Climate changed

When Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson join forces with Al Gore and Chevrolet in the fight to save the earth, you’ve got to wonder what is going on. We are all environmentalists now, as celebrities and business leaders jostle to establish their green credentials. For those who’ve been campaigning to put climate change onto the public and political agenda for the past 30 years, the dramatic mainstreaming of the issue in the past 12 months has been a long awaited and hard fought success. But, with this success comes a number of challenges.

First and foremost is how to translate widespread concern into real political action. As yet, there hasn’t been much positive correlation between public and media interest in the issue, and actual policy change. Neither of Australia’s major political parties have policies to cut greenhouse pollution at anywhere near the rate required, and the chasm between rhetoric and policy reality continues to widen.

The climate change debate can be confusing at the best of times, and it has become even more so with the arrival of a plethora of new commentators. This raises another key question over the role of activists and NGO’s who, in some cases, are finding themselves increasingly squeezed out of a crowded media and ideas marketplace.

This article aims to explore these questions, as well as other tensions in the environmental movement as it once again goes through a resurgence – of sorts. It is a useful time to reflect on the lessons of the past 30 years and to look forward to the future.

The death of environmentalism?

In many ways, climate change is the mother of all environmental problems. It is likely to exacerbate many existing local and regional environmental impacts and threatens the health of the global ecosystem. For this reason, it is now the focus of much of the attention and effort of environmentalists the world over. And if the impacts are myriad and complex, so too are the causes. While burning coal and oil are the obvious culprits, their use is so widespread and ubiquitous in our economy that nothing short of an energy revolution is required to wean us off the addiction.

In 2004, a group of major environmental funders commissioned a strategic think-piece to analyze why the environment movement was ‘failing’ to win the climate change campaign. Written by two US based consultants Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “The Death of Environmentalism” provoked considerable debate within green NGO’s globally. One of the key observations of the paper was that climate change isn’t actually an environmental issue as such, and that the green movement’s continued ‘ownership’ of the issue was limiting the potential for other sectors to effectively engage. Climate change can be seen as a health issue, a social justice issue, an economic issue, a geopolitical strategic issue, and a basic issue of survival – none of which require an environmental worldview. The paper argued that for climate change to become mainstream, it would need to be actively engaged by these other interest groups to lift it out of the ‘green ghetto’. The implication being that the environmental movement had to either reframe the issue or get out of the road.

Since that time, the climate change debate has been well and truly reframed and has been actively engaged by everyone from the Pope to the Pentagon. The insurance industry were early business movers and have now been joined by a host of businesses that see financial opportunities in climate action, or financial risks from inaction. The economic case was most convincingly put by Sir Nicholas Stern in his 2006 report to the UK Government in which he argued that the economic cost of doing nothing would far exceed the cost of taking preventative measures to cut greenhouse pollution. The Pentagon issued a report in late 2005 that identified climate change as a major risk to US security interests and global geopolitical stability. Elements of the religious right in the US have begun calling for renewable energy, and development agencies are pushing for climate refugees to be considered under the UN refugee convention.

The issue that was for so long the domain of environmentalists is now mainstream, and has many new champions, including an unlikely white knight in the form of Al Gore. His film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ arrived at exactly the right time to act as a tipping point in public consciousness. But while most of the public now understands the seriousness of the issue, this concern is yet to translate into substantive action. Greenhouse emissions continue to soar. Australia is massively expanding its export coal industry and there are a plethora of proposed new coal fired power stations on the drawing boards. Both the Coalition and ALP went to the November 24 election with policies that would see a massive increase in greenhouse emissions over the next decade.

The era of false solutions – divide and conquer

While powerholders can no longer ignore the issue, they can certainly delay action through obfuscation and false solutions. And surprisingly, nearly all of the distractions and false solutions proposed by government or industry have been embraced by parts of the environmental movement.

The Nuclear industry has used the urgent threat of climate change as a platform to stage an attempted renaissance and they’ve received support from some surprising quarters. James Lovelock, renowned author of the Gaia hypothesis, has argued that nuclear waste, while not ideal, is a lesser risk to the planet than runaway global warming. It isn’t a practical argument given that even a massive adoption nuclear power would not have any significant impact on cutting greenhouse emissions within the required timeframe. Bizarrely, the argument seems to be based on a distortion of the same precautionary principle that has underpinned the environmental movement’s opposition to nuclear power and other risky technologies for the past fifty years. The issue of nuclear waste is as unresolved as ever, as is the question of where to put the reactors.

