Building on Borders: Constructions of Ecological Knowledge

A Report on the interdisciplinary and international workshop at Technical University Darmstadt, April 6 - 8, 2006

The workshop “Building on Borders: Constructions of Ecological Knowledge” was devoted to an exploration of the various practices of constructing borders and boundaries in ecology and environmental studies.[1] The workshop brought together about 20 scholars from 9 countries and different disciplinary fields, including the history of science, ecology, philosophy, sociology and social anthropology. We had 6 sessions that covered a range of topics. These included metaphors and the character and morphology of concepts of borders and boundaries, debates around the physical character of borders and limits in ecology, the dynamics of ecological knowledge in environmental studies, and, finally, reflections on the process of recontextualising ecological knowledge in the age of technoscience. The workshop was organised by Astrid Schwarz (Darmstadt TU) with the assistance of Kurt Jax and Christian Haak (UFZ Leipzig), as well as Achim Lotz ( formerly of Darmstadt TU).

The starting point of the workshop – and probably the common perspective shared by most of the participants – might be described in terms of the following basic problem in structuring ecological knowledge. One of the most important features of ecological knowledge is that it is constructed along the borders between science and society, fact and value, applied and theoretical sciences, between different disciplines and scientific practices and, last but not least, between different epistemological positions in ecology itself. Ecology cannot be described adequately by means of the usual epistemic concepts, nor by using, say, a one-paradigm model or the idea of a unifying theory that structures the whole field. Considering the growing importance of ecological knowledge in addressing some of the most pressing problems at both global and regional level (e.g. global warming, vanishing natural resources and the deterioration of soils and water resources), it should be self-evident that we need to know more about the logical and disciplinary constructions of ecological knowledge. The debate about borders within and around ecology obviously also includes debates concerning the role and importance of ecological knowledge in social processes and in negotiations about the kind of nature with which we wish to live.

Over the last three decades most of the opposite concepts mentioned above have been examined above all in the field of science studies (STS), including research programmes on inter- and transdisciplinarity. However, none of these debates has analysed either the structure and metaphors of borders and boundaries nor their historical or philosophical status. Moreover, most of the case studies in STS and HPS are taken from physics or engineering or, within the life sciences, from genetics, physiology and molecular biology. These shortcomings were brought to the fore in the workshop: The overarching objective was to launch a debate on ecological knowledge by investigating not only concepts of borders and boundaries but also the established theoretical framework of “boundary discourse” in STS and HPS. This way of framing the debate constitutes an underdeveloped topic in each of these communities. Accordingly, the workshop announcement highlighted our intention to map ecological knowledge using a deliberately conceptual topology, focusing on three types of borders and boundaries: first, the concepts of borders in the scientific context; second, boundaries between different disciplines, institutions, scientific practices and analytical concepts; and, third, the limits and scope of ecological knowledge in general. One of the explicit objectives of the workshop was to develop, by the end of it, a more detailed and clear-cut topology of the borders and boundaries of ecological knowledge, including existing work in the field of the history, sociology and philosophy of science. This was considered a necessary prerequisite for being able to transfer ecological knowledge in an appropriate and comprehensible way within and between different scientific and other social groups, as well as for the social construction of natural environments.

