Values in Science: Lessons from Wildfires

Environmental Communication ISSN: 1752-4032 (Print) 1752-4040 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/renc20 Values in Science: Lessons from Wildfires Eric B. Kennedy To cite this article: Eric B. Kennedy (2019) Values in Science: Lessons from Wildfires, Environmental Communication, 13:2, 276-280, DOI: 10.1080/17524032.2018.1560965 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1560965 Published online: 15 Jan 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 21 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=renc20 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 2019, VOL. 13, NO. 2, 276–280 REVIEW ESSAY Values in Science: Lessons from Wildfires Wildfire management reveals the role of values in environmental controversies, argues Eric B. Kennedy. A tapestry of values: An introduction to values in science, by Kevin C. Elliot, New York, NY, Oxford University Press, 2017, 224 pp., $34.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780190260811 After preservation: Saving American nature in the age of humans, edited by Ben A. Minteer and Steven J. Pyne, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2015, 240 pp., $18.00 (paperback), ISBN 9780226259963 Flame and fortune: Urban development, environmental change, and the great Oakland hills fire, by Gregory L. Simon, Oakland, CA, University of California Press, 2016, 272 pp., $29.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780520292796 On 7 July 2017, more than one hundred and seventy new wildfires1 were reported in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Declaring a state of emergency, the province continued to deal with new fires. More than 110,000 hectares burnt within the week. This sheer number of ignitions meant that the government of British Columbia faced a massive managerial challenge. Lives needed to be protected, properties needed to be safeguarded, and fires needed to be extinguished. In parallel with fighting these conflagrations, however, fire managers needed to deal with the longterm complexities of fire ecology and fire economics. Landscapes across British Columbia have not only evolved with – but also depend on – fire for renewal and health. Establishing a mosaicked pattern of smaller burns by allowing some fires to continue can help prevent massive future fires. And, whether in firefighting, fire starting, or fire preparedness, the costs involved are massive – and some are easier to justify in the public eye than others. While it might seem initially to be about fire trucks and water bombing aircraft, at its core the question of fire management is one of values management: What should be allowed to burn and what should be protected? Which conflagrations should be prioritized when resources are limited? And, what should be done about thorny trade-offs, like those between different species with opposing fire preferences (moose that benefit from more recently-burned ecosystems, for instance, versus caribou that prefer unburnt old growth)? All too often these techno-scientific and socio-environmental debates are obscured by the “sexiness” of ever-larger water bombing aircraft, promises of perfect fire behavior prediction from advanced computational modeling, and skirmishes over the role climate change may play in the future of fire. Contested values are, of course, at the heart of all sorts of complex problems that we face as society. This is reflected in a wide variety of recent academic writing across disciplines, including three new books, A Tapestry of Values: An Introduction to Values in Science (by philosopher Kevin C. Elliot), After Preservation: Saving American Nature in the Age of Humans (edited by philosopher Ben Minteer and environmental historian Steven J. Pyne), and Flame and Fortune: Urban Development, Environmental Change, and the Great Oakland Hills Fire (by geographer and ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 277 environmental scientist Gregory Simon). These books provide important insights into the role of values in scientific and environmental controversies, as well as how we might go about resolving or ameliorating them. As a sociologist of wildfire management – and disasters more generally – I found this trio of books represents an insightful and thorough cataloguing of the role that values play in all sorts of enviro-scientific issues, as well an advancing of the specificity with which we can talk about the rightful roles of these values. In A Tapestry of Values, Elliot brings synthesis and coherence to the burgeoning literature on values in science in a way that is accessible to specialists and students alike. In After Preservation, Minteer and Pyne shepherd an edited volume that reveals just how contested, disputed, and unresolved values debates are with respect to environmental management. And, in Flame and Fortune, Simon weaves both of these conversations into an analysis of the socio-environmental values that affect our vulnerability, calling attention especially to the economic values that shape our experiences with fire. Establishing the rightful place of values in science and environmental management, however, first requires understanding the degree to which values are already a part of nearly all techno-scientific decisions. Given significant research in the fields of history and philosophy of science, sociology of science, and science policy to document the place of values, Elliot’s most significant contribution in A Tapestry