The Production of Information for Genred Activity Spaces:
Informational Motives and Consequences of the Environmental Impact Statement
Charles Bazerman, Joseph Little, and Teri Chavkin
University of California, Santa Barbara
Recognizable distinctions among kinds of texts help orient us within what might be seen as a vast and inchoate universe of linguistic utterances. Genre recognition orients us not only to the kind of text, but the activity sphere within it operates (Russell, 1997a, b), what acts such texts typically carry out (Bazerman, 1994), what information and affect and relation are typically realized (Bazerman, 2000a), what audience roles are typically afforded (Bazerman, 1988), what uses can conveniently be made of the text (Bazerman, 1997), and the usual means of interpreting the text (Miller, 1984). In short genre recognition attunes us in deep and complex ways as to what to make of the utterance. This is especially true for literate texts where immediate situational information about the utterance is lacking. The piece of paper could almost (but not quite) come from anywhere and anyone and could (almost) travel to anywhere and anyone--but the genre helps locate the text in some familiar social arrangements and activities, bringing it back down to familiar earth. Thus genre provides a middle space for approaching production and understanding of text--between the immediate local knowledge of specific conditions of production and reception and the distant authority of an undifferentiated and unactuated world of textual authority. But how the genre shapes the substantive material, the meanings and information conveyed in the textual space it opens up, presents another frontier of our understanding of how knowledge is produced and used for specific purposes and carries with it the motives and social relationships within which it is produced .
The case to be explored in this essay examines how a perceived social need for information to inform action motivates the creation of a genre of Environmental Impact Statement. This genre creates a space that prompts the production of certain kinds of information to populate that space and creates a place for the display of that information. That display has embedded within it certain assumptions about the value and uses of that information, that are presumed in the activities and work carried out by each text within the genre. The genre and the kind of work facilitated by it in turn spawned a constellation of related genres and a proliferation of information that have changed the way we monitor the environment and act with respect to it. Questions raised about the effectiveness of the genre and the information produced for it are in effect questions about how changing the genre and its conditions of the production and use might lead to even more useful information and effective action.
Each text opens up a space for communication and symbolic action, to be filled by the specifics discussed in the text and the actions instantiated. However, not every text is equally likely to be filled with any piece of information or equally conducive to every form of communicative action. Each genre has a typical set of contents--things it includes with its boundaries , relations among various parts of the contents, transformations of those contents that occur within that bounded space, and work accomplished by those contents, relations, and transformations. Among the many things a genre orients us towards is the kind of informational landscape typically available within the text--that is, what kind of objects, actors and events are presented, within what kind of time-space setting. Bakhtin's concept of chronotope helps explain what I mean. Bakhtin points out that as we recognize a text as representing a fiction of the type of Greek romance, we know many things about the story, setting, and plot. The story, for example, will have
descriptions, often very detailed, of specific features of countries, cities, structures of works of art (pictures for example), the habits and customs of the population, various exotic and marvelous animals and other wonders and rarities. (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 88)
We also know "There is a boy and girl of a marriageable age.... They are remarkable for their exceptional beauty. They are also exceptionally chaste. They meet each other unexpectedly, usually during some festive holiday." (p. 87) The kind of effect such a story is also intended to arouse is also typified. If we were to be angered or even worse left cold by such a story rather than charmed, either we will judge this a poor example of romance or will find in it some other genre--such as a cultural critique in the form of a romance.
Shakespeare near the opening of Twelfth Night charmingly plays on the expectation of a similar genre, the Renaissance Greenwood romantic comedy. At the opening of Act I scene 2, on a ship approaching a strange land, Viola, the female lead asks, "What country, friends, is this?"
The ships' captain answers, "This is Illyria, lady."
And Viola replies innocently, "And what should I do in Illyria?"
Of course we know what she will do in Ilyria. We know she will be in a land far from the concerns of daily life, will fall in love, will resist, will be witty, will dress up as a young man, will be caught in complications and sexually delicious ambiguity, and along with a whole cast of attractive noble and common characters will be married in the end. We know the world we will be entering for the length of the play, exactly what to look out for, and what pleasures we hope will be offered for us.