The first part of the workshop was entitled “Building on Borders - Morphing Knowledge” and was aimed at achieving harmonisation between the concepts of border and boundary used in HPS and STS respectively. Kevin de Laplante (Iowa State University) began with the statement that ecology is currently being called into service in many different fields, from applied ecology and endemic ecology to ecologically oriented sciences and environmental politics. He then contrasted this “open source picture” of ecology with a disciplined concept of ecology as a natural science which, as he emphasised, is essentially related to issues of demography. He proposed labelling this ecology as orthodox ecology in order then to argue against it and to show why this label is not appropriate (because, for instance, ecology is already a highly fragmented discipline, because it possesses no unifying concept and, finally, because orthodoxy reinforces disciplinary fragmentation and segregation). Uta Eser (Nürtingen Polytechnic) began her contribution by asking if this broad conceptualisation of ecology shouldn’t better be called environmental sciences: what pragmatic purpose or motivation warrants the call to extend the meaning of scientific ecology in this way? The lively and far-reaching discussion that followed threw up a number of topics and questions that ran through the whole workshop. To highlight just a few of them: - Is it appropriate to consider the environmental sciences as simply the applied science of a theoretically conceptualised ecology and, if not, what is the “added value” of the former and what is its epistemology? - Another important issue was that of the power inherent in labelling ecological knowledge: who is producing this knowledge and to whom is it denied? Both society and science seek labels that confer power and authority, but who is labelling whom in this process? What is immature ecological knowledge “worth” in a world where the mature sciences count? What is concealed by the rhetoric of mature science and who is interested in constructing it? What are the characteristics of immature science and in what sense is a science “mature” at all?

The subsequent presentations were aimed at examining concepts of border and boundary in the discourse of STS. Unfortunately the paper to be delivered by Irene Klaver (University North Texas) had to be cancelled for a most appropriate and ironic reason: the unwieldy border politics of USA Homeland Security left her as a non-citizen in an alien limbo between a visa and a green card. Since she circulated a short summary to all of us, we know that we missed a discussion on “the so-called edge of boundaries”, that is, boundaries as dynamic places of potential transition, transformation and translation. Thus, her focus is not on the boundary as a simple line of division but on “the power of boundaries as an area of co-construction”. In this sense, not a few ecological concepts might be understood as oxymorons, pointing simultaneously to two mutually exclusive meanings, as reflected, for instance, in the concept of ecotone, the area where two different ecosystems meet. Astrid Schwarz (University of Darmstadt) was also interested in the spatial character of boundary concepts. In her paper “The Morphology of Borders” she pointed to the relational character of boundaries and suggested, following a boundary concept proposed by Kant, that there is “always something positive”[2] in the way boundaries bring two entities into relation with one another. Given that the production of ecological knowledge – and even more so that of the environmental sciences – has to be seen as being constitutionally located at the intersection of various boundaries, the knowledge thus produced and labelled as ecological will be crucially influenced by the particular character of those boundaries. Schwarz then presented a historical reconstruction of borders in environmental discourse, starting with the “border trauma”[3] of the 1970s and the “global existential crisis” that made the environment and ecology issues of public concern, continuing through the turn from an ontological to an epistemological perception of borders, and ending up with a detailed discussion of concepts developed in the HPS and STS debate, focused on boundary work, boundary object, trading zone, and border zone.[4] In order to get a better understanding of their formative influence on the construction of ecological knowledge, she then proposed looking more closely at the images and analogies and the evoked form and structure of borders and boundaries inspired by geographical and geopolitical concepts and models. The modified border model[5] she presented allows for a detailed and multilayered analysis and visualisation of border concepts and may therefore help towards a better understanding and conceptualisation of the different constructions of ecological knowledge.

