La tour's Gaia - Not down to Earth?
Social Studies of Environmental Management for
Grounded Understandings of the Politics of
Human-Nature Relationships
lngmar Lippert'
Abstract
In a recent instantiati on by Bruno Larour of how STS can engage with matters of
concern, he conceptualises a changing relationship of humans with earth . For Latour,
the scientists' notion 'anthropocene' illustrates how humans accept that their industrial
act ivit ies are not m erely causi ng some surface environmental problems bur that they
establish a geological force . His proposal is that each of us must struggle inwardly
to achieve a proper engagement with Gaia (Lovelock). Ques tioning this individualist
rake, this paper reviews STS studies on how humans and societies enact the imagery of
'being able to manage' environments . We find conflict . I argue that studyi ng the
practices of so-called environmental management shows that throug h this ac tivity
environments are not merely known , but also enacted. This move imp lies that competing of enactments of the subj ection of environments to management are possible.
Consequently, the performative capacities of environmental management emerge as
a fundamentally politically and ethically relevant obj ect of stud y.
Introduction
For m any, earth itself seems to be at stake; or is it m erely human existence?
At the latest since the 1970s hegemonic institutions increasing ly accept
the view that humans and earth must succeed in getting along with each
other if the human species is to survive. This paper aims to contribute
to an emerging discussion in the field of Science and Technology Studies
(STS), the engagement with enactments of environmental problem-solving
by scientists and politics in the form of so-called management. Science is
considered a key actant in providing analyses of earth, serving policy-makers
to draw up strategies for saving mankind from troubles like climate
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Ingmar Lippert
change, loss of biodiversity or water resource depletion . A nd big politics,
often in agreement with big business, claims to have its handles on these
problems. The message is often: yes, out there, we recognise, environmental crises exist, and, no, no need to change the existing rules of society.
Indeed , ecological modernisation - the hegemonic policy approach to
tackle environmental problems (Hajer 1995) - insists that while theproblems are likely to 'have been caused by modernisation and industrialisation, their solutions must necessarily lie in more - rather than less
-modernisation and "superindustrialisation'" (Buttel 2000, 61). However,
as La tour (1993) remarked, we have never been modern: Western societies
never managed to put into practice the imagined and presupposed separation of nature and culture. Politics that consistently seeks to conceptualise human-nature relationships through the image of separated nature
and culture is likely to construct more and more environmental problems,
which are neither purely cultural nor purely natural. Following the studies
carried out by actor-network theory (e.g. Latour 1987) and by feminist
techno-science studies (e.g. Haraway 1991), knowledges are always constructed. This includes scientific know ledges of so-called nature. Yet, in
2004 Latour emphasised a political nuance of his work: 'The question was
never to get away from facts but closer to them, not fighting empiricism
but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism' (2004b, 231). For him the
point was that STS should reconstruct the networks encompassing earth
and heaven, which hold together the m atters of concern affecting humans
(246). Pressing concerns, for him, seem to include so-called environmental problems, resulting in global crises. To engage with matters of
such importance, Latour (2011) turns both earth and humans on their
heads, and calls for engaging with 'Gaia' and 'Terrians'. In the 2011lecture
Is it Possible to Get Ottr Materialism Back? An Inquiry into the Various
Idea/isms of Matter he provides more than a nod to the G aia hypothesis
(lovelock & Lodge Jr 1972; Lovelock & Margulis 1974). First, Latour
points to the understanding that humans may be shaping earth more
than the modernist take assumed. This understanding is becoming
widely acknowledged as indicated by the term anthropocene (Crutzen &
Ramanathan 2000; Falkowski et al. 2000). The concept marks a geological
era in which, in Latour's interpretation, industry and humans have become
Latottr's Gctia - Not down to Ectrtb?
93
a geolog ical force, just like plate tec tonics . The move by natural scientists
to recognise that humans may cons titute a force powerful enough to
shape earth, conceptually challenges the modernist dream in which humans
were to control nature but at the same time nature was supposed to be
unconcerned about humans, i.e. not fundamentally reconfigured by humans.
