Dr Tim Ingold TEDx

you you mesito let's welcome dr. Tim in gold thank you thank you very much it's an honor and a privilege for me to be here and I would like to offer my profound thanks to the Shah government and the Canadian Polar Commission for the invitation to to have me here just following the introduction the first thing I would like to say is that I am NOT and never will be an expert I find that word rather abhorrent and I'm not don't claim to be an expert I claim to be some kind of thinker but that's about it we we live in an era or so scientists policymakers and statesmen like to tell us when the environment is under threat in a way that it has never been before changes in climate largely induced by human activities could render large areas of the earth uninhabitable I do not mean to deny the threat or to underestimate its scale I do however want to question whether the so-called environment of scientific and policy discourses is one that human beings or any other creatures have ever inhabited for what these discourses presenters is not the world that we know from our everyday experience literally of course an environment is all around the person or organism whose environment it is the environment is the phenomenal world that we perceive with our senses with our eyes with our noses with our ears with our skin it includes the earth beneath our feet the sky arching above our heads the air we breathe not to mention the profusion of vegetation powered by the light of the and all the animals that depend on it busily absorbed in their own lives as we are in ours I would like to take you all outdoors into the open air to remind you of this since here inside this lecture theatre it seems to be something we can only imagine it is moreover so fragile and imagining that it is readily crushed by the high-powered impact of technologies of data projection that are designed to sell us things rather than to enhance our awareness or powers of observation this incidentally is why having attended a compulsory course in my University on how to use PowerPoint I decided on principle never ever to use it for what these technologies are telling us in conferences conference rooms just like this located all around the world furnished with exactly the same equipment with blinds drawn to cut out the light and populated by globe-trotting international experts not like me is that the environment is not at all as I have just described it or as we might find it where we to take a walk outdoors it is rather a world whose reality is given quite independently of our experience of it and that we can only know or only know correctly through the compilation of datasets drawn from detached observation and measurement and relayed back in the forms of maps graphs and images it is apprehended as the globe with its atmosphere rather than as the manifold of earth and sky it is apprehended as a catalogue of biodiversity rather than as the entangled life ways of animals and plants it is apprehended as susceptible to climatic change rather than to the vicissitudes of weather now for most people the environment of everyday life is understood in the first of the two senses I presented to you the world around us it extends from where we are to the horizon with the earth below and the sky above and yet it is the second sense of environment that predominates in the discourses of techno science and policymaking and from this latter perspective the relation between people and the world seems to be turned inside out when scientists and policymakers speak of the global environment they have in mind not the world around us but a world that we have ourselves surrounded as though we were expelled to its outer surface and covering this surface of the globe we have become in this discourse ex habitants rather than inhabitants in a world conceived as a globe as the philosopher Martin Heidegger remarked when he first saw pictures of the earth photographed from space in a world conceived as a globe there is nowhere for us humans to be the earth affords habitation the globe does not and while we may accept some responsibility for the global environment it is not one to which we feel we can belong so how can we respond to the prognostications of science how can we act to safeguard the future of a globalized world that in our experience has already been taken from us now I don't mean to imply that we should turn a blind eye to the changes largely induced by human activity which threatened the continuity of life in many regions of the planet but I do believe that the proper way to address this threat and to secure the continuity of a world fit for both humans and nonhumans to live in is to close the gap that currently exists between the experienced environment of our everyday lives that is the world around us and the projected environment of science and policy discourse and if present it seems to me that this gap is becoming ever wider we used the same term environment and slip imperceptibly from one to the other and for the discipline of anthropology which I represent caught as it is betwixt these contrary understandings and committed to mediating between them this poses an acute challenge now to begin to close the gap the first step is simply to bring it out into the open and recognize its existence at the moment we're using the word environment so casually and to mean such different things that we don't notice that the gap is there and yet that gap is the most important thing we have to address and the second thing is to acknowledge that the environment of lived experience is just as real if not more so than the one described by science and that the wisdom sensitivity and judgments of inhabitants that is people who live in these environments offers just as valid a basis for securing the continuity of life as to the models predictions and scenarios of scientists by that I do not mean that we should abandon science or that we should oppose the knowledge of inhabitants to scientific