Pragmatic sociology as political ecology

Towards a moral-political sociology of ecological value?

During the past thirty years, socio-political conflicts over the worth of nature have tended to assume a particular rhetorical form, that of the market and its discontents. In one of its intellectual moments, for instance, science studies scholars Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz (1994) discuss ecological economics as post-normal science by asking ‘How much is a songbird worth?’. Their own reply is striking: while the worth of a songbird has its ‘monetary aspect’, we are told, it cannot be ‘reduced to a commodity’, because this worth ‘also lies in teaching us about ourselves and what we want to do with our lives’ (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1994: 206). Tellingly, just how the songbird will teach us this remains opaque. Even sophisticated scholars well versed in social theory, it seems, are nowadays at a loss when it comes to articulating nature’s worth beyond market grammars, thus providing little grounds for sustaining much hope in theory and its politics in this domain (cf. Miyazaki, 2006).

In this article, I engage debates on political ecology by invoking some of the more hopeful re-workings of the moral-political force of social theory in recent decades: on the one hand, the sociology of critical capacity of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot; and, on the other, the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. Together, these two strands of theorizing constitute the core of what is nowadays discussed as ‘French pragmatism’ or ‘pragmatic sociology’ (e.g. Baert and Da Silva, 2010). While each strand of French pragmatism is the subject of a sizeable literature, drawing them together for sustained theoretical discussion is still rare. ¹ This is puzzling, given their many theoretical symmetries and the strong potential for cross-fertilization (cf. Guggenheim and Potthast, 2012). Here, I attempt such a feat by way of positioning political ecology as a privileged site for ‘testing’ – in the sense of this term found in pragmatic sociology – the relative strengths and weaknesses of the social theories of Boltanski, Thévenot and Latour, respectively. How well, I want to ask, do their respective theoretical grammars deal with the problem of the worths of nature(s)?

In raising this question, I am revisiting an intellectual territory already staked out by pragmatic sociologists in the 1990s. Following Boltanski and Thévenot’s ([1991] 2006) landmark work on the six existing grammars of legitimate social bonds in political modernity (the cité model), the question – picked up first by Thévenot – was whether ecology is today emerging as a novel sevenths order of worth, a new green world of justification (e.g. Lafaye and Thévenot, 1993). ² For his part, Bruno Latour (1998) soon undertook to raise the stakes of this debate, by suggesting that not just politics but modernity itself was in need of radical redefinition in light of ecological critique. Since then, exchanges have dried up, leaving important questions hanging: does ecology, after all, designate a novel political project, or rather a new combination of old moral attachments? What qualifies as ecological in political ecology, and how do actors test their claims to knowing the (shifting) worths of nature(s)? Amidst considerable theoretical and political stakes, such questions seem ripe for further inquiry.

In this article, then, I pick up the thread from Thévenot and Latour in their pragmatic-sociological debate on how to theorize the ‘political agencies and forms’ of ecology (to use Dewey’s terms). At the same time, I switch the theoretical parameters in one key respect. Hence, whereas Thévenot and Latour both assume the existence of one grammar of ecological worth – even as they disagree on its substance – I pursue the argument that ecology, in its present socio-political state, manifests itself in diverse cognitive and moral grammars, tied to specifiable projects of ecological justification, conflict and compromise. Hence, it is not simply that ‘nature’ is valued and tested via different co-existing orders of worth, as Boltanski and Thévenot’s ([1991] 2006) polity model suggests. On top of this pluralism, we need to add the multiplicity suggested by the observation that what qualifies as ‘ecological’ is both more loosely codified, and more politically diverse, than what either Thévenot, Latour or, indeed, Boltanski contends. ³ In short, there is not one, but several, common ecological worlds.

Just like the value pluralism of Boltanski and Thévenot, however, this ecological multiplicity is limited: while different ontological natures exist, these are subject to a limited number of collective qualifications of ecological worth that are currently widespread in environmental politics. In fact, the value of pragmatic sociology for theorizing political ecology, I want to suggest, lies exactly in the way its main protagonists – Boltanski, Thévenot and Latour – has each managed, in different parts of their work, to capture one of the important ways in which ecological entities are currently valued in public disputes. Put differently, my claim in this article is that the French pragmatic sociologists may themselves be read as significant political-ecological grammarians, comparable to how Adam Smith codified the market bond, Rousseau the civic bond, and so on. Except that, in this case, the grammarians must work together: read on their own, Boltanski, Thévenot and Latour provide only a partial rendering of the green world; taken together, they cover most of its emerging dimensions.

In order to render this claim plausible, the main body of this article consists in theoretically motivated case studies into three domains of environmental politics – each associated, in turn, with the grammars of pragmatic sociology. First, the case of carbon markets is taken to illustrate the plausibility, and the limitations, of Thévenot’s new ecological order (Thévenot et al., 2000), in that the inherently unstable compromises of carbon markets cast doubt on how actors may credibly test green worth. Second, the case of urban sustainability is taken to illustrate a green inflection of what Boltanski (Boltansiki and Chiapello, [1999] 2005) dubs the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, organized around projects of innovation and connectivity. Third, the case of biodiversity conflicts surrounding whales as charismatic animals is shown to involve a relaxation of demands on ‘common humanity’, as argued by Latour (1998). Rather than his non-modern settlement, however, this domain proves unstable, as actors slip beyond justification and into worlds of affective compassion and violent non-equivalence.