Equally, though less charmingly, when we turn to an Internal Revenue Service tax form (Bazerman, 2000b) we are entering a land filled with requests for particular information to be reported in particular formats, in order to be aggregated, subtracted, transformed into categories, defined as new financial entities, and ultimately calculated to define an obligation which we must pay. We know we will be defined within an historical bureaucratic identity with a social security number and a recoverable continuous history facilitated by preprinted address labels. That historical entity also draws into the picture not only our past filings, but many other intertextually relevant current filings by employers, clients, financial institutions, charitable organizations, and other financial entities. We know the majority of the entries will take the form of amounts in our national currency, and that they will play into a drama of relations and calculations until we get to the bottom to find out our annual obligation. We know the informational scape is bounded for the most part by the world of finances and is defined by the just past tax year, with some cumulative but limited relations to previous tax years. Love life has little bearing, except as it eventuates in dependents and standard deductions or hotel bills misreported as business expenses. Of course the informational scape evoked by tax forms is a function of which country and which country's system of taxation we are held accountable to, as well as to the particular year's iteration of the tax law and procedures. But whatever the landscape is, it provides the scene of local representation, action, and agency. No matter how constrained by forms, conventions, regulations and sanctions, the tax form becomes the scene of struggle between compliance and each individual's desire to protect personal financial interests. We each work hard at creating the most favorable individual representation within the genred site of information aggregation, representation, and calculation that forms a highly consequential relation and obligation to the government.
Tax forms are a particular salient interaction of information and genre, suggesting how information arises and is used within certain genres that require, activate, and make meaningful and consequential particular information. They also suggest how information is produced in order to fulfill the needs of genres and the activity systems they realize. These genres regularly create spaces that need to be filled and the information is produced to fill them. When the tax form annually arrives in our mailbox we know that there will be consequences if we don't fill the blank spaces. We must fill it, moreover, with information of the proper form and with proper pedigrees produced in related genres by adjacent activity systems. Much of daily business and personal accounting and book keeping practice and records are driven by the need to provide records for the tax system. Further business entities, spending and giving practices, and many other aspects of financial life are planned and executed at least in part with an eye towards how they will be reported and consequential on such tax forms. The genre is a key mechanism by which we are put at obligation to produce information of an appropriate sort, and a government-mandated genre puts the power of the state behind the requirement to produce that information. The genre in itself is not enough to produce the information, but it serves as a crystallization of motives and compulsions and provides a local habitation for the information to be lodged and recognized. The genre and its associated informational space resides in and is animated by social systems and the interactions that have found within the genre a useful way of doing communicative business. The genre nonetheless makes possible that form of social business by providing the space for it to be transacted within and the mediational locus of the other activities that are part of producing and using what comes to reside in the genre.
The United States' National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 and its mandated genre of the environmental impact statement provide an important case for examining the relation between information and the genres for which it is produced and through which it is made usable for social action. The character of the textual and social organizations define both the particulars and effectivity of that information, as well as the expanded need for further information, informational forms, and organizations. This case also raises questions about what makes for an adequate informational system, including both genres and social systems within which meaning, accountability, and consequences of the genred documents and information are realized. This current essay establishes the basic facts and problematics of the case and points to directions for further research. However the primary purpose of this essay and the case reported on is to develop the theoretical linkage between genres and the social production of information as part of social activity.
The large-scale production of certain kinds of information about the environment--about how the environment is at risk and the environment places humans and animals at risk--marks a major moment in both the environmental movement and the history of governmental involvement with natural resources. Although environmentalism has deep and complex roots in American and European philosophy, literature, belief systems, folklore, sport, and national images, in the U.S. the environmental movement only crystallized in the early 1960's, catalyzed by Rachel Carson's expose of the dangers of DDT and other insecticides and herbicides, Silent Spring . Carson gathered together the studies of the impact of DDT and other agricultural poisons which had been appearing in scientific and industrials journals, and presented this material compellingly for the general public (for analysis of the rhetoric of this volume see Waddell 2000). Her public presence brought widespread attention to information detailing the threat to the environment, and the headlong rush to use dangerous chemicals without adequate information about their long-term, cumulative and environmental effect. A report of the President's Science Advisory Council on "The Use of Pesticides" soon followed, taking a much stronger stand on the dangers of pesticide use than it and other government agencies (such as the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration) previously had. (Wang, 1997). One consequence of the heightened concern for the effect of chemical poisons was a 1972 strengthening of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. This law provided for registration, data submission, and approval of pesticides for particular uses, as well as monitoring of production facilities and seizure and criminal penalties for illegal distribution and use. The act sets in motion standard genres for registration of pesticides, the reporting of data, regulatory judgment, and criminal prosecution--in the pattern of other executive regulatory agencies. In this case the administrator of the act is located within the Environmental Protection Agency, created by executive order in 1970.
