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

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?