2 Social Movement Theory and the Character of Environmental Social Movements
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Notes 2 Social Movement Theory and the Character of Environmental Social Movements 1. I am very grateful to the stimulus given to this chapter by the invitation to give one of the Linacre Lectures 2000 at Linacre College, Oxford. That lecture was subsequently written up as a chapter in the volume of collected lectures (Yearley 2003); it examined the implications of the organisational features of the ecological movement for the likely future of environmentalism in the new century. 2. That is not to say that the argument has not been attempted: neo-Marxists used the notion of a ‘permanent arms economy’ to propose that military spending was functional for capitalism. On this view, the military consumed without producing and thus was a crucial influence on the demand side of the economy, particularly during recessionary times. Though this argument made some sense in the US case, the evidence appeared to indicate that such spending was precisely not functional for the success of the capitalist economy in the longer run. 3 Shell, a Sure Target for Global Environmental Campaigning? 1. The Ecologist magazine contains a ‘Campaigns & News’ feature in each issue; no details of authorship are given. Information from this source has been referenced in the text, not in the references in the full bibliography. 2. Interviewees have been anonymised. Quotes are taken from recorded interviews and ‘character’ labels ‘Int’ for interviewer and R1 for first respondent and so on are given only where they are needed for clarity’s sake. R1 and R2 do not necessarily refer to the same persons throughout. 3. The Braer and Sea Empress are both oil tankers which caused spills in Britain, in Scotland in 1993 and in Wales in 1996 respectively. The Sea Empress spill affected the area around the Milford Haven oil terminal in Wales. 4. The G7 refers to the meeting of what were the seven largest economies in the world: the USA, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Canada. It becomes the G8 when Russia is present. These countries are slowly being overtaken by China and India in terms of their overall annual income (China’s population is after all several tens of times the size of Canada’s). At present the G7 shows no signs of changing its make-up and may end up becoming sidelined. 185 186 Notes 5 Bog Standards: Contesting Conservation Value at a Public Inquiry 1. The research on which this paper is based was supported by an ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) grant (A00069295). I should like to express my gratitude to Brian Wynne for his detailed comments on this paper. 2. The Giant’s Causeway is a celebrated geological feature on Northern Ireland’s north coast where hexagonal basaltic columns run from the cliff into the sea; it was earlier thought of as a causeway used by superhuman figures to travel between Ireland and Scotland. Strangford Lough is a shallow marine loch (lough) on the east coast, rich in wildlife and magnificent views and largely free of giants. 3. This has long been an issue in Irish natural history; for historical examples see Whyte (2000). 4. To avoid the endless repetition of ‘Northern Ireland’ I shall occasionally use the term ‘province’ even if this might be found politically objectionable by some readers. Within the UK, Northern Ireland is – technically speaking – a Province. But to call it that rather implies that Northern Ireland properly belongs to the UK, something which is far from widely agreed. None the less, in Northern Ireland one can generally talk about ‘the province’ without causing too much offence. 5. This is a useful point to note some details of my method in this investigation. I attended the inquiry throughout, collected all the supporting written material I could, interviewed a number of the conservationist participants and made three field visits, in company with various environmentalists, to the peat bog itself. I also checked the details of my analysis with my respondents to make sure that I had understood various technical points correctly. 6. The previous designation, the Area of Scientific Interest (ASI), was a limited measure, essentially offering grounds for the DoENI to oppose planning applications if they saw fit. The ASI designation was commonly held to be too weak, see Newbould (1987, 82). 7. See Article 24 of The Nature Conservation and Amenity Lands (Northern Ireland) Order 1985 (London: HMSO, 1985, 18–19). 8. See paragraph 7 of the CWB’s submission to the Inquiry. 9. See ibid., appendix 3a. 10. See ibid., paragraph 10.3. 