But such focused regulatory legislation seemed to Congress to be only a limited solution, not adequate to cover a much wider and more fundamental, but poorly understood set of problems. A series of public alarms concerning fallout, soil erosion, loss of wetlands, clear cutting, and oil spills had created a political climate of uncertainty about the environment. Dramatic events such as the Santa Barbara oil spill and the Cuyahoga River pollutant fire in Cincinnati mobilized public sentiment in support of the growing environmental movement, and gave urgency and credibility to the information gathered and distributed through that citizen-based movement. (For an examination of the values, stances and assumptions structured into citizen-based information, and thus the enthymemes invoked by such information, see Bazerman 2001)
In the late 1960's various congressional subcommittees began hearings on environmental problems and they started to receive testimony from several quarters that both science and policy makers lacked adequate knowledge to understand what was happening to the environment and what needed to be done to preserve it. The National Academy of Sciences, for example, in June of 1967 submitted a report to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics concluding
Concern with the environment must be a growing Federal responsibility. Understanding, prediction, and control of the consequences of technology, industrialization, and urbanization on man's physical and biological environment are urgent. A broader more intensive national effort is needed on the integrity and sufficiency of the environment. (United States Congress, 1967)
A follow-up seminar organized by the congressional committee concluded that
Congress had a unique responsibility in obtaining objective and complete information on technological consequences. The legislative function was viewed as the place where scientific information could best be integrated with all the other demands of a highly technical society in coming to judgments about how and when to deploy technology." (United States Congress, 1967, p.2)
A report of the House subcommittee on Science, Research and Development, in June 1968 "Managing the Environment" repeatedly comments that current laws are inadequate to protect the environment because there is no provision for accurate and meaningful pursuit of information and knowledge. The report concludes in italics:
A well-intentioned but poorly informed society is haphazardly deploying a powerful, accelerating technology in a complex and somewhat fragile environment. The consequences are only vaguely discernible . (United States Congress 1968, p. 6)
Throughout the sections on findings and recommendations, the report stresses information needs and current ignorance, as well as the lack of objectivity within existing information producing systems--leading to an emotionally charged, ill-informed climate for the development of policy. We can see in this characterization of emotionality, a governmental response to the oppositional and threat-laden concept of citizen's information developed among advocacy groups (see Bazerman, 2001). Also the report reiterates the need for integrated approaches to knowledge--system based, ecological, and international approaches to the environment; life-long, wholistic, and complex epidemiological views of health and genetic impacts; and complex public decision-making for alternative development.
The interdisciplinary, dispersed, and incomplete nature of the relevant knowledges for such integrated thinking suggested to the report writers the multiplicity of executive agencies involved in environmental decision making. They saw the need for an integrative policy body:
Perhaps only the Congress has a large enough charter to encompass this management problem.... The best means of getting a long term rational management is to generate an information base and provide a policy for all operational programs which will cause individual decisionmakers to act in harmony with the entire system. (United States Congress, 1968, p 29)
Shortly thereafter a white paper on a national policy on the environment was submitted to the relevant House and Senate committees, based on a joint House-Senate colloquium. Again the paper emphasized the themes of need for knowledge and information, integrated perspectives, lack of facts necessary for making policy, and the lack of central bodies to aggregate and analyze information. Recommendations included the development of the needed information and increased science and technology with a specific focus on environmental management.