Howard started talking up nuclear power as a surefire way of creating division within the ALP but went silent on the issue in the run up to the election when it became clear that most Australians don’t want a reactor in their backyard. Nonetheless, he successfully created confusion and division over climate change solutions.

The other big technological red herring is so called ‘clean coal’. It’s a clever marketing device because it doesn’t really have a definition, doesn’t exist and is therefore difficult to critique in any real sense. If the various technologies proposed for carbon capture and storage (CCS) actually work, they will come online far too late to make the cuts that are required within the next decade. And it’s a very big if.

The thing that both nuclear power and so-called ‘clean coal’ have in common is that they are both technological solutions that employ the same 1950’s style, centralised, linear thinking that has got us into the problem in the first place. Dig it up, burn it, bury the waste and shift the problem to future generations. The flipside of this paradigm is the continued failure to understand and embrace renewable energy. How can an inherently decentralized technology that doesn’t directly involve mining or the creation of waste possibly work? Facts and the experiences from other countries are conveniently ignored to fit the story.

Voluntary action?

Another red herring, and one which much of the environment movement has embraced with enthusiasm, is the call for voluntary action. Take the case of incandescent light bulbs. On one hand, you can run expensive, time consuming education campaigns to encourage the uptake of more efficient light bulbs through voluntary, market based mechanisms. On the other hand, you can just ban inefficient bulbs. Much of the mainstream environmental movement did the former, while Malcolm Turnbull, a wealthy Liberal MP and a free-market ideologue, did the latter. Strange times indeed. It paints a disturbing picture of the politics and strategic approach of much of the mainstream environmental movement.

Encouraging people to take personal, voluntary action is great at one level, but it is no where near sufficient to bring about any where near the changes required within an ever closing time frame. And it brings the risk of de-politicising the issue by shifting focus onto individual consumers rather than powerholders. Of course, there is the argument that once people have their own backyard in order they’ll be a lot more willing to call for others to change. And voluntary, lifestyle action can often be an important stepping-stone along a journey of political development, but it’s a very roundabout way of trying to get change – particularly if you’re in a hurry and the stakes are this high. When we wanted to stop asbestos being used we just banned it – we didn’t ask people to voluntary seek alternatives while continuing to subsidise asbestos producers. It’s far simpler and far more effective to simply ban new coal fired power stations or put a tax on carbon than it is to convince 10 Million households to voluntarily buy green power.

The split between lifestyle activism and political activism has divided the environmental movement since the 1970’s, and has often been expressed as ongoing, low level sniping between the ‘back to the land’ permaculturalists vs city based activists. While the context is different, the debate is just as fruitless now as it ever was. It is admirable and important for people to ‘be the change you want to see in the world’, and we do need inspiring examples of how to live in harmony with the earth, but we’re also running out of time. It is clear that in order to really cut greenhouse pollution we need to make the big polluters pay for their environmental impact. We need a legally binding emission reduction target, we need to start phasing out the coal industry, and we need targets and massive incentives for renewable energy. These are political solutions that require political action.

From rhetoric to revolution - how does change happen?

In his analysis of contemporary social movements, Bill Moyer identified a series of phases that movements go though which he articulated in his ‘Movement Action Plan’ (MAP). What Moyer found is that a situation of ‘business as usual’ is followed by what he described as ‘ripening conditions’, where the problem becomes increasingly obvious and official channels for resolving the problem fail. Some kind of ‘trigger event’ will then catapult the issue into the mainstream of public consciousness. However, while public understanding of the problem increases, public opposition to powerholder’s policies lags somewhat and this often results in a sense of ‘activist failure’, where it seems as though things should be changing a whole lot faster than they are. If you look back on the civil rights movement, anti-war movements and so on, this pattern can be seen clearly.

So according to this one map of how social movements progress, we’ve been here before. We’ve had some major trigger events and it’ll just take some time (and a lot of hard work) for people’s opposition to powerholder’s policies and for support for movement alternatives to catch up with the level of awareness and concern on the issue. The problem is that we don’t have time to wait.

