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has become a
global ideology that covers all of existence - not merely modes of production but ways of life as well.
We rediscover in it the whole range of Marxist rhetoric, now applied to the environment: ubiquitous
scientism, horrifying visions of reality, even admonitions to the guilty parties who misunderstand
those who wish them well. Authors, journalists, politicians and scientists compete in the portrayal of
abomination and claim for themselves a hyper-lucidity: They alone see clearly while others vegetate
in the darkness.
The fear that these intellectuals spread is like a gluttonous enzyme that swallows up an anxiety, feeds
on it and then leaves it behind for new ones. When the Fukushima nuclear plant melted down after the enormous earthquake
in Japan in March 2011, it only confirmed a feeling of anxiety that was already there, looking for some content. In six months, some new
concern will grip us: a pandemic, bird flu, the food supply, melting ice caps, cellphone radiation.
The fear also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the press reporting, as though it were a
surprising finding, that young people are haunted by the very concerns about global warming that the
press continually instills in them. As in an echo chamber, opinion polls reflect the views promulgated
by the media. We are inoculated against anxiety by the repetition of the same themes, which become
a narcotic we can't do without.
To wake people up requires ever more extreme rhetoric, including a striking number of analogies to the Holocaust. Noel Mamre, a French
politician in the Green party, has accused another politician, Claude Allgre, of being a ngationniste about global warming - a French word that
refers to those who deny the Jewish and Armenian genocides. Economist Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, has explicitly compared the Danish statistician and eco-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg to the Fuhrer. The American climate scientist James
Hansen has accused oil companies trying to "spread doubt about global warming" of "high crimes against humanity and nature" and called
trains transporting American coal "death trains." Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman has writ-ten that "global warming deniers are now on
a par with Holocaust deniers."
Similarly, we are told that "our power exceeds our knowledge," as the German philosopher Hans Jonas once put it - yet we are also told, with a
certainty puzzling from such skeptics, that we must change our diets, cut back on air travel, consume fewer material goods and stop driving gas
guzzlers. This is the central aporia of green neo-asceticism: It attributes a wildly exaggerated importance to ordinary human behaviour, thus
weakening its appeal to the very humility that it tries to instill.
Another contradiction inherent in apocalyptic discourse is that, though it tries desperately to awaken
us, to convince us of planetary chaos, it eventually deadens us, making our eventual disappearance
part of our everyday routine. At first, yes, the kinds of doom that we hear about - the acidification of
the oceans, the pollution of our air - charge our calm existence with a strange excitement. The enemy
is among us, and he waits for our slightest lapses, all the more insidious because he is invisible. If the
function of ancient rites was to purge a community's violence on a sacrificial victim, the function of
our contemporary rites is - at first - to dramatize the status quo and to exalt us through proximity to
cataclysm.
But the certainty of the prophecies makes this effect short-lived. The language of fear does not include the word "maybe." It tells us, rather,
that the horror is inevitable. Resistant to all doubt, it is satisfied to mark the stages of degradation. This is another paradox of fear: It is
ultimately reassuring. At least we know where we are heading - toward the worst.
One consequence of this certainty is that we begin to suspect that the numberless Cassandras who prophesy all around us do not intend to
warn us so much as to condemn us. In classical Judaism, the prophet sought to give new life to God's cause against kings and the powerful.
In Christianity, millenarian movements embodied a hope for justice against a Church wallowing in luxury and vice. But in a secular society, a
prophet has no function other than indignation. So it happens that he becomes intoxicated with his own words and claims a legitimacy with no
basis, calling down the destruction that he pretends to warn against. You'll get what you've got coming! - that is the death wish that our
misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption
to refuse to listen to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy. It is a short distance from lucidity to bitterness, from prediction to
anathema.
Another result of the doomsayers' certainty is that their preaching, by inoculating us against the
poison of terror, brings about petrification. The trembling that they want to inculcate falls flat.
Anxiety has the last word. We were supposed to be alerted; instead, we are disarmed. This may even
be the goal of the noisy panic: to dazzle us in order to make us docile. Instead of encouraging
resistance, it propagates discouragement and despair. The ideology of catastrophe becomes an
instrument of polit-ical and philosophical resignation.
What is surprising is that the mood of catastrophe prevails especially in the West, as if it were
particular to privileged peoples. Despite the economic crises of the last few years, people live better in
Europe and North America than anywhere else, which is why migrants the world over want to come
to those places. Yet never have we been so inclined to condemn our societies.
Perhaps the new Green puritanism is nothing but the reaction of a West deprived of its supreme competence, the last avatar of an unhappy
neocolonialism that preaches to other cultures a wisdom that it has never practiced. For the last 20 years, non-European peoples have become
masters of their own futures and have stopped regarding us as infallible models. They are likely to receive our professions of environmentalist
faith with polite indifference. Billions of people look to economic growth, with all the pollution that accompanies it, to improve their condition.
Who are we to refuse it to them?
Environmental worry is universal; the sickness of the end of the world is purely Western. To counter this
pessimism, we might list the good news of the last 20 years: democracy is making slow progress; more than a billion people have escaped
absolute poverty; life expectancy has increased in most countries; war is becoming rarer; many serious illnesses have been eradicated. But it
would do little good. Our perception is inversely proportional to reality.