“Oikos and logos - ecology as the search for home” was the closing presentation on the first day, given by historian Paolo Palladino (Lancaster University). He proposed drawing parallels between the recent discussions on neuronal cells or stem cell technology and contemporary ecological discourse. This, he suggested, reveals the similarities of these two apparently very different technologies and their constructions of nature. In what followed, Palladino offered a plethora of approaches but stressed two aspects in particular, both of them concerned with issues of ontology. With regard to the first one, he pointed out that ecology tends to eschew “the holism of earlier forms, but only by displacing the problem onto history” – as do the laboratory life sciences by saying, for instance, that “neural stem cells may one day act as nature’s own brain surgeon, psychiatrist, pharmacist, and therapist”. With regard to the second aspect, he referred to the nature-artefact distinction that emerged in ecology, for instance, in the debates over ecosystem modelling and influenced the appreciation and validation of the formal qualities of mathematical models, namely their generality, precision and realism. To underscore his hypothesis, Palladino suggested that we look at the relationship between art, politics and the life sciences. He then took us through a wide range of artistic representations of the life sciences in contemporary works of art (e.g. Georg Dietzler’s “Self-decomposing Laboratory” 1999 and Mel Chin’s “Revival Field” 1990) as well as romantic landscape paintings. In his discussion of ecology and romanticism, Palladino highlighted the common roots of the idea of nature as humanity’s “home” (the oikos) and ecology’s inner tension between the incommensurable methods of holism and reductionism; This led to the final question as to the common baseline of works of art and ecology. This, he suggested, might be the “ecological” emphasis on the intrinsic relations contained in everything that constitutes a particular cultural practice and that necessarily needs a subject to go beyond the two antagonist elements that define nature in modernity. Arguing against Latour’s ontological relationality, which abolishes all categorical boundaries and hierarchies, Palladino defended the notion of a vigorous subject, a being who “can witness the transformations of the world” and maintain, break off and rebuild the boundaries of knowledge.

The second day started with a participatory workshop organised by Sandra Bell (University of Durham). She asked us to utilise the power of concept maps to explore the issues of borders and ecological knowledge in a way that avoids the linear process of writing.[6] With the help of Astrid Schwarz, she had prepared a list of types of boundaries that were to be picked up and visualised by reasoning for instance on the whole “terrain” of ecology or on the strength and permeability of its borders. Urging us to use lots of colours, symbols and signs, she grouped us around 6 tables and left us alone, asking us “not to think too much but to get drawing right away”. The result was a stunning diversity of drawings, which told just as many different stories about ecology and “bordering”. The discussion about the drawings prepared us perfectly for the subsequent sessions, which covered an equally wide field.

Fig.1: Drawing by Sandra Bell

The session that followed was dedicated to negotiations of borders and limits in scientific ecology, with presentations by Patrick Blandin (Museum Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris) and Kurt Jax (Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig), and comments by Angela Weil (München Technical University). Blandin took up the longstanding and still undecided debate on the stability of ecosystems and the consequences for species diversity, productivity and the complexity of ecosystems. He used the pros and cons in this debate to point to the awkward border between theory and ideology, and then went on to propose that we should move from stable equilibrium theories to dynamic models: “It is just pleasant for people to think that ecosystems are stable.” Adopting a model of co-changing entities would have far-reaching consequences for theoretical, psychological and ideological modes of thinking, not only about the ecosystem concept(s) itself but also our conceptualisations of nature in general. In conclusion, he pointed to the concept of the transection of systems, as proposed by John Dewey, the renowned scholar of pragmatism, arguing that this concept might be useful in developing a concept of ecosystem that promotes principles of contingency and chance and puts more emphasis on individuals. Following on from Blandin, Kurt Jax discussed ecological boundaries from the perspective of functional versus topographic limits. Starting with the rhetorical question as to the need for and significance of boundaries, he then presented a case study on the Yellowstone National Park in order to elucidate the conflict between functional and topographical borders. Jax then went on to present some interesting details from the relevant literature (especially Glick et al. 1991 and Strayer et al. 2003), elaborating on the properties of boundaries in ecology and also the practice of using images and metaphors in relation to functional boundaries in particular. The next speaker was Peter Taylor, who had first given us a short handout with “some thoughts on border-ing” along with some homework to do; he now asked us to engage in an interactive analysis of the paper he had circulated on “Savanna Plant Ecology” (Greg Sharam), focusing on the borders more or less explicitly mentioned in it. He encouraged us to think of borders as phenomena that are constructed through processes of intersection, as places where different kinds of dynamics come together, and as places that are policed (“with more or less seriousness”) and that might be reconstructed when the premises change – in other words, we should not only illuminate the construction of borders, “but also the possibilities of alternative constructions”. Peter Taylor left us with two messages, the first one emphasising that research should be done in a dialogue between models and phenomena, and the second one claiming “to make better work together inventive things and old things”.

