Jamieson, Dale

“Ethics, Energy, and the Transformation of Nature”

Since at least the rise of the contemporary environmental movement in the 1960s different sources of energy have carried various social meanings and even moral evaluations. Nuclear power was anathema to most environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s, in part expressing the movement’s roots in the anti-nuclear weapons movement of the 1950s. Wood was green in the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps because of its direct connection to nature and the decentralized energy system that it seemed to imply. Many environmentalists were slow to recognize the centrality and importance of climate change, in part because it disrupted these familiar associations. Wood, at least without a lot of technological help, is no longer good, while nuclear power, at least on its face, is no longer bad. Even more disorienting is that the widespread appreciation of the challenge of climate change augured a new way of looking at our relation to the natural world. Environmental problems, instead of being discrete violations of the natural order, have increasingly come to be seen as manifestations of the human domination of nature. But using energy, in all of its forms, transforms nature. When does transformation become domination? Answering this and related questions is the greatest theoretical challenge facing contemporary environmentalism.