Brian Wynne's study of Cumbrian sheep farmers, explained.

The strength of this paper is how thoroughly Wynne explains the sheep farmers' POV, their distrust of scientists and the government. Its weakness is its somewhat wishful thinking about their politics.

In my last post, I argued that trying to explain people’s political preferences (such as who they voted for in the 2024 presidential election) by attributing it to their lack of information, being misled, or being susceptible to prejudices is not as explanatory as some people think. It does not work when it was used to explain the public’s distrust in science—e.g., people are not skeptical of vaccines because they don’t know the science or have misinformed views about it—and it does not work when it’s used for politics.

But there can also be a tendency to go too far in the other direction. This Jacobin piece by the writer Liza Featherstone, for instance, starts with the reasonable point: don’t give up on voters and don’t explain their choices by attributing them to secret prejudices they harbor. But then it goes too far in the other direction: it interprets the voters’ actions, and what they sometimes say when asked about their decisions, as a call for a giant disruption of the status quo; for socialism, one might say.¹ It’s not that one cannot make that case; people are complicated creatures and hold a great deal of views that are not necessarily coherent when considered together. But I, for one, find it hard to believe that voters who are complaining about the rise in prices in the post-pandemic era, a rise in prices that disrupted their life as it was in the pre-pandemic Trump years, are advocating for a complete change in status quo which will bring with it a thousand more disruptions! (And for a little more systematic inquiry into why “embrace radicalism” may not be the best interpretation of the election results, see Eric Levitz in Vox).

This is not a blog about politics, obviously, and opining on American politics is not something I have expertise in. So what I thought I’d do in this post is describe the canonical study by the social scientist Brian Wynne of the Cumbrian sheep farmers that I referred to in the previous post. Why did the sheep farmers distrust the government and its scientists who were trying to figure out if their sheep were contaminated by the Chernobyl fallout? Wynne argues that it came from their history with another nuclear plant that was literally in their neighborhood; when it had caught fire in the 1950s, the government had hushed it up and had not really engaged with them about the causes and consequences. He also shows, brilliantly, that the farmers’ views are messy and contradictory, which is to say, richly human.

But Wynne, I think, is also guilty of attributing to the farmers his own leftist and progressive politics, when his own interview data, at least to me, show something different. Wynne is a social scientist who has devoted his professional life to understanding science-society relations. He seems to suggest that his farmer interlocutors share his view when it seems that their views are far less coherent (which does not make them any less valid).

So what I am going to do in the rest of this piece is explain the study in all its rich empirical detail, focusing on its merits and what I think is most convincing about it. I will end with the parts where Wynne attributes to the farmers his own views on science. But I also want to end with a couple of disagreements where I am not convinced by some of its claims that seem to me to be wishful thinking.

The Cumbrian sheep farmers and the fallout from Chernobyl

Cumbria/The Lake District. CC BY-SA 3.0.

It would be helpful to start from the events that inspired the study. Wynne’s objects of study were the sheep farmers in the Lake District of Northern England.

The Herdwick sheep of Cumbria. CC BY-SA 3.0.

As Wynne puts it, the main source of livelihood of this group was through “rearing a large crop of lambs each spring, and selling them in the late summer and autumn.” Interestingly, enough, this was an export industry and these lambs (or I assume, the lamb-meat) was mostly exported to continental Europe.

From Chernobyl to Cumbria, a distance of about 2000 miles.

In April, 1986, a reactor exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. By May, the UK authorities were worried that the fallout from the explosion, in the form of radioactive Caesium isotopes, may have reached as far as Cumbria. The danger was that these isotopes would be consumed by the sheep and would stay in their bodies after they were slaughtered. Then, they might find their way into the human beings who eat these lambs.

First, when this concern was raised, the government agencies tasked with trying to understand this dismissed the concern and argued that the risk was “negligible.” But then, a month later, Wynne tells us “a ban was suddenly placed on the movement and slaughter of sheep.” This ban was not welcome news to the sheep farmers for whom it represented the possibility of “wholesale slaughter [of their livestock] and complete ruin [of the farms],” all of it because of a “faraway stricken nuclear plant” that was almost 2000 miles away.

