Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
such judgments are based on “politics, not science,” they are working to
shape the discursive context of what counts as an environmental problem
for agriculture.
Whether for the sake of public relations, forestalling potential regulation
from the state, or genuine disagreement, this way of repairing environ-
mental problems may confl ict with advisors' attempts to promote change
through new practices and technologies. As with fi eld trials and environ-
mental change (see chapter 5), this confl ict places advisors once again on
awkward ground. How can they work within a structure and at the same
time seek to change it? Given the political complications surrounding
environmental problems, we would expect it to be diffi cult, and recent
social theory on the relationship between scientists and industrial interests
support this expectation. For example, Ulrich Beck's risk society thesis
holds a very dim view of the ability of scientists to address environmental
problems.
2
Beck claims that science and technology are themselves institu-
tions at the heart of industrial modernity, responsible for generating envi-
ronmental risks in the fi rst place. Further, science and technology are often
deployed as a kind of “ 'counter-science' gradually becoming institutional-
ized in industry” and beholden to the interests of capital.
3
In contrast to
Beck's risk society thesis, ecological modernization theory places science
and technology at the center of attempts to create a “green” modernity,
presuming that scientists and other experts will, in concert with vast
changes to the regulatory state, be a vanguard of environmental change.
4
And yet, despite these divergent perspectives on the ability of science
and technology to address environmental problems, there has been very
little empirical research on the role of experts in environmental confl icts.
Overall, science has been treated as an institutional black box in the theo-
retical debates over modernity and the environment. Instead of critically
examining the place of science in specifi c environmental confl icts, many
authors have assumed an overly simplistic view of scientifi c practice
(Wynne 1996). Using the case of farm advising, my aim in this chapter is
to demonstrate that advisors
do
act as agents of social change but also to
show that their work in this regard is tightly circumscribed by the larger
political economy of the farm industry and the regulatory state. As with
the forms of repair I described in previous chapters, advisors are con-
strained by the institutional context of their work, yet they use this context
strategically, manipulating elements in the ecology of agriculture to frame