The second part of the afternoon session was dedicated to the history of urban ecology from the perspective of cultural studies. Jens Lachmund gave a presentation and Tobias Cheung commented. Lachmund shared with us some insights from his detailed study on wasteland preservation in West Berlin. He started by reconstructing the history of urban ecology, focusing on the institutional and political dynamics of land-use planning in academia as well as in the public sphere. We were told how the ecological agenda entered this discourse and how the new environmental activism also intervened. Having now arrived in the era after the fall of the Berlin wall, Lachmund turned in more detail to the conflict of the environmental programme of restructuring urban places and spaces by framing wastelands as biotopes. The citizens of Berlin disagreed with this interpretation for a variety of reasons, aligning themselves along several borderlines. Not a few urban residents saw wastelands more as ugly and uninteresting, even “as kind of wounds” that recalled the bombing of the city in World War II, than as precious spots of pristine and wild nature; accordingly, calls for nature protection based on scientific parameters such as species diversity or vegetation features did not hold too much appeal for these citizens. Calls for wasteland conservation were more successful when they coincided with other public concerns, as was the case with the “Südgelände”, an abandoned area of railway facilities. This place was given a more appealing public image by being designed as a nature park with regular trails and some objects of art. One might say that in this case consensus was created by aesthetic interventions, and that the discourse on urban nature and biotopes succeeded in establishing cohesion between various expert groups and other actors. Cheung’s comments focused on three basic arguments. In the first, he questioned the notion of expertise in a sociological context, in the second he argued about the transformation of a city processed through the work of ecologists and thirdly he argued for interferences between changes in/of cities and the models of ecologists. Being thus well prepared, we had a lively discussion with some apposite references to the foregoing presentation, including some debate about intersecting places in urban dynamics.

The closing evening presentation was given by Wolff-Michael Roth (University of Victoria) on “Building Ecological Knowledge: Objects and Actions” and commented on by Chunglin Kwa (University of Amsterdam) with his paper entitled “Schopenhauer not Popper”. Roth took us on a virtual visit to some fish factories on Vancouver Island (Canada) and made us familiar with issues around “constructing salmon life history”, the enhancement and protection of fish habitats, and activities around salmon breeding. By means of an ethnomethodological study, he illustrated what happens when a fish is sacrificed to research and reified by images and graphs. His central thesis was that scientific objects are stabilised by images and that the stability of such objects is therefore something that is produced in the process of manipulating things, using instruments and visualisation techniques. In arguing for the importance of locally and tacitly produced knowledge that is crucial for “embodied practices”, Roth was clearly following some well-established arguments in STS literature. This was reinforced by his reference to Latour’s “chain of representation”, in which the world and language are connected by a sort of cascade model in which each overlaps but can never be interlinked with the other. At this point Roth offered a critique of this model by pointing to the fact that Latour did not include the element of action in his model; Roth suggested that objects become coherent (and thus knowledge stabilises) when the chain of representation becomes petrified, as it were, by the chain of action. In Michael Roth’s own words: “The nature of the action is of the same type as that of the objects, and therefore both are involved in their mutual interactive stabilization and constitution.” And, paraphrasing Ricoeur (1991), he added: “Actions can be interpreted with the same procedures as texts”. The importance of bodily actions for scientists is exactly what Chunglin Kwa proposed in his juxtaposition of Schopenhauer and Popper, the latter prioritising theory and the former searching for “things-in-themselves”. While Kwa agreed with Roth about the reciprocal verification of representation and intervention, he was less convinced by the pivotal role given to the natural sciences over the social sciences in “bridging the gap between the material and the representational world”. The discussion was continued in the pleasant atmosphere of Restaurant Alacarte, located in the exhibition building of the art nouveau district of Darmstadt.

