For scientists worried that advocacy undercuts credibility, this piece may allay your concerns.  I recommend reading the whole article (it’s a rich analysis).

Here’s the conclusion as a short excerpt:

Reasons to oppose advocacy by environmental scientists have been made on the grounds that doing so compromises scientific credibility, conflicts with the essential nature of science, and conflicts with the practical requirements of being a productive scientist. Reasons to favor scientist advocacy have been based on the fundamentally similar nature of science and advocacy, concern for the social harm that might arise from not advocating, and the dual nature of a scientist  citizen. When examining these positions as formal arguments composed of premises and conclusions, all but two arguments (social harm and citizenship) collapse. Moreover, only one argument seems robustly sound and valid.  According to this argument scientists, by virtue of being citizens first and scientists second, have a responsibility to advocate to the best of their abilities and in a justified and transparent manner. Importantly arguments against science advocacy are valuable for offering insight about how one should or should not be an advocate, not whether one should advocate. If these conclusions are accurate, then Hardin (1998) is correct: “[O]ne of today’s cardinal tasks is to marry the philosopher’s literate ethics with the scientist’s commitment to numerate  analysis.” Our assessment calls for more active participation by scientists in matters of policy. Nevertheless, each scientist is called according to his or her abilities. Broad participation, however, will undoubtedly result in disagreement among good scientists and in some scientists advocating in an unjustified and dishonest manner. Thus broad participation will substantially complicate the policy-making process. Although this might seem undesirable, our goal here should not be simplicity but rather the betterment of society.

¹Nelson and Vucetich (2009) On advocacy by environmental scientists: What, whether, why and how. Conservation Biology, Volume 23, No. 5, 1090–1101.

²Bowdoin people can link to the article here.

A few excerpts:

Environmentalism, in sum, has taken some very serious hits. Many of its most familiar and cherished icons have come under a veil of suspicion. Thoreau? Inspiring—but urged us to see nature as the antidote to the places we live. Yosemite? Spectacular, and essential for many reasons—and a site of violent conquest. And a white refuge from the troubles of cities. And culturally constructed to boot. Silent Spring? Indispensable to the ensuing 1960s and 1970s legislation—but apocalyptic, the reapers complain, with a millennial, paralyzing vision of nature as the pure true world that humans by definition violate. What would have happened with the civil rights movement, they ask, if Martin Luther King had given an “I have a nightmare” instead of an “I have a dream” speech? Ditto for the Cuyahoga River fire in Cleveland in 1969 and the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989. The earth from space? We may all live on one planet together, but environmental justice advocates have pointed out also that we are not entirely all in this together….

Post-environmentalism, the fourth wave, post-post-environmentalism, post-wave environmentalism?—or Lewis MacAdams says he’s an infrastructuralist. I’m not sure I care that much. I’m happy with just plain “environmentalism.” But I don’t agree with the reapers that we should jettison the word and category altogether—because I think that applying new definitions to the words people know is more effective than creating a new language. To use the reapers’ own metaphor, what if Martin Luther King had avoided the words “freedom” and “rights” rather than articulating them in new ways?

Let’s take nominations for what to call it—But this twenty-first-century environmentalism emphasizes as its absolute fundamental principle not that we save or destroy nature but that we inhabit nature for better and worse. It pays a great deal of attention to how we inhabit nature in cities, where most of us live—and tells us that the quality and equality of life in the places we make our homes depend fundamentally on how sustainably and equitably we use, move, change, manage, and preserve nature inside and outside of cities. It puts all this activity at the core and center of our social and economic lives. So being an environmentalist means being one in the course of producing and consuming wealth as much as, or much more than, in the course of giving money away. This environmentalism locates its heart and soul in sustainable and equitable economic and social systems—and in sound and equitable public policies and investment—as much as, or much more than, in individual personal virtue.