While each of the three cases is fed by the author’s own empirical inquiries, they are not pursued here in any ethnographic depth; rather, the idea is to provide just enough contextual information for the theoretical argument to work. I think of this method as corresponding closely to what Latour (2005) calls ‘empirical philosophy’ and what Boltanski and Thévenot (1999) dub ‘descriptive metaphysics’. Common to these endeavors, I believe, is a style of theorizing which aims to eschew grand generalizations, and instead engages in the work of conceptually modeling, and thus abstracting by way of, situational empirical observations. What I do to pragmatic sociology is thus simply to apply its methods to itself, by plotting its own theoretical models back into the variegated social landscapes of political ecology. In the end, I suggest, this maneuver will provide us with a firmer grasp on the many worths of nature(s).

The Thévenot–Latour debate: what ecology, which politics?

Generally speaking, one way of appreciating the theoretical novelty of pragmatic sociology is to note how it reintroduces a moral-political dimension into the core of sociological research (Blokker, 2011). Following Peter Wagner (1999), I understand this endeavor – epitomized in Boltanski and Thévenot’s On Justification (2006) – as manifesting a mixture of theoretical modesty and radicalism. Theirs is neither a new theory of society, nor a new moral philosophy. Rather, as Latour also notes (1998), Boltanski and Thévenot provide us with an original theoretical matrix for registering the grammars of moral evaluation, as actors search for the common good in everyday situations of conflict and coordination. The stress on pluralism, on situational constraints of justification, and on the need for testing claims against a material setting, I believe, makes pragmatic sociology a promising starting point for theorizing political ecology.

If political ecology is taken to designate the intersection of humans and non-humans in practical political philosophy (Latour, 1998, 2004), then environmental movements should be credited with reopening crucial questions of the proper ‘equipment’ of our good common world. In the ‘green order’ (cité verte), greatness (grandeur) attaches less to human persons or institutions; rather, ecology serves to qualify the worth of natural entities such as clean air and water, a pollution-free atmosphere, and the well-being of animals (Lafaye and Thévenot, 1993). As is reflected across various social theories (e.g. Beck, 1992; Luhmann, 1989; Urry, 2000), such non-human ‘ecological’ entities have been at the center of increasingly numerous socio-political controversies since the 1970s. Indeed, the French pragmatists, and Thévenot and Latour in particular, stand united in recognizing the theoretical importance of the rise of political ecology. The question that separates them, however, is how to interpret the cognitive-moral competencies implied in human engagements with nature(s).

Perhaps the best way of approaching the Thévenot–Latour debate – the core of what pragmatic sociology has had to say about political ecology ⁴ – is to adopt their almost common empirical ground: that is, public controversies in France, during the 1990s, as to proposed ‘developments’ of nature (roads, dams, agriculture) in relatively ‘pristine’ and ‘natural’ areas of the countryside (Thévenot et al., 2000). ⁵ From this shared starting point, Thévenot and Latour each insert the ecological case into the wider trajectories of their respective theoretical projects. To Thévenot, ecology offers a complex empirical site for the sociology of critical capacity to possibly detect a novel ‘green’ order of moral-political worth in-the-making (Thévenot, 2002). To Latour, by contrast, ecology serves as a crucial testing ground for his attempt to overcome the ontological strictures of modernity, promising to finally bring the natural sciences into political democracy (Latour, 2004). The debate thus offers up two ‘ecologies’, with a view to kindred but different pragmatist-theoretical commitments.

Together with Claudette Lafaye (1993), Thévenot sets the stage by noting that the sociology of critical capacity provides three broad interpretive possibilities when confronting political ecology. First, while ‘the environment’ may offer a range of novel conflicts, the justifications invoked in environmental disputes often fall back onto well-established moral grammars. This is the case, for instance, in frequent invocations of ‘sustainable development’, suggesting the internalization of natural resources into the technical planning of industrial worth. By contrast, some aspects of environmentalism may represent a political novelty, suggesting the rise of a new ‘green’ order of worth organized around ecological analysis, renewability, future generations, and the planet as an integrated ecosystem (Thévenot et al., 2000: 241). Third, however, this possibility also pushes against the very limits of public justifiability, as studied by Boltanski and Thévenot (1991): ‘common humanity’, the shared grammar of humanist political philosophies, threatens to be superseded by holistic biospheres (Gaia), future generations, non-human subjects (animals), and technocratic expert rule.

Thévenot examines these possible implications of political ecology is his comparative study of public environmental controversies in France and the United States (Thévenot et al., 2000). In this study, particular attention is paid to how actors employ ‘green’ justifications, in compromise with other orders or by reference to its own repertoire of evaluation. The picture that emerges, however, is fundamentally ambivalent. Empirically, the study documents a wide variety of ways in which ‘natural’ entities – landscapes, rivers, bears – may be qualified for cognitive and moral evaluation. This moral complexity of environmental disputes holds for both French and American cases, even as dominant modes of justification differ; market forms of worth (short-term prices), for instance, are more prevalent in the United States, often in compromise with civic (equal rights) and green (environmental friendliness) claims.

While empirically rich, Thévenot’s study thus remains theoretically inconclusive. On the one hand, the very notion of compromise implies that actors do in fact refer to distinctly green qualifications, such as the ‘health’ of an ecosystem, threats to ‘endangered species’, ‘unique’ landscapes, and so on. On the other hand, such green qualifications are oftentimes closely entangled with other orders of worth; not surprisingly, for instance, the domestic worth of natural landscapes, as part of local ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’, plays a prominent role in the controversies. As Thévenot sums up the situation, green evaluations are ‘gaining specificity but is still often used in combination with other types of justification’ (Thévenot et al., 2000: 237). What the comparative studies document, in short, is the on-the-ground construction of a green order of worth – the contours of which, however, still lack theoretical coherence.

