EGU21-8298
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-8298
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Beyond the technocratic truth to establish eco-development in the uplifted area of the Finnish southwestern shear coast as observed from space

Guido J. M. Verstraeten1 and Willem W. Verstraeten2
Guido J. M. Verstraeten and Willem W. Verstraeten
  • 1Karel de Grote Hogeschool, Antwerpen, Flanders, Informatics, Teuven, Belgium (gjmverstraeten@hotmail.nl)
  • 2Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium, Ukkel, Brussels, Belgium (willem.verstraeten@meteo.be)

Decisions about preventing further climate change involve human means for obtaining an equal and fair result for all humans. In consequence we have to make room for a complete different discours balancing between natural facts obeying natural laws and social behavior according to Duhem-Quine´s principle. In order to explain complex phenomena such as global warming and the isostatic uplift one should reject any one-hypothesis claim according to Duhem-Quine´s principle.

Considering climatologic problems as only pure positive scientific matter for making decisions for mankind how to deal with, is a pure essentialist and substantivistic conception of decision making. While climatologic models explain changes globally, the more unpredictable weather concerns rather local scales, implying that decisions must be adapted to the local situation. The unpredictability of some processes is universal but the consequences can be very local and form the boundary conditions of living. Stated otherwise, we do not just live on the planet Earth, but we live in a specific village/town in a specific region/country. 

Contrary to the widely accepted dominant paradigm decision making should not be based on the slogan ‘think global, act local’, but from the device ‘think local, manage the local effects of global warming’. Indeed, worldwide climate change will generally cause raising oceans, but more locally it will restore the former water balance of uplifted shear costs in Sweden and Finland and it affects the small fisher and farmer societies.

Here we suggest that knowledge of climate changes does not intervene in terms of their universal value such as truth, but under the local horizon of the social practices, artefacts and hierarchical relations with which they are associated. We advocate to reverse the former dominant technical code monopolized by technocracy from dominance of nature to creation of progress of the encroaching new ecosystems that develops out of the original shear coast in south-western Finland. We show based on Landsat imagery that this coast is rapidly changing due to the uplift. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the Eco-Development paradigm may rebalance nature, environment, humans and culture and that it is a valid alternative against the past and present-day socio-economical approach that have accelerated the change of the Earth’s climate, provided the global technocracy´s codes of the dominant paradigm are converted into local adapted social, economic and political codes.

How to cite: Verstraeten, G. J. M. and Verstraeten, W. W.: Beyond the technocratic truth to establish eco-development in the uplifted area of the Finnish southwestern shear coast as observed from space, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-8298, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-8298, 2021.

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