1. Planet-management geoethics naturalizes the concept of bioregional self-determination and the technosocial project of empire (rationalizing its expansions as natural) but also naturalizes cultural difference and hierarchy (the West's post-Enlightenment fundamentalism), essentializing the environment and embodiment (both the environment's and subjects' bodies), and rationalizing capital (through bioprospecting, capitalist innovation, and human capital). The naturalization of bioregional self-determination can be challenged by a critique that emphasizes (i) the historical, political and social contingencies of the concept; (ii) its often-assumed link with or evolution from Indigenous worlds; and (iii) its potential, in its contemporary use, to interfere with more radical efforts at decolonization, structural reform, or political upheaval. Conceptualizing the biosphere as analogous to an empire enhances technoscience's hegemony through a geoengineering ethic of dominion over nature that mirrors and is mirrored by colonialism's ethic of domination over non-Europeans, permitting empire's progressive advancement in a postcolonial era.

2. Discerning a new geopolitics of technoscience entails (i) viewing regional boundaries as political constructions and not as naturally-given, (ii) recognizing local imperatives and concerns as globally connected, and (iii) exposing the political, cultural, economic, and social consequences of hierarchically structuring diverse localities into regions that each claim hegemony over certain parts of the globe. Framing human agency as fallible and contingent challenges neoliberal discourses that naturalize perfectibility by isolating social problems and blaming those who fall outside institutions or who fail to adequately support them. Acknowledging humanity's environmental limits undermines claims that we will inevitably abuse nature through technologies that expand human choice and dominion. The pessimistic appraisal of social science—its assumption that human actions are largely driven by self-interest and impossible to predict or regulate in large numbers—can be combined with an optimistic political program focused on democratizing social life and augmenting collective rationality.

3. Despite increasing public resistance to global markets and techno-scientific norms, new institutional patterns have yet to develop. Renewing governance institutions requires (i) an integrated approach that encompasses technological systems, human subjectivity, and social institutions; (ii) a realistic appraisal of the fallibility of human agency in the global context; and (iii) a strategy that embraces uncertainty and deals with uncertainties rationally through democratic institutions, open communication networks, and multiple forms of evaluation. The global environmental crisis exemplifies the convergence of the local with the global such that all human actions can be seen as interconnected, rational action is becoming more difficult as the complexity of issues increases, scientific knowledge remains incomplete, and humanity is endangered by its ignorance of planetary-scale systems.

4. The postmodern challenge to science's objectivity has been met with the pragmatic defense of "science as usual" which, as Jeremy L. Caradonna demonstrates in Earthly Politics: Science in a Democratic Society (2004), constructs a counter-postmodernism whose premises are inconsistent with those of postmodernism but whose conclusions are compatible with it. Counter-postmodernism promotes values by reconstructing public morality into its own image: it justifies technoscientific pursuits by proclaiming human mastery over nature a moral imperative while simultaneously asserting that perfecting nature is not possible because "the loss of certainty makes morality necessary." These views are implicit in contemporary geoengineering proposals for dealing with climate change which present geoengineering as a goal-oriented activity despite its ability to produce side effects or other kinds of surprises in addition to controversy over whether it will produce any positive impacts at all. These projects construct moral authority without accountability through rhetorical strategies that essentialize nature and invoke normative assumptions about the environment's value and humanity's obligation to protect it; construct technology as undirected by intentional human choice so as to avoid acknowledging the reality of power relations among institutions, social groups, and political forces; and rely on rationalistic explanations to obscure the political character of the technological systems that these projects construct as value-neutral.

5. Geoengineering proposals are advanced without any systematic investigation of alternative strategies. This absence of alternatives recalls a classical postmodern concern with science's focus on technological "fixes" for social and environmental problems, noting that fixes tend to defer solutions by displacing one problem with another. The predominant concern among climate scientists is whether geoengineering projects will produce unpredictable side effects, as Alden Meyer and others suggest in Science magazine (1 October 2006), but this question neglects alternative approaches that could produce side effects of a different sort. Responses to climate change that focus on sustainability and adaptation promote alternative practices that enhance human cooperation with nature through social networks. These approaches can be categorized as incremental, transitional, or transformative: incremental responses seek to reduce carbon emissions while fostering regional resilience in the face of climate change; transitional approaches aim to respond to direct impacts by developing coping mechanisms that build toward long-term transformation; and transformative practices generate knowledge about existing local conditions so as to develop new forms of interaction between human communities and the natural environment (Jay Walljasper, "The Rise of Green Development," Utne Reader , January–February 2006). Incremental strategies might yield an uncertain benefit in terms of reducing global warming while promoting new ways of operating within global markets; transitional strategies might yield an uncertain benefit for particular communities and industries while fostering new kinds of communities with unique skills for responding to extreme weather events; transformative approaches might yield certain benefits from organic farming while inspiring fresh thinking about property rights in an era when private ownership threatens planetary health.