In many ways, Latour’s intervention in political ecology represents his attempt to provide exactly such theoretical coherence to an original and valuable practice which, as he notes provocatively (1998: 222), cannot ‘tell its left from its right’. ⁶ This project, as noted, goes to the core of Latour’s theoretical edifice; indeed, actor-network theory has always exhibited an ecological sensibility (Murdoch, 2001). Overall, what Latour tries to show, in part by using Boltanski and Thévenot’s polity model as a litmus test, is that ‘political ecology cannot be inserted into the various niches of modernity’ (Latour, 1998: 220). Translated into Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology of moral ordering, this means that the originality of political ecology can only be registered by breaking with some of their fundamental assumptions. Hence, in his new politics of nature, Latour (2004) claims that political ecology forces us to break with exclusively modernist attachments to ‘common humanity’, and to embrace a novel way of handling the hybrid objects of human and non-human collective life.

Even if one is willing to concede this point, specifying exactly what his novel non-humanist ‘green world’ entails proves challenging to Latour. In a surprising move, ⁷ Latour returns us to the canonical Kantian definition of morality, as a means–end relation, only now extended beyond its inbuilt humanism. What political ecology does, Latour suggests (1998: 230), is to ‘generalize to all the beings of the creation the aspiration to the kingdom of ends’: rivers, animals, biotopes, forests, parks and insects are no longer to be considered ‘mere means’ of human endeavors, but always also as ends-in-themselves. This drama of ethico-political transformation, where modernization gradually gives way to ecologization (Latour, 1998), is easily illustrated in the domain of river management whenever engineering efforts are mobilized to restore previously canalized rivers to their ‘natural’ meandering state. In allowing rivers to meander again, Latour notes (1998: 232) by echoing Aristotle, the ecological order leaves them to partially ‘deploy the finality which is in them’.

While this Latourian reinterpretation of ecological worth may seem plausible at first, it starts to look shakier when submitted to the test of Thévenot’s model of moral-political reasoning. First, Latour’s interpretation of political ecology suffers from a certain ‘misplaced concreteness’, in that it recognizes only singular ecological entities as carriers of moral standing. Indeed, this is how Latour (1998: 221) interprets the practical efforts of environmental movements: it is ‘always this invertebrate, this branch of a river, this rubbish dump or this land-use plan which finds itself the subject of concern, protection, criticism or demonstration’. This is a plausible depiction of some ecological controversies; however, it also prematurely constricts the diversity of political ecology. For instance, it downplays the important role of the natural sciences in enacting ‘Nature-wholes’, such as climate change, within bureaucratic and public domains (Asdal, 2008). While Latour is right in warning against too hasty notions of some ‘eco-totality’ (Mother Earth), his own suggestion is thus too ‘singularist’ to fully capture the way non-humans are qualified in ecological disputes.

This criticism relates, second, to a more profound ambiguity as to the exact entities to which Latour attaches ecological worth – and, importantly, how he envisages such worth to be tested in public disputes. On the one hand, Latour’s Kantian-Aristotelian language gravitates towards recognizing the ‘intrinsic’ worth of singular ecological entities; itself a well-known proposition in environmental ethics (Lafaye and Thévenot, 1993). At the same time, however, Latour distances himself from such a ‘deep ecology’: in the ecological world, what is worthy is not to assert, as does deep ecology, that ‘everything is connected’, but rather, on the contrary, to ‘presuppose a deep-rooted uncertainty as to the nature of attachments’ (Latour, 1998: 232; my italics). As Latour has consistently argued, sharing sociality with things in a common collective does not entail a move from anthropocentrism to biocentrism, but rather means that we go from being anthropocentric to becoming de-centered (Latour, 1993). The ecological order embodies this state of de-centered uncertainty.

Again, while this more-than-human ethics of volatile ecological attachments captures important dimensions of political ecology – expressed in notions of unforeseen consequences, precaution and experimentation – it is inadequate as a generalized model. As Thévenot points out (2002), Latour here disregards those requirements of public evaluation, including the constraining character of requirements for testing ecological and other arrangements, which forms a theoretical backbone in Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology of critical capacity. In the latter, available grammars of justification and critique serve as conventional coordination devices, aiding actors to reach agreement in those specific situations of public dispute where some form of generalization beyond the immediate (or ‘familiar’) contingency of interaction is needed (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2000). ⁸ How, then, will the volatile attachments of the Latourian green order lend themselves to constraints of public testing?

Latour has in fact provided answers to this question in a different context (1993; 2004): his ‘parliament of things’ is meant exactly to institutionalize the ecological order, by specifying a set of novel conventions for dealing democratically with ecological hybrids (mad cows, ozone layers, genetically modified organisms). Apart from the ambiguities of how to interpret this Latourian political philosophy and its relation to empirical realities (see Blok, 2011b), what is noteworthy in this context is the way in which, following John Dewey, Latour now turns political ecology into a matter of democratic ‘due process’. Hence, beyond granting ecological non-humans a right to be taken into account – as legitimate ‘matters of concern’ for the collective – the Latourian parliament of things accomplishes little in the way of qualifying the substantive cognitive-moral attachments of political ecology. In this respect, the work of Thévenot, even for its own shortcomings, moves us further in the right direction.