The Christian apocalypse saw itself as a hopeful revelation of the coming of God's kingdom. Today's has nothing to offer. There is no promise of
redemption; the only hope is that those human beings who repent of their errors may escape the chaos, as in Cormac McCarthy's fine novel
The Road. How can we be surprised, then, that so many bright minds have become delirious and that so many strange predictions flourish?
hope to inspire more scholarship in the spirit of Moser and Dillings (2007) call for a greater inter-disciplinary
conversation on climate change. The methodological tool of frame analysis can help foster common ground
between humanities scholars, social scientists, and climate scientists, concerned about global warming. Frame analysis can also be a valuable tool in
identifying the troubling aspects of how a discourse evolves and is communicatedand in so doing, it can lead to more effective
communication. Deconstructing the harmful effects of an apocalyptic frame, we feel some responsibility to try to
offer alternative frames which might balance the need to communicate the urgency of climate
change, without moving people to denial and despair. We would like to see the press inspire more of a
public dialogue on how we can mitigate climate change, rather than encouraging readers to continue
to be resigned to the catastrophic telos. This does not mean that we should ignore the potentially devastating consequences of global
warming (now and in the future); but it does mean that we must begin a conversation about how to change our daily
routines to make things better. We believe that the press could promote greater human agency in the issue
of climate change, so that people do not become resigned to the telos of global warming. This includes
encouraging more personal and civic responsibility, rather than suggesting that experts will take care
of it (or that we can do nothing to mitigate the impacts of climate change). Journalists could acknowledge the
expertise of scientists, balanced with an acknowledgement of the power of common sense and morality such a move may help avoid casting scientists as
Through a less tragic, more productive framing of the issues of climate change, we may expand
the common ground needed to build a political will for dealing with climate change.
prophets.
Links/Impacts
the
fastest warming in the history of civilization *is+ already under way (Herbert, 2000, p. A23), however, may
thoroughly discourage readers from active participation by minimizing human agency. Moreover, it is
possible to read signs of climate change as a catastrophic telos which is already in process: the oceans are rising, mountain glaciers are
shrinking, low-lying coastal areas are eroding, and the very timing of the seasons is changing (Herbert, 2000, p. A23). Global
warming
The combination of tragic telos, deterministic linear temporality, and an extrahuman force guiding
history appear most dramatically in discussions of feedback loops, self-perpetuating cycles that
exacerbate warming and its effects. Homer-Dixon (2007b) describes feedback loops as a vicious circle . . . in our global climate
*that+ could determine humankinds future prosperity and even survival (p. A29). Here, the end-point of global climate
change is cast completely outside of human agency, for nature takes over. Though Herbert (2002) mixes a
variety of caveats and verbs (for example, in the above excerpt he uses could, rather than would or will) in his discussion of feedback
loops, the tragic implication is clear: It is likely that surface temperature will rise between 3 and 10.5 degrees Fahrenheit. That is a level of
warming that could initiate the disintegration of the ice sheet. And stopping that disintegration, once the planet gets that warm, may be
impossible (p. A25). With the loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, Tremendous amounts of housing, wetlands and farming areas around the
world would vanish. Large portions of a country like Bangladesh . . . would disappear (p. A25). Once a feedback loop becomes instantiated,
there is little (if anything) humans can do but witness the (apparently rapid) disappearance of entire nations.
The argumentative force of the tragic apocalypse also appears through analogies, especially those between current climate change and ancient
climate catastrophes, or fictional weather apocalypses, as in The Day After Tomorrow (Bowles, 2004; Scott, 2004). For instance, Gugliotta
(2005) lures readers with the headline, Extinction Tied to Global Warming; Greenhouse Effect Cited in Mass Decline 250 Million Years Ago (p.
A3). Volcanoes releasing Huge amounts of carbon dioxide . . . trigger*ed+ a greenhouse effect that warmed the earth and depleted oxygen
from the atmosphere, causing environmental deterioration and finally collapse (p. A3). Stories about analogous events function as
enthymemes where global warmings worst effects are fated, outside of human capacity to mitigate or adapt to them. Through the harrowing
images of fictitious or ancient catastrophes, audiences may draw their own conclusions concerning the fate of humanity, and life itself.
Nature-washing is a process by which social transformations of nature are well enough acknowledged,
but in which that socially changed nature becomes a new super determinant of our social fate. It
might well be societys fault for changing nature, but it is the consequent power of that nature that
brings on the apocalypse. The causal power of nature is not compromised but would seem to be augmented by social injections into
that nature. (2008: 245)
While the part-anthropogenic process of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is readily acknowledged, the
related
ecological problems are externalized as are the solutions. CO2 becomes the fethishized stand-in for
the totality of climate change calamities and, therefore, it suffices to reverse atmospheric CO2 buildup to a negotiated idealized point in history, to return to climatic status quo ex-ante. An extraordinary technomanagerial
apparatus is under way, ranging from new eco-technologies of a variety of kinds to unruly complex managerial and institutional configurations,
with a view to producing a socio-ecological fix to make sure nothing really changes. Stabilizing
Link C02
Their singular focuses of C02 raises it to an unquestionable status this
overlooks alternate causes of environmental devastation and continues
Capitalist exploitation.
