Éric Darier

Think globally, act locally'? Climate change and public participation in Manchester and Frankfurt

Abstract ’Think Globally, Act Locally’ was one of the most famous slogans of the 1970s environmental movement. Discourses about global climate change are now a vivid illustration of this new ‘global thinking’. Although there is a substantial amount of research about global environmental issues and policy initiatives, there is still a gap in understanding of how lay publics actually comprehend global climate change. Using qualitative research method, this study is a comparison of how lay publics in Frankfurt (Germany) and Manchester (UK) perceive these issues and the possible solutions. The study found strong similarities in lay public perceptions in both cities including that (1) awareness of global environmental issues is always contextualised in broader perspectives not exclusively ‘environmental’, (2) there is a shared and strong sense of global equity based on recognition of differences and (3) there is an ambivalence about the role of environmental ‘information’. Differences between lay public percep...

Book Review: The struggle for nature: a critique of radical ecology

‘Confusion’ would be the best term to describe my state of mind after reading this book. Before trying to explain what this book is about, it might be helpful to say that neither the title nor the text on the back cover accurately reflects what is inside. In fairness, it might be difficult to encapsulate exactly what this book is about. The author is Jozef Keulartz, associate professor in the department of applied philosophy at Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands. His main objective, one I totally agree with, is to ‘map out the scientific traps and social pitfalls that invariably confront radical ecology on account of its naturalistic slant’ and to move ‘towards a post-naturalist environmental philosophy’ (p. 2). Under the banner of ‘radical ecology’, the author includes four clusters of ecological thinking: Bookchin’s social ecology, Naess’ deep ecology, Illich’s political ecology and ecofeminism. The problem starts when the author fails to introduce how he intends to analyse and evaluate ‘radical ecology’ . What he does is to name drop Arendt, Heidegger, Habermas, Foucault, Dilthey, Wittgenstein, Lyotard and others, probably hoping that this would be an acceptable substitute for a coherent analytical framework. The result is an attempt to synthesize all the authors cited, which inevitably produces strange conclusions. For example, the author finds that the ‘affinity between Habermas and Foucault stands out clearly’ (p. 13). The evidence for this surprising claim is that ‘although the notion of “biopower” does not figure as such in Habermas’, reflections, it does bear an unmistakable resemblance to this concept of the “system” ’ (p. 13). Despite the fact that Foucault never used the Habermasian term ‘communicative power’, the author brushes this aside on the grounds that ‘Foucault himself, as a “gay positivist”, chooses to cloak in darkness, but which can be readily brought to light with the help of the theory of communicative action’ (p. 14). These are only some of many examples of unsubstantiated and/or sweeping claims. Overall I was left with the impression that the author wanted to erase differences and forge a consensus at any cost between the eclectic list of names for a purpose that never became clear. Surely a ‘post-naturalistic environmental philosophy’ does not have to be a synthesis of every existing and trendy thinker! Structurally, the book has two main parts. The first one is titled ‘Between biology and biopower’. I was able to recognize the Foucauldian term ‘biopower’, but found it somewhat strange that one would want to separate it from ‘biology’; as if ‘biology’ existed independently from relations of power. Surely Foucault created the term ‘biopower’ to avoid the conventional separation between issues of ‘knowledge’ and issues of ‘power’ (hence ‘power/knowledge’ as a single word)? It got even stranger in the first section entitled ‘The discovery of the environment’, where the author reviews eighteenth and nineteenth century discourses in biological sciences. Why did the author presume that eighteenth and nineteenth century ‘biological sciences’ had anything to do with the ‘environment’? As we know, the term ‘environment’ started to get used in a few scientific publications in the 1930s and became a common term only after the 1960s. Maybe this is another bad choice of title. In the remaining two sections of the first part, references Book reviews