 1 Introduction: Studying Environmental Issues Sociologically 1 Part I Cultures of Movement: The Sociology of Environmental Movements and Problems 5 2 Social Movement Theory and the Character of Environmental Social Movements 7 3 Shell, a Sure Target for Global Environmental Campaigning? 26 4 How Environmental Problems Come to be ‘Global’: Sociological Perspectives on the Globalisation of the Environment 41 Part II Studies of Environment, Law and Public Policy 55 5 Bog Standards: Contesting Conservation Value at a Public Inquiry 57 6 Independence and Impartiality in Legal Defences of the Environment 75 7 Modelling the Environment: Participation, Trust and Legitimacy in Urban Air-Quality Models 89 Part III Cultures of Knowing and Proving: Science, Evidence and the Environment 111 8 Green Ambivalence about Science 113 9 Mad about the Buoy: Trust and Method in the Brent Spar Controversy 144 v vi Contents 10 Genetically Modified Organisms and the Unbearable Irresolution of Testing 159 11 The Value of Environmental Sociology: Towards a Sociology of the Sustainable Society 176 Notes 185 Bibliographical References 192 Index 200 List of Figure and Tables Figure 7.1 The three topics chosen to focus citizen discussions on air quality 96 Tables 4.1 The ‘logic’ of the universalistic discourse of science 51 5.1 A ‘scoring system’ for raised bogs 67 7.1 Three theorems about the public’s understanding of scientific expertise 93 10.1 Levels of contention in the UK GM debate 171 vii This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction: Studying Environmental Issues Sociologically The day after I send the manuscript of this book to the publishers, some friends have promised me a boat trip from Queenscliff, a Victorian seaside resort. As well as the boat ride there will be a chance to visit the Ozone Hotel, a venerable establishment dating from the late nineteenth century. The hotel took its name from a paddle steamer that used to run day jaunts to Queenscliff, outings that were believed to offer urban trippers the chance to breathe in some invigorating – ozone-rich – sea air. On my day trip, I will be concerned with ozone in a different way. Because of the recent depletion of the ozone layer, I will have to take care to apply extra sun-cream to offset the effects of increased ultra-violet radiation. In about a century, ozone has gone from a blessing into an anxiety and somehow the Ozone Hotel’s name has retained its topicality. Just as in the naming of the paddle steamer and the hotel, we inscribe our views and concerns about the environment onto the cultural objects around us. The environment suffuses society and our treatment of cultural objects reflects back on our understanding of the environment itself. This basic observation lies at the heart of sociological approaches to the environment. Environmental sociology asks where our views of nature and the environment come from, how our conduct towards the environment is moulded, how we draw the distinction between nature and culture, and how our knowledge of the environment is shaped. The studies in this book are designed as empirical investigations of these themes, of various cultures of environmentalism. Sociology is about as old as the Ozone Hotel, but environmental sociology is only a recent invention. In the 1980s, when I began my work on environmental organisations there was a good deal of environmental 1 2 Cultures of Environmentalism activism but hardly any environmental sociology. Now the reader has a wide choice of books. Compared to most of its rivals, this book is meant to stand out because it is primarily empirical. It is a collection of studies of environmental campaigns, disputes, movements and problems. As sociological interest in the environment has grown, sociologists have sought to bring environmental issues within the scope of their theories. This is a welcome development. However, it has meant that it is now possible to write books about the environment for a sociological audience that are primarily organised around theoretical schools and the debates between them. I have tried to do something different by keeping the theory in the background and highlighting the details of the cases. I hope this strategy makes the chapters accessible and appealing. But I believe it serves a further function by focusing attention on the question of how it is that I claim to know the things that the studies describe. Though – in the interests of readability – the chapters do not have lengthy methods sections I have tried to foreground issues of evidence by, for example, including lengthy quotes from interviews and describing the settings in detail. In this sense, the chapters are simultaneously about the environment and about one way to undertake sociological studies of the environment. The book is divided into three parts, each composed of three chapters. Part I, ‘Cultures of Movement: The Sociology of Environmental Move- ments and Problems’, examines the culture of environmental campaigning and activism. In particular it looks at how the environmental movement differs from other contemporary social movements and asks how the culture of environmental organisations influences the nature of environmentalism itself. The issue of the shaping of environmentalism is then developed through studies of the ways in which environmental campaigning and concern have been refashioned in response to the globalisation of environmental issues. Part II, ‘Studies of Environment, Law and Public Policy’, consists of three UK case studies examining how policy and planning decisions are made. These studies demonstrate how legal and governmental institutions – ‘modernist institutions’, theorists would call them – attempt to handle environmental matters. My aim is to show that detailed analysis of environmental case studies allows sociology to focus on pivotal issues in the way that contemporary cultural institutions try to fit modernist conceptual tools to the evalu- ation of culture and nature. In Part III, ‘Cultures of Knowing and Proving: Science, Evidence and the Environment’, I investigate the role of knowledge about the environment. Sunderlin (2003) and other analysts have rightly noted that environmental issues are deeply ideological in the Introduction 3 sense that where some commentators are struck by evidence of imminent environmental catastrophe others see nothing but continued progress, dependent only on sensible and affordable adaptations to ecological change. So entrenched have these positions become that, at the start of the twenty-first century, attempts to make an overall assessment of the state of the environment have come to be as much a right-wing as an

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