Swyngedouw 13 (Erik Swyngedouw Geography, School of Environment and Development University of Manchester,
UK) [The Non-political Politics of Climate Change] http://www.acme-journal.org/vol12/Swingedouw2013.pdf (Pg. 4-5) //MC
The negativity of climatic disintegration finds its positive injunction around a fetishist
invocation of CO2 as the thing around which our environmental dreams, aspirations as
well as policies crystallize. The point de capiton for the climate change problematic is CO2, the objet petit a that
simultaneously expresses our deepest fears and around which the desire for change, for a better socio-climatic world is woven4, but
one that simultaneously disavows radical change in the sociopolitical co-ordinates that shape the Anthropocene. The fetishist
disavowal of the multiple, complex and often contingent relations through which
environmental changes unfold finds its completion in the double reductionism to this
singular socio-chemical component (CO2). The reification of complex processes to a thinglike object-cause in
the form of a socio-chemical compound around which our environmental desire crystallizes is indeed further inscribed with a
particular social meaning and function through its enrolment as commodity in the
processes of capital circulation and market exchange. The procedure of pricing CO2
reduces the extraordinary socio-spatial heterogeneities and complexities of natural
CO2s to a universal singular, obscuringin Marxs view of commodity fetishismthat a commodity is a very strange
thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties(Marx, (1867) 2004: 162). The commodification of
CO2 primarily via the Kyoto protocol and various off-setting schemeshas triggered a rapidly growing
derivatives market of futures and options. On the European climate exchange, for example, trade in CO2
futures and options grew from zero in 2005 to pass the 3 billion tons mark in June 2010;
585,296 contracts were traded during that month, with prices fluctuating from over 30 Euro to less than 10 Euro per ton over this
time period5. CO2s inscription as a commodity (and financialized asset) is dependent on its
gestures that permit incorporating the atmosphere into the commodified logic of capital
circulation and neoliberal recipes. It also stands guarantee that economic growth and
energy demands will continue on their insatiable trajectory. The consensual scripting of climate change
imaginaries, arguments and policies reflect a particular process of de-politicization, one that is defined by Slavoj iek and others as
post-political and becomes instituted in what Colin Crouch or Jacques Rancire term post-democracy.
Link Geoengineering
The projected rationality of geoengineering proposals triggered by the
apocalyptic fear of climate change promises consequences that only quicken
natures decline turns the case.
Crist 7 [Eileen Crist, Associate Professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech
University, 2007, Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse, Telos, Volume
141, Winter, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Telos Press, p. 48-50]//JH
Given the dominant framing of climate change, it is hardly surprising that schemes for what is called
geoengineering (and, in even more Orwellian speak, radiation management) are increasingly aired as reasonable
solutions to the climate crisis; it will be equally unsurprising if they are soon promoted as inevitable. A recent article in Nature
claims that given the need for drastic approaches to stave off the effects of rising planetary temperatures . . . curiosity about geoengineering
looks likely to grow.54 Six months earlier, an article in Wired gushed over the prospects, assuring us that luckily, a growing number of
In the wake of
apocalyptic fears, geoengineering is easily packaged as an idea whose time has come; physicist Paul
scientists are thinking more aggressively, developing incredibly ambitious technical fixes to cool the planet.55
Crutzens recent attentions have imbued it with even more credibility. Crutzen received the Nobel Prize for his work on ozone depletion, and is
now cautiously promoting active scientific research into the possibility of shooting SO2 into the stratosphere, which, by converting into sulfate
particles, would mask global warming by an effect known as global dimming; Crutzen calls it stratospheric albedo enhancement.56 In essence,
this strategy calls for countering one form of pollution with another.
In a 1997 article in the Wall Street Journal, nuclear physicist Edward Teller beat the environmental mainstream to a geoengineering solution for
global warming by a decade. Indeed Tellers summons to undertake, if necessary, incredibly ambitious technical fixes to cool the planet, as a
rational and economically defensible enterprise, may turn out in retrospect to have been pioneering in the realm of policy. It even seems plausible
that Tellers self-assured and dollar-quantified message (coinciding with the year of the Kyoto protocol) played into the current U.S.
administrations resolute defiance of calls to curb emissions, for he confidently affirmed that should global warming turn out to be dangerous, an
ingenious engineering mega-fix for it will be cheaper than phasing out fossil fuels.57
If mainstream environmentalism is catching up with the solution promoted by Teller, and perhaps harbored all along by the Bush administration,
it would certainly be ironic. But the irony is deeper than incidental politics. The
employees convince themselves that risk-assessment processes really are rational and
objective, and that therefore their decisions really aren't causing harm. Such employees may then focus more on
whether a risk assessment has been developed according to the "rules" than on whether it reflects reality.
2. Risk assessments can be manipulated endlessly, and government agencies like to have discretion.
Because risk assessment can be manipulated to approach desired outcomes, current policies can
remain in place or policies accommodating predetermined management can be installed.
3. Since
risk assessments involve so much uncertainty, so many assumptions, and large doses of
cumulative reality, they are not reproducible, as is a scientific experiment or study. They therefore
cannot be disproved. An agencys conclusions can be criticized, and alternative assessments can be proposed, but who is going
to rule that this agency's conclusions are wrong or arbitrary? When you are building with putty, whose sculpture
is the correct one?
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, for instance, that courts must defer to the "scientific" claims of federal agencies, even if independent
scientists' evidence seems more compelling (Marsh v. ONRC 1989). Imagine trying to challenge an agency's risk assessment in the face of this
required presumption against science, evidence, and rationality.
4. Risk
assessment gives specialist power to an agency in ways that alternatives assessment does not.
Not everyone is able to prepare, read, or decipher a complicated risk assessment. On the other hand,
society has many people who know about alternatives to current harmful activities. Limiting a risk
assessment to one option or a few standard options and to the habits of conventional risk-assessment
companies allows an agency to work primarily with business. These standard risk assessments allow an agency to avoid
dealing with many other groups who know about alternatives to the proposed activity and about unquantifiable benefits and hazards of the
activity and of the alternatives. Most
agency and contract risk assessors know a great deal about standard riskassessment techniques and very little about alternative technologies or processes. If they were to
depend on citizens in the society to show them alternatives, they would lose their specialized power.