11. In his semi-autobiographical account of scientific conservation work, N. W. Moore recounts that when trying to select the best Mendip ash-wood to adopt as a National Nature Reserve ‘It was tempting to develop a scoring system, but since there was no common denominator such a system could do no more than quantify our opinions’ (Moore 1987, 79). It seems that when the selection criteria are not going to be challenged it is safe to depend on one’s naked judgement. However, erecting a scoring system does little to ward off the determined adversary as the developer’s QC demonstrated. 12. It was also important to the legal argument to establish that the need to declare the ASSI had been made clear to the DoENI at the time and I am happy to report that a letter I wrote to the head of the environment service Notes 187 formed part of this case. It turned out that my days of bog enthusiasm at the inquiry and on Ballynahone More were not passed aimlessly, even if my role was exceptionally minor. 6 Independence and Impartiality in Legal Defences of the Environment 1. The RSPB is Britain’s (indeed Europe’s) largest organisation devoted solely to nature conservation or environmentalism with – depending on how exactly you count them – around a million members. It works to protect birds and their habitats in Britain and elsewhere; see the centenary publication, Samstag (1988) and also Yearley (1992a). 2. The RSNC was very influential in the foundation of the NCC’s forerunner, the Nature Conservancy; see Lowe and Goyder (1983, 154–57). 3. The UK consists of GB and Northern Ireland. For most of the last three decades of the twentieth century the latter was under direct rule from London since its own parliament had become discredited. It retains its own legal system, civil service and other institutions. In GB the NCC stands (or rather, stood since it has been reformed and renamed) outside the civil service; an independent body of this sort was not formed in Northern Ireland where its functions were performed at the time of this case study and of the study in the preceding chapter by a constituent part of the DoENI: the CWB. Campaigners have often argued that this meant that the DoE in Northern Ireland was both ‘gamekeeper and poacher’. 4. The ruling rejoices in the name of the European ‘Directive on the assessment of the effects of certain public and private projects on the environment’ (85/337/EEC). 5. On terminology for naming Northern Ireland, see the end notes to the previous chapter (note 4). 6. As its name implies, the AONB is a designation for areas of exceptional landscape value; its provisions constrain development in those areas. 7. On the British public inquiry system see the last chapter and Wynne (1982, 52–73). As Wynne makes clear (pp. 97–104), a persistent problem for objectors to the nuclear plant that formed the core of his study was their lack of financial resources; by contrast the nuclear industry was supported by government. In the present case also, objectors received no funding to mount their arguments. It should be noted however that certain environmental objectors, such as the NCC and the Council for Nature Conservation and the Countryside (the statu- tory advisory body in Northern Ireland), would be able to use public funds to hire legal representatives for public inquiries. One might say that questions about impartiality could be raised in such cases because, after all, the government is paying for the presentation of the arguments. However, as we shall see, the issue of impartiality arises much more strongly in the present example where an objector has a commercial relationship with one of the would-be developers. 8. Respectively, these documents were UWT, ‘Preliminary Environmental Impact Assessment’ (1989a) and ‘Proof of evidence to the Killyleagh Marina Inquiry’ (1989b). 9. This is minuted in UWT Conservation Committee minutes (CC/60/M, page 3). 188 Notes 10. One anonymous reviewer kindly pointed out that it is not self-evidently necessary for environmental advisers to keep facts and values separate. For instance, on a ‘deep green’ view, the artificial separation of facts and values is just one of the symptoms of our ecological and spiritual malaise. Conceivably, people could come to deep green experts for factual-cum-evaluation advice. This seems to me to open a vast and fascinating debate. At this point I would like to make only two comments. First, the leading conservation groups in the UK are far from deep green and therefore the problem I describe is also the problem as they perceive it. Second, however justified deep green views are, those views would not currently cut much ice in a British public inquiry. For, as Wynne notes (1982, 130), ‘Judicial rationality also assumes the complete separability of facts from values or emotions’. See also Cramer and van den Daele (1987, 17–64). 11. Though the focus for this chapter is on the ideal and practicalities of impartial advice and the fate of such advice in adversarial settings, readers will be interested to know (I hope) that the DoENI turned down all three proposals, although a compromise proposal was subsequently resurrected.