> On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 9:07 PM, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ecological footprint analysis drives
> > me up a tree because of its absolute refusal of class/power analysis and
> > environmental in/justice...
>
> But ecology is, at least in principle, a science and not an ideology.
> Expecting a "class/power analysis" from it is like expecting one from
> astrophysics.
>
So... you're saying sociology's not a science.... As far as I am concerned, if a "science" like ecological footprint analysis is being treated by folks as the foundation for policy agendas and those policy agendas have no comprehension whatsoever of the class/power silences in ecological footprint analysis then the policies are going to replicate the ecologically and socially destructive consequences of all prior rounds of "science-based policy" based on class/power-silent sciences.
>
> > as if Population, Affluence and Technology could be straightforwardly and
> > quantitatively operationalized in any historically-informed,
> > socially-meaningful and viable policy-relevant way...
>
> I'm not a scientist myself, but I don't believe the goals of science
> include
> any of those things.
You should talk to the folks doing ecological footprint analysis. They all believe what they are doing is socially-meaningful and viably policy-relevant... and their work ought to be sufficient for good policy... and no social scientists concerned with the silences in their data, like WHY population is what it is (its just Natural Increase), WHY affluence is distributed the way it is (its just the fact that these places haven't modernized yet) or WHY these, as opposed to those, technologies are in place (technology is either good or bad, but its never social) having any say.
And are you really saying that the goals of science are simply to collect and generalized from the objective facts of nature? I like science and many scientists, but science is a social institution not an objectively empirical activity done by heroic (or normal) individuals. There's a ton of literature on this out there.