5. Risk-assessment models
and numbers- are intimidating to citizens, so they give agencies the upper
hand. Recall the Kettleman City case, mentioned earlier in this chapter. Even a native English-speaking community would have trouble wading
through and critiquing a 3000-page risk assessment.
6. By focusing the public's attention on the details of a risk assessment, agencies divert public debates
from consideration of whether the assessed activity should even be taking place.
The risk-assessment process lets agencies avoid facing the responsibility of helping a community or a
society to change and the responsibility of requir ing a multinational corporation to change.
destructive capitalism
would thus accompany and accelerate society all the way down the resulting spiral to a continually
postponed, never-quite-reached bottom- and that slow-motion spiral will be our social-environmental
catastrophe, one that we are already decisively in.
Impact Eco-authoritarianism
Environmental fear rhetoric abrogates the political and is a method of coercion
where people are forced to participate in order to save their existence this
approach fails
Gourevitch 10 [Alex professor at Harvard University, 2010, Duke University Press, Public Culture
22:3, EnvironmentalismLong Live the Politics of Fear \\NL]
Scaring Us into Action/Submission
Gores passage further reveals how environmentalism
properly political choice also carries with it the force of necessity. But that kind of necessity
means that social conflict has gotten to the point where individuals must recognize their social
existence and use their powers of reason and judgment to choose between alternatives. If they are
forced by circumstance to act politically, how they act is still a matter of choice, and political choice is
presumed to be deliberate choice. That is different from being forced by circumstance to act in a
particular way. Gores thrill is not the courageous stance of responsible persons but the exultation of being liberated from the burden
of having to choose by the sheer overwhelming force of external necessity the juggernaut of eco-apocalypse. This thrill is just fear
fear that ones life will be destroyed by natures revenge for our moral lassitude. This is not politics,
and it is hardly the basis for a moral rejuvenation of an unequal and unjust society.
its predictions; worse, its more specific predictions are all too vulnerable to refutation by events. It also
exposes environmentalists to being called grim doomsters and antilife Puritan extremists. Further, concern with crisis
has all too often tempted people to try to find a "total solution" to the problems involved-a phrase that, as an astute analyst of the limitations
of crisis discourse, John Barry, puts it, is all too reminiscent of the Third Reich's infamous "final solution." 55
A total crisis of societyenvironmental crisis at its gravest-threatens to translate despair into inhumanist authoritarianism;
more often, however, it helps keep merely dysfunctional authority in place. It thus leads, Barry suggests, to the
belief that only elite- and expert-led solutions are possible. 56 At the same time it depoliticizes people,
inducing them to accept their impotence as individuals; this is something that has made many people
today feel, ironically and/or passively, that since it makes no difference at all what any individual does
on his or her own, one might as well go along with it.
for the suffering of distant others is rehearsed today even in nondisaster related media programming, but it is particularly prevalent when large-scale tragedies result
in not only live television news broadcasts, but also the many commemorative events and products
whose proceeds are supposed to benefit those distant others. Consuming such experiences and
products marks one as an ethical, moral person with the capacity to understand the pain of others.
Unlike classical forms of Enlightenment sympathy, however, in which detached spectators sought to actually alleviate the suffering of
unfortunate others whose causes they found worthy, the empathy on display when one buys a Virginia Tech t-shirt or a record benefitting New
Orleans musicians, or when one watches television programs devoted to these disasters, seems to be as much about self-improvement as the
improvement of the conditions of those less fortunate. This is not to say that such consumption is not driven by sincere concern for disaster
victims, but simply that mass culture tends to direct such concern towards viewing habits and consumption practices that help the self-image of
the viewer or purchaser at least as much as they help any disaster-stricken communities.
The consumption of disaster thus encourages a kind of political anesthesia that reduces ones ability
to recognize the collective solutions to problems, as well as ones willingness to work towards them
(Szasz, 2007). Instead, the authentically threatening quality of disasters often nurtures a paradoxically
fantastic desire to secure the safety of oneself and ones family through private acts of consumerism.
But these fantasies are often backwards looking; they envision the next disaster as a similar chain of
catastrophic events that, having recently happened, is actually unlikely to happen again due either to
officialdoms new awareness of this problem or simply to the remote odds of two similar disasters
happening in such close succession. Of course, in the current American political moment of ascendant
neo-liberal governance, such individualistic strategies of preventative consumption may constitute the
only preventative measures being taken on ones behalf.
space, time, or need for politics. Swyngedouw argues that this universalizing discourse currently drowns out
the rest.
Third , scientific experts present climate change as a crisis that requires immediate action,
predominantly in the form of governance-beyond-the-state. National political processes and
international negotiations have proven to be too slow and cumbersome to deal with urgent needs:
what is needed is decentered, participatory governance that rests on self-management and
controlled self-disciplining, under the aegis of a non-disputed liberal-capitalist order (Swyngedouw 2011,
270). So, rather than operate in the public spaces of politics, individuals are admonished to accept
personal responsibility for reducing CO2 emissions. Through a neoliberal, disciplining process that
some have called responsibilization (Rose 1999), we pledge to change our behavior rather than
question the global and local asymmetries and inequities that create, sustain, and legalize
institutional forms of environmental exploitation.
The fourth sign that the dominant framing of climate change is post-political, according to Swyngedouw, can
be found in the power of scientific discourse not only to define the problem itself but also how we
ought to relate to the natural world. Here I will sidestep the philosophical debate about whether there is such a thing as nature
and how discursive constructions and the material facts presented by the natural sciences may or may not be related (but see Morton 2007).
