The themes of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and organizing

REENCOUNTERING NATURE AND CULTURE: THE ENVIRONMENTAL EPISTEMOLOGICAL CHALLENGE

Environmental rationality opens new perspectives for the social construction of sustainability; it changes gears for the innovation process towards other purposes that depart from the inertial ten­dencies ofmodernity. Rationality, organized in its main orders of rationality - formal and theoretical rationality; instrumental and practical; substantive and cultural-, change their meaning and priorities.

In modern rationality, substantive, cultural and scientific rationality have been subordinated to the imperatives of formal logic, economic value and instrumental rationality that project the po­tentialities of the Real and the creativeness of the Symbolic towards the objectification ofthe World and an unsustainable techno-economic process of unsustainable growth. Environmental rationality is constructed from critical theory and ethical principles that reorient the civilization process towards sustainability.

When environmental problems emerged and economic growth and the World economic order were questioned for their impact on environmental degradation, back in the late 60s, the economy responded by asserting that the environment is an externality of the economic system. In its self - justifying eagerness, the economy confessed its fundamental flaw in building the economic process in a divorce from the natural, ecological, geo­physical, and thermodynamic order within which it operates; that is to say, by ignoring its conditions of sustainability. In this way, an initial idea of the environment emerged as an epistemological space for the reencountering between society and nature, to solve the disjunction between the object and the subject of knowledge and the split between natural and social sciences.

A more careful investigation of the constitu­tion of the sciences as conceptual structures built around a nucleus-object of knowledge led us to understand the exclusion ofthe environment in the universe of the “centred formations” of modern sciences. From George Canguilhem and Jacques Derrida, an epistemological inquiry unfolded that was particularly fruitful in forging the epistemo - logical basis of environmental rationality. Follow­ing the perspectives of French critical rationalism - from Gaston Bachelard to Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault-, an epistemological inquiry led to the positing of the environment not only as a factual territory inhabited by living beings, but actually as the epistemic space bordering and surrounding the logocentric spaces of science.

Thus, the environment was defined as otherness to dominant scientific rationality, beyond the holistic perspectives that were shaping theoreti­cal systems and emerging ecological thought. In this way, it was possible to transcend a merely empirical and functional conception of the envi­ronment, as the milieu surrounding a population, the economy and society. Beyond identifying economic, political, and social causes tied to an array of socio-environmental problems - pollution, deforestation, ecological degradation, soil ero­sion, global warming-, this epistemological view transcended the stance of systems theory and the holistic visions that led to a will for interdisciplin­ary integration of existing sciences as a method to solve the fragmentation of knowledge associated to the environmental crisis (Leff, 2001).

The environment was not, then, the junction of fragmented disciplines, focused on their own autonomous objectives of knowledge; it was not a simple “environmental dimension,” that could be internalized within the systemic approaches and planning practices based on the principles of ecology, cybernetics and general systems theories, that could be extended to other paradigms of knowledge or serve as the unifying thread capable of weaving the transversality of environmental through into the dispersed and dismembered body of knowledge, as suggested and posited by diverse authors (i. e., Sachs, 1972; von Bertalanffy, 1976; Morin, 1980, 1993).

The environment was formed as a field of ex­ternality to the logocentrism of science, outside the system ofestablished scientific theories. From that position, emerging environmental savoir problematizes the “normal” paradigms of science and promotes their transformation in order to generate environmental branches of knowledge. In this sense, environmental epistemology goes beyond those proposals that pretend to integrate natural and social disciplines to generate the much desired environmental sciences, interdisciplinary fields and transdisciplinary methods capable of ap­proaching complex emerging socio-environmental problems (Leff, 2001).

In the realm of theory, from the standpoint of environmental rationality, a new approach to inter­disciplinarity emerged. Beyond the methodologi­cal purpose of articulating the actual paradigms of science, the construction of new objects of knowledge was proposed. From a critical episte- mological perspective that derived from systems theory conception of the environment as an exter­nality of the system, the environment was defined as the lack of knowledge of existing sciences, as the unknown to the logocentric organization of science, as the “external” processes that influence, condition and even determine the processes that sciences are concerned with, but that have been erradicated from their field of knowledge. An ex­emplary case of this “externalization” of material and symbolic processes impringing on a scientific paradigm is that of economic theory, where nature as a condition of sustainable production has been simply ignored. The response to this fact in the history of science, is the reaction of economics to construct a new discipline of environmental economics by extending its traditional and main - steram paradigm to embrace nature -ecological systems, environmental goods and services - by recodifying nature as natural capital instead of integrating nature as nature’s Being: the ecological organization of nature; the laws of entropy that determine the flows and degradation of matter and energy in the economic process.

In the perspective of environmental rational­ity, a new economics was proposed. Following the epistemological indagatories of George Canguilhem (1970, 1977) derived from critical rationalism, interdisciplinarity is thought, not as the intended articulation, hibridization and blending of existing paradigms (that carry within themselves their own epistemological obstacles), but as the conjunction of different ontological orders and disciplines in the construction of a new scientific object. Thus, instead of recodifying nature in economic terms, or trying to subsume the established economic order within the limits and conditions of the biospheric ecological system, a paradigm of sustainable production can be thought of as the articulation of ecological, technological and cultural productivity: as an economic process based on the potency of nature, - ofthe negentropic productivity of photosynthesis and the ecological organization of nature- signified and embedded in culture (Leff, 1995, 2009a).

This new productive paradigm carries within itself a complex array of innovative processes:

In the level of theoretical rationality, it implies the deconstruction of the theories (economic, ju­ridical, social) that became the pilars of modern rationality. In the field of economics and law, it carries the deconstruction of economic value and positive law based on the individual as the principle of economic and juridical actions, of intellectual property rights, etc., to construct new paradigms based on common property rights over the com­mon patrimony of nature and culture.

In the level of instrumental and practical ra­tionality, the technological innovation process is subordinated to the preservation ofthe productive potentialities of nature supported by the organi­zation of ecosystems, neguentropic productivity derived from photosynthesis and the ecological management ofthe metabolism ofmaterial and en­ergy flows in agricultural and industrial, urban and rural, domestic and social systems. Technological innovation is not restricted to “ecoefficiency” in the production system - dematerialization of production end recycling of waste-; ecolabel­ling and the compliance to environmental rules of trade; new technologies for clean production - energy derived from renewable sources: solar, eolic, biofuels-; it promotes important shifts in agronomic production systems - agroecology and agroforestry - and new strategies for the collective and sustainable management of water and forests beyond the economic valuation of environmental goods and services under the geopolitics of sus­tainable development.

Substantive rationality becomes fundamental to environmental rationality. Environmental ra­tionality is not a model, nor a paradigm to guide a “new deal” State planification for sustainable development, nor the scientific management of nature, but rather the “governance of the com­mons” based on cultural institutions (Orstrom, 1990). Environmental rationality is rooted and embodied in different matrixes of cultural ratio­nality. It is from cultural rationality that nature is revalued. Culture is the source of meaning and inventiveness that resignifies the potency ofnature, the creativeness that orients the construction of sustainability through a dialogue of knowledges imbedded in social imaginaries, beyond the sci­entific management of nature (Leff, 2006, 2010).