This is also where Thévenot raises legitimate objections to the Latourian reading of his sociology. Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) orders of worth have always taken into account the divergent ways in which the world is equipped, or furnished, by material objects; each order of worth integrates and qualifies humans together with other beings in its own specific way. Hence Thévenot’s retort to Latour’s construction of the green order (2002: 78): green critiques and justifications ‘are not new insofar as they integrate nonhuman beings into evaluations but rather because they rest on a different kind of generalized linkage’. In this respect, Latour should be credited with providing important building blocks to such a novel ‘generalized linkage’: including non-humans (such as animals) in the kingdom of moral ends, and committing to collective experimentation on uncertain ecological attachments, remain real moral and political possibilities. What seems less convincing, however, is the claim that Latour has thereby articulated the novel grammar of ecological worth.

To summarize, this movement in-between Thévenot and Latour on the question of political ecology leaves us in much the same state of theoretical inconclusiveness with which we commenced – only now, a more reflected inconclusiveness. While pragmatic sociologists agree on the rising socio-political importance of ecology since the 1970s, the trajectory, originality and weight of this collective moral project remain disputed. In this context, Thévenot is the more cautious theorist: even as he posits the emergence of a novel green order of worth, the exact place of ecologically qualified objects in the webs of compromises constituting our moral-political orderings remains open to empirical analysis. Latour, for his part, ascribes more ontological weight to his theory of political ecology, in terms of overcoming deep-seated modernist boundaries between humans and non-humans. When it comes to questions of political qualification and testing, however, Latour remains equivocal.

In what follows, the aim is to extend Thévenot’s empirical agenda, in terms of highlighting the place of ecologically qualified objects across a diversity of situations of public environmental controversy. Drawing on Latour, however, my approach broadens the rather narrow parameters set by Thévenot, in order to encompass a wider diversity in the kinds of hybrid ecological matters subject to collective dispute. Inserting the theoretical models back into environmentalist history, this exposition thus aims to show that, contrary to what both Thévenot and Latour assumes, we need to distinguish different common grammars and worlds of ecological worth. To do this comprehensively, moreover, the work of Boltanski should enter the debate. Much of the ambiguity of political ecology, I want to show, stems from internal tensions between those multiple senses of the ecological to which Thévenot, Boltanski and Latour have each helped give voice in their respective theoretical grammars.

The ambivalent nature of capital: Thévenot on carbon markets

Market evaluations were common in the United States and were often combined with … ‘green’ worth (which is surprising, given the anti-capitalist tendency of some environmental movements). (Thévenot et al., 2000: 262)

Cap and trade is the best option to stop climate change. It limits carbon emissions and gets environmental results at lowest cost. (Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), website)

Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol Agreement, the emergence of transnational markets for trading in carbon dioxide emissions – known collectively as carbon markets – has come to constitute the latest frontline in what Bruno Latour (2004) succinctly dubs the ‘war of the eco-sciences’ (Blok, 2011a). Political ecology, as both Latour and Thévenot point out, historically gained much of its force via strong denunciations of the market world, cast in the critical civic language of a capitalism with in-built contradictions, inequities, and self-serving interests. Much political ecology, as noted, plays itself out along this economy–ecology tension. With carbon markets, however, and the more general shift to market-based environmental regulation since the 1990s, signs of compromise between market and green orders of worth have become discernible, extending well into the ranks of environmental movements (see Jamison, 2001).

The standard narrative of carbon markets emphasizes that these markets are ‘made in the US’ – in the sense that American economists and regulators innovated emissions trading as a policy instrument before globalizing it to the Kyoto Protocol (e.g. MacKenzie, 2009). This is unsurprising, given Thévenot’s comparative observation, as quoted above, on the well-developed grammar of a market–green compromise in the American setting. Hence, in disputes over a proposed hydroelectric dam on the Clavey River in the Sierra Nevada mountains, Thévenot shows that both sides of the controversy judged the project on market criteria: whereas proponents emphasized cheap electricity supplies, their opponents maintained that other sources would be cheaper still – as well as less environmentally damaging. Similarly, American environmentalists such as the EDF nowadays promote carbon markets as the cheapest way to combat global warming, evoking another market–green compromise.

In the wider discourse and practice of environmental politics, this notion of a positive linkage of market and green criteria of evaluation has come to be known as ‘ecological modernization’ (Hajer, 1995). Contrary to the anti-capitalist denunciations of earlier political ecology, eco-modernist story-lines of the 1980s onwards cast the ecological problematic as a spur to new ‘green’ markets, equipped with ‘eco-products’, ‘eco-managing’ firms and ‘eco-conscious’ consumers – all in keeping with the new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, [1999] 2005: 447ff). Over time, this market–green compromise has come to achieve considerable stability, as institutionalized in organizational settings both nationally and internationally. While critics from the grassroots movements of the 1970s tend to denounce eco-modernism as ‘selling out’ to ‘corporate strategy’ (e.g. Jamison, 2001), its allure extends widely to more professionalized transnational NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

The rise of eco-modernism is observable in the changing contours of public controversies surrounding carbon markets in Europe (Bomberg, 2007). During the early 1990s, European environmental NGOs engaged in public denunciations of the very principle of carbon trading, arguing that it legitimizes businesses’ ‘right to pollute’. As the European Union (EU) developed its own emissions trading scheme (ETS) in the late 1990s, however, NGO evaluations changed, with critical opposition diminishing significantly. Instead, major NGO coalitions such as the Climate Action Network (CAN) started elaborating their own set of justificatory criteria for conditionally supporting carbon markets. Alongside a market–green compromise, CAN stresses the importance of industrial (‘ambitious targets’) and civic (‘participatory decision-making’) commitments (Bomberg, 2007: 252). These claims are directed at the technocratic setting of EU climate change policy-making, itself heavily reliant on industrial forms of worth in the shape of long-term expert planning of economic growth.