The high stakes political game that is being played by those in power is to try to delay serious action on climate change for at least another five or so years – just long enough to enable the next generation of coal fired power stations and coal mines to be built in order to lock in the next 30 years of profits. From the other side, it is to ensure the transition to clean, renewable energy starts now so that we can make significant cuts in greenhouse pollution within the next 10 years – which is what the science tells us is required if we’re to avoid catastrophic, irreversible global warming.

Raising social costs

The issue clearly isn’t about winning the arguments and rational debate. It’s about power, and about overcoming the massive, vested interests of the fossil fuel and dependant industries. One of the clearest articulations of change making that I’ve seen is in Michael Albert’s book “The Trajectory of Change” in which he describes the ‘logic of dissent’. He writes: Short term we raise social costs until elites agree to implement our demands or end policies we oppose. Longer term we accumulate support and develop movement infrastructure and alternative institutions while working towards transforming society's defining relations.

In trying to figure out how to get change on any issue you need to ask a couple of simple questions. Who can give you what you want? What do they care about (what motivates them)? How do we get them to give us what we want? Or in Albert’s terms, how do we raise social costs?

As a general rule, the main thing that politicians care about is getting elected. The main thing that corporations care about is making money – it is essentially their reason for existence.

When Bob Hawke announced that he would stop the construction of the dam on the Franklin River, he made a calculation that it would help him win the election. Sure, there were moral arguments, and he probably liked the idea of doing the right thing, but ultimately it was a calculated political decision. He found a legal justification for the intervention and the rest is history. Anyone who has been involved in winning a campaign knows that this is how the business is done. It’s about power. Winning on climate change will be no different. Politicians will enact laws to radically cut greenhouse pollution when the political costs of them not doing so are higher than the costs of maintaining the status quo.

In 2003, over half a million people took to the streets in protest against the proposed invasion of Iraq. Howard surveyed the political landscape (no doubt with the aid of a lot of polling and focus groups) and he stared the movement down. In the equation of political cost vs benefit, the movement wasn’t powerful enough and, as a consequence, we went to war. Howard’s ability to ignore the biggest movement in recent history was partly dependant on the lack of any clear political opposition from the ALP, but also on other cultural factors. Howard knew that once we went to war, Australians would rally behind the diggers. Greenpeace got crucified in the media for protesting the departure of the HMAS Sydney because it was seen as an attack on the troops.

The challenge for the leadership of the peace movement was to figure out how to escalate the social and political costs associated with the war, whereas once the war started, the movement radically de-escalated. Similar challenges of escalation face the movement for climate action.

Polarising the issue

In the lead up to the 2007 election we had the vast majority of Australians in support of serious action on climate change and the issue was high on the political agenda. Both major political parties were responding to the issue, but doing it in a way that largely involved re-arranging deckchairs on the titanic of our fossil fuel dependent economy. A small handout here, a token gesture there.

One of the things that has changed significantly in recent years is the advent of poll driven politics in Australia. Where, politicians used to rely on their gut feel, now they increasingly rely on endless focus groups and polls to understand the nuances of the electorate. They know that people are concerned about climate change, but they also know that people are confused about what to do about it and it is difficult for punters to tell the difference between spin and substance. A 30% reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2020? What does that really mean to the average person? What was that percentage again? And how on earth do you accurately measure greenhouse emissions anyhow? Even the environment movement is divided on the solutions and has many competing policy positions and demands which just become a swirling mess of gobbledygook when you start adding things like carbon trading into the mix.

If you look back at every successful environmental campaign of the past 30 years, the demands were clear, simple and compelling. It is impossible to win public campaigns if the issues are grey and confused. There needs to be a problem and a solution, a good guy and a bad guy.

One of the limitations of Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, is that it fails to identify a target or even a coherent demand. It leaves the public feeling that we have a climate crisis that, inexplicably, is all of our fault, and that we all need to work together to solve it. So while the film was spectacularly successful at raising awareness and profile, it’s framing of the issue was profoundly unhelpful from a campaigning point of view.

How about this instead… We have a crisis that is caused by burning fossil fuels. We need to stop burning fossil fuels. This means no new coal or oil projects and rapid shift to renewable energy. The fossil fuel industry are the bad guys. The renewable energy industry are the good guys. We need to make burning more fossil fuels socially, politically and economically impossible.This means raising the costs (social, political and economic) for the fossil fuel industry and any politicians or financiers who support them - until we keep fossil carbon in the ground. End of story.

