p.6 For Durkheim, a social fact is 'any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint' (2002 [1895]: 117). This constraint is normally manifested in the form of law, morality, beliefs, customs and even fashions. We can verify the existence of a social fact, Durkheim ventured, by examining an experience that is characteristic.
p.36 Hajer (1995: 264) defines discourse as 'a specific ensemble of ideas, concepts and categorizations that is produced, reproduced and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities'. Or, put more succinctly, discourse is an interrelated set of 'story-lines' which interprets the world around us and which becomes deeply embedded in societal institutions, agendas and knowledge claims. These story-lines have a triple mission: to create meaning and validate action, to mobilise action, and to define alternatives (Gelcich et al. 2005: 379).
p.61 Situations such as these challenge political ecologists to 'attend to how discursive relations - and not just market relations - organize social and ecological change' (Braun and Castree 1998: 16).
p.36 Hajer (1995: 6)... insists that interests are constituted primarily through discourse, thereby excluding other institutional practices and institutions. The politics of discourse, he maintains, is not merely about 'expressing power-resources in language but it is about the actual creation of structures and fields of action by means of story-lines, positioning, and the selective employment of comprehensive discursive systems' (p. 275).
p.80 Schlesinger (1978) observes that... news is the product of a fixed system of work whose goal is to impose a sense of order and predictability upon the chaos of multiple, often unrelated events and issues... In addition to mandating that news be planned, time also acts as a constraint upon the final product itself. This has the effect of rendering news reports 'incomprehensible rather than comprehensive' (Clarke 1981: 43).
p.84 Short-term pressures of time have meant that environmental issues and problems have often been framed by journalists within an event orientation. As Dunwoody and Griffin (1993: 47) point out, this event orientation limits journalistic frames in two ways: it allows news sources to control the establishment of story frames, and it absolves journalists from attending to the bigger environmental picture. Three major types of environmental events can be identified: milestones... catastrophes... and legal/administrative happenings
p.88 an environmental problem must be able to be related to the present rather than the distant future in order to capture media attention.
p.97 What particularly opens the door to the creation and contestation of environmental problems is the inability of science to give absolute proof - unequivocal evidence of safety. Instead, scientists are reduced to offering estimates of probability that often vary widely from one to another. This lack of certainty allows claims-makers both within and outside science to assert that the situation is alarming, that the risk is too high and that society should do something about it.
p.98 A large measure of the disagreement here revolves around how science should be done. In traditional science, a reductionist principle predominates. This means that researchers break down a problem into the smallest number of constituent parts and look at each part separately, controlling as much variation as possible. If you want to look at the effect of a toxic chemical on the breeding pattern of fish, you isolate the fish in an experimental setting, vary the levels of the chemical and record the birth results. By contrast, a cardinal principle of green science is the necessity of looking at the world holistically. Since everything is connected to everything else, it does not make sense to disassemble an ecological web experimentally. For example, immunity is a complex system that is linked to a variety of factors from genetics to environmental pollution to socio-psychological stress. Causation may be indirect or multiple, making it all but invisible to the reductionist perspective of traditional 'good science' (Wynne and Mayer 1993: 34).
p.98-99 Blowers (1993) has observed that scientific evidence is problematic as a basis for environmental policy-making in five ways. First, there is the problem of cause and effect that we have been discussing; this makes it difficult to establish responsibility for the externalities produced by polluting activities. Second, there is the problem of forecasting impacts; for example, the uncertainty about the incidence, distribution, timing and effects of global warming. Third, uncertainty over the consequences of present actions and the risks imposed on future generations may lead to a paralysis of policy or to a tendency to discount the future risks of present action. Sometimes, in fact, another future focused scenario - the crushing burden of a spiralling national debt - may discourage taking bold ameliorative or prophylactic steps in the here and now. Fourth, the frequent absence or sparseness of environmental data not only makes it more difficult to provide sound scientific judgments but it also opens the door to manipulation by vested interests who claim that environmentalists have exaggerated the danger. Finally, the fragile interpretations of environmental science can easily run aground on the shoals of politics where conflicts between interests dominate. This is especially the case where one is dealing with broad speculative ideas such as the Gaia hypothesis rather than narrower, more empirically captured linkages.
p.138 To begin, let us turn to Raymond Murphy's (2004) seminal treatment of another disaster, the ice storm that impacted parts of Quebec and Eastern Ontario in January 1998. Murphy uses the metaphor of a 'dance' to describe the interactive relationship between nature and society. Sometimes, nature takes the lead and humans react and improvise after nature's moves in this dance. Other times, humans take the lead and choreograph a response in anticipation of nature's moves. In the case of the ice storm, nature issued an extreme 'prompt' that was, at least initially, ignored or denied... Murphy concludes that the ice storm disaster 'resulted not from freezing rain per se, but rather from the vulnerability of the infrastructure that modern society had constructed and upon which it had become dependent' (p. 257).
p.138 In such instances, nature's 'prompt' can and should inspire a process of environmental learning.
