Care for the environment? The armed forces’ evolving understanding of the environment and their own influence on it
This article contributes to research on the armed forces’ understanding of and adaptation to environmental issues. Drawing upon new materialist scholarship (Latour 2004; Tønder 2020), it develops a ”constructive” critical analysis of gatherings of heterogeneous elements across human and non-human divisions that shape armed forces to integrate environmental considerations and reduce their environmental impact. The analysis thus contributes action-oriented knowledge to address the armed forces’ environmental impact. The article is based on Swedish, British, and American environmental policies for defense and four informant interviews with personnel from air bases in Sweden. The article shows that despite resistance to environmental regulations by armed forces, gatherings of knowledge, standards, civil society pressure, laws, pollution, rising temperatures, and more have made armed forces gradually care for the environment and understand operational demands as increasingly enabled by such care. The approach and findings have implications for researching how environmentally impacting organizations can be adjusted to reduce their environmental impact and for critical scholarship on how to address the challenges of the Anthropocene.
Latent risk situations are always present in society. General information an these risk situations is supposed to be received differently by different groups of people in the population. In the aftermath of specific accidents different groups presumably have need of specific information about how to act to survive, to avoid injuries, to fmd more information, to obtain facts about the accidents etc. As targets for information these different groups could be defined in different ways. The conventional way is to divide the population according to demographic variables, such as age, sex, occupation etc. Another way would be to structure the population according to dependent Variables measured in different studies. They may concern risk perception, emotional reactions, specific technical knowledge of the accidents, and belief in the information sources. One procedure for forming such groupings of people into homogeneous clusters would be by statistical clustering methods on dependent variables. Examples of such clustering procedures are presented and discussed. Data are from a Norwegian study on the perception of radiation from nuclear accidents and other radiation sources. Speculations are made on different risk information strategies. Elements of a research programme are proposed.