Latour (2011) proposes that recent environmental discourse can be aptly
conceptualised throug h the notion of Gaia. Earth has become a closed
place, an ecologised cosmos. Whereas earth was a universal place, Gaia
is local and thin; Gaia designates an entity which is reactive while nature
was stable and indifferent to humans; and while environmental problems
had been accepted as happening on earth (the planet was not under
threat , it would survive) , Gaia emerged as a fragile being. He refers to
the International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) as trying to measure
Gaia's fragility; and in 2010 he laments that at the Copenhagen Climate
Change Summit (in 2009) actors 'sit on their hands for days doing nothing'
instead of averting the 'revenge of Gaia' (latour 2010, 4 7 3). Subsequently,
he challenges the identity of earth-dwelling humans and proposes: let us
call Terriam all those who enact a sustainable footprint, i.e. live in a way
which utilises not more than one earth. With this argument Latour leads us
directly to the m easurement of 'carrying capacities', hegemonic in ecological
modernisation politics (Hajer 1995, 26-29). Latour is disconcerted by
the thought, which he references to Lovelock, that only two of seven
humans would survive Gaia given the hegemonic trajectory of humannature relationships. The moral imperative implicit to his argument is that
'we ' should act in a manner that will give greater leeway to survival. H e
talks of a war that 'we' have to fight- within ourselves, between the human
and the Terrian side (which, he proposes, are part of each of 'us '). He wants
us to develop better, sustainable, ways of cohabitation between humans
and non-humans (2010): experimenting together in a civilised manner
to bring about Gaia (2004a). I must admit, I inserted the universal 'we '
myself for reasons of grammar; Latour did not point at all to different
interest groups or societal conflicts between competing sides in struggles
over environmental goods or bads (Beck 1996).
This discussion leads us to a point at which it seems urgent to fight for
a more sustainable way of conducting life. If we follow this interpretation
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we are in great company - in the heart of the hegemonic discourse of
sustainable development, win-win situations, the global green New Deal,
emissions trading and green consumer lifestyles. The talk of Gaia and
Terrians resonates with discourses that stress the responsibility and agency
of the individual to fight their non-sustainable behaviour. This is a take that
fits perfectly to the program of ecological modernisation. Latour is not
calling for grand revolutions or changes of state policy, but proposes that
'we ' understand that we are actually engaging with Gaia, that we should
abandon the modernist dreams. This raises the question of whether the
individualist take is not in itself quite modernist. At least for Huber
(2008) it seems self-evident that individual humans and organisations can
manage to reduce their ecological footprint and, in consequence, create a
green modern society. While other proponents of ecological modernisation
(theory) like Mol (20 10) would disagree with the reduction of ecological
modernisation to individualist strategies, Latour (2011) is definitively
proposing a combination of analysis (environmental problems are now
global and threaten a large proportion of humans) and strategy (individual
action is needed), which are discursively well compatible with the politics
of sustainable development. The latter, however, has been shown to stick
to modernist resource management, serving capitalist industrialism (Dingler
2003; Eblinghaus & Stickler 1996). While Marxist takes point to the
threat that environmental conflict could easily be resolved not through
the option of socialism but through fascism (Skirbekk 1996, 129-130)
and while, e.g., anarchist practice resulted in the transformation of
unsustainable infrastructure projects into mass conflicts (Wall 1999),
the insight has emerged in environmental sociology and political science
that so-called sustainable development is indeed mostly furthering
unsustainability (Bltihdorn and Welsh 2007; Wilson & Bryant 1997).
Thus, Bltihdorn and Welsh call for studies of how this hegemonic kind
of environmental conduct is sustained. Latour's contribution to STS is
great; but his approach to Gaia seems not to be down to earth. The talk
of Gaia comes with the risk of missing out the patterned differences
and conflicts in material and semiotic struggles over the ways environments are enacted. I identify a gap between this talk and the required
analyses of such material-semiotic struggles. Hence, here I attempt con-
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tributing towards closing this gap- by way of turning to environmental
management as practice.
I argue that STS is well equipped to study a key approach suspected of
reproducing the (un)sustainability of human-nature relationships, namely
the management of environments. For this argument I retrace the rationality of the said approach through STS studies of human-nature interaction and environmental problems. By that I reconceptualise the engagements revolving around the concept and practices of environmental management. This allows for this claim: environmental management should be
considered as a form of onto-epistemic performative practice.