These reports and related hearing eventuated in the National Environmental Policy Act, signed Jan 1, 1970 by Richard Nixon (Smythe, 1997, 12). This act, though it had goals that were regulatory in character, provided only for the production, reporting, dissemination, and analysis of the information to result in policy recommendations. The stated goals of the act balanced protection of a safe, healthful and pleasant environment with resource to "permit high standards of living." ( Section 101)
However, these goals were to be achieved by the intermediate mechanism of improving governmental inspection and coordination rather than by direct regulation. The particular mechanisms ("practicable means") set up to carry out the improvement and coordination were two--both informational in character, requiring the preparation and publication of reports. First, the Counsel on Environmental Quality (CEQ) was established to monitor governmental actions, make policy recommendations and help the President in the preparation of an annual Environmental Quality Report, which was to be the main vehicle of their findings and recommendations. Second, an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was to be prepared by each agency as part of each planned action of the federal government. Each EIS was to contain
(i) the environmental impact of the proposed action,
(ii) any adverse environmental effects which cannot be avoided should the proposal be implemented,
(iii) alternatives to the proposed action,
(iv) the relationship between local short-term uses of man's environment and the maintenance and enhancement of long-term productivity, and
(v) any irreversible and irretrievable commitments of resources which would be involved in the proposed action should it be implemented. ( Sec. 102 [42 USC § 4332C]. )
In effect the law created certain informational genres with policy implications to be prepared and disseminated. Both the CEQ report and the EIS were only loosely specified. These genres were intended to be inclusionary and open-ended, based on interdisciplinary non-quantifiable information from both social and natural sciences. These documents would require the production and presentation of extensive information, and would make that information available for both reflection and accountability by multiple agencies and audiences. Agencies would be forced to create accounts reflecting on the environmental implications of their actions. The CEQ and the President would review the EIS's of agency actions and develop policy. Congress would consider legislation based on the EIS's and CEQ and Presidential reports. The courts would have EIS's to rule on cases involving the environmental effect of government actions. Finally the public would have greater information on which to put pressure on government agencies and to act politically. Beyond preparation of these documents, however, no further actions were required by NEPA, no specific findings needed to be produced and/or acted upon. The entire mechanisms were based on the idea that if various parties had information on environmental consequences, they would act differently, would formulate environmentally conscious long-term plans and policy, or would hold other entities accountable for their actions, in the courts, legislatures, community hearings, and voting booths. Whether responsible action would result from the preparation of EIS's was a question rarely raised. Many simply assumed that court-mandated "full disclosure" would guarantee fundamental changes in decision making activity (Anderson, 1973, p. vii).
How these loosely defined genres worked out in practice is complex and controversial. Indeed it has been complained that the lack of forced action beyond the preparation of documents has not intervened strongly enough in the motives and practices of government agencies, and therefore have not produced adequate environmental protection. Although some see the EIS's primary value as a "point of entry for concerned citizens to challenge government actions," (Anderson, 1973, p. v) others, especially environmentalists, argue that NEPA should press beyond the procedure of full disclosure toward a mandate that would be enforced on substantive grounds (LBJ School of Public Affairs, 1974, p. 10; see also Twiss, 1974). Moreover, the CEQ and EIS mechanisms and the information produced are easily ignored by Presidents based on their own priorities, policy commitments, and interests. Insofar as the presidency has become an instrument of personal and political party agendas and not an administrative or executive role, environmental information has only as much consequence as the President wishes to grant it. Under an administrative concept of the presidency, however, such information and reports would be the very mechanism of administration and policy and thus would necessarily be influential (Caldwell, 1998, pp. 42-47). Further, the courts have interpreted the law narrowly, holding government agencies only for due diligence in preparation of EIS's and other documents but not on acting on any of the findings or holding themselves to any level of environmental concern (Caldwell, 1998, pp. 54-55). (For another recent assessment of the court's interpretation of the NEPA EIS process, see Byrne, 1996).
Carolyn Miller has seen the Environmental Impact Statement as created by a congressional mandate insensitive to rhetorical dynamics. It is built on such unstable sands of situation, context, and purpose and so rife with conflict and contradiction, that it has no formal stability as a genre. She sees it as imposing, therefore, no normative rules on meaning-hierarchy. Rather she sees it as a class of discourses. (Miller, 1980, pp. 237-246).
These critiques suggest that the EIS has no direct force in any tightly strung, relatively stable system of action, so it is not clear what exactly it does, how it operates, or what its force and meaning is and or should be.