The main issue for the post-political thesis is that dominant climate narratives have fear as a central
trope, which leads to a profoundly depoliticized imaginary. Swyngedouw writes: apocalyptic imaginaries are
extraordinarily powerful in disavowing or displacing social conflict and antagonisms. As such,
apocalyptic imaginations foreclose a proper political framing (Swyngedouw 2011, 263). Dystopian and
apocalyptic narratives of natural disasters, chronic resource shortages, global pandemics and
perpetual warsuch as those shown vividly in The Age of Stupidhelp to create acceptance of the need for extreme
measures and radical policies (for example, on population growth). These narratives are not merely the stuff of science fiction:
further examples can be found in the communications of UN conferences and grassroots organizations. One could look, for example, at the
opening ceremony of the 2009 Copenhagen Summit, which included Please Save the World, a video depicting a child's nightmare about climate
change, or at the publications of the Transition Town Movement, which is founded on predictions of civilizational collapse (Smith 2011). It
has been argued that levels of public concern about climate change have declined in the US as a result
of apocalypse fatigue (Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2008). Not only do apocalyptic climate narratives create a
sense of emergency, they also cast the humannature relationship as one of antagonism and conflict,
where nature is threatening and out of control, and where societies must prepare themselves to
withstand its wrath (Doyle and Chaturveydi 2010). Although Swyngedouw does not make this point, I would argue that this
narrative gives rise to the concept of climate resilience that now pervades UN and NGO discourse.
There has been a gradual policy shift from mitigation to resilience, which can be read as prioritizing
the protection of people from climate-related disasters over the protection of the environment from
human-related disasters of contamination, extraction, and extinction. As such, the dominant framing of
climate change has produced a depoliticizing view of nature as the enemy, which can only serve to
reduce further the political potential of environmentalism as a social movement that is dedicated to
remedying destructive humannature relations.
condition. In this part, we shall chart the characteristics of populism (see, among others, Canovan, 1999; 2005; Laclau,
2005; Mudde, 2004; iek, 2006a) as they are expressed in mainstream climate concerns. In other words, to the
extent that consensual climate change imaginaries, arguments and policies reflect processes of
depoliticization, the former are sustained by a series of decidedly populist gestures. Here, I shall
summarize the particular ways in which climate change expresses some of the classic tenets of
populism.
First, the
climate change conundrum is not only portrayed as global, but is constituted as a universal
humanitarian threat. We are all potential victims. THE Environment and THE People, Humanity as a
whole in a material and philosophical manner, are invoked and called into being. Humanity (as well as large
parts of the non-human world) is under threat from climatic catastrophes. However, the people here are not
constituted as heterogeneous political subjects, but as universal victims, suffering from processes
beyond their control. As such, populism cuts across the idiosyncrasies of different, heterogeneously constituted,
differentially acting, and often antagonistic human and non-human natures; it silences ideological and other
constitutive social differences and disavows conflicts of interests by distilling a common threat or
challenge to both Nature and Humanity. As iek puts it:
. . . populism
occurs when a series of particular democratic demands [in this case, a good environment, a retroenchained in a series of equivalences, and this
enchainment produces people as the universal political subject . . . and all different particular
struggles and antagonisms appear as part of a global antagonistic struggle between us (people) and
them *in this case it, i.e. CO2+. (iek, 2006a: 553)
fitted climate, a series of socio-environmentally mitigating actions] is
The system ensures that scientific technocrats and political elites influence
populist movements leads to depoliticization and political apathy
Swyngedouw 10 [Erik professor of geography at the University of Manchester in the School of
Environment and Development; Apocalypse Forever?: Post-political Populism and the Spectre of
Climate Change, Theory Culture Society, May 24th, Sage \\NL]
Fourth, populism
is based on a politics of the people know best (although the latter category remains often empty,
by a scientific technocracy assumed to be neutral, and advocates a direct
relationship between people and political participation. It is assumed that this will lead to a good, if not optimal,
unnamed), supported
solution, a view strangely at odds with the presumed radical openness, uncertainty and undecidability of the excessive risks associated with
Becks or Giddens second modernity. The
Sixth, populist
demands are always addressed to the elites. Populism as a project addresses demands to the ruling elites
is not about replacing the elites, but calling on the elites to
undertake action. The ecological problem is no exception. It does not invite a transformation of the
existing socio-ecological order but calls on the elites to undertake action such that nothing really has
(getting rid of immigrants, saving the climate . . .); it
to change, so that life can basically go on as before. In this sense, environmental populism is inherently
reactionary, a key ideological support structure for securing the socio-political status quo. It is inherently
non-political and non-partisan. A Gramscian passive revolution has taken place over the past few years, whereby the elites
have not only acknowledged the climate conundrum and, thereby, answered the call of the people to
take the climate seriously, but are moving rapidly to convince the world that, indeed, capitalism can not
only solve the climate riddle but also that capitalism can make a new climate by unmaking the one it
has co-produced over the past few hundred years through a series of extraordinary techno-natural
and ecomanagerial fixes. Not only do the elites take these particular demands of the people seriously, it also mobilizes them in ways
that serve their purposes.
current framing of climate change as the urgent issue encourages regarding the unwinding
of biodiversity as a less critical matter than the forthcoming repercussions of global warming.
Attention to the long-standing ruination of biodiversity underway is subverted in two ways in climatechange discourse: either it gets elided through a focus on anthropocentric anxieties about how climate
change will specifically affect people and nations; or biodepletion is presented as a corollary of
climate change in writings that closely consider how global warming will cause biodiversity losses.
