The Blue Roots of Green Crisis
"Trouble Brewing" by Orin Zebest is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Some people collect data about carbon-dioxide concentrations and surface temperatures and observe the phenomenon of global warming. Other people spy on tigers and observe that they are endangered. Numerous scientific papers and reports have been published about such observations. In the process of writing up these documents, reporting on them and considering them, the question of what these observations mean in terms of ‘action’ arrives:
‘Why are tigers endangered? What can we do about it? If there are fewer tigers, and we still want tigers to exist, then protection areas must be established. People should be educated as to the value of tigers and disincentivised from harming them by providing alternative livelihoods. If harm persists, they must be punished. We must generate the funds and support to do this, most likely through public policies, raising awareness and getting people to understand the value of tigers and the habitats they represent…’ etc…
Spending so much time meticulously observing but then rushing to conclude what this means in terms of action. However, this is not as effective as it sounds. The above way of thinking and associated ‘actions’ fail to understand that ‘doing’ does not directly follow from ‘knowing’. What you know, what you conclude from observation, is not the same as what is out there. I could summarise a similar situation with regard to global warming or water availability.
These kinds of observations are extremely abstract, torn from context. And that is kind of okay if one recognizes this, but few in the business of saving the planet do. Instead, such observations’ abstractedness is what is valued and celebrated, perhaps because it makes these isolated bits and bytes ripe for instrumentalization. In other words, tigers, water, or climate do not exist separate from humanity. Knowing that tigers are endangered, that global temperature is increasing, or that water availability is decreasing, does not tell you what to do with these observations. Unfortunately, they are often acted upon precisely as if it’s mechanically obvious what to do.
Recognition of this - to some degree - has happened within scientific circles and work has been done on making observations on how to act upon the original observations. Whilst I find most of this work extremely flaky, let’s put that to the side for now. The point is that this more recent recognition that action does not follow from decontextualised observation is not really improving the situation but making it worse. Because instead of reconsidering the initial problem of manufacturing decontextualised observations from a social world, this decontextualised eye is simply turned onto the rest of the social context to also break it up into other abstract notions.
Yes, a tiger is real and can claw your face off. Yes, I am real and can shoot a tiger. But aggregates of that kind of information are as helpful as pretending life is a messy pile of sand. Life as an aggregate of individual units of information. On the one hand, this world-view tells you little about lived life. On the other hand, it tricks you into thinking you can reshape life as if it were a pile of sand. And when you inevitably fail, because you are not acting in relations but are acting on a mirage as if it were reality, you start investing in a bigger bulldozer to tame that sand.
So what’s new, you might ask? I have tackled a similar point in previous articles at Gods and Radicals. What’s new is I encountered this work on the history of police power by Mark Neocleous, and it helped me crystallize the phenomenon I have mentioned, amongst many others in science and policy. Where these phenomena are not merely things that can be analysed as exhibiting police-like characteristics, they are in fact historically actual police institutions. In other words, these institutions have led to the tearing of observations from context, and then acting as if what you do directly follows from what you know. On top of which, it is this way of doing things that is driving the very crisis that is being observed and responded to, i.e. the blue roots of green crisis.
Let me unpack this a bit. Exploring the history of what we know today as professional police forces from a UK perspective, Neocleous notes that the police emerge with capitalist modernity, not after it. Where policing is not about upholding the law and addressing criminal behaviour, but about creating and recreating a certain social order with classes of people. To this day, he notes, what we now know as the professional police force only spend 10% of their time on anything to do with the law. Most of their time is involved in maintaining the social order. For example, you encounter sheep crossing the motorway. No law is being broken, but you call the police. For example, you wander around a shop but don’t buy anything. No law is being broken, but the police will ultimately be called. For example, your friend starts speaking gibberish. No law is being broken, but the police will ultimately be called.
In any case, the early days of creating this social order, at least in the Septic Isles context, were heavily focussed on policing the exponentially increasing phenomenon of private property. Where most common people were turfed from where they lived, where they sourced their subsistence and made their livelihood. This land being converted into private property policed by men astride horses riding around clouting anyone picking a potato or eating a fish, often hanging them for it. In sum, Neocleous argues, all forms of subsistence were criminalised except earning a wage. So people flocked to cities to find wage labour to be able to subsist.
In doing so, I would argue that a whole litany of traditional ecological knowledge was lost or marginalized. Replaced with aristocratic fields of study such as conservation and forestry, ultimately leading to transitions from woodsmxn to foresters, from diverse commons to safari parks. These fields being offshoots of the original police science that emerged with capitalist modernity. As Neocleous notes, from public health to water drainage, these were all originally responsibilities of the police, only later to be hived off into their own institutions and associated fields of study. Leaving behind what we know today as professional police forces. Crucially, all these break-offs from the police force are not independent. They are interlinked with the professional police force and work hand in hand with them. Or as Graeber puts it, the threat of violence is behind every state interaction.
These fields of study follow the earlier mentioned logic of tearing from context an observation and mechanically defining action based on it, and they are all literally extensions of police science. A science whose premise is to spy on populations and apply policing, policy, and politics. All variations of the same logic of isolating the bad actors from the good actors, based on knowledge that seemingly can be transmitted unimpeded up the chain of command e.g. there are x number of tigers and there are bad actors impacting them. This kind of information can travel up to the aristocrat-eye at the top, who can then say, ‘okay apply this policing to remove the bad actors.’ In doing so, this aristocracy is made to feel like they have some connection to reality on the ground and are actually doing something meaningful. In fact, all they are doing is creating and recreating a social order according to their class fantasies. It is inconsequential whether the aristocratic eye has put a jackboot on the ground themselves, the eye is still beholden to thinking according to social order.
Today we have the police sciences creating this link between decontextualised observations (usually called ‘the science’) and supposedly obvious actions (usually called ‘the policy’), or in some cases, scientists just plain instrumentalising whatever observations they prefer. But really the work of police science is the work of reproducing a social order based on class fantasies that give rise to things like the tiger-awareness-fences-incentivizes-punishment complex. So, what am I doing about ‘global warming’ and ‘biodiversity loss’, I am working to abolish police science and its reliance on the threat of violence.
AVI (DR. KBH)
Teacher of global public health, researcher of landwork systems, roleplayer, demon summoner, cook of many tasty things.