Bureaucratic rationalism

A second element in green discourse has been a rejection of predominant forms of rationality in modern societies, which are both themselves prevalent in state operations and which states act to entrench broadly across society.

As a consequence, resource managerialism has become the privileged form of state rationality governing environmental questions (Luke 1999). This approach is replete with the language of efficiency, management, and resources. Closely identified with the conservationist ethic established in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, contemporary resource managerialism turns to experts on ecology to impose corporate needs and public agendas on nature in order to supply the economy and provision society with natural resources held in trust by centralized state authorities. Resource management reflects the character of economics as a ‘science of means’. This efficiency-oriented approach focuses on the relationship between means and ends, and it is important to note that the overall quality of the outcome is not considered - only the efficiency of the means matters (Sachs 1999).

Greens offer a critique of instrumental rationality which has many echoes amongst feminist, critical-theoretic (Frankfurt school) and poststructuralist critiques. Specifically, for Greens, the instrumental rationality which emerged as dominant from the scientific revolution onwards, involves a number of moves which engender ecological degradation. First, humanity is separated from the rest of nature, in a dualistic manner where humanity is at the same time made superior (morally and empirically) to ‘nature’. Second, facts are made ontologically separate from values. Third, a method of producing know­ledge about the world is developed which is purely (purportedly, at least) about producing ‘facts’. Fourth, this method is atomistic - it reduces the world to phenomena describable in isolation from the rest of the world. But while the commonplace assertion by scientists that this effects a separation of means and ends, at least for the scientific revolution’s ‘founding father’, Francis Bacon, the purpose behind such knowledge production was clear - to enable more effective human domination of nature (and of women by men; see Merchant 1980).

More generally, it is possible to discern two things here. First, Greens reject claims regarding the ‘neutrality’ of knowledge, which usually rests on a consequentialist argument that one cannot know in advance the conse­quences of the production of particular knowledge and thus one must leave scientists free to pursue their intellectual enquiries. Second, Greens assert that even in instrumental rationality, there is still an implicit end involved in the production of knowledge, which is that it rests on a (ethical) separation of humanity from nature, with humans as ends in themselves, and ‘nature’ reduced to being means to human ends. For Greens, this instrumental ration­ality (knowledge claims framed by power) is widely held to underpin ecological degradation, both because it ethically fails to generate systems for valuing non-human entities and systems adequately, and because empirically its individualizing method means it fails to identify ecological problems which can only be understood holistically or relationally.

The rationality of the state is a particular form of this instrumental ration­ality. It similarly (claims to) effect a means/ends, or facts/values, distinction, where the activities and institutions of the state are neutral with respect to ends, they merely supply means to such ends. Critically for green writers (and often drawing on Weber), the institutions evolve to become their own ends. Ecologists have countered instrumental rationality and the administrative mind that is so drawn to calculation, prediction and control. Torgerson (1999:100) recalls that ecology has been called a ‘subversive science’, deriving its subversive characterization from its ability to orient metaphors that challenge the presumptions of the administrative mind. More recently the emergence of interdisciplinary forms of knowledge, such as ecological economics and ‘sustainability science’ attempt not just to re-integrate the natural and social sciences, but also explicitly ‘repoliticize’, ‘re-ethicize’ and ultimately restore democratic standards and accountability to scientific and technological innovation, along the lines that ‘risk society’ theorists such as Beck advocate. The rise of the corrective ‘precautionary principle’ is a practical outworking of these debates driven by ecologists.