Climate change is undoubtedly speeding up the unraveling of lifes interconnectedness and variety. But if global warming has such potential to
afflict the natural world, it is because the latters immunity has been severely compromised. It is on
an already profoundly
wounded natural world that global warming is delivering its blow. Focusing on the added blow of climate change is
important, but this focus should not come at the expense of erasing from view the prior, ongoing, and
climate-change-independent wounding of life on Earth.
emerged in
postindustrial countries and bears heavy marks of this origin. For wealthy people in rich countries the
concern over possible ruinous events somewhere in a distant future is more important than the
gigantic environmental problems now oppressing the large underdeveloped parts of the world.
Western environmentalists are much readier to invest money and energy to prevent a risk that might
affect their distant offspring, like the potential (and controversial) warming of the climate that might
happen sometime next century, than to finance efforts in out-of-sight areas of the world. There
present huge environmental problems need to be solved (air pollution, water pollution and water
shortage). These problems destroy the environment and kill thousands of people each year. For
wealthy people in rich countries the future environment is "our environment," while the present
environment where underdeveloped people live is "their environment."'14 In other terms, environmentalism and
environmental policy sell what can be sold. The purchasers of this merchandise live - with few exceptions - in Europe, North America and
Australia. They receive what they are willing to buy. b) Another important reason is that the disaster-strategy is not
particularly new or unique to the environmental movement: on the contrary, it fits perfectly in what H.L. Mencken considered a common aim of
practical politics: to
the public intellectual to project [*482] horrors on a global scale. Posner counts environmentalists, such as Paul Ehrlich,
as prominent examples of this type. n40 Of course, as jeremiahs mount, it takes increasingly dramatic predictions in order to gain the public
attention required of a public intellectual.
The existence of the controversy over The Skeptical Environmentalist should not be terribly surprising. Lomborg gives the environmental
jeremiahs a convenient foil for another round of debate. He has exploited his status as a former environmentalist to promote his book, and that
has surely further provoked the ideological ire of the jeremiahs, who picture him as a traitor to the true cause of environmentalism. Some
environmentalists seem to divide up the world into friendly members of their own "green team" and enemies to be attacked.
The jeremiah approach may profit the individual public intellectual, who gains prominence, prestige and cash from success, as public
intellectuals may be punished for ideological error but not for simply "being wrong." n41 The jeremiahs are fueled by a media industry that can
use drama to sell papers. n42 A Defenders of Wildlife representative recognized that the "best way to get on TV is to take an extreme position."
n43 Thus, the inducement to sell scientific accuracy and credibility for attention and advocacy.
The radical and erroneous claims of environmental doomsayers hardly advance the overall interests
of the underlying environmental policy, however. The loss of credibility is a profound cost to an
advocate. n44 The logical effects of the most extreme jeremiahs are "to discredit its side of the political
spectrum," to dissipate the energies of allies in "battles over symbols and cultural institutions," and
"to provide a raison d'etre for the polemics of the opposite [*483] fringe." n45 The jeremiahs are therefore no friends
to the environmental movement. By "crying wolf" repeatedly and falsely, they only undermine the credibility of
the movement and may cause its warnings to go ignored when a true wolf is in the fold. n46
Environmentalists could establish some credibility by abandoning the jeremiahs and rejecting their
unsupported claims. Yet the movement has scarcely done so and clings to fellow members of its "green
team" who urge environmental action, regardless of the merits of their particular claims. The
movement continues to embrace the very doomsayers, such as Ehrlich, whose past predictions were
absurdly wrong. They may even be regarded as heroes of the movement. However, such "movement environmentalists"
form only a small percentage of the population. The more typical American, or "median voter," has seen the litany of
doomsaying and seen the projections proved false. For them, the association of environmentalism with the jeremiahs
only undermines environmentalism and renders suspicious even well-founded environmental
problems. This is the effect that Lomborg apparently seeks to combat.
Extreme claims about climate change distort scientific evidence and undermine
environmental movements.
Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office Hadley Centre, 09 ["Scientists must rein in
misleading climate change claims," The Guardian, 11 February 2009]//JH
News headlines vie for attention and it
climate change can be distorted. The reality is that extreme events arise when natural variations in the weather and climate
combine with long-term climate change. This message is more difficult to get heard. Scientists and journalists need to find ways to help to make
this clear without the wider audience switching off.
Recent headlines have proclaimed that Arctic summer sea ice has decreased so much in the past few years that it has reached a tipping point
and will disappear very quickly. The truth is that there is little evidence to support this. Indeed, the
For climate scientists, having to continually rein in extraordinary claims that the latest extreme is all due
to climate change is, at best, hugely frustrating and, at worst, enormously distracting. Overplaying natural
variations in the weather as climate change is just as much a distortion of the science as underplaying
them to claim that climate change has stopped or is not happening. Both undermine the basic facts that
the implications of climate change are profound and will be severe if greenhouse gas emissions are
not cut drastically and swiftly over the coming decades.
When climate scientists like me explain to people what we do for a living we are increasingly asked whether we "believe in climate change".
