Mimesis in action: nuclear decommissioning as conceptual playground for societal and ecological future making

这个跨学科项目是对人们在不确定的背景下为未来做准备时所做假设的调查。我们探讨的背景是核退役，这充满了未知：它结合了人类处理高放射性废物的第一次尝试，其时间框架可能超出人类物种的未来，以及拆除未来生计可能性非常不清楚的区域经济。我们想了解人们在退役领域的假设是什么，这些假设根植于哪些道德框架，以及这些假设如何增强或阻碍对未来的想象。在对人类环境可持续未来的广泛焦虑中，我们想知道参与或受核退役影响的人们如何设想他们的未来，以及子孙后代的未来，以及如何以富有想象力的方式激发他们的思考和行动。通过将社会人类学、前瞻研究和生态学的研究专长结合起来，设计出挑战想当然的想象力建模技术，我们的目标是为想象替代未来开辟道路。我们让研究参与者参与的建模（场景构建、模拟和生态系统建模）将模仿作为人类学习的一种形式。Mimesis既是一种创造性的、变革性的力量，也是我们项目的研究对象。通过使用建模，我们希望更深入地了解模仿作为人类获取知识的实践。我们在欧洲（英格兰、苏格兰、法国和荷兰）核退役发生的四个不同环境中进行民族志实地调查。核退役地点很有趣，因为它们与时间和环境的关系。核设施往往对当地的生计和生活经历产生长达几代人的影响，既有消极的影响，也有积极的影响。由于这些网站陷入了情感和社会经济的纠缠，它们的退役往往与失业和短期内黯淡的未来有关。然而，核退役在很大程度上是长期的：它涉及数十年的回收和储存核废料，这些核废料将在数千年内保持放射性。它要求作出关于保护废物、生物和景观的基本决定。因此，核退役的过程为规划超越人类关切的长期未来提供了时间。核退役与技术创新和实验有关。如果没有社会上可以想象的同样创新的概念，这一技术努力将是不完整的，而这正是我们提议的项目所提供的。需要的是一种更全面的方法，考虑生态系统层面的可持续性，并将注意力从短期转移到退役的长期潜力上。通过在我们的研究设计中加入研讨会和艺术干预，我们希望通过将未来的未知和不确定性作为开辟机会而不是导致瘫痪的途径，来活跃公众对核退役的辩论。我们邀请生活在核退役地区的人们帮助我们创建模型，以面对、与之共存，并可能利用不确定性。我们希望这些模式具有颠覆性，因为它们不把任何事情视为理所当然。我们的目标是为未来的制造设计模型，拓宽以人为中心的关注，并在短期经济和长期生态系统利益之间建立桥梁。我们想挑衅地问，生态系统的健康是否可以被假设为人类和超越人类繁荣的必要条件（如果不是充分条件的话）。生态系统的健康，而不是经济增长，能否成为地方规划过程的出发点，而不是事后的考虑？如果可以，如何做到？

This interdisciplinary project is an inquiry into the assumptions people make when they try to prepare for the future in a context of uncertainty. The context we explore is nuclear decommissioning, which is full of unknowns: it combines the first human attempts to dispose of high-level radioactive waste in relation to time frames that potentially extend beyond the future of the human species and the dismantling of regional economies where the possibilities for future livelihoods are very unclear. We want to understand what people's assumptions are in areas of decommissioning, in which moral frameworks they are rooted, and how these enhance or hamper imaginations of the future. Amidst wide-spread anxieties about an environmentally sustainable future for humankind, we want to find out how people involved in or affected by nuclear decommissioning conceive of their futures, and those of future generations, and how their thinking and acting may be stimulated in imaginative ways. By combining research expertise in social anthropology, foresight studies, and ecology in designing techniques of imaginative modelling that challenge what is taken-for-granted, we aim to open up avenues for imagining alternative futures. The modelling (scenario building, simulations, and ecosystem modelling) in which we engage our research participants draws on mimesis as a form of human learning. Mimesis is both a creative, transformative force and an object of study in our project. By using modelling, we want to gain deeper insights into mimesis as a human practice of acquiring knowledge. We undertake ethnographic fieldwork in four different settings in Europe (England, Scotland, France and the Netherlands) where nuclear decommissioning takes place. Nuclear decommissioning sites are interesting because of their relationship with time and the environment. Nuclear sites have often had a generations-long impact on local livelihoods and life experiences, both negative and positive. Because these sites are caught up in affective and socioeconomic entanglements, their decommissioning tends to be associated with job losses and a bleak future in the shorter term. And yet nuclear decommissioning is very much about the long term: it involves decades of retrieving and storing nuclear waste that will remain radioactive for thousands of years. It requires fundamental decisions about caring for wastes, living organisms and landscapes. So the process of nuclear decommissioning affords time to plan for long-term futures that go beyond human concerns only. Nuclear decommissioning is associated with technological innovation and experimentation. This technological endeavour would be incomplete without equally innovative conceptions of what can be imagined socially, which is what our proposed project offers. What is required is a more holistic approach that considers sustainability at ecosystemic levels and draws attention away from the short term towards long-term potentialities of decommissioning. By including workshops and art interventions in our research design, we hope to enliven public debate on nuclear decommissioning by foregrounding future unknowns and uncertainties as paths that open up opportunities rather than lead to paralysis. We invite people living in areas of nuclear decommissioning to help us create models meant to confront, live with, and perhaps take advantage of uncertainty. We would like such models to be disruptive in the sense that they do not take anything for granted. Our aim is to design models for future making that broaden out from human-centred concerns and bridge short-term economic and long-term ecosystemic interests. We want to ask, provocatively, whether ecosystem wellbeing may be posited as a necessary if not sufficient condition for human and more-than-human prosperity. Can ecosystem wellbeing, rather than economic growth, become a point of point of departure rather than an afterthought in local planning processes, and if so, how?