of Values is to provide a masterful and desperately needed synthesis of this body of knowledge, as well as extending it to argue for transparency, representativeness, and engagement. The book’s chapters serve to provide a well-demarcated articulation of the places that social values creep into – and are inherent to and necessary within – scientific knowledge making. These locales include the significant roles of values (both descriptively and normatively) in choosing topics of inquiry, methods for carrying out this research, the ultimate aims of these projects, approaches to dealing with uncertainty, and the description of the results. Early in the book (pp. 14–15), Elliot offers three principles about the rightful place of values that guide the subsequent analysis. Scientists ought to be transparent about their aims and processes so that those outside of the scientific community can identify the influences and impacts of these values on the work being produced. They should also strive to be guided by values that are, argues Elliot, representative of “major social and ethical priorities.” And, all involved (including policymakers, scientists, and the citizens themselves) ought to create avenues for engagement that can facilitate the first two principles. While these principles seem, prima facie, to be acceptable – and they certainly serve a useful function throughout the book as values are explored in their different instantiations – their introduction and justification in the book is relatively light considering the heavy lifting they are required to do throughout the remainder of the volume. Part of the challenge here is a “regress problem” of sorts. To determine which values can play an acceptable role in science (and in what ways) requires some sort of higher-level justification. In Elliot’s case, he leans on meta-values like transparency, representativeness, and engagement. Yet, their use simply pushes the problem of justifying appropriate values up a level, causing questions about why those values ought to be the guiding principles. They certainly hold appeal for western, pro-democratic, Science and Technology Studies-informed audiences – but may not be universally and a priori accepted as the proper guiding principles. The impossibility of solving this regress problem, however, is broader than theoretical debates about values in science. Simon, Minteer, and Pyne run into similarly revelatory moments in dealing with the multiplicity of values and meta-values present in their case studies. What all three books reveal is a modern world where increased complexity, human influence, and diversity in priorities, epistemologies, and ontologies results in an unsolvable landscape of contested values. In science, conservation, and even emergency management, pursuing the “right” outcome isn’t enough anymore: What’s “right” is fundamentally up for debate. As a result, what Elliot describes so effectively is that science, far from being a neutral recorder of objective truths, is another terrain upon which contests of values play out. These can range from subtle motivations of researchers that shape their academic interests to deliberate campaigns to pervert the scientific norm of skepticism to protect private profits, as with the attacks on evidence 278 REVIEW ESSAY linking cigarettes and cancer, or sulfur dioxide and acid rain. Neat solutions are not obvious either. If we accept that values should play a legitimate role in prioritizing what research ought to be done, for instance, we open up even large questions: How should this work in practice? Who should do this prioritizing? How should we discern between partisan smears of valuable, if odd-sounding research, and proper transparency and oversight capable of steering the system towards more societally desirable outcomes? Perhaps the most difficult challenge in Elliot’s analysis is to account for times when values have played rightful and wrongful roles. Because he comes down strongly in favor of values having a legitimate role in the scientific process (for instance, in motivating certain courses of research, helping to balance false positives and negatives, and in allocating funding), a difficult question remains: How to account for those situations when values have clearly played a negative role, such as in tobacco lobbying or climate change denial. The solution, argues Elliot, lies in a combination of the three principles from earlier (transparency, representativeness, and engagement) and accurately identifying other modes of failure (e.g. willful misrepresentation or misalignment between corporate and public values). Yet, while this prescription leaves us room for the post-hoc justification of why certain applications of values are misguided in hindsight, it’s less clear how this helps us in the heat of contentious debates. Consider the debate between those who are pro- and anti-logging as a means of reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfires. The kind of transparency, representativeness, and engagement that Elliot suggests might tease out the rightful place of values would require good faith participation from all sides – something in seemingly short supply in a world so polarized. In fact, claims about the relative transparency, representativeness, and engagement (or lack thereof) of the opposing group could even be weaponized to defend entrenched viewpoints. A landscape of values Nowhere is the relevancy of this landscape analogy – and the diversity of competing