Instead we have endless policy analysis about carbon trading and incomprehensible market mechanisms. We have demands for something percent cuts in some immeasurable quantity of something that people really don’t understand by some far-flung future date that is really beyond our comprehension.

A sheep in wolf’s clothing?

So why isn’t the environmental movement cutting through with hard edged, clear campaigns that demand what is required? Three weeks out from the Federal Election, the industry group Environmental Business Australia (with members including Woolworths, BP and the Commonwealth Bank) released a climate change pledge calling on political parties to support a range of policy measures that were almost identical to the policy demands of the peak environment groups (ACF, Conservation Councils, Greenpeace etc).

This is no doubt partly due to the lowest common denominator consensus process that has plagued the environment movement for at least the last decade, but there are also other factors at play. After ten years of the Howard Government, many activist organizations are feeling beaten up around the edges. It feels as though our vision has been reduced. We’ve become more ‘realistic’ - too scared of being accused of extremism. The terms of allowable debate have been narrowed and we’ve found ourselves somehow complying – talking about things we never wanted to talk about, in ways that we never imagined. There is a fine line between ‘appealing to the mainstream’ and becoming so bland as to become irrelevant.

The environmental movement has always been a middle class movement in Australia, and has long suffered from being too nice, (nice, of course, is an acronym for Not Insightful or Critical Enough) but the climate change movement has taken things to an extreme. Invariably, NGO climate strategy meetings end up spending more time getting bogged down in some minutia about how a hypothetical carbon trading market might work than actually discussing campaigns that will have impact. And it is the assumptions of these discussions that are most disturbing – as though the global justice movement had never existed and market mechanisms are all we have left.

The carbon trading debate has so far been dominated by economists and policy wonks and has seen little public discussion of the big political issues surrounding what is essentially the privatisation of the atmosphere and the world’s carbon banks. In the European emissions trading scheme, the well accepted principle of ‘polluter pays’ was turned on it’s head, with the big polluters receiving billions in public handouts without actually having to cut emissions. We shouldn’t feel obliged to be nice about this. We should be angry. Not only is our planet being destroyed, but we’re paying the corporations who are doing it.

Re-imagining the movement

Over recent months there has been a subtle shift. The mild consensus is cracking. Questions are being asked. Some of the exciting vision, ideas and hope of the global justice movement have begun to appear, providing a tantalizing glimpse of what lies ahead. Recent direct actions by students against the coal industry in Victoria and NSW are an encouraging sign that the status quo is becoming unacceptable. Projects like ‘Cheat Neutral’ are emerging to ridicule false solutions and the words ‘climate change’ and ‘capitalism’ were even used in the same sentence at a recent Sydney rally.

I’m confident that social movements will rise to the challenge of climate change in the years to come, but it won’t be the movement of professional NGO’s that have dominated climate politics to date. Sure, they’ll still be part of the landscape and will have an important role to play, but the real people’s movement that will rise up to transform our society is still only barely discernable. It’s still just a sparkle in that student’s eye. It’s politics are still being scratched out on the back of beer mats in pubs all over the country. It’s tactics are being re-imagined – the bastard children of the Franklin, North East Forests, James Hardy and Jabiluka campaigns. The movement has reinvented itself before, and it will do so again, as the tide of public opinion turns once more.

Howard spins into hotter water

After ten years of being a climate sceptic, John Howard begrudgingly pronounced himself a climate change realist. But while the rhetoric has changed, Government policy hasn’t. Australia’s greenhouse pollution continues to soar as the renewables industry slowly but surely packs its bags and heads overseas. Meanwhile the coal industry continues to expand with the help of massive public subsidies.

With APEC over and the federal election looming, Howard is behind in the polls. With climate change still a hot button issue, he has a simple choice: He can either do something serious to tackle climate change and win voter confidence, or he can somehow try to take climate change off the political agenda. His trick will be to figure out how to appear to be doing the former, while actually doing the latter - and this is exactly what the Government’s $23 million climate change advertising campaign attempts to do.

Inviting individuals to ‘Be Climate Clever’, the ad urges Australians to take responsibility where the Government is not. The campaign is craftily designed to deflect attention away from the need for policy change. By embracing an increasingly concerned community, Howard is gambling that he can convince voters that they don’t need to worry about climate change; as long as they do their bit at home the Government will take care of the rest.