The original restricted area for the fallout investigations was the larger area indicated by dotted lines. This was eventually whittled down to the smaller area (with the solid line). As per Wynne, this area remained restricted even when the article was written. Of course, both the larger and smaller areas are adjacent to the Sellafield Nuclear Plant which plays a central role in the conflict between the government and the sheep farmers.

But there was more drama. First, they were told that the ban would only last three weeks, but at the end of three weeks, it was extended indefinitely. Three months after this, the “restricted area” was whittled down. While it had covered about 500 farms before (see the larger area in the figure above), it was eventually cut down to a core area of 150 farms (see the smaller area enclosed by the solid lines). Wynne tells us that this area remained restricted, which means it remained restricted until 1992 when the paper was published.

The Sellafield-Windscale nuclear plant

It is here that the story starts to get even more thorny. If you see the figure above, there was another nuclear plant in the restricted area called Sellafield-Windscale. From what Wynne tells us, this was not so much a nuclear power plant as it was a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility. It was also the “biggest employer in the area” and “dominate[d] the whole area not only economically, but also socially and culturally.”

Sellafield had also been the seat of local controversies. Wynne devotes almost a page to the local controversies around Sellafield, starting from the 1950s to the 1980s (all preceding Chernobyl). Most importantly, he tells us that Sellafield had been the site of a nuclear accident all the way back in 1957:

[In] 1957 the Sellafield-Windscale site suffered the world's worst nuclear reactor accident before Chernobyl, when a nuclear pile caught fire and burned for some days before being quenched. It emitted a plume of radioactive isotopes, mainly iodine and caesium, over much the same area of the Lake District of Western Cumbria as that affected by the Chernobyl fallout. This fire and its environmental effects were surrounded by a great deal of secrecy preceding Chernobyl.

The point, of course, is that while the details of all these incidents can be litigated, the fact remains that the farmers had always had a conflicted relationship with the nuclear plant and with the experts who claimed to speak on behalf of the scientific establishment. (At least some farmers believed that Sellafield’s 1957 fallout had caused leukemia in local children although this hadn’t been proved.)

As Wynne puts it, “Not only is [Sellafield] close physically, it is also never far away from contemplation. Far from giving Sellafield-Windscale some welcome relief, the Chernobyl emergency ironically brought it even more to critical public attention.”

The government scientists did not consult the farmers even when it led to experiments failing

When the possibility of a Chernobyl fallout became real, government servants and nuclear scientists descended on the farmlands. Their job was twofold: first, they were supposed to consult with the farmers in terms of how to manage the restrictions on the sheep, and second, they were to do research to understand the extent of the caesium contamination in the soil, vegetation, and animals.

On the first objective, the farmers found that the workarounds that the scientists proposed did not pay any heed whatsoever to the practices the farmers used in their sheep-breeding. When they spoke to Wynne and his collaborators, they were outspoken about this.

For example, one farmer seems to have lost it when an official mentioned that he feed his sheep with straw:

There was the official who said he expected levels would go down when the sheep were being fed on imported foodstuffs, and he mentioned straw. I’ve never heard of a sheep that would even look at straw as fodder. When you hear things like that it makes your hair stand on end. You just wonder what the hell are these blokes talking about? When we hill men heard them say that we just said, what do this lot know about anything? If it wasn’t so serious it would make you laugh.

Another tells Wynne that the officials and the scientists had no idea of how animal-breeding scales. Not selling the animals on time has consequences for ALL animals, he said. Thus:

If you start fattening lambs and sell twenty, the next twenty get fat quicker, because you’ve got more grazing. But if you keep them all . . . [gesticulation of disaster].

What’s worse is that the officials and scientists did not seem receptive to what the farmers are saying. The same farmer continues:

But that’s the problem with the ministry-trying to tell them those sort of things. That’s where the job has fallen down a lot. They couldn’t understand that you were going to sacrifice next year’s lamb crop as well. They just couldn’t grasp that!

So, for the farmers, the ministry’s restrictions on selling their livestock were already causing grave problems. Whatever “help” they provided was often no help at all and was arrogant in its own way in that it took no notice of the practices that the farmers had already crafted.

But the real disagreement was about the science

But if this was the extent of the disagreement, that would just be another example of the insensitivity of government bureaucracies to local problems.