Yet the fundamental notion of the congressional framers of the act and its chief architect and advocate Caldwell, is that the informational processes are powerful in themselves--and that the only forcing provision of creating and publishing the information will in itself have powerful effects. Caldwell, although decrying the personal presidency and wishing that legislative mandate would have required the information be treated as findings and acted upon , still has faith in the power of the information.
We might consider these alternative evaluations of NEPA exemplifying a conflict between two views of the operations of regulatory activity systems . The first view is that the activity system the documents are created within and serve as active within must be compulsorily linked to the documents to enforce particular kinds of actions. The second view is that the information once created and presented within the activity system, if it is available and usable by relevant parties within the activity system, will have itself profound effects on the system. The information will create meanings that will influence the participants in the system, such that they will act differently and modify the system in accordance with the information. This second approach is consonant with a view that we do not know enough to identify and compel necessary action until we are more informed, while the first is consonant with the view that we already know what needs to be done and can frame regulation that will achieve those known objectives through known specific mechanisms. The second also is consonant with the view that change occurs best when participants come to understand issues and are convinced of the need for change and action, while the first relies more on legislative compulsion of recalcitrant actors to follow an externally imposed regime. Finally the second perspective would direct us toward an understanding of informed environmental policy as an emergent and continuing process--still very much before us, rather than as a resolved regulatory issue. We see such a continuing concern in such documents as the 1996 study of the National Forum on Science and Technology Goals, published by the National Research Council , Linking Science and Technology to Society's Environmental Goals . And we can see this perspective in the two lengthy volumes of the 1999 Handbook of Environmental Impact Assessment . At the same time as this handbook documents methods, it examines fundamental questions of how Environmental Assessment can act as a policy tool and what the experience of thirty years can tell us about focusing and improving environmental assessment as a policy tool regionally, nationally, and locally.
In order to understand the power of the genres to create information that will amend behavior and policy, we need to enter into a detailed investigation of the informational processes, the information genres, the specifics of information that have emerged. As well we need to investigate the detailed mechanisms, social groups, and other entities that have emerged to produce and act on the information--that is to suggest how the genre itself may have changed the social landscape of knowledge production and use. Further, we need investigate the specific behaviors of the pre-existing government entities in the light of information, the response of other actors, and the concrete actions and policies that have occurred in the wake of information.
Here I cannot begin to provide anything like a comprehensive view of what environmental information has come to mean and be. But I will gather together a few fragments to suggest that at the very least environmental information has proliferated since the passage of NEPA.
In the first ten years of the law alone, over 9000 Environmental Impact Statements were filed and over 500 court cases eventuated. Currently, around 500 federal EIS's are filed per year, averaging 204 pages, such that there are on the order of 20,000 Federal EIS's now available. In the government documents section of my university library several aisles of shelves are devoted to EIS and related documents. I cannot, however, account for the decreased number in the early years--whether it reflects a backing away from the intent of the law through an avoidance of the process, a more efficient recognition of those cases needing assessment, an exhaustion of the grandfathered issues, a regularization of the process, or some other cause. A 1997 CEQ study The National Environmental Policy Act: A Study of Its Effectiveness after Twenty-Five Years , suggests that the NEPA processes are often initiated too late into projects to have sufficient effect and that citizen input is often not adequate (1997a, pp.7-8); it also points to the wider use of less rigorous documentation of Environmental Assessments and Findings of No Significant Impact (FONSI) and mitigated FONSIs as efficient, but perhaps questionable ways of avoiding full EIS reviews. (1997a, 19-20). Other criticisms have been raised about the use of Habitat Conservation Plans and other strategies that fold several sites or actions into a single EIS.
While Miller (1980) only gave a philosophical analysis of the rhetorical problems and contradictions faced by EISs, Ginger (2000) has examined how specific situated argumentative concerns gave shape to the structuring of information in EISs concerning wilderness study areas. In these cases concerning a new Bureau of Land management program, the shift of focus toward study areas and away from program establishment, influenced the information included. Both studies indicate, as we would expect, that EIS's are highly rhetorical documents and that the information scape presented is shaped by the goals and needs of the agencies preparing the documents.