In the language of Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), the situation thus amounts to a widespread agreement among European environmental elites – in government, science, business, and NGOs – that climate politics involves a new market–industrial–green compromise, organized around the simultaneous ‘sustainability’ of economic growth and the planetary ecosystem. Much of the critical tension in European climate debates stems from actors emphasizing different aspects of this compromise (‘more market or more green’); public debate seldom moves outside of such parameters. Contrary to what Thévenot implies when associating sustainability with tests of green worth (Thévenot et al., 2000), this observation suggests that ‘sustainability’ remains a fragile grammar, torn in-between (at least) the worlds of market, industrial, and green worth. ⁹ For the purposes of public qualification, then, there simply is no stable way of assessing whether carbon markets contribute or not to an ecologically sustainable climate politics of the future (Callon, 2009).

In theoretical terms, this situation casts doubt on just how solidly grounded Thévenot’s green order of worth really is – at least when inscribed into the global territory of climate change concern. While ideas of planetary-atmospheric sustainability are socially present, enacted most strongly by scientific voices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), such ideas currently seem detached from any meaningful conventions of prudent collective ecological action. In its stead, ‘sustainability’ comes to be dispersed among a plurality of value-orders, allowing multiple and mutually contradictory actors to claim climatic grandeur for themselves, but little means of testing such claims in credible ways. Here, the difficulties posed by carbon markets are not just moral-political but also cognitive: as is well recognized in science studies (e.g. Edwards, 2010), the techno-scientific complexities needed to mediate the ‘global climate’ impose considerable constraints on public debate.

In sum, climate change could be taken to vindicate a Latourian definition of the green order: the situation enacted around carbon markets, we might say, presupposes a deep-rooted uncertainty as to the natures and values of our non-human attachments. If I undertake a climate-damaging tourist trip to the Taj Mahal, for instance, will it be legitimate for me to ‘offset’ my actions by subsidizing the market-based transfer of treadle water pumps to poor Indian farmers (Blok, 2011a)? Rather than hailing such widespread climatic ‘perplexities’ as a state of ecological greatness – as Latour (1998, 2004) might be caricatured – it seems more sober to recognize, however, that we currently find ourselves in urgent need of collective green coordination devices. Without new cognitive-moral formats, we are left with few possibilities to assess the paths open to us, via markets or otherwise, in taking steps toward climatic sustainability. In itself, Thévenot’s green order seems too fragile and ill-equipped.

The sustainability of hopeful projects: Boltanski on green urbanism

It is precisely because the project is a transient form that it is adjusted to a network world: by multiplying connections and proliferating links, the succession of projects has the effect of extending networks. (Boltanski and Chiapello, [1999] 2005:111; italics in original)

We aim to inspire and engage in conversations about sustainable cities with people, communities and organizations from all over the world. (Sustainable Cities^TM, website)

If carbon markets point to the emergence of an ‘under-qualified’ market–green compromise – in the sense of inherent ambiguity in cognitive-moral formats – the domain of green urbanism might be said to point in the direction of an ‘over-qualified’ ordering. Unlike carbon markets, which represent at best a reluctant compromise even to the most optimistic liberalists, urban sustainability is currently invested with substantial collective hopes for the future. Working towards urban greening within local partnerships and transnational networks not only promises to move the world onto a path of ‘low-carbon transition’ (e.g. Bulkeley et al., 2011). In the process, it simultaneously evokes a range of utopian imaginaries, from capitalist dreams of nurturing ‘green’ creativity and innovation, to communitarian aspirations of improving the health and well-being of excluded urban minorities. In short, urban sustainability aspirations work as a ‘green attractor’, drawing vital energies from all sides.

Even this short (and admittedly oversimplified) description points in the direction of an important question, one that is arguably insufficiently dealt with by both Thévenot and Latour in their takes on political ecology. In classic social science parlance, we may think of this as the problem of ‘motivation’: beyond a pure commitment to green values, how might we explain the apparent attraction of ecologizing projects to socio-political groups in some domains – and their relative absence or marginality in others? Given the stakes of political ecology, this is clearly an important question. Unfortunately, most answers are seriously over-determined by social theory: as in other social realms, ubiquitous reference to ‘interests’, ‘power’, ‘ideology’ and ‘symbolic capital’ all too often constitute start- and ending-points of social scientific views on the greening of societies. ¹⁰ As Boltanski and Thévenot (2006: 340ff) point out, such conceptual markers constitute a baseline relativism running deep in social theory – and blocking their project of taking seriously actors’ situated sense of the just.

If such questions were left pending in his work on justification, they have come back with full force in Boltanski’s subsequent work, with Eve Chiapello, on the emergence, since ‘1968’, of the new ‘connexionist’ spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, [1999] 2005). As is well known, this new connexionist world – or, following the polity model, the ‘projective city’ (cité par projets) – is a world of networked and globalized firms, organized around transient project-work, and one in which flexibility, creativity and mobility have been elevated to the highest common good. What is particularly noteworthy in Boltanski and Chiapello’s work is the very notion, famously adopted from Weber, that capitalism needs a ‘spirit’ to keep its unlimited accumulation running. As a set of widespread social representations – indeed, in this sense, an ‘ideology’ – the spirit of capitalism is what provides actors with reasons for committing to the system (Chiapello, 2003). This idea carries purchase also in the context of green urbanism.