The real disagreement was about what the science showed. The farmers believed that the traces of the radioactive caesium that the scientists claimed to find did not come from Chernobyl at all; rather, they came from Sellafield itself, from its leak in 1957 as well as from its regular operations.

When this point was raised, the official scientific response was that the data did not show this and the fallout was mostly from Chernobyl. Why? As Wynne explains:

The scientific view was that the Chernobyl caesium depositions could be distinguished from the caesium in routine Sellafield emissions, 1957 fire emissions, or 1950s weapons testing fallout, by the typical 'signature', in gamma-radiation energy spectra, of the ratio of intensities of the isotopes caesium 137 and caesium 134 (each isotope has a characteristic gamma-ray frequency or energy). The half-life of the caesium 137 isotope is about thirty years, while that of the caesium 134 isotope is less than one year, and so the ratio of intensities of caesium 137 to caesium 134 increases with time. A typical Sellafield sample (from fully burnt-up fuel, usually stored for several years before reprocessing; or if from the 1957 fire, aged in the environment) would therefore show a greater ratio (about ten to one) than a Chernobyl sample consisting of fresh fuel and fission products (about two to one).

Essentially, the explanation was that it was easy to distinguish between the Chernobyl fallout and the Sellafield fallout because they would have different proportions of caesium isotopes. Based on this, the authorities claimed—very confidently—that the fallout could not be from Sellafield. But about a year later, the authorities changed their tune. They started to say that “only about 50% of the observed radioactive caesium was from Chernobyl, the rest being from ’other sources’. including weapons testing fallout and the 1957 Windscale fire.”

The farmers, for their part, when assessing the fallout maps produced by the scientists, became more and more convinced that the fallout was from Sellafield. For the farmers, the maps were visual evidence and these maps also fit into their own daily experience of watching and walking around the Sellafield plant. As Wynne puts it:

Thus the farmers gathered evidence which was drawn from science, including scientific inconsistencies on which the scientists themselves did not focus. They entered the scientific arena in this sense, re-drew its boundaries, and, operating with different presuppositions and inference rules, also re-drew its logical structures.

For the farmers, it just made sense, given their fraught relationship with Sellafield, that when the scientists came looking for fallout from an accident 2000 miles away, they miraculously ended up in the vicinity of Sellafield! One farmer says with heavy irony to Wynne that perhaps that Sellafield was like a “magnet” and drew all the Chernobyl fallout to itself. Another explains to Wynne:

Most farmers believe it’s really from [Sellafield]. You’d have great difficulty convincing them otherwise. The area is a kind of crescent shape. If you’re up on the tops [of the fells] on a winter’s day you see the tops of the cooling towers, the steam rises up and hits the fells just below the tops. It might be sheer coincidence, but where the [radiation] hot spots are is just where that cloud of steam hits-anyone can see it if they look. You don’t need to be a scientist or be very articulate to figure that one out. [my emphasis]

The farmers witnessed how science was actually done, with all its uncertainties and contingencies

Whom should we believe here? The scientists who claimed that most of the fallout from Chernobyl based on their specialized knowledge or the farmers who relied on “scientific inconsistencies” and visual evidence?

I would still believe the scientists but it is here that Wynne puts in one final piece of the puzzle. While the farmers did not claim to be scientists, they had had first-hand experience watching the scientists at work, collecting samples from vegetation and from the livestock. They found that the certainty that the scientists expressed in their findings to be at odds with what the science looked like to them in practice: contingent, full of little judgement calls that seemed to them to be inconsistent.

Here’s an example. One farmer tells Wynne about the process of counting whether the sheep are showing any radiation:

Last year we did 500 [sheep] in one day. We started at 10.30 and finished at about six. Another day we monitored quite a lot and about 13 or 14 of them failed. And he [the monitor] said, ‘now we’ll do them again’-and we got them down to three! It makes you wonder a bit. . . it made a difference do a job like that you’ve got to hold it [the counter] on its backside. and sheep do jump about a bit.

The farmer says that when the first count was done, he and the scientist found 13 or 14 failed samples (I assume that means contaminated sheep). But then the scientist just suggested they do it again and this time only 3 failed! What is this, he wonders? To be clear, the farmer recognizes that to monitor a sheep for radiation, the counter has to be held in just the right way for it to be accurate, and yet, he finds the scientist’s decision to take a recount somewhat inexplicable. If science is full of these judgement calls, then he wonders how accurate it really is.

