Myanna Lahsen

Technocracy, Democracy, and U.S. Climate Politics: The Need for Demarcations

Ulrich Beck and other theorists of reflexive modernization are allies in the general project to reduce technocracy and elitism by rendering decision making more democratic and robust. However, this study of U.S. climate politics reveals complexities and obstacles to the sort of democratized decision making envisioned by such theorists. Since the early 1990s, the U.S. public has been subjected to numerous media-driven campaigns to shape understandings of this widely perceived threat. Political interests have instigated an important part of these campaigns, frequently resorting to ethically problematic tactics to undermineattemptsat policy action designed to avert or reducethe threat. The disproportionate in fluence of such interests suggests the need for a more level political playing field characterized by more equalized access to power and influence.

Anatomy of Dissent: A Cultural Analysis of Climate Skepticism

Based on findings from ethnographic analysis of U.S. climate scientists, this article identifies largely unrecognized sociocultural dimensions underpinning differences in scientists’ perceptions of anthropogenic climate change. It argues that culturally laden tensions among scientists have influenced some to engage with the antienvironmental movement and, as such, influence U.S. climate science politics. The tensions are rooted in broad-based and ongoing changes within U.S. science and society since the 1960s and propelled by specific scientific subgroups’ negative experiences of the rise of environmentalism and of climate modeling, in particular.   Attending to these and other experience-based cultural dynamics can help refine cultural theory and enhance understanding of the deeper battles of meaning that propel climate science politics.

Addressing the complexity of the Earth system

This paper discusses the development of a prediction system that integrates physical, biogeochemical, and societal processes in a unified Earth system framework. Such development requires collaborations among physical and social scientists, and should include i) the development of global Earth system analysis and prediction models that account for physical, chemical, and biological processes in a coupled atmosphere–ocean–land–ice system; ii) the development of a systematic framework that links the global climate and regionally constrained weather systems and the interactions and associated feedbacks with biogeochemistry, biology, and socioeconomic drivers (e.g., demography, global policy constraints, technological innovations) across scales and disciplines; and iii) the exploration and development of methodologies and models that account for societal drivers (e.g., governance, institutional dynamics) and their impacts and feedbacks on environmental and climate systems.

Climategate: the role of the social sciences

As has been widely documented, lavishly funded media campaigns by political and financial elites and corporations with vested interests against climate policy are a central instigator of the climate backlash and a threat to democratic processes. However, it would behoove the environmental coalition, including sympathizing academics, to reflect on how they help create conditions that enable and magnify the impact of the backlash campaigns and incidents such as Climategate. This editorial argues that prevalent idealized understandings of science increase public vulnerability to backlash campaigns, and that academic analysts reinforce these understandings when they avoid to perform critical analyses of the science and scientists promoting concern about climate change.

Toward a Sustainable Future Earth Challenges for a Research Agenda

Future Earth is an evolving international research program and platform for engagement aiming to support transitions toward sustainability. This article discusses processes that led to Future Earth, highlighting its intellectual emergence. I describe how Future Earth has increased space for contributions from the social sciences and humanities despite powerful, long-standing preferences for bio-geophysical research in global environmental research communities. I argue that such preferences nevertheless are deeply embedded in scientific institutions that continue to shape environmental science agendas and, as such, constitute a formidable obstacle that needs to be recognized and countered to bolster efforts at effective societal transformation in the face of sustainability challenges. The analysis draws on two decades of observant participation in environmental research communities in the United States, Europe, Brazil, and elsewhere, including participation in the visioning process that led to Future Earth.

Conflicting Climate Change Frames in a Global Field of Media Discourse

Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations) in media discourse. The authors analyze the global field of media climate change discourse using 17 diverse cases and 131 frames. They find four main conflicting dimensions of difference: validity of climate science, scale of ecological risk, scale of climate politics, and support for mitigation policy. These dimensions yield four clusters of cases producing a fractured global field. Positive values on the dimensions show modest association with emissions reductions. Data-mining media research is needed to determine trends in this global field.