To study the current form of the EIS, I examined a recent EIS for future use of the Cane River Creole National Historical Park ( United States. National Park Service, 2000) . In this document many areas and domains of impacted environment are considered. First there are easy to understand overview statements about all the aspects of the environment in the region. The environment is broadly and interdisciplinarily construed to include all aspects of human and non-human life as well as inanimate nature. The historical and cultural background of the two plantation sites in the park are first examined, along with an examination of the archeological, cultural, and ethnographic resources available as well as the actual collections and buildings on site. Also described are visitor use and recreational resources, and socioeconomic environment. Then are specified those items we are more likely to think of as environmental: local natural resources including air quality, geology and soils, floodplains and wetlands, water resources and quality, wildlife, threatened species, farmland and hazardous materials on or near site and dams in the region. Finally described are regional planning items, such as land use, roads, bridges, and transportation. Then the impact on each of these is examined under each of the four alternative plans for park development, along with a statement of impacts common to all. While the topics covered seem comprehensive, the descriptions of the resources and impacts are summative and not very technical, aimed more to a general public understanding than to warranting the conclusions through technical analysis and extensive data, although a number of data charts are presented. Overall it seems that public accessibility and straightforward policy consequences are advanced in a plain-language mode. The depth of the underlying analysis and data gathering, however, remains obscure. Further there is no zero-change alternative examined, so we do not get a true zero baseline against which to examine environmental consequences. The law and regulations apparently do not mandate any baseline or control situation for comparison. There appears to be no experimentation or scientific peer review. The inspection of the document depends entirely on motivated citizen monitoring, which requires the continuation of an activist, information engaged citizen movement, of the sort which existed prior to NEPA, created the conditions for NEPA, and whose impulse was coopted into NEPA.
Environmental Impact Assessment is now accepted internationally as a widely-useful decision tool, with versions adopted in at least 25 states and 80 countries (CEQ report; II:10) but also in international treaties such as the United Nations sponsored conventions on Biological Diversity and the Framework Convention on Global change (I:27) as well as the European focused EUN Economic Commission for Europe Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary context, approved by the European community and at least 22 other countries (II: 85). Environmental Impact assessment documents are also prepared as part of economic planning by the major multilateral financial institutions, such as the World Bank, the European Ban for Reconstruction and Development, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development bank, and the African Development Bank. (I: I98-120). In various jurisdictions they need be prepared not only for government-sponsored projects, but private and corporate projects requiring zoning or other government approval.
NEPA and affiliated legislation and executive orders have created a massive bureaucratic system with now a thirty-year history of activities. NEPA was only one of many congressional acts passed in recent decades, but it is the most comprehensive and general. Almost all of the acts, however, have their informational component. Almost all, also, are administered at least in part through the Environmental Protection Agency. In Fiscal Year 2000, the EPA had a budget of seven and a half billion dollars and a workforce of over 18,000. The EPA website contains extensive databases on multiple areas of environmental concern, including Air, Chemicals, Facility Information, Grants/Funding, Hazardous Waste, Risk Management Plans, Superfund, Toxic Releases, and Water Permits, Drinking Water, Drinking Water Contaminant Occurrence, and Drinking Water Microbial and Disinfection Byproduct Information. It also serves as a clearinghouse for information created by university and other public entities.
