Critical Thinking Hinders Progress

This is about a problem with my personal future - about how to make sense of the great diversity of organisations where I might want to pursue a job, or institutions and people I might want to study further with. My education here has done a good job (I think) in teaching me to think critically. Now when I read someone's writing or hear someone speak, especially when it is about something with which I'm familiar - like environmentalism or sustainability, my thoughts often turn to questioning their positionality, whether their opinions are shaped by their philosophical viewpoints, and I always try to see the bigger (or smaller) picture. I believe that this has been very beneficial, and has allowed me to understand a greater depth of what I read and what people say.

However, it also means that when looking at organisations and people working in a field with which I'm familiar - environmental protection, environment-society, sustainability - and wondering where to work or study, I'm faced with lots of individual outlooks and missions, and few of them seem to match what I'm looking for. While I'm sure much of this is due to me being unclear about what I want, this increased critical awareness has come at a cost - I can't just wander, blind and uncritical, into a comfortable (and perhaps well-paid) job anymore!

This all ran through my mind while watching the final episode - entitled Living Together - in the awe-inspiring BBC documentary Planet Earth. A wide range of environmental professionals, academics, policy researchers, etc. are interviewed as the discussion unfolds, even including the Chief Scientist of the World Bank, and a representative of the National Center for Public Policy Research. And as I watched, I agreed with elements of what many of these people were saying, after all many of them are people whose opinion I respect - such as Jonathon Porritt (UK Sustainable Development Commission) and Tony Juniper (Friends of the Earth). However, many of them also said things which grated - bringing to mind some criticism of the foundations of their argument, or an implicit link to post-colonial critique, the debate over critical realism in the environmental movement, or criticisms of the role of international environmental NGOs.

Which leaves this feeling of confusion, and a need to find some way of prioritising the good points in all these different views and missions, in order to find a good path to take in the next few years.

Recurring Tree Metaphor

An element of the last post about potential futures resembling branches of a tree must have stuck in my mind over the past week - now in planning a review piece about political ecology I find myself using the same metaphor to describe the role of geography in drawing together thinking about human-environment interaction.

This time the roots of the tree are a range of factors affecting an event or situation - political, socio-cultural, economic, biophysical, leading to the contemporary expression of that event or situation - the trunk of the tree. This event could be any aspect of human-environment interaction - environmental degradation, global climate change, the HIV/AIDS epidemic - all of which are complex issues affected by a range of factors and studied by specialists from a range of disciplines. The suggestion is that geography has the ability to draw together these diverse range of inputs (from a range of different epistemological positions), and to map a range of possible future scenarios - the branches of the tree.

The original idea behind this came from a UNAIDS document entitled Aids in Africa: Three Scenarios to 2025 which uses the tree metaphor as a scenario building and storytelling device - drawing on scenario methodology promoted by the Royal Dutch Shell corporation (not a common source of inspiration for me...)

introduction

I'll graduate in 3 months so now, for the first time, I have to start making some real decisions. Just to recap what's happened so far:
birth - rapid development - school - some more school - a bit more school - travelling the world - university and an undergraduate degree
... so at this stage I'm remarkably similar to thousands of other people my age. But now my choices about the future really are mine. Think of the events described above as progress up a tree - to start with we all follow the same track - up the trunk of the tree. Now we've hit the spot where the branches separate out. So now there may be three or four choices of branch which we could follow, but we must remember that each of these larger branches will subdivide and subdivide and subdivide.
So this is space for me to explore all these potential futures.

Who swindles who?

My initial reaction to the first 15 minutes of The Great Global Warming Swindle was surprise - at the seeming strength of the programme's argument that the consensus view on climate change, and at the credentials of some of the interviewees. The programme, which aired on Channel 4 (UK) on 8 March (and More4 12 March) was created by documentary-maker Martin Durkin, and presented what seemed a coherent argument against the anthropogenic CO2-based greenhouse warming theory, based on the influence of sunspots and solar activity.

As the programme progressed, accusing the west of using this climate change argument to prevent the global south developing (there obviously being only one route to 'development'), my skepticism increased and as soon as it ended, I went to the internet to poke around - if there's discrediting to be done it's happening in real time on the internet somewhere. And sure enough, the 'environmental journalists' criticised by the programme had responded. Robin McKie's article in the Observer illuminated the backgrounds of some of the those interviewed and reminded readers of the apology issued by Channel 4 following the airing of a previous Martin Durkin documentary.

According to the Independent, Professor Carl Wunsch of MIT is considering making a formal complaint after being misrepresented by the programme-makers, claiming in a statement posted on his website that the programme is "an out-and-out propaganda piece, in which there is not even a gesture toward balance or explanation of why many of the extended inferences drawn in the film are not widely accepted by the scientific community."

So it becomes clear that this is another example of a debate covering both the scientific community and the media in which the truth is not clear cut, and where the media is used to manipulate people's opinions. And it is here the there is some value in a programme like The Great Global Warming Swindle.

As a student of geography with an active interest in environmental issues, I tend to side with those termed environmentalists when confronted with a black and white choice. The Great Global Warming Swindle reminds us that we should remember the intimate link between knowledge and power, and not to be blind to this connection even amongst those working on issues close to our own hearts. Environmental awareness and 'protection' is now a massive industry, and as such now shares the same power-laden discourse status as many other issues where our skepticism might be more healthy.