Tracing environmental management
The concept of environmental management refers to directed endeavours
by humans to influence, shape or control selected elements of the environment, that is, of the world external to the manager (for a discussion of
definitions cf. Lippert 2010b, Sections 5.2-5.3). Literature within the
academic field of environmental management mostly analyses 'nature' or
tools and instruments to intervene in 'nature'. As a critique, Bryant and
Wilson (1998) propose that social scientific takes should be utilised to
understand how the environment is managed or how 'actors seek to manage the environment' (338). Albeit they demand no less than a complete
'paradigm shift ' (Kuhn 1970) within the field of environmental management, they firmly reproduce the neat separation between social and natural
sciences, imagining environmental management as an interdisciplinary
field (cf. Bryant & Wilson 1998, 331: Figure 1). STS seems to have much
to offer in this respect: in laboratory studies (Doing 2008) and in studies
of applied ecology and other field sciences (e.g. Waterton 2002, Wynne
1996), STS scholars scrutinised the production of facts of nature and interventions therein, finding that natural science and facts are profoundly
social and that the social is also profoundly material and technical. I take
this literature to suggest that environmental management studies would
better recognise the ultimately hybrid character of the objects deemed to
be managed as well as their managers and their instruments.
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In an edited volume by Picketing and Guzik (2008), A splen (2008)
claims to provide us with the account which we are looking for: her paper
takes the vantage point that studying the work and practices of environmental managers would provide 'a potent space for mapping the interrelationships and mutually constitutive interplay between "agents" on
both sides of the traditional divide between nature and culture' ( 163 ).
Subsequently she presents the reader with amazing claims: environmental
managers and their approaches emerge as 'mangle-ish', i.e. 'they reflect an
explicit recognition and sensitivity to[ ...} posthumanist perspectives[ ... }
through a fundamentally decentered and open-ended approach to environmental management practice' (166). This would indeed be great news: the
picture she draws differs utterly from the criticisms so aptly summarised
by e.g. Bryant and Wilson (1998); if environmental managers in their
engagement with realities recognise the implicatedness of humans in the
objects which they presumably manage, we might expect less environmental management imagining and seeking to dominate nature (to extract
resources for capitalist purposes). She portrays managers as being openminded with respect to the outcome of their engagement with environments.
If this was the case, these human agents would be willing to abandon the
exercise of managing earth, as in geo-engineering, nuclear energy production or emissions trading. Unfortunately, her empirical evidence seems
to fail in substantiating her claims for a straightforward reason: she enrols
the support of environmental managers' narratives for her optimistic
account. She optimistically reproduces these practitioners' retrospective
narratives about their work. This approach to analysis fails to engage with
actual environmental management practice.
For a more substantial account, it seems necessary to engage with
studies of the instruments of environmental management and the practices
by which they are exercised upon presumably external realities. To do this
we need to turn physically to study the actors and their instruments in
their every-day situations (Lippert 2010a). A first point we have to
recognise is that limits to managing the environment exist (Lippert 2011d).
In many ways any management of environments is situated in particular
local, material , historical, discursive and practical circumstances ; and,
further, the conceptions and imaginaries of the manager her- or himself
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are always adapted to these circumstances - which can be considered
both enabling as well as constraining (Lippert 2011a). A nd these limits,
I propose, cannot simply be integrated and levelled out within environmental management practices but position the latter as precarious as well
as politically and ethically problematic.
Nevertheless, environmental management is largely staged as omnipotent, performing various god tricks (Haraway 1988), not only in representing environments but also in governing them. To provide evidence
for this interpretation, I sketch the field of recent STS accounts of environmental management practices, their agents and their artefacts (for an
underlying review of this literature, see Lippert 2011a).
Representing environments ...
. . . is key for the management approach to sustainability. Its assumption
is that evidence of what is happening on earth ought to be, as well as
would be, used as the base for decision-making.
Evidence, however, is a tricky concept . Discursively, what counts as
evidence may be heavily contested. A s no universal all-encompassing world
model can exist- and what would be its use(?), it would be too complex
to be manageable - any representation constitutes a translation from
some reality into another, whereas the very point is that the information
differs after its translation (Latour 2005). Law (2009 , 144) calls this
quality 'betrayal'. No method seems to exist which would not imply such
differences. Representation is thus inherently limited . The question is
what kind of limits affect actors (Lippert 2011a) - a question which
should not be too easily reduced to the question of which externalities
(Coase 1960), or overflows (Callon 1998), are built into management
approaches . In the discourse of global climate management, for instance,
Ninan (20 11 b) identifies that management instruments such as the Clean
Development Mechanism are modelled on the assumption that gradual
changes that improve industrial practices will suffice to fight global
warming. Representing environments in the climate change discourse
has become an issue of economically internalising environmental goods
and bads. This constitutes a stark epistemic reduction . This kind of re-
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ductionism in representing environments is not limited to climate change
but is being applied to all kinds of environmental entities, including
ecosystem services (Sullivan 201 0) - whereas the latter have been conceptualised precisely to allow them to be processed by this economic
reductionism.
