Knowing Nature, Knowing Science: An Ethnography of Environmental Activism

Environmental History, Jan 1999 by Hill, Sarah

Knowing Nature, Knowing Science: An Ethnography of Environmental Activism. By Eeva Berglund. Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1998. viii z25 pp. References, index. $55.oo.

An ongoing debate in environmental history has centered on the relationship of human agency and intention to the production of nature and the environment. A new contribution to the discussion is Eeva Berglund's provocative exploration of environmental change and social response in postunification Germany. Tackling the dilemma as a dialogue between extreme social constructionism and environmental determinism, Berglund seeks to understand how specific consequences of reunification produced rising concern over threats to the quality of life in a small city, located near the old border separating East and West Germany.

She follows three sets of environmental groups in their opposition to a toxic waste facility, a proposed super highway, and proposed high-tension electric lines. To her surprise, Berglund found that the activists shared her own skepticism that science could evaluate these projects independently of social interests or political bias. As the issues unifying the activists (or alienating them, as the case may be) are different, so were the groups themselves, varying greatly in size, composition, and their sophistication of technoscience critique. The superhighway group, a much broader-based coalition uniting numerous smaller civic activist organizations, attempted to find a middle ground between science and politics. Finally, those opposing the electric utility used scientific expertise to more openly question the political economy underlying increased energy use. All three groups' sensitivity to the social embeddedness of scientific knowledge presented, for Berglund, challenges to both the ontological status of nature and the epistemological means by which to understand human-environment relations.

Berglund organizes her material as a conversation among Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky's 1982 essay, "Risk and Culture: An Essay in the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers," the large body of Tim Ingold's work, and Ulrich Beck's Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity(Sage, 1992). Douglas and Wildavsky's reduction of environmental activism to a mere popular tool in the service of social organizing does not acknowledge that some social groups "would not [even] exist were it not for phenomenal . . . changes in the landscape" (p. 14). She thus finds useful Ingold's contention that social organization cannot be separated from the environment in which it exists. Some of the book's most interesting questions are raised by Berglund's engagement with Beck's thesis. As the activities of the activists opposing the electrical utility echo much of Beck's work, Berglund suggests considering his interventions as a reflection of, rather than a blueprint for, German environmentalist thinking in the late twentieth century. In her final analysis, though, Beck's advocacy of democratized science falls short too, because it raises more problems than it resolves for the activists.

Unfortunately, Berglund fails to adequately answer the most important question that she sets for herself: "why do some people not seem to fear things that for others cause profound and justified anxiety?" (p. 19o). Because in the final analysis she sides with Ingold, and considers that the tangible and not just imagined changes in the environmental context drive the activists, her neglect of why only some activists joined each cause becomes frustrating. All attempts to bind theory to empirical data are inevitably messy, complicated, and incomplete because not all social data conform to theoretical rules. However, her effort would have been better served by spending more time on the cases-giving history to her informants instead of implying that they have a history-and less on theory. Approaching the material of her study with more attention to the broader historical context of pre- and postunification Germany might have made the lack of an answer to her central question less glaring.

Reviewed by Sarah Hill. Ms. Hill is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Her thesis research examined the production of stratified environmental risks on the U.S.-Mexico border.