Without irony, the ad insists that “Together we can be Climate Clever.” It’s as if we each have equal responsibility: You, me, Mum, Cam and Pru next door, and the Howard Government - working shoulder to shoulder to solve the climate crisis. In a sense it is true. We all do need to be part of the solution. Most of us can reduce greenhouse emissions in our own homes. But in another sense, it is a sophisticated manipulation.

Howard knows that in order to really cut greenhouse pollution we need to make the big polluters pay for their environmental impact. We need a legislated emissions reduction target and we need targets and incentives for renewable energy. These are policy solutions that require political leadership. Deflecting the need for climate action back to individual households is a great ploy to delay the necessary action by at least another few years.

Don’t get me wrong, personal, voluntary action is great - but it is not sufficient. When we wanted to stop asbestos being used we just banned it – we didn’t ask people to voluntarily seek alternatives while continuing to subsidise asbestos producers. It’s far simpler to ban new coal fired power stations than it is to convince 20 million people to voluntarily buy green power. It’s easier and cheaper to simply legislate for high energy efficiency standards than it is to voluntarily change 50 million lightbulbs – one at a time. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter how many energy efficient lightbulbs you install if the Government continues to approve new coal fired power stations and coal mines. It doesn’t matter how good you are at turning off your computer if our Government continues to undermine global action on climate change and the Kyoto protocol.

While the Howard Government tries to distract us all with appeals for ‘aspirational’ targets, voluntary action, and the myth that coal can be clean, the reality is that we’re going to need more than words if we’re to avoid climate chaos.

The only really honest statement in the ad campaign is that “Climate change affects us all”. We are all in it together, and we can all be part of the solution, but the key role for individuals is to hold our Government accountable and force them to take real action. We need a legally binding target to reduce emissions by at least 30% by 2020. We need to stop building coal fired power stations and coal mines, and we need a massive investment in renewable energy. Anything else is not climate clever, it’s just more hot air.

Cheat Neutral

Having problems being faithful? Why not offset your infidelity by paying someone else to do the right thing? This very funny and biting project exposes the absurdity of carbon offsets.

Seeing through the APEC police state

It would seem that the battle lines are drawn. On one side are thousands of highly trained police with batons, tazers and a brand spanking new water canon. On the other side are the people of Sydney. Hang on a minute. Isn’t there something wrong here? In an era of anti-terrorist hype, it is all too easy for beefcake politics to trample over democracy and for the issues to be obscured by hyperbole and shows of police strength.

Quite simply, John Howard is trying to use the APEC summit to further undermine global action on climate change and the Kyoto Protocol. So of course people are going to protest. And so we should.

When the laws are unjust or are destroying our future, and when official channels continue to fail, people of conscience have a responsibility to act. We have a responsibility to take to the streets to hold our elected decision makers accountable. Whether it be your State MP that is supporting a new coal fired power station, your Federal MP who is refusing to support renewable energy, or our PM who is trying to wreck the international framework for greenhouse gas reductions.

Peaceful direct action and civil disobedience are a fundamental part of our democracy. The reason we have weekends is because of labour movement protests. Women have the vote because the Suffragettes took to the streets. The anti-slavery movement, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement all used civil disobedience to win fundamental freedoms that we now take for granted.

When your children ask you about climate change and about the future, can you honestly look them in the eye and tell them that it’ll be ok? And that you’re doing enough to protect their future?

Climate change is already resulting in more extreme weather events, displacing people from their homes, and is expected to cause massive problems of starvation, not to mention extinction. It’s time to move beyond the endless rhetoric and posturing of our political leaders. We need to massively cut greenhouse pollution and we need to start doing it now. Howard’s APEC agenda is basically to take us in the opposite direction by undermining the Kyoto process and pushing for non-binding, aspirational targets. In other words - more hot air and no action.

So amid the inevitable discussions about violence on the street, it’s important to remember the overwhelming moral imperative that is driving people to protest. And the serious violence that needs to be exposed is the violence on the people and the planet that will be unleashed if Howard succeeds in his attempt to use APEC to undermine Kyoto and climate change reaches tipping point.

APEC - Australia Pushing Export Coal

The leaders of the 21 nations of APEC will decend upon Sydney in a matter of weeks. It would appear that Sydneysiders are greeting the meeting with an appropriate level of indifference. Our lives will be disrupted by the security, and our common sense will be assuaulted by the hyperbole that will no doubt eminate from our good Prime Minister.