An environmentalism inspired by this river’s revitalization appreciates, and understands the tremendous ecological significance of, wildness, but it does not embrace wilderness as a way to ignore or escape, rather than to grapple with, the use of nature to sustain our lives.

It does not leave other people facing the worst consequences of how we use nature. It emphasizes that we may all be in this together, but also that we are not all in this together—and makes clear the essential connections between socioeconomic and environmental inequities, and between using nature equitably and using it sustainably.

It emphasizes compromise and negotiation, and process over solutions. It is less apocalyptic than alarmed, less utopian than optimistic, and less religiously dogmatic than pragmatic and full-souled and whole-hearted.

It connects preservation and conservation, and muddles them energetically. It proclaims that in wildness is the preservation of the world. It proclaims with equal enthusiasm that in the world is the preservation of wildness.

A twenty-first-century environmentalism, with the L.A. River as icon, argues for a world in which channeling and intensively managing a flood-prone river can be a wondrously environmentalist thing to do—and where the important questions are not whether you manage nature but how sustainably and fairly you negotiate to do it.

On the banks of the L.A. River, a once and future environmentalism takes joy in wild nature. It takes joy in our everyday connections to nature. It is an environmentalism, all told, in which our joy in wild nature is widely and deeply informed by the great joy of using nature well.

¹Price, J. (2008) Remaking American Environmentalism: On the Banks of the L.A. River. Environmental History, 13(3):536-555.

²Bowdoin people can link to article here.

• What does the good life mean in the 21st Century?
• How do personal choices and values play a role in this conversation?
• What do the natural sciences have to say about the way our world is changing?
• What do the social sciences and humanities have to say about the ways that the social and the cultural intersect with questions surrounding environment — What is nature, how it is implicated in our lives, who benefits and who loses from environmental harm, what issues of power and identity are invested in environmental discourses, how do we make policy or economic decisions given these questions?
• How can we address environmental and social challenges at the same time?
• How is environmentalism changing in response to these pressures?
• What’s the role of higher education in facilitating sustainability and environmental literacy?

There are a lot of environment blogs that assess daily political battles on energy and climate.  Others take a “100 things you can do to save the environment” approach.  And many others provide a laundry list of daily news, from solar panels to tree frogs to Copenhagen to sea ice, and so on.  Those approaches are useful and helpful, especially for fast-moving matters like policy.

But they sometimes lose sight of the big questions we need to be asking in our quest to develop a more ecologically sustainable and socially just world.  When the information deluge mainly contains narrowly focused stories, factoids, and policy play-by-play, there’s often no theoretical context in which to analyze these things as part of a bigger picture.  And let’s face it, how much air time do the humanities and civil society get relative to science and policy?  The blogosphere delivers a great deal, but it also fails in making important interdisciplinary connections that foster a more-sophisticated, substantive analysis.

globalchangeblog.com forges a new path.  I want to analyze environmental change by focusing on the interaction between nature and culture, showcasing big ideas from all disciplines —sociology/anthropology, ethics, ecology and other natural sciences, psychology, history, political science, ethnic studies, religion, literature, visual and performing arts, and so on.

I hope this forum will provide the creative space to attract the best and most-interesting ideas for how we might get to a more ecologically sustainable and socially just world.  I hope that the constellation of posts can lead to a more useful integration of ideas around these big questions.

I’d also like the forum to contain a dose of useful, practical information—not so much “100 things to save the environment” but ideas to help people become more personally invested and informed. Check out the post Do our daily routines put our health at risk? for an example.

Everyone is an important part of this conversation. I encourage you to subscribe to the blog (which is easy to do using the RSS and email subscribe options on the main page), and please send me any interesting articles you come across. If you wish to write a guest post, please feel free to drop me a line with your ideas.

All the best,

Phil Camill

Rusack Associate Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies
Program Director, Environmental Studies
Bowdoin College
Brunswick, Maine
6700 College Station
Brunswick, ME 04011
pcamill@bowdoin.edu
P. Camill’s website