Put briefly, my theoretical hypothesis is that the domain of urban sustainability provides a vivid illustration of what a ‘green’ inflection of the new spirit of capitalism looks like; or, in other words, offers up a view to new compromises between projective and green orders of worth. What this highlights is that most representations of urban sustainability – as produced in-between the social worlds of urban planners, architects, city administrators, green-tech firms and community movements – are heavily invested in grammars of networking, sharing project experiences, and working towards innovative and creative green solutions. In fact, the dominant cognitive-moral format for organizing urban sustainability effort is that of creating and circulating examples, cases and demonstration projects, cast in the language of ‘best practice’. These best practice projects are visualized and stored in a range of digital archives, aimed at specialized experts in urban greening, and circulated within a plethora of transnational urban sustainability networks (Blok, 2012).

Much like the management literature studied by Boltanski and Chiapello ([1999] 2005), such digital archives of urban sustainability projects allow us to trace the modus operandi of an influential avant-garde – only this time, a ‘greener’, more expert, and more self-consciously global avant-garde. To take one example, the Danish Architecture Centre (DAC), a knowledge hub for urban architectural developments based in Copenhagen, hosts a database of world-wide urban sustainability projects known as Sustainable Cities^TM. In its own words, the database aims to ‘inspire politicians, architects, city planners, businesses, NGOs and citizens all over the world to learn from each other and to collaborate with each other’. Here, the language of inspiration is telling: mediated through what Boltanski and Chiapello dub the ‘artistic critique’ of capitalism, the new projective world borrows part of its self-description from the older inspired order of worth. Conceivably, this is part of what makes belonging to the projective-green avant-garde exciting and gratifying.

As Boltanski and Chiapello have themselves pointed out ([1999] 2005: 447ff), ecological critiques of ‘consumer society’, present since the 1970s, constitute one of the current refuges of artistic critique, organized around nature as a site of aesthetic and authentic value. Much like other aspects of the artistic critique, however, rather than challenging the continued existence of capitalism, such aesthetic ecological commitments have been widely internalized in the grammar of its new connexionist spirit. The corollary of such incorporation, as noted, is the commodification of ecology, as ‘green consumerism’ has emerged as the dominant market–green compromise. However, in the assessment of Boltanski and Chiapello ([1999] 2005: 449), this redefinition of capitalist ideology fails to assuage critical tensions; commodification, they note, is ‘enough to cast doubt on the reality and value of eco-products’. Nature, they seem to suggest, remains a source of critical ‘surplus authenticity’. ¹¹

In sum, this theoretical extrapolation from Boltanski’s work may lead us to hypothesize that, at this historical juncture, urban sustainability emerges strongly as a ‘green attractor’ by usurping the surplus authenticity of nature – and by casting it in the attractive grammars of projective-green worth. When planting green roofs on top of Tokyo skyscrapers, installing solar power on new Copenhagen buildings, or preparing the path for bicycle lanes on Manhattan, actors from a range of social worlds – including worlds of activism – tap into vital energies that reach well beyond the narrow confines of capital itself. Of course, hardcore anti-capitalists will fail to be impressed: as Slavoj Žižek notes (2008), ecological visions may well have become the new ‘opium for the masses’ – and, we should add, mostly the urban Northern masses. ¹² For better or worse, the world of urban sustainability projects, cast in the grammar of a new ‘inspired’ environmentalism, seemingly attracts much of what is around, in Boltanski’s connexionist world, in terms of utopian hopes for a greener future.

Wild natures beyond justification: Latour on whaling controversies

What would a human be without elephants, plants, lions, cereals, oceans, ozone or plankton? … Less than a human. Certainly not a human. (Latour, 1998: 230)

I place whale eating on the level of cannibalism as barbarous behavior. (Paul Watson, Sea Shephard director, website)

If the domain of green urbanism illustrates how networked capitalism usurps surplus authenticity from ecology, then this sense of authenticity quickly fades (to ‘light green’) when set against the domain of natures inhabited by ‘wild’ and ‘charismatic’ animals (Lorimer, 2007). Hence, rising Euro-American concerns with biodiversity since the 1980s index the way ‘global nature’ has come to be seen as a preserve of aesthetic and organic differences, whose proliferation – in accordance with Thévenot’s green order of worth – is to be treasured in itself. In the climatic domain, for instance, much visual investment is made into the sad plight of polar bears, acting as non-human messengers from a melting Arctic. As this example shows, public concern with biodiversity is often channeled towards those few select larger-than-life animal species, who are themselves iconic carriers of the wider ecological cause: pandas, elephants, white tigers, bald eagles – and, of course, whales (see Macnaughten, 2003).

Since the 1970s, global assemblages of ‘whaling controversy’ have arguably provided one of the most striking experimental sites of public action that renders the Latourian more-than-human interpretation of political ecology socially plausible (Blok, 2011b). In the contemporary world, few non-humans give rise to affective compassion and political turmoil comparable to that of whales, as animal quasi-subjects long since invited into the kingdom of ends-in-themselves. Within international law, most whale species nowadays enjoy a de facto right to life, since the 1986 adoption of a moratorium on commercial whaling – and against the fierce protest of recalcitrant ‘whaling nations’ such as Japan, Norway and Iceland. Meanwhile, in widespread Euro-American public imagination, whales have emerged as near-sacrosanct, intelligent and friendly creatures. When it comes to whales, in short, Latour’s singular ecological beings have indeed become carriers of significant moral standing.