In another case, the scientists conducted an experiment where they tried to figure out whether the mineral bentonite could be used to adsorb the caesium and thereby reduce the contamination of the sheep. To do so, they laid out bentonite in different amounts on different plots of land and fenced in the sheep who would be restricted to an area with a particular concentration of bentonite. The goal was to measure the contamination of the sheep to see if it was less than what it would have been without the bentonite. What the scientists did not know was that sheep whose movements are restricted to very small areas tend to “waste” because of the lack of movement, since they are used to open fields. Even though the farmers pointed this out, the scientists still kept the framework of the experiment (I assume because they couldn’t figure out a different experimental design that gave them the degree of control they wanted). Later, the farmers found that the experiments had been abandoned and no one ever explained to them why.

As Wynne puts it:

The experience of watching scientists decide where and how to take samples, of seeing the variability in readings over small distances, of noticing the difficulty of obtaining a consistent standard for background levels, and of gradually becoming aware of the sheer number and variety of less controlled assumptions and judgments that underpin scientific facts, corroded the wider credibility of official statements couched in a typical language of certainty and standardization. By accident, as it were, the farmers entered the ‘black-boxes’ of constructed, ‘naturally-determined’ science, and saw its indeterminacies for themselves.

To conclude, what Wynne shows is that the farmers disagreement with and distrust of the scientists and the government is not a consequence of their lack of knowledge of science. Rather, it comes from their history with the Sellafield nuclear plant, the way the restrictions on sheep movement impacted their livelihood, and their interactions with the scientists, and their observation of how the science was done.

The farmers alleged both conspiracy and incompetence—against their own economic interests

Here is where the richness of Wynne’s account starts to become very clear. The farmers themselves were not entirely coherent in what they are saying. They were really arguing for two things.

On the one hand, they argued that the scientists were in on a government conspiracy and cover-up. For all these years, the government had covered up the fallout from the 1957 Sellafield fire. Now, with Chernobyl, they had found the perfect pretext; they had come in and found radiation but had pointed to Chernobyl as its cause thereby covering up their own complicity in this through Sellafield.

But on the other hand, the farmers also asserted that the scientists were somewhat incompetent (i.e., ignorant), and, relatedly, arrogant. Their incompetence was demonstrated by some of the mistakes they made in their experiments; experiments that the farmers could see for themselves based on their local knowledge of the area and of the sheep. The scientists were also arrogant because they persisted in their certainty despite their ignorance; they ignored all efforts at help and refused to take the local knowledge of the farmers into consideration.

Clearly, these two stances are in conflict. If the scientists were engaged in conspiracy to cover up the fallout of the 1957 Sellafield fire, would they really have acted as they did? Would they have first announced that there was no risk, then imposed a lockdown supposedly for 3 weeks, and then extended it indefinitely but for a smaller area? Would the scientists have revealed the uncertainty in their results by carrying out their science in the close vicinity of the farmers?

For me, at least, these two stances are clearly in contradiction. But that’s the point. Enmeshed in their context, with the memory of what they saw as the coverup from 1957, both these positions made perfect sense to the farmers. As Wynne puts it:

The farmers saw this [the government’s refusal to provide them radioactivity data from the pre-Chernobyl period] as evidence that the authorities were trying to cover up-either that they did have data which showed high fell-top levels of caesium before Chernobyl, or that they had no data at all! If the former, they were guilty of straightforward lying and conspiracy. If the latter, they were guilty of at least gross complacency and incompetence, but possibly also conspiracy to remain deliberately ignorant of the levels before Chernobyl forced them to look.

So, the government either had the data and refused to divulge it to cover up its own responsibility. Or the government did NOT have the data at all but that could be a “conspiracy to remain deliberately ignorant” of radioactivity levels; at the very least, this was at least “gross complacency and incompetence.”

Last, but not the least, the conspiracy charge went against the economic interests of the farmers. After all, if the fields were contaminated with caesium from Sellafield and had been since 1957—which, remember, was a matter of great uncertainty as the scientists kept changing their estimates—the only solution was to destroy the farmers’ livestock and perhaps lock down the land for years and years. This would certainly not be in the farmers’ interest; it might take their land away from them. So the farmers’ suspicion of the scientists and their findings could not be chalked to their economic self-interest in maintaining their livelihoods.

