Abstract
I Introduction
In June 2017, the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement to keep global climate change under 2 degrees C below pre-industrial levels. A month later, an iceberg twice the size of Luxembourg calved off the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica, foregrounding concerns that ice shelf collapse could destabilize adjacent glaciers. These events, coupled with the recent purging of climate scientists from the US bureaucracy, highlight the uneasy relationship between liberal democracy and the pursuit of environmental sustainability. While critical environmental scholars have decried the rise of ‘post-political’ forms of decision-making as substituting technocracy for political deliberation, recent world events have revealed the threat posed by public reasoning without science. Perhaps the question needs to be revisited: if democracy cannot protect the environment, can rule-by-scientists do better?
Although Antarctica is formally owned by no-one, scientists have acquired and exercised authority over Antarctica since the mid-1900s. The Technocratic Antarctic, the first book from anthropologist Jessica O’Reilly, provides an ethnographic window into this evolving experiment in scientific technocracy. The book explores how, armed with discourses of global environmental change and a suite of imagined geographies, scientists and bureaucrats regulate the study of – and access to – Earth’s ‘last wilderness’. Through a variety of legal and scientific protocols, scientists both protect and exploit the continent, creating space for particular scientific projects and practices, whilst excluding others.
The Technocratic Antarctic is an ethnography of scientific expertise, drawing on participant observation, historical research, interviews, and auto-ethnographic reflection. The book draws on ethnographic material collected over 2005–6, including two weeks spent in an Antarctic field station assisting scientific research, and observations from meetings in New Zealand, India, and Scotland. Through 10 chapters, O’Reilly takes readers through different settings in which the environmental imaginaries of Antarctica are composed and enacted: from the first discovery of the land itself, through the multitude of scientific methods used to ‘sense the ice’, to the scientific and geopolitical meetings in which access to the continent is controlled and justified.
The book provides imagery and tangible examples that convey the complex and often convoluted governance of a globally ‘public’ place that nonetheless remains inaccessible for most people. Readers interested in the concept of technocratic utopia, such as what we might envision in the colonization of outer space, will find value in accounts of the pitfalls facing technocratic governance. Readers interested in the politics of science will find examples of how science handles (or struggles with) dissenting views on research value and merit, and how the production of knowledge is navigated formally and informally around centres of power. Where the book struggles, in our view, is articulating a coherent theoretical contribution from across these observations. As readers, we are left asking: how do these observations rework our previous understandings of science and/or environmental governance?
Below, we situate the contributions of this book within recent conversations in the literature about 1) demystifying global environmental change (GEC) science, 2) spotlighting the practices and politics within the glaciological community, and 3) the contested value of critical social research to GEC science and environmental science more broadly.
First, by documenting GEC science in action, this book provides empirical grounding to otherwise abstract discussions of values in science (see Castree et al., 2014). The book provides a detailed network view of the many ‘extra-scientific’ norms, logistics, and mechanisms that affect what kinds of Antarctic knowledge can be produced and recognized as valuable. Scientists debate the relative rigor of modelling vs field science, geopolitical actors argue for exceptions to environmental regulations based on spiritual motivations, and scientists present ‘charismatic’ interpretations of the Antarctic continent to funders and policymakers. Antarctic science is not simply the result of best methods applied to strong research questions; science is negotiated through a multitude of scientific and extra-scientific relationships, and all of these relationships affect who is allowed to participate in the production of what kinds of knowledge about Antarctica.
Second, with glaciers and the Ant/arctic at the forefront of public and scientific interest in climate change, a recent provocation has challenged the glaciological community to consider the inclusions, exclusions, and politics of its science (see Carey et al., 2016). The Technocratic Antarctic is the first example (to our knowledge) of a book-length social scientific study of the glaciological community, and provides insight into its organizing norms. O’Reilly explores the ways glacial modellers and field scientists imagine their relationships to each other and to the scientific endeavour, analysing how scientists ‘sense the ice’ based on physical experience and mental reasoning. She describes how glaciologists and other scientists interact in policy workshops, noting how, through gendered norms and force of personality, ‘[s]mall, almost silent decisions at the grassroots level filter up into the highest level of policy decision making’ (p. 120).
Third, The Technocratic Antarctic provides an empirical basis from which to analyse the value of critical social science to GEC discourse. Recent debate in journals such as Nature Climate Change has focused on whether social science should be actively critical of the values in science, or whether it would achieve more effect with a measured tone (Castree et al., 2014). Given that O’Reilly has participated in these debates (see Lahsen et al., 2015), it is instructive to consider how she relates (critically or otherwise) to her interlocutors. While the book carefully weaves in observations about unintentional exclusion, charismatic data and individuals, and geopolitical marginality in relation to making Antarctic knowledge, overall the book shies away from explicit critique. Rarely if ever does O’Reilly argue that Antarctic science should be made differently. We wonder if such acquiescence might be necessary when conducting social science research in an environment where access is so strongly controlled by scientists, some of whom the author may wish to work with in future. However, we also wonder whether vague gestures to ‘inclusion’ are enough to be effective in changing the order of things.
Though the book struggles to articulate a clear overarching theoretical contribution, it spurs us to think about the geopolitical entanglements of science and the imaginaries of Antarctica, arming readers with rich ethnographic evidence. By illuminating the spaces in which the value of Antarctica is articulated and claimed, we hope this book will inspire further engaged critique of the governance of this seventh continent.