The Shrew Environment

Abstract

The ArgumentThe paper begins by addressing the notions of technological pessimism, society and environment from the point of view of geography and planning. It identifies two pessimistic waves in the recent history of geography and planning thought: “technological or explanational pessimism” in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and “understanding pessimism” in the late 1980s. The first is a distrust of positivist geography and rational planning to explain and control the environment; the second adds to the first a distrust of that part of social theory which in the early 1970s was thought to provide the alternative to positivism — a distrust of structuralist-Marxist-humanistic (SMH) geography and planning to understand (and thus to control intellectually) the individual, society, and the environment. The paper proposes that at the root of both types of pessimism is the essentially causal, mechanistic, and thus aspatial, property of social theory as a whole. It then examines the conjunction of Bohm's orders and Haken's synergetics as a source for optimism — not to control, but to participate and dialogue.