Ecology, objectivity and critique in writings on nature and human societies

Abstract

Inspired by the Green Movement and invoking many of the analytical concepts of ecological science, environmental historians have offered trenchant criticisms of modern society and its relations with nature. Recently however, their position has been eroded on several fronts. Revisionists in ecological science have repudiated the idea of stable, holistic ecosystems used by many environmental historians and other Green critics to measure and assail the environmental damage wrought by society. Various assaults on the authority of science and history to represent nature and the past have also undercut the exclusive claims to knowledge that environmental historians rely upon to legitimate their critique. I review these various challenges and the responses to them in turn. In the final part of the essay, I advance the position that environmental historians and other Green critics should end their search for foundational authority, be it in science or elsewhere, and appeal instead to diverse moral, political, and aesthetic criteria to arbitrate between particular representations of nature in particular situations. This situation does not rule out appropriations from ecological science or other fields of knowledge where they prove useful and convincing, because ultimately, environmental narratives are not legitimated in the lofty heights of foundational epistemology but in the more approachable and more contested realm of public discourse.