The environmental sciences have greatly expanded in activity to document and understand environmental phenomena. According to the ISI Web of Science, 3,481 science or social science articles with "environment" or "environmental" listed as a keyword were published between 1960 and 1969; of these, 2,452 were published in the latter half of the decade, after the release of Carson's Silent Spring . In the 1970s, the number of environmental articles tripled, to 11,783. In the 1980s, nearly 18,000 environmentally oriented science or social science articles were published in the English language, and in the 1990s, that number grew to a staggering 117,082. The increased environmental presence in the literature was not restricted to policy issues or the so-called "soft sciences": According to Hoffman (1997, p. 114), the number of environmental articles published annually in Chemical Week alone increased from 5 in 1965 to nearly 30 in 1973; by 1994 that number reached 55. Likewise, industrial environmental expenditures in America have steadily increased since the early 1970s, from $5 billion in 1973 to $25 billion in 1992 (Hoffman 1997, p. 25; see Palmer, Oates, & Portney, 1995, for less conservative estimates). For the most part the scientists and engineers carrying out this work have been trained in and remain affiliated with traditional disciplines such as geography, biology, chemistry, and mechanical engineering, even though they focus on environmental problems. Within those fields, however, identifiable specializations have formed. In landscape architecture, some scholars have begun to list environmental issues among their research interests, and symposia, such as the 1998 "Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture" sponsored by Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks, provide important communicative spaces for fostering further discussion in lieu of professional journals or national conferences (http://csf.colorado.edu/ecofem/feb97/0032.html). The situation is similar in geography: Some geographers, especially physical geographers, list environmental concerns among their research interests, and newly developed centers of research, such as the Lovell Center for Environmental Geography and Hazards Research at Southwest Texas State University, provide important sites of interaction for environmentally oriented geographers. But such research centers do not provide geographers with their primary affiliation, nor do they offer specialty-specific employment or publication avenues. Plenary papers from the Lovell Center's "Conference on Environmental Geography," for example, were published in the nationally recognized but traditional journal, Physical Geography (http://www.geo.swt.edu/lovell/purpose.html).
Additionally, several new aggregative specialties have arisen to deal with the large and complex amounts of environmental information and the way they interact with other forms of large aggregated knowledge. In 1975, an international panel of editors led by S. E. Jorgensen launched Ecological Modelling , an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the "use of mathematical models and systems analysis for the description of ecosystems and for the control of environmental pollution and resources development" (Jorgensen, 1975, p. 1). For the first time, mathematicians, systems analysts, and computer scientists grappling with environmental problems had a unifying rubric from which to follow or contribute to this rapidly growing area of activity. Likewise, by the 1990s epidemiologists and public health professionals with a special interest in environmental factors had their own International Society for Environmental Epidemiology as well as two journals, the Journal of Exposure Analysis and Environmental Epidemiology and the Journal of Environmental Epidemiology and Toxicology . Other aggregative specialties include environmental statistics, with the journal Environmental and Ecological Statistics first appearing in 1994 and the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics in 1996 (see also Cothern & Ross, 1994) and environmental information systems, with the first meeting of the International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems in 1995 and several major programs arising about then (see also Gunther, 1998). These nonetheless are considered part of the disciplines and people trained in these specialties are hirable within university departments in the traditional disciplines, even if their publications are in environmentally focused journals (Arturo Keller interview). A striking example of this is ecology which as a field dates back to the mid-nineteenth century when Haeckel introduced the term to cover the study of the interactions between species and their environments (Dajoz, 1977). However it remained a rather esoteric, somewhat mathematical study with little direct application until the rise of the environmental movement which soon began employing systemic ecological thinking (Hoffman, 1997).
In at least two cases, however, environmental subfields have taken on distinctive characteristics that have in essence created new domains of knowledge. Environmental Economics seemed to have emerged into its own in the late 1970's with the founding of a journal and society, and now is so distinctive from mainline economics that anyone who focuses attention entirely in this area and publishes only in environmental journals is no longer considered a mainline economist employable in an economics department (Keller). In the case of toxicology, turning to environmental issues has meant major transformations in theoretical orientation, research methods, and research focus. Modern toxicology as a field dates back to Mattieu Joseph Bonaventura Orfila (1787-1853), the attending physician to Louis XVIII of France, but its focus was traditionally on the effect of particular agents on individual organisms. However, the rise of the environmental movement and the particular impact of toxic agents on entire populations and the ecology, gave rise to the new field of ecotoxicology. The name was coined in 1969 by Truhaut, but the style of work goes back at least a decade, and was popularized in Silent Spring . This field was concerned with large aggregate data about population dynamics, in contrast to the individual approach of the older disciplines. The field began to flourish in the 1970's after NEPA with the founding in 1973 of Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology and the highly technical and mathematical journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety in 1977. Collections on particular topics soon followed like Boggess and Wixson's (1979) Lead in the Environment , Nriagu's (1979) Copper in the Environment , and Nriagu's (1980) Cadmium in the Environment . A decade after summative textbooks for graduate training like Newman & McIntosh's (1992) Metal Ecotoxicology: Concepts and Applications appear and Boudou and Ribeyre (1990) Aquatic Ecotoxicology: Fundamental Concepts and Methodologies . The authors of the latter remark, "Ecotoxicology is one of the essential disciplines which provide the scientific basis for environmental protection policy." The preface of the book laments the inadequacy of traditional toxicological methods in dealing with sublethal effects of harmful substances on complex environments, and offers this book as a step in the new direction .
