Expertise and Environment: Reckoning with Scientific Authority in an Anthropogenic Age

Discussions about the nature of scientific authority and its relationship to governance have become increasingly urgent in our current era of climate change. Expertise seems simultaneously necessary and suspect, and scholars in the history of science and STS have mounted responses ranging from Naomi Oreskes’ defense of scientific authority and its processes of community consensus to Michelle Murphy’s despairing surrender of hope in institutions and call for a retreat to spaces of intergenerational and interspecies relations of care. Such charged and polarized discussions suggest the importance of revisiting expertise and environment from a variety of disciplinary and geographical perspectives, in order to examine the diverse institutional sites and political contexts in which scientific authority operates.

Based on a recent workshop in Geneva, this paper proposes possibilities for a less categorical, more flexible, and more fluid vocabulary for understanding big concepts—e.g., “expert,” “the state,” “the public interest”—along with the nimbleness or lack thereof by which experts navigate complex social, political, and institutional settings.  The pluralism of expertise itself, the distinction between specialized knowledge communities and the specifically public character of expert knowledge, the long history of environment and landscape as sites of intervention by states, and the increasingly fragmented character of knowledge in an “age of fracture” have combined to bring scientific authority to its current crossroads. Ultimately, one must take seriously the diverse ecologies of knowledge in which experts operate, and reckon with the inevitably unstable and contested nature of knowledge in public settings, which makes expectations of unitary truths untenable at the level of national and international politics.