Benjamin Hale
University of Colorado
Indeterminacy and Outcome in Environmental Interventions
At a time in which climate change has come to dominate, if not overwhelm, the environmental discourse, it is easy to approach environmental issues as if they are mere maximization problems, in which risk assessment, cost-benefit analysis, and ecosystem services accounts dominate. In doing so, such approaches simultaneously simplify environmental problems by quantifying and rationalizing them, but also explode environmental issues into “wicked” problems, making them unsolvable using standard political or policy tools. This then naturally lends itself to technocratic solutions, including efforts to use economic tools or as-yet undeveloped technologies to steer our environmental outcomes in the right direction. Meanwhile, more basic moral questions about permission and intervention are left unanswered. This five-day summer seminar will tackle issues in intervention ecology by turning an eye to questions of framing, outcomes, targeting, technology, responsibility, and risk.