The final morning began with two presentations and a commentary related to the issue of trans- and interdisciplinarity in the environmental sciences. Thomas Potthast (University of Tübingen) presented a broad range of ideas about “the nature of borders between ‘hard science’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ approaches in ecology” and the environmental sciences. He focussed on epistemological ontologies as borders and on epistemic-moral and epistemic-political boundaries and hybrids, having first clarified what is meant by ecology as hard science and by ecological inter-and transdisciplinarity, “the n > 1 disciplinarities”. Rounding off this part of his discussion, he presented a selection of responses relating to this issue in the scientific community, varying from cynical to melancholic. Potthast distinguished three different kinds of epistemological ontologies of borders, each of which dealt with the fact-value border in different ways: firstly, ecological political scientism (naturalism) versus Weberian hard science within hard science; secondly, dualism versus interdisciplinarity; and, finally, “n>1 Monism versus political ecology within n>1 disciplines.” He then introduced the epistemic-moral hybrid[7] as an analytical category that allows for specific conjunctions and is therefore able to overcome traditional claims of universalism and unity. These might be conjunctions of, say, scientific concepts, theories and practices, or of ethical implications and norms for action. In the end he displayed the agenda of the epistemic-moral hybrid that should allow for explaining the implicit and for “critically evaluating different ethoi and morally/ethically normative powers of the context(s).”

In his presentation “bordering environment – investigating the space between science and society” sociologist Christian Pohl (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich) concentrated on the conceptualisation of the transformation from normal science (mode1) towards post-normal science (mode2) (e.g. Gibbons et al. 1994, Nowotny et al. 2001). To begin with, Pohl provided us with an empirical study on the sources of new forms of knowledge that are supposedly characterised by their robustness and local specification – and not by universality, truth or ethical neutrality. For his analysis, Pohl investigated environmental and sustainability research programmes (SPPE, MISTRA) using a ‘model’ of policy cultures (Elzinga 1997, Jasanoff and Wynne 1998) and distinguishing three axes of input into science: the state (regulation), the economy (selling) and civil society (participation). On all three axes he was able to find projects that inform science (waste technology, air pollution abatement, coastal management), whereas projects on soil remediation, say, or biodiversity did not mix. On the basis of these facts Pohl went into more detail regarding the particular conceptual challenges posed by the predicated transformation from “clear dichotomies to a mess, truth to usefulness or helpfulness, certain knowledge to uncertainty management, universal to contextual knowledge”. While pinpointing the conceptual underdevelopment of the concept “mode 2” Pohl suggested that it was necessary to differentiate between three forms of knowledge: first, “transformation knowledge”, which is aimed at embedding technical, social or cultural changes in existing technologies and power relations; second, “system knowledge”, which enables reflection on and ways of dealing with uncertainty; third, “target knowledge”, which tackles the plurality of norms and values and aims at “clarifying and setting priorities among various values in relation to the common good as a regulatory principle”.[8] In his comments, Matthew Kearnes appealed emphatically for the politics of mode2, an intervention that opened up an informed and lively discussion.

The final paper of our workshop, given by Andrew Jamison (Aalborg University), followed on seamlessly from the foregoing presentations, as implied by its title “Ecological knowledge in an age of technoscience: New contexts and new challenges”. Jamison started with a short historical reconstruction of the “cultural transformation of environmentalism”, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s with the “making of a movement” and ending up in the 1990s with the programmes on sustainable development, green business and, of course, critical ecology. This transformation might be characterised by changing regimes of knowledge and power: from industrial “little science” before World War II and military “big science” between the 1940s –1970s through to commercial “technoscience” from the 1980s onwards. As a result, the type of knowledge that predominated at each stage changed from disciplinary to multidisciplinary to transdisciplinary (or mode 2) forms. With regard to the most important milestones in the transformation from big science to technoscience, Jamison identified a general change in range and scope, orientation towards the market, university-industry collaborations, “hybrid identities” and, finally, the state as strategist. In the remaining part of his talk, he dealt with the question of what this might imply for the production of ecological knowledge and sketched out a hybridisation on various levels: hybrid competencies created by mixing skills and theories in new combinations; hybrid concepts that migrate through different societal groups and areas, such as economics, design, citizenry and science; and hybrid applications, such as green business and sustainable communities.