One indicator of the growth of knowledge professions in the wake of NEPA and related legislation is the emergence of graduate programs in Environmental Studies and Sciences. The Guide to Graduate Environmental Programs indicates that although programs in zoology, Botany, forestry, etc that now do environmentally related work have longstanding histories, some going back almost a century, all those programs designated by some direct environmental term were founded from 1968 onward, with many formed in the early 1970's, such as the Ball State Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management in 1970 (p. 59) Baylor's Department of Environmental Studies founded in 1969 and the program in environmental economics founded in 1978 (p. 67). Within the University of California, UC Berkeley's Program in Environmental Law began in 1990, (p. 291); UC Davis Graduate group in Ecology started in 1968 (p. 292); UCLA's Environmental Health Science Program, in 1989 (p. 294), Geography, 1971 (p. 297), and Environmental Science and Engineering Program 1973 (p. 299); UCSB's Bren School of Environmental Science and Management in 1996 (p.301) with an earlier undergraduate Environmental Studies Program in 1969; and UC Santa Cruz Environmental Studies Board formed for undergraduates in 1970 and graduates in 1994 (p.303).
The EIS was the first mechanism for creating broad-focus, government- and large institution-sponsored interdisciplinary knowledge for public policy and planning. It arose in response to citizen sponsored and independent scientific information shared in an open activist context. The Information produced within EIS arose in response to public informational movements and within a political climate calling for openness of governmental proceedings and information--the same climate that produced the Freedom of Information act, first passed in 1966 and amended in 1974, 1976, 1986, and 1996. Thus not only was information made available for public planning, it was made open for public inspection, accountability, and political action and decision. Thus it presents a very different informational regime that existed in the previous post WWII period and out of which the activist movements grew.
The EIS clearly was only the first of a much larger class of environmental assessment and planning documents, which provided space and need for many forms of information about the environment and which supported the development of many scientific and social scientific specialties. Many questions remain about
·how this knowledge enters into voluntary and compulsory decision making at all levels of state, national, international government and institution planning and decision making;
· who has the means and access to produce, make visible, and make imperative which kinds of information bearing which interests;
·what the underlying assumptions and enthymemes of these forms of information are and how they enter into the systems of activity that bear upon the environment;
· whether we yet have adequate information to make wise policy choices and to persuade all parties that need to be brought into the decision making and decision compliance process.
Every one of these questions raises readily visible problems and causes for cynicism. But having recognized that the environment is endlessly complex, particularly as it interacts with human life, we seem to have no other choice except to produce and ponder what forms of information that we can create. Language--symbolic representation--has been associated deeply and for millennia with reflection for purposes of action. Creating genres for the production, contemplation and decision making of information is an essential part of our reflective monitoring of our collective behavior and its impact on the world we live in, a world that our unreflective action seems to be mindlessly threatening.
To even begin to have a sense of the communicative systems, the document types, and the informational landscapes within which environmental decision-relevant knowledge is displayed and acted upon is a mind-boggling task. But I can think of no more pressing task for genre studies to bring their tools to bear on--for what else is language for but to help us live well in our world? Through the study of our forms of language in their situated use we can obtain some reflective understanding on how we produce knowledge, how that knowledge is connected to action, and how our need for knowledge to act wisely can be addressed through creating forums for the creation of the knowledge we need.
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For an examination of some of the theoretical issues surrounding the situated construction of meaning within genred spaces see Bazerman, forthcoming.
In fact in some other nations the EIS system has been mandated as forcing action and creating accountability for action. For example the Netherlands. (Petts 1999).
For elaboration of activity theory and its applications to issues of writing, see Bazerman & Rusell, 2003.
Thanks to Mark Schlenz for these and other observations about the difficulties in the current NEPA/EIS process.
For a more complete account of the development of ecotoxicology and its relation to toxicology, see Bazerman & De los Santos, forthcoming.