Scientific representations are, of course, supposedly clearly traceable back
to the original raw data (Latour 1987). Thus, the following claim is widespread: even if representations are actually only narrowly representing
some environmental entity, if agents wanted, in principle they should be
able to get back to the original data to study the entity again, i.e. reveal
it more fully. However, as Waterton (2002) shows in her study on the
practices of putting the UK National Vegetation Classification (NVC)
and the EU CORINE Biotopes Classification into practice, reversibility
of the environmental facts produced in ecology is not necessarily given.
Similarly, in climate change modelling and accounting , fact production
cannot necessarily be traced back to some antecedent nature because
their data is not independently given bur materially-socially constructed
(Edwards 2010, Lippert 2013). This can be explained through the practices
of myriad translations and processes of formatting environmental data.
No unmediated relation exists between knower and known. Haraway
0988) convincingly made the point that not only are knowers socially
and historically positioned, but also they are biologically positioned.
Consider for a moment the fact that the human eye is restricted in its
perception to certain wavelengths. And no prosthetic technology will ever
allow the human eye to see everything . At each step of translation data
is thus reprocessed, flowing from one form into another - with corresponding overflows. Let alone the point that agents who are to represent
an entity always have to interpret how exactly this representation should
be performed; even if they act totally in agreement with the discursive
reduction of the entity, they are normally concerned not only with the
process of representation but also with practical issues, like getting the
work done, as Lippert (2012) shows for the case of corporate carbon
accounting . This may easily require getting the presumably internalising
documents into an order that also si lences (i.e. externalises, Strathern
2005) precisely in order to foreground particular realities- always with
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99
an imagined audience in mind (Garfinkel 1967, Chapter 6). Internalisation enacts at the same time betrayal of the environmental entity.
Whether representations of environments can actually constitute an
appropriate base for decision-making can often not be answered for all of the
affected actors in the same way. Strauss (20 11) provides a detailed account
of the implications of visualisation techniques used in environmental
management and landscape planning . She shows that while some form of
landscape impact representation might be useful for corporations requesting a planning permission, citizens would require different perspectives
to have a base for informed decision-making. In her study she shows that
the bird's eye view of a planned nuclear power plant in Finland does not
easily allow the affected publics to envision the visual effect of the plant
from the human eye perspective at ground level. To improve participation
in environmental management, a number of organisations have to some
extent started to integrate affected actors in the construction of the
organisation's knowledge about its environment. Lippert (2011c) reconstructs how a corresponding corporate suggestion scheme (a participative
instrument) utilised for energy knowledge management worked in practice.
Environmental experts m ay be positioned, he shows, to select in and out
certain types of knowledge of the environmental situation within or around
the organisation. Martello (2008) exemplifies this problem in a study of
representations of climate change in the Arctic. While she points to the
emancipatory potential of representations and new forms of knowledge,
she also shows how for example male knowledges are privileged in representations of the effects of environmental change .
This discussion clearly indicates that no form of representing environmental entities is impartial or universal. For environmental management
this implies that its knowledge base renders any activity inherently political.
'Governing at a distance' ...
... is a concept based upon the work by Latour (1987) to denote processes
by which actors persuade others to organise their practices in line with
the policies of the former. For environmental management, the ability to
achieve effective action at a distance is a significant presupposition.
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A well-known and widely accepted concept is to refer to this issue as
'policy implementation' . Environmental management policies conceived
at the top of an environmental bureaucracy need to be implemented at
ground level to come into effec t. The typical environmental management approach can be reduced to top-down didactics: policies are
designed as scripts which need to be correctly interpreted as plans and put
into practice. However, as Suchman (2007) suggests, devising plans and
policies follows an utterly different logic compared to situated practicefor practical action takes place in particular locations and under particular
circumstances. Any plan for an environmental management intervention
has to be translated into the situation, requiring the alignment of heterogeneous entities, including humans, technologies and natures, as Akerman,
Kaljonen, and Peltola (2005) point out with respect to the implementation
of agri-environmental and energy policies. Despite efforts for effective
translation, some of these entities might resist: Krause (2011) indicates
how a river, presumably managed, does not fit the engineers' dynamic
models . Managers are, and this may be Asplen's point, aware of the fact
that natures do not necessarily fit into their plans. Thus, managers can
be conceptualised as heterogeneous engineers (law 1987), trying to align all
the entities relevant to achieve a successful management action.