6. Considering each of these categories of climate-change responses reveals limitations to current debates on the ethical value of geoengineering. Climate scientists themselves are increasingly focusing on the importance of being "better at being humans" through attention to how social networks structure decision-making, particularly in terms of governance (Stephen Gardiner, "Bounding Power," Oxford Political Theory Group, 2008). Nevertheless, Alden Meyer and others also note that "no purely technological fix will get us out of this global warming jam" (Science 315:971; 18 September 2007). Such statements posit two different ways for imagining human governance in an era of climate change. The first imagines geoengineering projects as inevitably requiring global governance through a transnational authority vested with regulatory powers over planetary health. This view takes seriously the need for international planning, but neglects the question of how global planning will be brought about in a way that respects local agency and regional capacities for self-governance. The second understanding positions geoengineering not as an instrument of global planning but rather as one technology among many strategies for responding to climate change. This approach takes seriously the challenge of local conditions while simultaneously respecting existing patterns of human interdependence around the world. While both global visions offer valuable insights, our point is that neither addresses the full range of ways in which human governance structures decision-making about planetary health, including questions about whether alternative strategies can help reduce carbon emissions while fostering local knowledge and skills for responding to climate change. We believe that the voices advocating serious engagement with alternative responses to climate change can produce a more flexible approach than is available either from global planners or advocates for geoengineering projects.

7. The second imagines humans as ethically responsive, self-regulating creatures capable of managing climate through behavior. In terms of international or global governance, the limitation to current discussions in the literature (with regard to the ethics of geoengineering) is a focus on ethical theorizing which proposes different kinds of global governance as a means to managing technologies and mitigating climate change. This paper does not propose any particular global governance structure, but questions the assumption that technology is necessarily political, either in the direction of legitimating world government or in the direction of enabling capitalism or national interests to overpower global cooperation.

8. Judith Butler also argues that limits to globalization should be recognized so that global governing bodies do not inadvertently override regional concerns and needs: “We need to take seriously how existing world bodies often find their interests aligned with those who are already globally powerful” (Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso, 2004: p. 57). It might be supposed that geoengineering could significantly alter planetary boundaries - depending on whether the effects would be temporary or permanent and depending on how such effects were distributed on Earth's surface - particularly among regions and between North and South. At present it is unclear whether geoengineering would alter planetary boundaries or whether there would even be consensus over what constitutes planetary boundaries (Thomas Lovejoy, "The Real Planetary Boundaries," Science 317(1): 56-58; 8 January 2007).

9. Regardless of these limitations in the current debate over the ethics of geoengineering, both science and practice can be understood as political practices informed by different degrees of power relations, including relations among scientists from different countries or regions. There remains much work for theory to do in teasing out these relationships alongside research into how international laws can better regulate research into geoengineering projects. For example, “in an essay on the politics of geoengineering governance, Margaret Kosal argues that focusing on individual policy recommendations for a global governance regime detracts from a more fundamental understanding of international politics. She argues that politics and power are not unitary constructs and that multilevel games are the result of the complex interaction between ‘power over’ at one level and ‘power to’ at another. She advocates instead for looking at ‘politics in the plural as a means of managing this complexity.’”

10. Regarding the efficacy of geoengineering, however, there seems to be little debate: whether for intentionally disrupting the climate or intentionally mitigating anthropogenic climate change, geoengineering cannot alone guarantee that species will survive and it cannot alone guarantee human survival and prosperity.

by Paul Kingsnorth, in Technoscience and the Postcolonial World: Understanding New Forms of Knowledge, Power, and Difference, ed. by William I. Robinson, James F. Reynolds, and Gerald V. Nye (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 90-99.

References

[1] Âmin, Samir. Sustaining the New Economy: Work, Family, and Community in the Information Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

[2] Amin, Samir. "Trade and Ecology in the Neo-Liberal Phase." Monthly Review 59, no. 6 (2007): 30-39.

[3] Buell, Frederick and Lourdes Gouveia. "Is Science Responsible for Accidents?" In How Societies Respond to Technological Risk, eds. Daniel Chiras and Tim Lenton. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 133-152.

[4] Despommier, Dickson. The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010.

[5] Hewitt, Corey. Who's Afraid of Relativism? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

[6] Peppard, Tobias. Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

[7] Sheppard, Eduardo Farias, and others (eds.). "The next generation of geoengineering research." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 371 (2016): pii: 20150182. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2015.0182. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0182