Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
dependency. Scientific thinking is officially and publicly presented by politicians
and scientists as the most important, if not the sole reliable source of knowledge
and understanding. When proved wrong, modern expert institutions have focused
on reconstructing history to communicate their own blamelessness, attributing
catastrophes to acts of God or the public's own misunderstanding of the subtleties
and indeterminacies of the scientific method. Furthermore, public trust is com-
promised, according to Wynne (1996: 27), by these institutions responding to dangers
'in the idiom of scientific risk management, tacitly and furtively' and imposing
'prescriptive models of the human and the social upon laypeople and these are
implicitly found wanting in human terms'. The real world is treated as if it were a
lab experiment and human and other living beings as simply among the many
controllable variables.
In his analysis of the conflictual relationship between government scientific
investigations into risks from radioactive fall-out and the local knowledge of Cumbrian
sheep farmers following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, Wynne clearly shows how
scientific investigation consistently ignored or discounted local expert knowledge and
consequently failed to appreciate the full complexity of the issues they were addressing
or the inadequacy of their own methods. Lab methods cannot simply be transposed
to Lakeland hills. The attempt and expectation of government scientists to predict
and control failed to achieve any effective results and further succeeded in reinforcing
public suspicion of the efficacy of official institutionalized knowledge processes.
Wynne writes:
After a few months, the scientists' experiments were abandoned, though the
farmers' criticisms were never explicitly acknowledged. . . . Much of this conflict
between expert and lay epistemologies centred on the clash between the taken-
for-granted scientific culture of prediction and control and the farmers' culture,
in which lack of control was taken for granted over many environmental and
surrounding social factors in farm management decisions. The farmers assumed
predictability to be intrinsically unreliable as an assumption, and therefore valued
adaptability and flexibility as a key part of their cultural identity and practical
knowledge. The scientific experts ignored or misunderstood the multidimen-
sional complexity of this lay public's problem domain, and thus made different
assumptions about its controllability.
(1996: 67)
Wynne concludes that it is necessary for (indigenous) local knowledge to become
part of a broader understanding of risk than has often been the case in the past.
The trajectory of this line of thought appears to be that sustainable development is
again perceived as a constructive consequence of a dialogue of values, methods and
understandings. There needs to be a recognition of the public value of science,
and a concerted and genuine effort to engage the public in scientific debate and
developments, and to ask questions that scientists sometimes feel is not their job.
This may mean that the institution of science, including its established role and
expectations in academia and big corporations, will need to change significantly.