When engaging with management success, we immediately encounter
the fact that success depends entirely on the performance of complying
with a given norm, such as a standard. Suchman (2000), studying civil
engineers building a bridge, addresses the production of an Environmental
Impact Statement (EIS). This kind of environmental management docmnent
constitutes not merely a document representing facts, but is also used as
a technology for ordering various publics and the bridge-building process
simultaneously. To allow the bridge construction process to move ahead,
citizens need to be enrolled. Thus, environmental management in this case
needs lay actors to agree with a construction choice. This need is legally
and practically stipulated: existing official norms stipulate participation
in all kinds of environmental projects. Also, in order to prevent conflict,
environmental managers need to persuade powerful affected actors to
accept the intervention decision . Environmental management thus needs
to effectively govern these actors in order to ensure that the management
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plan can be pursued . Note that successful management, therefore, is not
related intrinsically to environmental ethics or the like. Rather, what norms
managers use to perform their competence is an empirical question . In a
study of the practice of pollution regulation in Norway, Asdal (20 11)
finds that while state environmental management may be able to ensure
consensual pollution accounting (referring to accounting standards), this
does not necessarily imply that environmental managers manage to force
industry to reduce its emissions (referring to ecological norms) .
This raises the question of what is actually governed at a distance and
by whom . Asdal's study problematises the assumption that state environmental officers are able to manage the emissions of a factory. In theory the
public office is supposed to govern the factory's polluting practices from
a distance. In order to do this they have agreed that the corporation introduces emissions accounting. While the state environmental managers
fail to effectively govern the factory 's environmental conduct, however,
the business actors are able to take the initiative and govern within the
public environmental management office, ensuring that no pollution limits
are defined or enforced which would threaten business-as-usual. Such a
pattern of parallel directions of (non-)effective governance within environmental management is paralleled by this case on waste management:
Lippert (2010, 2011e) shows how a recycling arrangement is able to govern
the processing of waste, while the environmental manager is governed by
the convention that the waste's existence in itself cannot be questioned .
In effect, environmental management interventions may thus result in
naturalisations of environmentally detrimental assemblages .
Environmental management is thus facing three dimensions of governance problems: all kinds of social, material and discursive elements need
to be aligned to affect a workable solution . However, competing norms
exist which could be employed to measure the success of governing these
elements. Finally, we find that while environmental management interventions can be staged as successful , the networks causing environmental
crises may be sustained .
This section revisited two key assumptions of environmental management - that accurate representations of environments are possible and that,
based upon these representations, management can intervene in and govern
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environments. STS studies on environmental management in practice
can well be translated in emphasising the limits built into management
approaches. Albeit environmental management normally performs the god
tricks of a) unlimited vision for all practical purposes and b) possessing
suitable power over the entities to be managed, the discussion showed
that all representations and practices aimed at governing are ultimately
limited by the particular way they are situated in practice. However,
pointing to such limits does not make explicit an alternative conceprualisation of environmental management, as Ninan (2011a) comments.
On this note let us turn to the STS contributions that are suitable to
reconceprualise the practice we are concerned with.
Conclusion: Reconceptualising the enactment of
environmental management
Having recognised that the practices of environmental management are
highly precarious and not able to pay justice to the god tricks staged, it
seems apt to reconceptualise environmental management: not in terms
of the degree of actual control of so-called nature but in terms of the ways
it is played out in relation to other entities, including but not limited to
'natural' entities, social collaborators, accomplices or audiences together
with, or vis-a-vis whom, management of environments is performed . To
finalise this argument, I need to make two points. First, I show that the
entities presumably being managed are constituted in practices, rather
than existing independently of and antecedent to the manager. For this
I borrow Mol's (2002) concept of enactment: the entities are enacted into
the management's reality. Second, I conceptualise these enactments as a
form of performance that plays a role in the wider political management
of the political and ecological economy.
