The relation of ecocriticism to the natural sciences is uniquely close, for unlike most political movements environmentalism claims a scientific basis. Green arguments
often rest on the authority of scientific modelling and prediction. Science is also an ally in critiques of the illusory self-sufficiency
of the cultural or of notions of ‘nature’ as mere cultural construction. The timeframes of geology or intimate studies of lives of other creatures undermine at a stroke any narrowly
human-centred perspective on things.
At the same time ecocritics are often profoundly critical of the institutions of science. Science has become deeply implicated
in techno-industrial society as both a practice and as an ideology. The growth of reform environmentalism has also seen the increasing co-opting of scientists into systems of global surveillance in not always
comfortable ways.
Other critics challenge the basic assumptions that underlie the scientific claim to an exclusive understanding of reality
through causal, material laws to be formalised mathematically. Scientific notions of ‘objectivity’ are accused of having unjustly discredited other modes of understanding and of having generally drained all
ethical, spiritual and even aesthetic value from the world.
Sometimes, however, science appears in rather caricature forms. The multiplicitous work of scientists gets identified with a kind of totalitarian monolith whose aim is
simply the domination of nature, for which all knowledge is a mode of power, and which threatens every remaining island of
subjective freedom and individual responsibility with modes of administrative procedure. This view is sometimes pertinent
but it does no justice to the plurality or the internal divisions of the sciences.
In sum, environmental criticism finds itself in the difficult position of needing, at the same time, both to draw on scientific
knowledge and expertise and also to criticise the social power and intellectual authority of science. This situation reflects
the way the environmental crisis is also one of culture, values, politics and ethics as well as the functioning of ecosystems.
One manifestation of this is that issues engaging environmentalist thinkers no longer fit inside currently
institutionalised divisions of knowledge, with the natural sciences on the one side and the social sciences and
humanities on the other. Val
Plumwood writes of the current, fragile demarcation of intellectual disciplines: ‘The idea that we humans are completely immersed
in a self-enclosed sphere of our own we can call “culture” while non-humans are part of a non-ethical sphere of
“nature” is the leading assumption that corresponds to and structures these disciplinary exclusions.’
1