The Agenda is supposed to be about driving action on climate change but, it's really about positioning in the lead up to the federal election. Greenpeace was leaked a copy of the draft declaration on climate change that is due to come out of the meeting.

The document is long on rhetoric, and short on substance. Typical for Howard, it stresses voluntary targets for greenhouse gas reduction, that can then be changed later on if they get too hard. What kind of a target is that?

It is clear that the real agenda behind Howard's posturing at APEC is to undermine the Kyoto protocol in the lead up to the second commitment period. Sure, Kyoto is highly problematic becuase it doesn't go far enough - which is why it needs to be seriously improved and tightened up - not further undermined.

Australia managed to win significant concessions in the negotiation of the first commitment period under Kyoto - which made it seem odd that we then didn't ratify it. The only obvious explanation for our continual undermining of Kyoto is that it if it is effective in driving down greenhouse pollution in other countries, it will have a big negative impact on the Australian export coal industry. In this context, APEC might well be renamed from 'Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation' to 'Australia Pushing Export Coal'.

Is nanotechnology the new creationism?

Have you ever watched a child carefully taking apart their favourite toy, only to find that they can’t for the life of them put it back together again? It’s a phenomenon that’s as old as humpty dumpty and as old as the enlightenment.

We’re remarkably good at pulling things apart. Scientists have been doing it for hundreds of years - looking at smaller and smaller pieces of our world. Every time we thought we’d found the smallest bit, it in turn was revealed to be made of ever more minute components like so many Russian dolls. But while we may have been able to take the universe apart, until now we haven’t had the first clue how to put it back together again. With the new alchemy of nanotechnology, we’re set to reverse this trend - to create what hitherto has only been able to be reduced.

Working at the nano scale, the boundaries between scientific disciplines are increasingly blurred – a phenomenon known as ‘convergence’. When we add the Bits of information technology with the Atoms of molecular manufacturing, tie them up with Neurons and cutting edge cognitive sciences, and then add Genes to throw a bit of life into the party, the whole thing’s likely to go off with a BANG! The typically lyrical, Canadian based ETC Group has labelled the convergence of these powerful technologies The Little BANG Theory.

The hyper-optimism with which nano and biotechnologies are being promoted has an almost religious zeal. Perhaps we're witnessing the birth of a new creationism?

The Kimberley

When you are in the Kimberley in north west Australia, you know you are on aboriginal land. The ancient landscape puts in you in your place. It's a humbling experience.

After nearly 3 weeks of sleeping under the night sky, the tensions and stresses of our strange urban existance all seem to dissolve into nothingness. What was the point of that meeting again? And what about that new electronic gadget I was thinking of getting? Oh look, a billion stars stretching into eternity. And under my feet, a landscape that has sustained a rich civilisation for over 40, 000 years.

The experience is one of humility yet also one of potency. In less than a hundred years, a heady mix of colonisation, technology and ideology all but obliterated one of the oldest living civilisations on earth. And a bauxite mine, if approved on the Mitchell Plateau could reduce a unique and diverse ecosystem to little more than monoculture in the blink of an eye. And yet the landscape engulfs you. The birds laugh at you and the Goanna's ignore you, as your own self importance slowly blows away to swirl and settle in the red soil. More photos

Like You

I stumbled accross this poem - "like you" by El Salvadorean poet Roque Dalton. It was used as a reference in a great article about movement strategy published last year by 'The Free Association'

Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-blue
landscape of January days.
And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
And that my veins don't end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.

Bio to Nano: Technology, Risk & Democracy

Chain Reaction, Autumn 2006

The scientific and business community are still struggling to understand the global public rejection of genetically engineered (GE) foods, and with the growing discourse around the risks and disruptive impacts of nanotechnology, many are becoming increasingly worried that history is about to repeat itself. There is a blossoming of reports and conferences that explore ‘From bio to nano’ and how governments can avoid ‘fighting the last war’. PR consultancies and think-tanks are doing a roaring trade in communications advice and ‘upstream engagement’ tools to minimize the risk of backlash. However, it is becoming clear that virtually all of the issues that have made GE food so controversial are also present with nanotechnology. The only real question that remains for executives and politicians worried about a nano backlash is… when?