These cultural developments are not lost on Thévenot’s construction of the green order of worth; nevertheless, in this particular domain, his theorizing does seem to fall short of adequately capturing the full implications of ‘non-human charisma’ (Lorimer, 2007). In the empirical cases studied by Thévenot, in France and in the USA, distinctly green justifications often invoke threats to ‘endangered species’ of animals, and even to the ‘health’ of fish stocks. Analytically, however, Thévenot subsumes all moral extensions of the community, by which it comes to include the good of non-human natural entities like animals, under that particular version of green evaluation known as ‘deep ecology’. In this view, calls for ‘animal rights’ constitute a ‘moral crusade’ that has proven particularly strong in the United States – but one which breaks fundamentally with established moral requirements in political modernity (Lafaye and Thévenot, 1993). Indeed, it seems telling that such ‘deep ecology’ arguments only show up, in Thévenot’s French case, in the guise of an ironic mockery of disproportionate American preoccupations with ‘saving whales’ (Thévenot et al., 2000: 256ff).

The analytical shortcomings of this approach is where Latour seems justified – initially, at least – in critiquing the too strong humanist attachments of Boltanski and Thévenot (Latour, 1998). Put bluntly, Thévenot’s construction of green worth leaves little room for understanding the widespread reality of human attachments to whales and other charismatic non-humans. Partly, at least, this shortcoming seems attributable to an overly cognitive conception of human engagement with things, portrayed by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) as mainly employed in tests of public argumentative credibility. Against this view, any account of human–whale relations needs to pay attention to their often significant affective charging of public spaces – whether expressed in the aesthetic joys of whale-watching, or in visceral attachments to whale-meat eating (Blok, 2011b). Far from being a-political, such affective attachments arguably form the backbone of contemporary whaling disputes; hence, as Latour notes (2004), political ecology involves also a new direction for our political passions.

The redirection of political passions onto non-human animals is nowhere more obvious than in the coordinated efforts of environmentalists, led by Greenpeace, to turn the Japanese hunting and killing of whales in the Antarctic Ocean into a global media spectacle. Here, dramatic images of whales in death throes, red blood pouring into the surrounding blue water, are brought onto television screens around the world, orchestrating its own public of the ‘visually affected’. In many ways, this setting resembles the social scene analyzed by Boltanski (1998), whereby contemporary Euro-American television viewers are confronted with the moral exigencies of witnessing the ‘distant suffering’ of the world’s poor and starving populations. Whereas the distant ‘victims’ in question are here non-human rather than human, the available moral registers seem much the same: one may denounce the ‘cruelty’ of the Japanese ‘whale slaughterers’, express one’s ‘sadness’ at the sight of ‘innocent’ whales dying a ‘painful’ death, and so on. ¹³ In most Euro-American contexts, to treat whales as ‘mere objects’ of human disposal would quickly seem morally inappropriate.

In the vocabulary of Boltanski (1998), then, the political ecology of whale attachments has, to a significant extent, become a politics of compassion. Initially, as noted, this public assemblage seems to vindicate the Latourian model of political ecology, according to which we would all be implicated in an open-ended experiment on the proper distribution of ‘greatness’ and ‘smallness’, among humans and non-humans alike. From this Latourian point of view, it comes as no surprise that such experimentation proves globally controversial, nor that it introduces considerable uncertainty as to the appropriate moral conventions. This, after all, is exactly the value of political ecology, according to Latour: to justify the green world, we need to suspend the certainties of both science and politics, objects and subjects, in search of new ways of dealing with their mutual attachments (Latour, 1998: 233). In this process, the ontological form of the whale has changed quite dramatically (see Blok, 2011b).

At this point, however, Latour’s relative disregard for the constraints of public qualification comes back to haunt his political ecology of non-human attachments. His shortcoming manifests in an inability to distinguish, within the new green world, between situations calling upon a principle of common equivalence – the basic two-tier metaphysics of justice – and situations, such as those of love (agape) and violence, characterized by the non-equivalence of involved parties (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999). As Boltanski makes clear (1998), any politics of compassion is an inherently composite situation: owing to the irreducible distance separating spectators from suffering parties, the ‘world’ (cité) in question tends to elude any conventional tests of justice. With few available means of closure, this implies that, in compassionate politics, ‘there is a risk of the controversy becoming interminably unstable’ (Boltanski, 1998: 70). This, indeed, is exactly what has happened with whaling controversies; and on its own, Latourian political ecology possesses few means of bringing protagonists engaged in (oftentimes) violent clashes back into his parliament of things.

In sum, what the experimental site of heated whaling controversies demonstrates, arguably, is the insufficient elaboration – by actors and theory alike – of the collective protocols needed to test the grandeur of particular human–nonhuman attachments according to the Latourian green world. Perhaps, then, we could read this as manifesting a state of transition, from modernization to ecologization, with whales serving as a non-human avant-garde for the moral extensions of the more-than-human collective? Even if we grant this much to Latourian political ecology, however, his theorizing still leaves us short of specifying the character of those ‘inevitable compromises’ (Latour, 1998: 235) into which, as he acknowledges, his new political ecology must enter with other established worlds of moral sentiment. Indeed, this is where the sociology of critical capacity seems justified in distancing itself from the ‘immanentist’ actor-network theory. For his part, however, Latour usefully reminds us that not everything in the environment is subject to cognitive testing: if it is to mean anything, political ecology must also entail a new ecology of collective passions.

Conclusion: pragmatic sociology within multiple ecologies?