In short, the farmers are like real flesh-and-blood people who are full of contradictory beliefs. Trust in science was not just a matter of understanding the science; in fact, a closer look at the science increased distrust. It was also not just a matter of economic self-interest; the farmers believed many things that went against their economic well-being.

When I assign this reading to students—Berkeley students are progressives, more or less—they have a tendency to view it through their rose-tinted progressive glasses. The reading responses are full of phrases like “local knowledge” and “credentialed expertise.” The story is often recast with the farmers being cast as marginalized peoples and the scientists as arrogant elites; the elites chose to ignore the local knowledge of the farmers which was non-credentialed and grounded in practice and experience. The moral is simple: if only the elites had listened to the marginalized and their lived experience, the Cumbrian sheep farmer episode would have ended better for everyone.

This is not completely inaccurate but it is certainly not the full picture. And it is testament to Wynne’s detailed recounting of it that he does not pretend it is. I always try to end my class on this paper by asking students a question. Let’s say that the scientists had done all that Wynne suggests they should have: they had expressed uncertainty when it was warranted, they had involved the farmers in the experiments, and they had gotten the farmers’ input in terms of how the livestock movement was to be restricted. Which is to say: credentialed scientific expertise was mixed with genuine local knowledge and the voice of the marginalized people. Would this have lead to an outcome where trust in science increased, rather than decreased? Obviously, I cannot answer this with certainty but I don’t think so.

What is the farmers’ problem with science? Is it the same as Wynne’s problem with science?

But while Wynne takes great pains in the paper to inform us about the farmers’ worldview and identity, there are assertions that strain credulity. Part of the problem here is that Wynne, like many academics in the interpretive social sciences, is a progressive leftist with particular normative beliefs about the social order. He distrusts science that is in the service of big corporations or big governments. He dislikes that science, in the service of the capitalist mode of production, has developed an “ethos of prediction and control” and works in a register of certainty; he would prefer that scientists express more uncertainty, be more reflexive about what they do, and recognize other forms of uncredentialled local knowledge.

To some extent, he sees the farmers as echoing his own criticism of science and how it is being used, as a cultural form, to guide both “nature and society.”² This seems to me to be a form of wishful thinking: taking the cluster of somewhat inconsistent beliefs and feelings that the farmers experience through their everyday experience and equating that with Wynne’s own professional critique of science.³

For one thing, Wynne is absolutely on the side of the sheep farmers. All the events, including the story of the Sellafield fire, are told from their perspective. We never hear about these events from any of the scientists who descended on the Cumbrian farms: what were their constraints? How did they deal with uncertainty?⁴ Even more damningly, Wynne never seems to have considered the perspective of the consumers, situated in Europe, who would have been the ones actually eating the lamb meat and therefore actually exposed to radioactivity (again, all of this is highly uncertain which is precisely the problem). Wouldn’t they have preferred the current status quo, i.e., the open-ended lockdown of sheep movement?

Wynne argues that the farmers are more reflexive—more open to reconsider the foundations of what and how they know—than the scientists. Given that he would like to see science that is more self-aware and reflexive, this statement is best interpreted as saying that the scientists should be more like the farmers. What makes Wynne think that the farmers are more reflexive? It is that the farmers do, to some extent, acknowledge that they are not experts on the science even when they disagree with the scientists. As one farmer puts it:

We can’t argue with them, but you can think your own ideas. I still think it [the radioactive caesium] was here before [from Sellafield rather than Chernobyl].

This does not strike me as the farmers being very reflexive about their own knowledge practices.

The strain—of mapping the farmers’ somewhat contradictory views to Wynne’s carefully thought-through critique of science—often shows when the farmers praise science itself. When this happens, Wynne’s prose turns turgid and abstract.