values within it – more obvious or pertinent than in debates about conservation itself. After Preservation by Minteer and Pyne serves as a rich example of contested views on how we ought to preserve, conserve, or shape the “natural” world or the “wilderness” within it. While the volume’s edited nature reads in a slightly more disjunct manner than the Elliot or Simon books, the provocations within (at times conflicting!) illustrate that agreement on the necessity of conversation can still involve deep, and potentially irreconcilable differences of values. Beyond some of the more well-known value differences (e.g. preservation vs. conservation; whether the Anthropocene represents hubris or humility) present in the book, an interesting and disputed question runs more tacitly through the volume: Do we need to achieve agreement on our values and rationales to work together towards goals of sustainability, of biodiversity, and of a healthy relationship with “the natural,” or can we do so from positions that may be diametrically opposed? In the opening contribution, environmental journalist Andrew Revkin offers a pragmatist’s path forward – one based on looking “for common interests among diverging factions” and, as science policy scholar Roger Pielke Jr. says, not aiming to “get everyone to think alike, but instead to get people who think differently to act alike” (p. 13, 14). The essay by environmental historian Mark Fiege on the “Democratic Promise of Nature Protection” disagrees, however, and presents a case for indeed finding this agreement between different communities. Fiege argues that preservation is ultimately a “story with democracy at its heart” (p. 115), wherein efforts at protecting wilderness and creating parks both were motivated by and served to reinforce democratic ideals within American society. Muir and the broader turn to seeing nature as intrinsically valuable, then, represents a falling away from this democratic motivation – a motivation that Fiege argues must be shared to enable the richest forms of preservation. Calling for a values consensus, Fiege underscores that “if preservation is to have any use in the Anthropocene, it must revive and deepen its democratic roots” (p. 121). Much like with debates in conservation, understanding wildfire also requires mapping and clarifying a landscape of contested values. Over the past several decades, wildfire management has become ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 279 increasingly focused on protecting “values at risk” rather than simply suppressing all fires. In Flame and Fortune, Simon highlights an honest truth that is rarely spoken aloud: These “values at risk” are often a literal reflection of economic values like homes, infrastructure, and potential timber harvest. As he rightfully notes, wildfire should not be seen as simply an issue of climate change, as that myopia can obscure questions of where and how we build. “The Fort McMurray fire,” he argues, “would surely have received much less coverage if it seared only throughout the surrounding, uninhabited bush” (p. 42). Instead, he introduces the concept of the “affluence-vulnerability interface,” which is a method for understanding the who, what, where, and when of vulnerability – and its all-important connections to economic dimensions. The largest contribution of Simon’s analysis, however, goes beyond this compelling case for seeing wildfire as an economic and structural problem. He suggests that these structural decisions are effectively depoliticized as the “affluence-vulnerability interface and its associated controversies [go] unnoticed and unchallenged” (p. 20), with public discourse instead getting caught up in debates about the fire itself that leave us “tinkering around the edge of the problem” rather than “grappling with the root cause of the major blaze itself.” In other words, much like other natural resource management issues become proxy debates for more foundational disagreements over governance, rights, and freedoms, public and media deliberation about wildfire obscures the root values disagreements that ultimate create and justify living in such flammable landscapes. While I might disagree slightly with the totality of Simon’s framing – as a sociologist of wildfire management, I think there are substantive values debates to be had within preparation, response, and recovery – his point is well taken: Public debates of climate attribution of wildfire, among others, can obscure grappling with other crucial causes of catastrophic fires. In essence, Simon urges us to pay attention to the ways that values interact. In his exploration of the development of the Oakland Hills in the lead-up to the devastating 1991 fire – the “Tunnel Fire” that killed 25, injured another 150, and destroyed over 2,800 houses and over 400 apartment units – he illustrates the ways that wealth and vulnerability are “recursive, iterative, and mutually reinforcing” through patterns of industrial and residential development, local governance, and natural resource policy. Although not explicitly using the same terminology as Elliot, he takes values both in the Elliot (e.g. in decision-making, research, and the larger techno-scientific apparatus) and the economic senses and highlights the ways in which wealth accumulation has become resilient and durable in a way that has created “incendiary” intermixes of people living in particular ways within forested, flammable landscapes. Simon’s views rhyme nicely with the chapter