Contesting the future: schismogenesis and the production of knowledge in a minign dispute

Erin Tuckwell

Research output: ThesisDoctoral Thesis

287 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

[Truncated abstract] This thesis presents an ethnographic account of a dispute between conservationists and developers over a proposed solar salt field adjacent to the Exmouth Gulf on the northwest coast of Western Australia. If successful, the mine would have become the largest of its kind in the world, requiring significant infrastructure development in a landscape that had so far remained largely unknown and under researched. In the process of undergoing the environmental reviews process, both developers and conservationists were obliged to produce valid and ‘objective’ scientific environmental knowledge as evidence to support their beliefs as to why the mine should or should not be constructed in area about which so little was understood. In this way, they were drawn into a dispute that became increasingly polarised, bitter, and personal. To frame this discussion, I draw on the notion of schismogenesis (Bateson 1972, Binde & Boholm 2004) to illustrate the process whereby the two opposing groups became locked in an increasingly polarised and simplistic dispute over whose environmental narratives should be used to decide the future of the environment. The result was the production of two utterly opposing bodies of environmental knowledge, which were both equally supported by valid scientific and local experiential knowledge. Often, the oppositional beliefs, values, and knowledge presented by the conservationists and developers were presented in public discourse as “shallow”, driven primarily by economic greed or superficial aesthetic motivations. As such, both conservationists and developers emphasised the importance of ‘good’ science in the arbitration of dispute. Yet while science provided knowledge in the form of ‘facts’, it was the role of decisionmakers and the wider public to decide what to do with it.
Original languageEnglish
QualificationDoctor of Philosophy
Publication statusUnpublished - 2012

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Contesting the future: schismogenesis and the production of knowledge in a minign dispute'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this