4th Global Conference
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Tuesday 5th July - Thursday 7th
July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford
Session 7: Resistance, Risk and Action
Chair: Kerry Joy Ard
The Promise and Threat of Climate Justice: Geographies
of Resistance in the Context of Uneven Development
Michael
Dorsey
Environmental Studies Program, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
To examine the eclectic manner in which particular constituents of the environmental justice movement have sought to challenge myriad orthodox approaches to climate change we begin by considering some of the current empirical facets of the current crisis in the global economy. This is our starting point inasmuch as the ideological basis for solutions to the economic crisis are co-terminus with prescriptions for resolving the climate crisis. We move forward by tracing the ways in which, neoliberal economic doxa has been doubly prescribed, infected and inserted itself into both hegemonic economic and environmental policy-making. The extent to which this doxa has taken hold of environmental policy-making it has been utilized and promulgated by a wide variety of hegemonic or "establishment" environmentalists - to use the parlance of some scholars. As few global-scale infections (metaphorical or real) rarely occur without countermeasures, penultimately we examine the manner in which institutions and individuals supportive of and within the environmental justice movement have responded to the hegemonic environmental movement and its doxas. We focus on the countermeasures of the environmental justice movement in the form of two seemingly disparate yet related conferences and their outputs. We conclude by situating these countermeasures and the resultant conflicts within and against the emerging literature on novel forms and expressions of geographies of resistance.
Resistance is Fertile: The Commodification of Life
and Environmental Protest in the 21st Century
Debora
Halbert
Department of Political Science, Otterbein College,
Westerville OH, USA
This paper will examine the interrelationship between
patents, GMOs and environmental protest. The environmental movement
has a long and rich history of social protest. Despite this important
history, environmentalism has suffered from significant backlash in
the past decade and recently there have been calls marking the death
of the environmental movement (Shellenberger and Nordhaus 04).
While
it may be the case that the environmental movement is no longer effective,
this paper argues that environmental resistance is not dead, but has
evolved. Intellectual property issues such as the patenting of genes,
seeds, and genetically modified plants and animals, have sparked intense
reactions not only among environmental activists, but among the general
population as well. This resistance goes beyond “traditional” environmental
protest for clean air and water and protection of endangered species. It
illustrates that environmental protest must be evaluated within a technological
and global environment that transcends earlier state-based environmental
action and romanticized visions of nature.
First, I will examine
the death of environmental movement thesis and use it as a starting point
for rethinking what we mean when we talk about the environment and about
environmental resistance. Second, I’ll
argue that the resistance to the commodification of life surrounding
the GMO debate is a key environmental form of resistance. To make
this argument I would like to draw upon Habermas’ theory of new
social movements and assess the applicability of Hardt and Negri’s
notion of the multitude. Finally, I would like to illustrate the
importance of this battle. Resisting the expansion of patent rights
to seeds, plants and animals is key to formulating a future where environmental
and social justice prevails.
What Rights are Eclipsed when Risk is Defined
by Corporatism? Governance and GM Food
Paul
Anderson
Centre for the Study of Global Ethics, School of Public Policy, University
of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, United Kingdom
Governance by corporate
power and financial institutions has long been associated with the demise
of the public arena and substantive democracy (Habermas, 1962; Westbrook,
1991; Chomsky, 1992). Significant among contributing factors is the presentation
of new technologies. The central contention of this paper is that where
public debate on the introduction or extension of new technologies is
prescribed to the technical limits of the expert, such dialogue can be
confined to areas which in no way question the role of these technologies
in the de facto selection
of an exclusive kind of society whose development they serve. It is precisely
attention to the technically-defined social, economic and environmental
impacts of certain technologies, at the expense of attention to their
role in shaping society, that underwrites this agenda for narrowing avenues
of meaningful public participation. Such confinement limits popular democratic
and NGO efforts to influence the use of such technologies. As a consequence,
these efforts are unlikely to succeed unless and until the reasons for
narrowing public political discourse down to a technology’s technically-defined
risks, costs and benefits are better understood and challenged.
The question
of just what is at risk when risk is defined for us is of fundamental
concern to the prospects of viable democracy. The UK government’s
(declared) position on genetically modified (GM) food provides a case in
point. The government’s general framing of the debate on this technology
will be analysed, contrasted with the form of argument employed by opposition
groups, and compared with the manner in which nuclear power was framed
in the 1960s in order both to disclose the presentation of ‘corporatist’ political
choices as technical options and to suggest how this may be countered.