Here is the best example. One farmer asserts in his interview that it was the government’s “deliberate policy” to not do any “monitoring and testing” around Sellafield because if they did, they would have found that the fallout from the Sellafield fires was causing leukemia to children who lived nearby. He goes on:

When you have bottomless financial pits like Sellafield sponsoring this, that and the other in order to blackmail local feeling, why could they not instead do something positive like supporting controlled experiments to answer all the questions that need to be answered?⁵

One might see this farmer as expressing confidence in science, a science based on prediction and control, that is however directed at a problem that comes from the farmer’s concerns. Wynne interprets the quote in this way:

Of course we can judge that these views were encouraged by probably unrealistic ideas about what can be expected of scientific knowledge in a situation such as the post-Chernobyl emergency. Even allowing for this factor however, the expressed attitudes reflect a rich supply of evidence to support a model of the subordination of science to untrustworthy institutional and political interests, and of a deep flaw in the very nature of science which drives it towards unrealism, insensitivity to uncertainty and variability, and incapability of admitting its own limits. (These can be seen as contradictory models of science, but are better treated as rhetorical stances which deconstruct and delimit the authority of the social control which the science represented in the experience of the farmers.) Analysis of the logical structure of the farmers’ responses to the scientific expertise indicates both a far greater open-endedness about scientific logical structures and its institutional and cultural forms than is usually recognized; and a greater need to acknowledge and negotiate these as a condition of science’s social legitimation.

I have read this paragraph multiple times and I am not sure I have understood it. Wynne thinks that the farmers have an “unrealistic” ideas about what science can do but nevertheless, the farmer is hinting at a “deep flaw in the very nature of science” (its ethos of prediction and control, etc.). But if you think these two ideas are contradictory, they are really not, he says. Rather, they are “which deconstruct and delimit the authority of the social control which the science represented in the experience of the farmers.”

It seems certainly true that the farmers would like the scientists to be less sure and less certain rather than pronouncing something one day and then reversing it the next, both times with utmost confidence. But it seems much more likely to me that the farmers associate science with institutions that they distrust like the government but they do not seem to have any clear opinions about the ethos of prediction and control in science. Rather, they would like it to work on their behalf.

Wynne seems to fall into the same trap as the socialist writer from Jacobin who interprets the Queens Trump voters as proto-socialists rather than regular people with contradictory beliefs that stem from their political identity.

All of that said, Wynne’s study of the Cumbrian sheep farmers is exactly how we should be thinking about voters who vote in ways we disagree with: by situating their views in their political and social identities rather than believing that they have some cognitive deficit or prejudices. At the same time, the scholars and journalists who have taken on the task of interpreting these worldviews should be careful not to attribute to these people the philosophies and beliefs they themselves hold.

1. What is socialism exactly? It’s not clear. It might be a call for a Nordic-style welfare state. It could also mean some kind of state ownership across all sectors.

2. This, more theoretical, formulation comes from a different Wynne paper. Wynne, Brian. 2003. “Seasick on the third wave? Subverting the hegemony of propositionalism: Response to Collins & Evans (2002).” Social Studies of Science: 401-417.

3. Which is to say: this is a critique of science that Wynne has developed in his role as a scholar.

4. In the footnotes, Wynne says: “Over 50 interviews were conducted with affected farmers, farmers' wives, MAFF officials, scientists, farmers' representatives, and others.” However, the scientists’ POV shows up only once but this is an interview with dissident “ecologists” who feel that they were suppressed because of the “‘physicalist’ ethos which dominated the official advisory mechanisms.”

5. Here is the full quote:

The Department of Health could body monitor but they don’t deliberately because if they did and found high readings then various ministries could one day be accused of irresponsibility in this regard. I think it self-evident that when BNFL [the Sellafield operator] were accused of being responsible for leukaemias they were quick to say ‘what evidence is there?’ I have been told that if I make an accusation that my grand-daughter has got leukaemia in the future and I suggest it was due to Sellafield they will say to me ‘what evidence have you?’ It is a deliberate policy of government not to do this appropriate monitoring and testing so that they can protect themselves against an accusation of this nature. I would suggest we have another Christmas Island situation. The first such situation was at BNFL [it was then the Atomic Energy Authority] in 1957. Now we have Chernobyl Cumbria, Chernobyl Wales, South Scotland and Ireland. . . . When you have bottomless financial pits like Sellafield sponsoring this, that and the other in order to blackmail local feeling, why could they not instead do something positive like supporting controlled experiments to answer all the questions that need to be answered?