I consider the existence of entities like a bridge, a mouse, a tree, a
factory or carbon dioxide emissions to be environmental(ly relevant) entities.
And I assume these to be entities that can be easily imagined as objects
to be subject to environmental managers. If we can show that these entities
are not simply pre-existing, waiting for environmental management practice,
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but have to be somehow brought into existence, we can speak of environmental management as enacting entities into reality.
Suchman (2000) shows how in the process of constructing a bridge
all kinds of elements needed to be constituted. For construction management, she reports, it was important to represent human interests as well
as how different bridge construction options would affect entities like a
mouse or certain wetland species. In public hearings some of these entities
had to be presented to citizens in order to position them to make informed decisions (a premise which we have problematised above). Experts
were assembled in the public hearing to construct and provide views of
spatially and temporally distant realities for citizens . The environmental
entities could not simply be carried in from outside the meeting hall,
but were translated into inscription devices that could be shown to the
audience. The hearing situation required that the environmental experts
study the reality out there beforehand, represent it and bring it to the
hall where the hearing was held. Thus, we can easily identify here a spatial
and past-to-present temporal displacement. The environmental entities
present in the hall have certainly changed in the process of these displacements. (In saying this, I do not, however, claim that the scientific
and management practices could do without such a displacement.) For
the environmental managers in the hall, exactly as in a state environmental office (Asdal 2011) or a corporate headquarters (Lippert 2012),
an environmental entity is not taking the form it has in the imagined
'out there'. The environmental entity is instead heavily reformatted in
the process of getting it from the field onto the manager's table (see also
Latour 1999). Asdal (2008) shows how 'nature as manageable ' came only
into existence through environmental accounting; what we need to expect are practices of enacting environments (Lippert 2013). Political institutions have been constructing nature as a governable space in reaction
to the spreading perception of environmental crises . The specific way
this so-called 'nature' is deemed manageable is premised upon the transformation of field findings into a limited set of quantifiers and qualifiers.
The object under management, hence, needs to be conceptualised as
being brought into and made present in the manager's reality through
specific practices.
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It is not at all the case, however, that environmental entities once
cons tructed into m anagement reality simply stay present and in shape.
Much rather, Suchman (2000) argues , continuous efforts are necessary to
m aintain particular characteris tics of environmental 'entities as m anageable'. She points to the role of persuasion required ro organise affected
humans into supportive relations to a long-rime environmental intervention - fo r example building a bridge. The construction rakes form over
a period of several years during which humans continuously have ro be
alig ned to the bridge idea, its materialisation and, thereafter, maintenance.
Krause (2010), showing that a river is nor a stable environmental en tity
that would allow a once-and-for-all m anagem ent technology, stresses
manifold rhythms throug h which interaction revolving around the river is
shaped . River management has to take a form that is as in flow as the river's
engagement with life on and around it. Even abstract and m athematically
clearly defined entities like carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of a corporation are constantly in flux: Lipperr (201lb) traces how emission data is
stored and processed within a corporate headquarters' database and distributed cognition technology. Carbon emissions emerge as environmental
entities that are subj ect to on-going computational engineering and
changing accounting practices.
This discussion es tablishes the practical nature of environm en tal
entities. What they are, how m any they are, how they exist and undergo
change - all this is subject to transformations. M anaging them can only
partially control or direct these transformations. The degree of control,
however, is nor necessarily self-evident. It is an empirical question ro
determine how (rather than whether or nor) management actually affects
enti ties and to reconstruct the normative and political dimensions of
how entities are m anaged. For all kinds of entities, the attempt to control
them and rendering entities subject to management is of existential
importance. Lipperr (2013, Ch. 4), for example, traces how enrolling
g lobal environmental accounting standards and auditors as well as an
independent NGO can help a company to increase its discretion - rather
than being subjected to more social control over its envi ronmental
impacts. The politics of environmental management continue as long as
management practices shape environmental entities . In the efforts to
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105
control the latter, management is constantly enacting boundaries to how
these entities exist. Therefore Ninan (2011a) proposes to conceptualise
environmen tal management as a technique of setting boundaries .