Undervaluing and Overexploiting the Brazilian Cerrado at Our Peril

In a context of international scrutiny, important efforts are being made to preserve Brazil’s tropical forests. Meanwhile, the destruction of its Cerrado biome advances with increasing leaps but little controversy. Yet the damaging changes threaten life-supporting natural resources and ecosystem services that are vital for the majority of Brazilians, as well as for the continued viability of agriculture. This ancient region of considerable geological and cultural significance encapsulates all of the major environmental challenges to sustainability, and begs new responses from science and society. Fresh policies are needed to promote and integrate the importance of this biome for the nation. These include implementing systematic monitoring systems and improving the management of established ones, minimizing new clearing. Degraded areas must be restored to comply with existing Brazilian environmental laws and international commitments related to climate change, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable development. Addressing the threats to this critically important yet neglected biome requires attention to structural governance problems, including improved education and involvement of stakeholders in key decision making about the region, as well as historically informed reexamination of the country’s economic development path.

Global environmental change research: empowering developing countries

This paper discusses ways to reconcile the United Nations Millennium Development Goals with environmental sustainability at the national and international levels. The authors argue that development and better use of sustainability relevant knowledge is key, and that this requires capacity building globally, and especially in the less developed regions of the world. Also essential is stronger integration of high-quality knowledge creation and technology--and policy--development, including, importantly, the creation of centers of excellence in developing regions which effectively use and produce applications-directed high quality research and bring it to bear on decision making and practices related to environmental change and sustainable management of natural resources. The authors argue that Southern centers of excellence are a necessary first step for bottom-up societal transformation towards sustainability, and that such centers must help design innovative ways to assess and place value on ecosystem services.

Disasters, Intransigence, and Transformation

WWW.TANDFONLINE.COM/VENV VOLUME 60 NUMBER 6 In this issue, Susan Cutter discusses how best to characterize “cascading disasters”—catastrophic chain events triggered by extreme events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. In all of their dimensions, such developments are ill-captured by the still common term of “natural” disasters. This is a misnomer because human decisions are of central importance as to whether or not connected impacts escalate to become catastrophes with deep and geographically far-reaching consequences. It is the interaction of foreseeable but (in their timing and intensity) unpredictable extreme events with ill-prepared and often culpable social and technological systems that make them cascade into larger social and “natech” disasters. These are disasters intensified by accompanying technological and regulatory failures dependent on human decision making. In a world dependent on massive, planet-spanning infrastructures vulnerable to extreme events, cascading disasters are akin to sociologist Charles Perrow’s “normal accidents” in that they demand recognition of risks and vulnerabilities of social and technological systems. Cutter notes that the overwhelming attention in research has been on the physical causes of cascading disasters, and suggests that it would be intellectually and societally beneficial to focus more on the social dimensions, closing gaping knowledge and improving management responses. In this way it is possible to search for predisaster natural and socioeconomic circumstances that contribute to the cumulative damage and overall peril. EDITORIAL

Precaution Needs to Abound, Not Wither

WWW.ENVIRONMENTMAGAZINE.ORG VOLUME 59 NUMBER 5 The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has decided to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and to weaken regulatory safeguards and scientific input by subordinating both to control by representatives of the very industries from which societies need greater protection. Its decisions are particularly monumental and strident instances of today’s global and systemic environmental and social destruction. Currently, humanity uses up the annual planetary “budget” to pollute and produce goods within an ever-shrinking period—or “sustaining year”—which now ends in early August. Pesticides used in Latin America are generating unprecedented rates of cancer and birth defects. Degrading ecosystems and the resources that these sustain, the pesticides also thereby threaten food, water, and energy security. The cancerous rationality of deeply corrupt political leaders in important parts of this region leads them to ignore or reconstruct scientifically well-grounded evidence. As they and Trump make painfully obvious, many decision makers are disinclined to be persuaded. Not all scientists are as aware of that as they should be, preventing sufficiently hard thinking about what to do to improve decision making in such “post-truth” contexts of willful ignorance. The need for precaution and trend reversal has never been greater. The precautionary principle offers a framework for organized skepticism about innovations, a framework that privileges the goals of healthy ecosystems and humans, including the rights and welfare of future generations. The adoption of the precautionary principle in law and regulations—or the lack thereof—is hugely consequential. The precautionary principle is not explicitly mentioned EDITORIAL