Büscher - The Truth about Nature: Environmentalism in the Era of Post-Truth Politics and Platform Capitalism

Preface and Acknowledgments

How to search for something as elusive as truth in an age of deeply troubling forms of post-truth politics? And how to do so in relation to an equally troubling ecological crisis? Is this at all relevant or possible in this day and age? With hindsight I can say that a large part of the journey that led to this book was spent mulling over these questions. At first this did not concern post-truth or platform capitalism. The beginning of the journey in 2010 simply involved a curiosity about new online media and how these might influence environmentalism and human-nature relations. The rather straightforward hunch that led to a grant supporting the research was that these new trends were likely to affect environmentalism quite a bit. Little did I realize how big an understatement this proved to be.

As I dug into the research and started spending (even) more time online, my attention gradually shifted from online environmental discourses and images to the power dynamics behind new media platforms. The larger truth was that these different sides could (and should) not be separated. Yet it also meant that the challenges of the research multiplied rapidly. No longer content to limit the study to how online natures related to offline natures, I now also wanted to tie these into the power structures behind online platforms. And as these were changing extremely rapidly, it was hard to keep the project together. Let alone to work it into a larger storyline and argumentation that could intervene productively into contemporary debates on swiftly escalating environmental crises.

Basically, this new and expanded aim of the research meant working on and connecting three levels: the level of everyday environmental politics, the more structural level of political economy and the level of (meta)theory or epistemology, and how all these and their relations are changing due to the rise of new media and online platforms. I was and am still convinced that connecting these levels is necessary to come to a holistic understanding of contemporary socio-environmental realities.