Environmental policy tends to be conceptualized too narrowly, obstructing attention to higher-level policies that set the conditions under which “environmental decisions” are made – often inadvertently. Too frequently, it favors neither environment nor human wellbeing as needed. My scholarship draws attention to higher-level policies affecting how societies understand the environment – how problems and solutions are framed and perceived, and embedded assumptions about agency and responsibility (who can and should act). I particularly draw attention to limiting assumptions and policies bearing on what knowledge is produced by academic researchers, and to the need for central attention to media and technology policies.
A conclusion confirmed various lines of my research is that critical examination of mainstream institutions, including the politics of academic knowledge production, is key to improving both environmental science and policy. Much of current environmental research falls short in crucial respects, not the question of whether and how research priorities, artificial intelligence, big data, and media, old and new, might be harnessed to support needed, urgent just sustainability transformations.
In recent and forthcoming work (see fist listed publications under “Highlights”), for example, I discuss how undemocratic forces intensify existential environmental threats, boosted by rapidly evolving artificial intelligence. I argue that countering these trends requires harnessing information and communications technologies to the global sustainability goals. I discuss how achieving this hinges on overcoming dominant cultural (mis)understandings of mass media as neutral transmitters of information rather than constitutive of reality.
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References:
1. Lahsen, M. and C.A. Nobre, Challenges of connecting international science and local level sustainability efforts: The case of the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia. Environmental Science & Policy, 2007. 10(1): p. 62-74.
2. Lahsen, M., et al., Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability to global environmental change: challenges and pathways for an action-oriented research agenda for middle-income and low-income countries. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2010. 2(5-6): p. 364-374.
3. Nobre, C.A., M. Lahsen, and J.P.H.B. Ometto, Global environmental change research: empowering developing countries. Anais Da Academia Brasileira De Ciencias, 2008. 80(3): p. 523-529.
4. Bennett, E.M., et al., Bright spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2016. 14(8): p. 441-448.
5. Lahsen, M., Toward a Sustainable Future Earth Challenges for a Research Agenda. Science, Technology & Human Values, 2016. 41(5): p. 876-898.
6. Lahsen, M., J. Marcovitch, and E. Haddad, Dimensões Humanas e Econômicas das Mudanças Climáticas, in Mudanças Climáticas em Rede: Um Olhar Interdisciplinar, C.A. Nobre and J.A. Marengo, Editors. 2017, INCT: São José dos Campos, SP, Brazil. p. 247-306.
7. Lahsen, M. and E. Turnhout, How Norms, Needs, and Power in Science Obstruct Transformations Towards Sustainability. Environmental Research Letters, 2021. 16(2): p. 025008.
8. Lahsen, M., Evaluating the Computational (“Big Data”) Turn in Media Communications of Climate Change. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2021, forthcoming.
9. Lahsen, M., Comment on Susan A. Crate’s paper, ‘Gone the Bull of Winter? Grappling with the Cultural Implications of and Anthropology’s Role(s) in Global Climate Change’. Current Anthropology, 2008. 49(4): p. 587-88.
10. Lahsen, M., The social status of climate change knowledge: an editorial essay. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews-Climate Change, 2010. 1(2): p. 162-171.
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Myanna Lahsen 