Intellectual Responsibility for an Ecology Agenda

After Auschwitz and Hiroshima—using these words as labels and signifiers of many phenomena and issues—I think we all would agree that technoscience (in Bruno Latour's sense of 1987) is not only the contested ground for debates informed by technophobia and technophilia (see, e.g., Hickman, 1985, Part I), but is also the site where personal and public responsibility should be scrutinized under a magnifying glass. Whatever the question, whether rainforests or urban pollution, responsibility is traversing the private/public domains along a conceptual path that is often called "globalism." This framework itself tries to maintain a dialectical balance between localism and globalism; yet, as Andrew Ross says, this "globalist move is not taking place in a political vacuum" (Ross, 1991, p. 221).