Quite simply it is not a matter of belief. Our concerns about climate change arise from the scientific evidence that humanity's activities are
leading to changes in our climate. The scientific evidence is overwhelming.
approach is
arrogant and patronizing, and anti-democratic, as public intellectual advocates assume that we
"unwashed masses" can't be trusted with the truth but must be manipulated into the political policies
that the advocates prefer. It enables conservatives to [*490] credibly claim that environmentalists do
not defend science but only use it as "a weapon to advance the cause." n86
It is distinctly possible that at least some aspect of environmental
For decades, environmentalists have projected a series of growing problems and sometimes horrible
disasters. Cornucopians have predicted that none of these would occur. The track record over this period is pretty one-sided in favor of the
Cornucopians, at least on matters for which there is extensive information. None of the major disasters have come to pass. Most of the
measurable environmental problems have declined, and human health and wellbeing has broadly improved. Of course, this improvement has
not been universal. But if
that global
warming is occurring had declined from 71 percent in April of 2008 to 56 percent in October an astonishing drop
in just 18 months. The belief that global warming is human-caused declined from 47 percent to 36
percent. While some pollsters questioned these numbers, the Pew statistics are consistent with the findings by Gallup in March that public concern about
global warming had declined, that the number of Americans who believed that news about global warming was exaggerated had increased, and that the number of
Americans who believed that the effects of global warming had already begun had declined. The reasons offered for these declines are as varied as opinion about
climate change itself. Skeptics say the gig is up: Americans have finally figured out that global warming is a hoax. Climate activists blame skeptics for sowing doubts
about climate science. Pews Andrew Kohut, who conducted the survey, says its (mostly) the economy, stupid. And some folks have concluded that Americans, with
our high levels of disbelief in evolution, are just too stupid or too anti-science to sort it all out. The truth is both simpler and more complicated. It is simpler in the
sense that most Americans just arent paying a whole lot of attention. Between being asked about things like whether they would provide CPR to save the life of a
pet (most pet owners say yes ) or whether they would allow their child to be given the swine flu vaccine (a third of parents say no), pollsters occasionally get around
to asking Americans what they think about global warming. When they do, Americans find a variety of ways to tell us that they dont think about it very much at all.
Three years after it seemed that An Inconvenient Truth had changed everything, it turns out that it didnt. The current Pew survey is the latest in a series of
studies suggesting that Al Gore probably had a good deal more effect upon elite opinion than public opinion. Public opinion about global warming, it turns out, has
been remarkably stable for the better part of two decades, despite the recent decline in expressed public confidence in climate science. Roughly two-thirds of
Americans have consistently told pollsters that global warming is occurring. By about the same majority, most Americans agree that global warming is at least in
part human-caused, with this majority roughly equally divided between those believing that warming is entirely caused by humans and those who believe it to be a
combination of human and natural causes. And about the same twothirds majority has consistently supported government action to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions since 1989. This would be good news for action to address climate change if most Americans felt very strongly about the subject. Unfortunately, they
dont. Looking back over 20 years, only about 35 to 40 percent of the U.S. public worry about global warming a great deal, and only about one-third consider it a
serious personal threat. Moreover, when asked in openended formats to name the most serious problems facing the country, virtually no Americans volunteer
global warming. Even other environmental problems, such as air and water pollution, are often rated higher priorities by U.S. voters than global warming, which is
less visible and is experienced less personally than many other problems. What is arguably most remarkable about U.S. public opinion on global warming has been
both its stability and its inelasticity in response to new developments, greater scientific understanding of the problem, and greater attention from both the media
and politicians. Public opinion about global warming has remained largely unchanged through periods of intensive media attention and periods of neglect, good
economic times and bad, the relatively activist Clinton years and the skeptical Bush years. And majorities of Americans have, at least in principle, consistently
supported government action to do something about global warming even if they were not entirely sold that the science was settled, suggesting that public
understanding and acceptance of climate science may not be a precondition for supporting action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The more complicated
questions have to do with why. Why
change yet so weakly committed? Why has two decades of education and advocacy about climate change had so little discernible impact on
public opinion? And why, at the height of media coverage and publicity about global warming in the years after the release of Gores movie, did confidence in
climate science actually appear to decline? Political
American public a little more credit. They may not know climate science very well, but they
are not going to be muscled into accepting apocalyptic visions about our planetary future or
embracing calls to radically transform our way of life just because environmentalists or climate
scientists tell them they must. They typically give less credit to expert opinion than do educated elites, and those of us who tend to pay more
attention to these questions would do well to remember that expert opinion and indeed, expert consensus, has tended to have a less sterling track record than
most of us might like to admit. At
the same time, significant majorities of Americans are still prepared to support
reasonable efforts to reduce carbon emissions even if they have their doubts about the science. They may
be disinclined to tell pollsters that the science is settled, just as they are not inclined to tell them that evolution is more than a theory. But that doesnt stop them
from supporting the teaching of evolution in their schools. And it
end-point of global climate change is perpetuated through a self-reinforcing cycle. This cycle
builds momentum toward the narratives conclusion, to the point that there is little or no space for
human agency in forestalling the anticipated telos. Even more disturbing, the average person does not begin
to worry until after the self-reinforcing feedback kicks in, suggesting that human involvement in changing
the narrative will not come until it is too late. While the articles do not all suggest that human agency or
adaptation is impossible, the narrative temporality limits the will of people to tackle the underlying
cause of global warming increased greenhouse gas emissions.
The affirmatives model for risk assessment turns the case humans attempt to
manage the environment by only analyzing how much we can exploit nature
without causing irreversible harm and this leads to constant degradation of
ecosystems.