Such boundary setting practices of environmental m anagers can be
well conceptualised by engaging with the heterogeneous assemblies which
form entities. Larour (2004b) proposes that community assemblies - once
called things - can be considered as parr of shapi ng thi ngs . Following
this move, we find that things shaped nor only small material items bur
also norms or laws governing the issue of how to engage with land . Land
was being shaped by things, resulting in the notion of land -scape (Olwig
2005). The assembly, rhus, can also be understood as forming environments . Olwig (2010) argues that boundaries can be set within landscap es,
enclosing commons and shaping areas for specific uses. Thus, landscapes
may also be performed - as in staged - for audiences: a landscape can
perform a government as the centre of a society (Olwig 2011). By performing environments, therefore, also the leg itimisation of pol itical and
ecological economies can be performed. Environmental science and management practices can in this way be considered to constitute apparatuses
through which nor only know ledges of environments are constructed bur
through which also the on tic and , therefore, proper status of environments
is enacted (Barad 2003). Examples for this are: a) the enactment of wolves
as parr of a landscape scenery (Skogen, Mauz & Krange 2008); b) wind
turbines which p erform nor only a vision of sustainabiliry within the landscape bur also a g reen polity (Drackle & Krauss 2011); c) the formation
of agricultural nature by farmers who resist governmental governance
techniques bur provide governments access to alternative natures in order
to stage the implementation of policies (Kaljonen 2006); or d) the onticepisremic reconstitution of entities like water bodies as ecosystem services
-in practices of m essy and simultaneous (re)qualificarions and (re)quantificarions (Verran 20 11). Larour's (20 10, 2011) call for experimentation
partially misses the point; modems are in the midst of pracricing new
assemblages of humans and non-humans, of cohabitation- and all of this
to presumably bring about 'susrainabiliry '. The talk of Gaia seems to
miss out the careful engagement with the dominant practices that attempt
to integrate natures (irrespective of whether they 'succeed') and in this
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106
process reconfigure, redo and transform nature, environments - both
epistemically and ontically. Indeed, Latour seems to miss that Gaia itself
is the artefact of a historical se tting that approaches nature, earth and the
human in peculiar ways - Lovelock developed Gaia in the midst of his
engagements with NASA and the fossil fuel giant Shell (Haraway 1995 ,
xii). With Haraway, Gaia reemerges prefigured as a cyborg engagement
with reality. Gaia is a matter of power, conflict, friction, a matter between
fact and fiction, mutating and never still (ibid., xix).
In this messy and continuously transforming reality (Law 2004), the
practices of managers should not be conceptualised as control instances,
but as improvisations in which the weaving together of heterogeneous
entities creates environments (Ingold 201 0). Studying environmental
management needs to engage with the flow of and around so-called
'management ' practices. STS seems well positioned for taking such a
down to earth approach: our take can contribute to the solution of the
anthropocene's problems by reconstructing what onto-epistemic practices
are enacting environments and their subjection to management.
107
Akerman, M., M. Kaljonen , and T. Pelrola (2005), 'Integrating environmental policies
into local practices: The policies of agri-environmental and energy policies in
rural Finland', Local Environment 10 (6): 595-611.
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matter comes to matter', Sigm: journal of Yflomen in Culture and Society 28 (3):
801-831.
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Wynne (1996), Chapter 1, 27-43.
Bluhdorn, I. and I. Welsh (2007), 'Eco-politics beyond the paradigm of sustainability:
A conceptual framework and research agenda', Environmental Politics 16 (2): 185205.
Bryant, R . and G . Wilson (1998), 'Rethinking environmental management' , Progress
in Human Geography 22(3): 321-343 .
Buttel, F. (2000), 'Ecological modernization as social theory', Geoforttm 31: 57-65.
Callon, M. (1998), 'An essay on framing and overflowing: economic externalities revisited by sociology', In Call on, M. (Ed.), The laws of the markets, 244-269. Oxford, Maiden: Blackwell.
Coase, R. (1960), 'The problem of social cost' ,Journal of law and economics 3: 1-44.
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Note
Academic knowledge is not produced by individuals bttt in networks and co1mmmities. This
paper draws heavily on debates with members of the Environment, iHanagement
and Society Research G·roup. Work on this paper has been supported by a grant by
the Hans-Biickler Foundation. I am grateful to Amrei Aigner for her comments
and to two anonymous reviewers.
290 (5490), 299-304.
Dingier, J. (2003), Postmoderne ttnd Nachbaltigkeit. Eine diskttrstheoretische Analyse der
sozialen Konstntktion von nachhaltiger Entwicklttng, Volume 7 ofHochschulschriften
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Technik- und Wissenschaftsforschung
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