This article uses pragmatic sociology in order to explore the multiple senses of the ecological, with a view to assessing how worth is distributed, to paraphrase John Dewey (1927), within the existing agencies and forms of political ecology. To put my theoretical conclusion in the sharpest possible form, what the preceding exercise in empirical philosophy shows is that, in their own ways, Thévenot, Boltanski and Latour all succeed in elaborating plausible grammars of ecological worth. Contrary to what the protagonists themselves imply, however, none of these grammars quite add up to a satisfying, context-transcending depiction of the novel ecological order of worth. Rather, each theoretical construct, so the argument goes, needs to be situated within a set of more circumscribed, and thus more partial, spaces of common ecological qualification, tied to divergent cognitive-moral trajectories of ecological conflict. In other words, as grammarians of the eco-political bond, reading the French pragmatists together helps us theoretically distinguish three of the most important, co-existing, and partially overlapping grammars, or common worlds, of ecological worth.

This argument may be read as a critical rejoinder to some aspects of pragmatic sociology, particularly regarding the need for more theoretical cross-fertilization among its main strands (Guggenheim and Potthast, 2012). At the same time, it is important to note that it builds from acknowledging the inherent contribution made by Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology of critical capacity to theorizing political ecology. Hence, according to their polity model, the value of nature may have its ‘monetary aspect’ (cf. Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1994) – to the extent, that is, that it is actively qualified according to a market grammar of prices and goods. But nature’s value is equally present in all other orders of worth: as a ‘natural resource’ to be rationally exploited (industrial); as a ‘collective good’ of equal citizens (civic); as part of the local ‘heritage’ (domestic); as experiences of ‘sublime grace’ (inspired); and as communicative signs of ‘trendy popularity’ (fame). Even before raising the question of specifically green worth, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) present us with a useful model of political ecology, build on the inherent value pluralism of political modernity.

The contributions of Thévenot, Boltanski and Latour on the question of green worth should all be understood as extensions of this in-built pluralism – albeit to different effects. First, Thévenot adds ecology on top of existing moral orderings, as a novel order of worth; at the same time, however, he keeps open, as a matter of empirical contingency, the degree of specificity of this emerging green world. Second, Boltanski depicts ecology – with its aesthetic and authentic nature – as part of that more general artistic critique of capitalism which has come to feed, in turn, its new connexionist spirit. Much like Thévenot, however, Boltanski is ambivalent on the exact implications for contemporary projects of political ecology; except for claiming that such cannot be subsumed under the commodity form. Third, Latour performs by far the biggest theoretical rupture, associating ecology with a radical overcoming of modernist ontological strictures. Somewhat incongruently, however, he still holds open the prospect of compromise between modernizing and ecologizing projects.

Recast in this light, the theoretical conversations of the new French pragmatist scene may be seen to diffract a number of internal tensions within and between the different practical projects of political ecology co-existing today. In exploring this hypothesis, I resituate each of the three theoretical models into different trajectories of environmental political history, with which they enjoy some elective affinities: carbon markets (Thévenot), urban sustainability (Boltanski), and whaling politics (Latour). Taken as grammars of the eco-political bond, in each case the theoretical constructs help to articulate more clearly the moral-political force embedded in important projects of ecological critique. Deployed in turn as empirical philosophy, however, each case description also conjures theoretical shortcomings: carbon markets cast doubt on Thévenot’s depiction of ‘sustainability’ as a testable criteria of green worth; hopes invested in urban sustainability projects suggest a ‘surplus authenticity’ of nature not fully accounted for by Boltanski; and the ‘compassionate politics’ of whales dramatize Latour’s relative neglect of the constraints imposed by conventions of public justification. Testing pragmatic sociology on the territories of ecological politics, I suggest, thus helps generate new arenas of both empirical and theoretical inquiry.

This brings us, finally, to the theme of multiplicity – the end-point, as it were, of the preceding arguments. Following Annemarie Mol (2002), multiplicity is taken here in an ontological sense, in order to conjure situations where modes of ordering, including green ordering, work through languages and materialities of a not fully equivalent kind. Such ambiguity, and the way it is tempered by the practical work of political philosophies, are strongly present in Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology of critical capacity. Nevertheless, the notion of multiplicity, taken from actor-network theory, helps pinpoint those exact sites where incoherent modes of ordering interfere with each other and create new irresolvable tensions. This article argues that political ecology is such a site. In this sense, ecology is not just a matter of plural value orders; rather, ecology itself emerges as a world of inherent moral and cognitive tensions. Thévenot’s green order, in short, manifests a bounded multiplicity, in that none of its constitutive grammars quite exhausts the many worths of nature(s).

What, then, does this conclusion imply about the likely moral-political fate of political ecology? Clearly, no definitive answer can be provided here; but two modest proposals suggest themselves. First, if my conclusions hold water, then political ecology is a less coherent, more internally varied, and more morally diverse ensemble of projects than what is commonly assumed – including by the pragmatic sociologies of Thévenot, Boltanski and Latour. Learning to differentiate senses of green worth, and to apply their justifications and critiques according to situational opportunities, would then be an important task for both practical and theoretical work. Second, and reflexively, social scientists will need to attend more closely to such divergent senses of ecological worth – or, paraphrasing Mol (2002: 164ff), to the immanent possibility of alternative ecological configurations. The problem of the worths of nature(s) is as yet unsettled, a project for the future. Once we accept that ‘reality leaves us in doubt’, as Mol nicely puts it, it becomes all the more urgent to theorize, justify, critique, and otherwise live the ecological good – in this, that, or the other of its guises.