by Pyne in After Preservation. In a volume largely defined by debates about the Anthropocene – Is the term at all useful? Does it signify hubris about our power or humility about our impacts? Does it underpin or undermine the future of preservation, conservation, and nature? – Pyne’s reflections on wildfire allow us to see the forest for the trees (or, more accurately, for the homes now sprawling throughout them). He hits back on notions of preservation as purification (cleanly demarcating the “wild” and the “human”), urging instead a way forward that can handle the muddled and intermixed human-natural landscapes. It is an incendiary landscape, as Simon suggests, but one wherein all sorts of values about nature, fire, community, and livelihoods must all begin to coexist. This muddled landscape demands “hybridized” responses, including a rich role for planning, reflection, and active management by both government and civil society. It’s a wickedly complex landscape filled with “uncertainty and ambiguity” (p. 131), wherein we need to think about the past, present, and future simultaneously. Wildfires as wicked problems How, then, do these volumes advance the conversation on wicked problems? Scholars like Rittel and Webber (1973) have long called attention to the nature of these complex problems themselves, including the diversity of values in play and the reality that different stakeholders can define solutions (and even problems!) differently. These three books provide both the context before and 280 REVIEW ESSAY the direction after Rittel and Webber’s observations. By exploring the nuanced values that lead to the emergence of wildfires as wicked problems, the authors contextualize the disputes in play in a richer way that enables us to disentangle the drivers of conflict. And, in turn, their specificity allows for recommendations of the path forward – glimpses of practical ways in which we can manage the tensions even in a hyper-partisan era of politics and civil society. All three books deserve commendation for their readability, quality content, and thought-provoking ideas. It is hard to overstate the clarity and accessibility with which Elliot explores these issues, for instance, or the corresponding suitability of the text for use in undergraduate and graduate classes in related fields. Vivid examples like debates around the adoption of Golden Rice and citizen engagement with toxicology in Woburn, Massachusetts are deployed with an effective level of detail to illustrate the real-world implications of these questions of values. One ironic criticism: Elliot has a masterful handle on research on values in science, yet the editorial decision to eschew footnotes or in-text references actually decreases readability (many times, for instance, Elliot references the arguments of a particular thinker, which then must be hunted down without a convenient and nearby reference). Likewise, the essays within After Preservation do a strong job of capturing the dissonance in views among those who think professionally about conservation. Several formats (e.g. one essay framed as a “Letter to the Editors” about why the author must decline writing for the volume) are especially effective at capturing attention with provocative, well-founded, and clearly articulated think pieces on conservation. While edited volumes always struggle with disjointed transitions between disparate writers, the tension between pieces does the volume a service in highlighting the disagreements between well-intended and well-informed scholars. Even so, I found myself longing for short interludes, provocations, and syntheses from Minteer and Pyne (beyond their strong chapters included within) to shepherd the reader through the volume. Finally, Simon’s Flame and Fortune deserves notable positive attention and uptake. Pushing against the timbre of the times (an emphasis on seeing wildfire through the focused lens of climate change), it does an excellent job of raising crucial questions about where and how we build, the connection between economic status and vulnerability, and the need to reframe from seeing landscapes as “flammable” to, instead, as “incendiary” (emphasizing the human role in fueling these fires). Although this might not be an easy task – ideological lines have been drawn around climate attribution, and emphasizing climate-scale patterns helps to alleviate the need to grapple with difficult choices about where and how to build – Simon offers a thorough and evidenced case that acknowledges the role climate change can have on fire while encouraging us to consider other issues as well. The work of all sorts of decision-makers (be they wildfire managers, parks staff, or part of the scientific enterprise more generally) increasingly requires not only an ability to reflect on one’s own values, but to be able to foster public discourse about how to deal with conflicts among our many views of the way the world ought to be. While these volumes do not offer a single path forward – these questions need to be negotiated in a place-specific, time-specific, and context-specific way – they provide a much richer toolkit with which to have these conversations. Note 1. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/b-c-wildfires-burning-out-of-control-province-wide-state-ofemergency-declared. Eric B. Kennedy Disaster & Emergency Management, York University, Toronto, Canada [email protected] © 2019 Eric B. Kennedy https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1560965