Losing and Creating: Climate Change and Everyday Lives Embedded in Social Experiments

• Published in: Journal of Environmental Sociology Vol. 26; pp. 44 - 59
• Main Author: FUKUNAGA, Mayumi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Japanese
• Published: Japanese Association for Environmental Sociology 05.12.2020; 環境社会学会
• Subjects: Climate Change; Economy of Qualities; Hybrid Forums; Novel Ecosystem; Socially Experimental Everyday Lives; Trust; ハイブリッド・フォーラム; 信頼; 品質経済; 新しい生態系; 気候変動; 社会実験的日常
• ISSN: 2434-0618
• DOI: 10.24779/jpkankyo.26.0_44

The “novel ecosystem” that has appeared with climate change demands an exploration of new metabolic interactions between materiality, knowledge, and social practices. In addition, government, more than ever intricately interwoven with science and technology, is reorganizing the very details of our lives in an attempt to create certainty within uncertainty in the novel ecosystem. We are now living such socially experimental lives, facing a reality where we can no longer believe in the idea, cultivated throughout our history, of the nature of the relationship between mother earth and human-beings. How are such new socially experimental lives reorganizing the relationships and interactions among experts, expertise, and laypeople? And, what does such reorganization mean for us?To explore these questions, this article illustrates the dynamism of losing and creating in these socially experimental lives, focusing on how salmon, that have experienced a rapid domestication in recent decades, have been divided into multiple existences ontologically; the wild, the artificially propagated, the farmed, and the cell-proliferated. In particular, the cell-proliferated salmon demonstrate that the site of such reorganization of salmon existences, simultaneously generates a contested and discursive site within which to explore a question which has no single easy answer either scientific, ethical, or social. Because of the above, in the market for this product, multiple actors, including consumers as laypeople, are expected to present themselves as those to be communicated and negotiated with as to the features expected of the latest commodity in order that it be well received in the market place. Referring to the theories of ‘economy of qualities’ and ‘hybrid forums’（Callon et al. 2002）, the article explores interactions between experts, expertise, and laypeople as consumers in this site, and ultimately, suggests that trust increases the functional role of the interactions as a medium to sustain networks of actors and support their ethical standards of judgement, rather than those of scientific expertise or governmental authority.