Environmental Skepticism: Ecology, Power, and Public Life (review)

Peter Jacques's Environmental Skepticism provides a necessary and welcome foundation for confronting those who deny the problems of global environmental change. Jacques argues that environmental skepticism is a powerful movement that enables human societies to disassociate with nature, deny responsibility for non-human and similarly marginalized others, and unwittingly precipitate civilization's collapse. In response to this "malignant public life" (p. 171) Jacques advocates disrupting existing international and transnational networks of capitalist power to create a more radically democratic practice of world governance. The ecological demos Jacques posits is supported by empirical analysis of environmental skepticism as a social countermovement to the environmental movement, and a remarkably accessible critical theoretical scaffolding that deconstructs the political and moral dimensions of skeptics' "confidence in the continuity of modern civilization" (p. 18).

Jacques defines environmental skepticism as characterized by an "unshakable" commitment to industrial science that provides both the basis for that movement's political agenda and its social identity. Jacques substantiates this opening claim by identifying skeptics with influential conservative think tanks (CTTs). Ninety-two percent of those who authored books antagonistic to global environmental problems since 1973, Bjorn Lomborg¹ among them, have been affiliated with influential CTTs, primarily in the United States. He then situates skeptics' summary dismissal of the idea that ecological problems threaten the sustainability of contemporary, industrialized societies in the context of their underlying opposition to the ecological sciences and environmental movement. None of this introductory material is controversial among scholars of global environmental politics or environmentalists more generally. Yet Jacques' argument is significant because it problematizes skeptics' environmental counter-claims in a way that simultaneously provides a rhetorical framework for challenging their political influence and underscores the success of the environmental movement.

Los Angeles Times columnist James Rainey recently explained that where we once had "a global warming discussion dominated by sober if fractious voices from within academe … we've got a snowball fight, where anyone with an opinion and a URL is hurling high, hard ones across the raucous public square."² According to Jacques, a formerly strong and highly regarded environmental movement is losing ground to the environmental skeptics in a "snowball fight" characterized by both sides' reliance on objective science as the only "tool in our civic toolbox" (p. 5). Jacques argues that environmental skepticism is best understood as a civic problem that requires us to establish foundations for democratic, public discourse that would effectively judge the multitude of ecological contentions that relate to our human and non-human lives together.

Jacques presents and contests a series of five propositions: 1) Environmental skepticism is a social countermovement to the environmental movement; 2) This countermovement is nested within a powerful industrial political economy that rejects the core ideas of political ecology; 3) Environmental skeptics' civic program is deeply anthropocentric; 4) Environmental skepticism threatens the ontological security of marginalized groups; and 5) Environmental skeptics have so paralyzed politics that global civil society is on the verge of collapse.

He submits each of his propositions to the same level of scrutiny he argues must be applied to skeptics' environmental claims and political positions. Jacques explains that a proposition "will either be more or less compelling based on the evaluative conditions for public discourse" (p. 9). Is there corroboration across other ideological expectations? Is there any vetting of the claims that occur outside of the author's own parochial interests? How does the proposition fit within already-validated, institutionalized suppositions? This tack provides a strategy for assessing the bevy of scientific and political positions surrounding issues of relevance to global environmental change. It provides a way around, if not through, the prevailing "point-counterpoint parade of facts and science" (p. 2) that characterizes current debates on environmental issues.

Naturally, Jacques finds all five propositions persuasive. They are, however, less convincing than alarming. Any number of contemporary socio-economic and political decisions—the introduction of genetically modified crops, for example—may lead to uncontrollable and irreversible environmental change. Such situations cause unnecessary resource depletion and...