Perhaps because he is preoccupied with fleshing out the basic framework of a new 'constructionist realist' approach to environmental sociology, Murphy does not extend these important notions of prompts, improvisation and creative movement too much beyond the nature/society nexus. Yet, they have considerable applicability within a wide spectrum of environmental events, arenas and policy zones, including but by no means restricted to disaster episodes.
To capture these dynamics more fully, I am proposing an approach to environment and society that pivots on the concept of emergence.
p.138-139 Emergence denotes process, flow, adaptation and learning. In the physical and biological sciences, it is associated with what has come to be known as 'complexity theory'. In his book, Emergence, American cultural and technology commentator Steven Johnson (2001) says that emergence is what happens when an interconnected system of relatively simple elements self-organises to form an intelligent, more adaptive higher-level behaviour.
p.139 What all of these ideas of emergence have in common is a realisation that social organisation
and the production of knowledge are fundamentally fluid, dynamic, and adaptive.
p.139-140 Emergence theory, or as it was initially known emergent norm theory, was introduced in 1957 in the first edition of Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian's foundational text Collective Behavior. Borrowing concepts from the small-group studies of Asch (1951), Lewin (1947) and Sherif (1936), Turner and Killian proposed that a member of a crowd acts in a particular manner not because of a blind propensity to imitate, nor as the result of being 'infected' by a 'contagion', but rather because a certain course of action is perceived as being appropriate and required (Milgram and Toch 1969: 553).
p.140 What is characteristically unique about a collective behaviour episode is that the situation is ambiguous or undefined, and therefore existing norms fail to provide significant guidance. As a result, the crowd or other collectivity is forced to innovate, together forging its own guidelines for behaviour. Frequently, one or more innovators ('keynoters') suggest a course of action and a consensus develops that this be considered as appropriate. In ambiguous situations... reliable information is difficult to obtain and collective actors therefore often rely on rumours to supply the appropriate cues. Shibutani (1966), in a memorable turn of the phrase, labelled rumours as 'improvised news'.
p.140 in the third revised edition of Collective Behavior Turner and Killian (1987: 33) reiterate that 'the concept of norm as used here does not refer merely to a rule or a precise behavioral expectation; rather, it encompasses a complex of factors, including indications of the salient features of the situation and typifications of the actors presumed to be involved'. This re-conceptualisation expanded the potential applicability of the perspective to a much wider spectrum of collective action.
p.142 Tierney argues... disasters typically are:
complex occasions characterized by a high degree of ambiguity often coupled with extreme urgency, that require extensive improvisation and that call for more autonomy
, rather than less on the part of organisational entities involved in the response. (2004: 117)
p.148 One important conduit for a more dynamic view of nature and society is through the process of improvisation. Thus, in discussing the 1978 ice storm that severely impacted large sections of Eastern Canada and the Northeastern United States, Murphy (2004: 11) observes that such severe disturbances of nature act as a prompt, influencing human conceptions, discourses and practices and inciting an 'improvised response'. And, improvisation, as we have seen, is closely identified with Shibutani's (1966) description of rumour transmission as 'improvised news'.
p.148-149 Whether or not life today is any more hazardous than it was a century ago, it often appears that way... each week seems to herald the arrival of some new danger. What all of these have in common is an overpowering sense of ambiguity or contingency, what Sartre (1975: 100) once called 'the vertigo of possibility' (cited in Horlick-Jones 2004: 108).
p.149 Barbara Adam (1996: 95-7) observes that time is centrally implicated in the emergence of this 'prevailing uncertainty' for four reasons. First, past knowledge has consistently proven to be of limited value in predicting a future that is characteristically indeterminate and contingent... Finally, the links between cause and effects become obscured in late modernity. With some environmental hazards, there is a time-lag during which no visible symptoms emerge. We are no longer dealing with static, isolated phenomena but with interconnected, continuously changing, dynamic situations in which the link between input and output is far more complex than pollutants pouring out of a pipe into a stream. In the case of global warming, for example, cause and effect do not emerge in a linear manner, making this an environmental issue 'replete with uncertainties and the prospect of an indeterminate future' (p. 97).
This sense of uncertainty and indeterminancy is crucial to emergent theory because it leaves people without a firm set of cognitive guidelines. Like disaster victims or those caught up in civil disturbances, citizens today are stranded in a twilight zone.