In some ways, the outrage over GE was the accumulated and unexpressed outrage over the role of industrial agriculture and chemical companies in our lives for the past fifty years. It was a gut-level reaction that the industrial experiment had gone far enough. When pesticides were first introduced, it was done with little or no knowledge by the general public of the negative effects, and it was done when the modern environmental and consumer movements had yet to develop. However, 40 years after Rachael Carson wrote ‘Silent Spring’, after 4 decades of creeping revelations about the health and environmental impacts of industrial agriculture, after 4 decades of increasing public skepticism about the impacts of science, the public was not willing to idly accept the next major technological experiment with the environment and with their health.

Social movements don’t spring out of nowhere. They emerge and grow within a context – a mixture of culture, counter-culture, hopes, fears and ideas. The dramatic rejection of GE foods in the mid-late 1990’s was a trigger event in a movement that started long before. The groundwork was laid by the many groups who had been campaigning against GE since the mid 1980’s, so by the time Monsanto started planting commercial GE crops in the US in 1996, there was a clear political, social, intellectual and cultural context for the movement to flourish. The public was recently attuned to the problems of industrial food systems following BSE and other food/health scares, and was already distrustful of chemical companies. The obvious and immediate question over GE foods was, and still is, who benefits and who bears the risks? The answer was obvious. So was the response.

The official debate about GE has largely been limited to a narrow discussion of risk – involving an assessment of both the probability of some negative event happening, and the magnitude of the consequences. However, theorists such as Ulrich Beck have argued that the potential consequences of new technologies such as nuclear fusion and biotechnology render this traditional risk assessment approach inadequate because of the new and potentially massive scale of the consequences and the fact that, in the long run, the least likely event will occur. But even this critique misses what has been one of the primary sticking points for public acceptance of GE foods - the simple fact that the people who create the risks are not necessarily the ones who accept the consequences. Why should a person or a community accept any level of risk whatsoever if there is no benefit for them? On the otherhand, it is easy to see why companies are less concerned about creating and imposing risks if they are not accountable for consequences.

The mainstream debate on risk has flourished because it essentially leaves the paradigm of technological development intact. The basic assumption is that new technologies will be introduced unless a relatively narrow scientific assessment indicates that there will be negative impacts. This is in stark contrast to the model proposed by many critics of GE who argue that the burden of proof should be reversed – and that proponents of risky new technologies should be required to prove safety prior to introduction of their products. There is a rather compelling argument that both the probability of negative effects of genetic engineering, and the scale of any negative consequences are fundamentally unpredictable. Thereby justifying a precautionary and enduring ban on the release of GE organisms into the environment.

Despite the early stage of technology adoption, the debate about nano risks is already quite well developed. This is probably due to a combination of a number of factors, including a more active regulatory and public/media context around risk following 10 years of relentless public conflict over GE. The other factors are the similarities between nanoparticle toxicity and the known toxicity of other ultra-fine particles (vehicular emissions etc) and the doyen of public health scandals – asbestos. However, issues of direct environmental and health risks are only one small part of a bigger picture. The introduction of transformative new technologies also raises more fundamental questions about values and ideas about our future.

The problem is that it has somehow become taboo to contest ideas. It’s as if industrial capitalism is somehow not an idea and is therefore exempt from scrutiny, while anything else can be dismissed as ‘ideology’ – a slur that implies a lack of critical perspective. At this point, it is worth asking what kind of society is it where anyone who raises criticisms of new technology is immediately derided as an ideologue and a luddite? It’s almost as though science has achieved a quasi-religious status, where bio and nanotech might well be regarded as the new creationism.

So what are the values that underpin the coming nanotechnology revolution? To answer this question, we need to ask a few closely related questions. Who is funding the technology? In whose interests is it being developed? To what end? How are decisions being made about the technology and by whom? The short answer is that nanotechnology is primarily being developed by the world’s largest corporations and by the US military in order to introduce a range of new products and processes either for the purposes of increasing profits or extending military supremacy. While there are some genuinely interesting and possibly beneficial applications of nanoscience, this is not where the real action is and certainly isn’t what is driving research agendas.

At a fundamental level, the debate over nanotechnology will be about democracy. It will be about our future and who gets to define it. About who benefits and who bears the negative impacts. That’s what the GE campaign is about, and that’s what is at stake with nano. In the absence of a cautious and responsible approach by governments and industry to such a powerful set of technologies, the community is faced with little choice but to put the brakes on - using whatever means are possible.

John Hepburn

For more information about nanotechnology, risk and democracy, visit http://nano.foe.org.au