Concluding the principal part of the workshop “Building on Borders”, Astrid Schwarz reminded the participants once again of the aims of the workshop and proposed some preliminary conclusions, but first and foremost some further queries: How might the relationship between ecology and the environmental sciences be most appropriately described? Does the conjunction of the two imply a “versus”, a “part of” or a “transformed into”? How can we make better use of the power of borders and boundaries in dealing with ecological knowledge, especially with regard to environmental policy? Is it possible to capture the positivity of boundaries with concepts such as hybridisation, and of shifting boundaries with concepts such as transformation or transection? What exactly is the difference between these latter and the more spatially penned concepts such as border zone or boundary work? How can we contribute towards promoting a better appreciation of blurred border zones and hybridities in general, be it hybrid identities or hybrid knowledge, both of which are necessarily part of producing ecological knowledge?

The final part of the workshop was dedicated to a presentation, discussion and updating of the HOEK project (Handbook of Ecological Concepts) that provided the framework for our workshop. Several of the workshop participants are already involved in the project, and, this workshop, along with the two foregoing ones, is also intended to contribute to the project in some way or another. The objective of the HOEK is to write a philosophically and historically informed six-volume handbook for a broad based readership. To fulfil this objective it needs both the support and the contributions of the scientific community as well as the public. The first volume is expected to appear in print early in 2007. Its title is “Revisiting Ecology. Reflecting Concepts, Advancing Science”, edited by Astrid E. Schwarz and Kurt Jax. The second volume will follow in 2008, “Ecological Units”, to be edited by Kurt Jax and Astrid E. Schwarz. More information about the project is available on the project’s website: www.hoekweb.net.

Notes

1 The workshop was generously supported by the Volkswagen Foundation (project number AzII/81985).

2 Kant, Immanuel, Beschluß von der Grenzbestimmung der reinen Vernunft, Kant Werke Vol. V, 229.

3 Think of for instance Meadow’s book “limits of growth” or Carson’s “Silent Spring”.

4 Gieryn, Thomas (1983): Boundary work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. – American Sociological Review (48) pp. 781-795; Leigh Star, Susan, Griesemer, James R. (1989): Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907-39. – Social Studies of Science (19) pp. 387-420; Galison, Peter, Stump, David J. (ed.) (1996): The Disunity of Science. Boundaries, contexts, and power. Stanford: Stanford University Press; Kohler, Robert E. (2002): Landscapes and labscapes: Exploring the lab-field frontier in biology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

5 Martinez, Oscar (1994): The dynamics of border interaction. New approaches to border analysis. In: Shofield, Clive H. (ed.): Global boundaries. London: Routledge.

6 In a paper on interdisciplinary work, Sandra Bell and her collaborators discuss different methods and strategies not only to follow but also to shape “the process of interdisciplinary work by documenting the experiences, thoughts, perceptions, ideas and concerns of researchers working in interdisciplinary projects”. Marzano, M., Carss, D.N., Bell, S.: Working to make interdisciplinarity work: investing in communication and interpersonal relationships. – Journal of Agricultural Economics. In press.

7 Potthast, Thomas (2001): Gefährliche Ganzheitsbetrachtung oder geeinte Wissenschaft von Leben und Umwelt? Epistemisch-moralische Hybride in der deutschen Ökologie 1925-1955. – Verhandlungen zur Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie (7) pp. 69-89.

8 For more details see the recently published book “Gestaltungsprinzipien für die transdisziplinäre Forschung - Ein Beitrag des td-net”, Pohl, Christian and Hirsch Hadorn, Gertrude 2006. Munich: ökom Verlag.