knowledge rather we need to find ways in which they can work together and by the way I talked about the knowledge of inhabitants I do not talk about traditional knowledge because I do believe that the word traditional carries unfortunate associations of a body of knowledge that is static already packaged and that is available to pass on from one generation to the next independently of people's involvement in the land from which that knowledge grows it seems to me that that knowledge is something that is dynamic that is continually growing in the lives of people that each generation in a sense has to discover for itself though under the guidance of predecessors and for that reason I prefer to talk of knowledge as growing within practices of habitation rather than being handed on as a fixed body of tradition so it seems to me that um that we need to both revalue the environmental experience and creative interventions of lay practitioners that is people living in the land and that knowledge that Science and Technology two are grounded in practices of habitation doing science is one particular way of inhabiting the environment now at present with rare exceptions this bringing together of inhabitant and scientific knowledge is not happening and the reasons for this failure I think are not philosophical it's not because these are knowledge ease that are epistemologically of a fundamentally different kind they are not both scientific knowledge and inhabitant knowledge grows out of practices that are conducted on the land in the environment so the reasons why this is not happening are not philosophical they are political and they lie in the overwhelmingly greater power of the neoliberal state and corporate industry to enlist institutionalized science in the pursuit of global interests and these are interested in the language of large corporations more often than not pass under the rubric of sustainable development the calculus of sustainability is one that treats entire tracts of the Earth's surface and the resources they Harbor as standing reserves for a for the continuing benefit of a globally distributed humanity much as one might administer a trust fund for future generations it is to protect the earth in the same way that the company protects its profits this is not a question of personal care based on familiarity and experience but of bookkeeping and rational management of balancing recruitment and loss in renewables just as one might balance monetary income and expenditure or in short sustainability as it is used largely in the corporate world is premise upon a perspective of X habitation and by and large the management of sustainability has made it more difficult and not less for the vast majority of people on the planet who have access neither to corporate power naught of the wealth that goes with it it's made it more difficult not less for them to inhabit the earth their lands or their rights to use them have in many cases been curtailed or confiscated they have been divested of both the responsibility of care for their environment and of the power to exercise it and their knowledge in many cases has been reduced to evidence answering to systems of governance and regulation not of their own making but imposed from above by more powerful interests and so currently scientific and inhabitant knowledge occupied two poles in a hierarchy of power with science at the top and inhabitants at the bottom they are like two bulbs of an hourglass where the flow is unilaterally as policymakers love to say from the top down rather than the bottom up now I am NOT suggesting that we should invert the glass today more than ever our actions in the world need to be informed by a science of the environment but we need to forget about tops and bottoms we need to put the glass on its side to give equal weight to the knowledge and wisdom of both practicing environmental scientists the people who actually do the work and inhabitants because scientists are inhabitants - it's not the scientists that are the problem it is the institutionalized co-option of science - powerful interests scientists our inhabitants - and their studies are not just of the environment but are carried on in an environment all science depends upon observation and all observation depends on the same sensitivity and judgment in relation to the world around us that is key to the practices of inhabitants be they scientists farmers foresters fishers hunters trappers or anyone else whose livelihoods are inextricably bound to the lands and oceans of our one earth and this rootedness of scientific inquiry in our habitation of the earth its general messiness and incoherence I think is something to be celebrated and not suppressed scientific knowledge people talk about the science so it was one great edifice and all scientists agree nothing could be further from the truth science is a complete mess just as everything else is and no scientists agree on anything and whenever they pretend to agree it's a kind of awkward compromise so this messiness and incoherence is something we should celebrate we need to turn the relation between people and environment back again from inside out to outside in and I believe that only by doing so by founding a science of the environment upon a foundation an ontological foundation that lets us be in the world we seek to know and understand rather than expelling us from it only then can scientific knowledge and the wisdom of inhabitants meet in the common project of designing environments for life thank you very much dr. M hold the University of Aberdeen your students your colleagues are so lucky to have you you are a true contrary I love your coyote spirit Massey Cho thank you thank you

Channel: Tłıchǫ Research and Training Institute

Views: 22,151

Rating: 4.9756098 out of 5

Keywords: Tim Ingold (Author), Anthropology (Field Of Study), Tedx, Traditional Knowledge

Id: RY4Vw_lT-x0

Length: 17min 31sec (1051 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2015