Peter Montague, director of the Environmental Research Foundation in Annapolis, Maryland, 2000
[Foreward of Making Better Environmental Decisions: An Alternative to Risk Assessment by Mary
OBrien, MIT Press 2000, p. viii ix]//JH
The nation's new risk-based regulatory system was founded on three unspoken assumptions, summarized
by Theodore Taylor and Charles Humpstone in The Restoration of the Earth (Harper & Row, 1973). Paraphrased, these assumptions
are as follows:
Humans
can manage the environment by deciding how much of any destructive activity the Earth (or
any portion of the Earth) can safely absorb Without harm. Scientists call this the "assimilative capacity" of an ecosystem or a
human being or a population of fish. According to this assumption, scientists can reliably decide how much damage a river or a human or the
Florida panther can absorb without suffering irreversible harm. The purpose
Once
an ecosystem's "assimilative capacity" for a particular toxicant (or destructive activity, such as road building in grizzly
habitat) has been decided, then we can and will impose limits so that irreversible harm will not occur. We
will set restrictions, river by river, forest by forest, factory by factory, chemical by chemical, everywhere on the planet, so that the total,
cumulative effects do not exceed the "assimilative capacity" of the Earth or any of its ecosystems or inhabitants.
We already know which substances and activities are harmful and which are not; or, in the case of
substances or activities that we never suspected of being harmful, we will be warned of their possible
dangers by traumatic but sub-lethal shocks that alert us to the danger before it is too late.
Unfortunately, with the benefit of 30 years' hindsight we now know that all three assumptions are
dead wrong.
For 30 years we have relied on a risk-based environmental-protection apparatus based on these incorrect assumptions. As
a result, the
world's ecosystems and its human inhabitants have suffered major damage. Think of ozone depletion,
global warming, acid rain, lead poisoning of tens of millions of children, mercury buildup in the
atmosphere and subsequently in fish, industrial poisons (such as PCBs) measurable throughout the
vastness of die oceans, the rising incidence of many cancers (including brain cancers, lymphomas, and
childhood cancers), escalating immune system disorders (including asthma and diabetes), the rising
incidence of nervous system diseases (such as Parkinson's Disease and Lou Gehrig's Disease), coral
reefs dying worldwide, and numerous species gone extinct. This list could be extended readily as new evidence of harm
pours in. All this damage has resulted from our "innocent until proven guilty" approach to destructive
activities, including the massive ongoing release of industrial poisons. If our risk assessments told us
some activity would cause only "acceptable damage," we plunged ahead on that basis. Now we wake
up to find that the cumulative effects of our risk-based decisions have severely degraded many of the
planet's biological systems.
The pluralism of interpretations of the modern project combined with the imperative tone of the logic
of humanization result in a variety of great political catastrophes of the 20th century: the Second
World War, the Cold War, genocide, totalitarianism, and repression. Fascism was also a modern project after all.32
Thus, Peter Sloterdijk contends in the Rules for the Human Zoo, that the project of humanism ultimately represents the discourse of self
domestication and an algorithm of self constrain, and that after the tragic events of the 20th century, it becomes clear, that humanism as
salvation from barbarianism clearly does not work, and will have to be reconsidered.33 The
It is important to emphasize again, that as a (presumably) false epistemological paradigm not only the
Modern humanism is considered to fail to provide social transcendence, but it is believed to have
dreadful practical outcomes. The postmodern society is thus (as its condition is imagined to be) the society that has gone too
far in its optimistic and arrogant delusions about the power of civilization. This cultural logic partly explains
the radical tone of the postwar philosophy and environmental critique. The increasingly popular narrative
of sustainability is, thus, often seen as the ultimate alternative to modern narrative; as the opposing logic
that should eventually come to the place of the logic of progress, or in other words, as another medicine for human
condition. The ultimate message of the radical environmental philosophy implies that progress and
humanism did not save us from the apocalypse. We are still heading in this direction, and to reverse
the movement we need to change these false outdated concepts to the ones of sustainability and
posthumanism.
There are multiple versions of posthumanism, with some of them being more radical (like the Deep Ecology movement) and other representing
more moderate versions (like the one that can be found in Jane Bennets Vibrant Matter35 or in some ethical reconsiderations of the concept
of Home). The general theme of these conceptions, however, always contains the expansion of ethic and reasoning beyond humanity to the
natural world.36 And in this way the family of posthumanist conceptions often falls into Modern logic (ironically while criticizing it), as long as
they imply the fatal flaw in the preceding paradigms of human place in the world and suggest a once and for all decision for the problems of
humanity. I will not analyze the content of various posthumanist conceptions and ponder their perspectives for the future development of
humanity in this paper.
Let me, however, briefly summarize the outcomes of the apocalyptic rhetoric, in which
the concepts of sustainability and posthumanism are wrapped. Generally speaking, the perceptual shift is
still delivered within the utopian/dystopian dichotomy, as it employs the same logic of the teleological temporal
movement: if the old remedy did not cancel the apocalypse, we need to find a new one. Herein lies the point
where arise the eventual conversational difficulties, as we encounter two radical salvationist rhetorics clashing.
There are multiple examples of this problem that can be found in the very structure of the political ecological discourse. As the
apocalypse, in words of Jacques Derrida, is essentially a nonevent (i.e. it cannot be really encountered, until it is
encountered), then it cannot be scientifically or analytically proved. Thus, application of the apocalyptic logic
from both sides results in nothing, but constant mutual accusation in false prophecies. Let us take for
example the aforementioned article by James Lovelock, who in 2006 predicted that the ongoing climate change would dramatically affect the
planets conditions in the near future, and eventually would signify the end of current civilizations. When four years later the scientist corrected
his prognosis, stating that over the course of time we have proved not to have enough data for such predictions, the headlines of the
newspapers invariably contained the word alarmist and the reviews without exception sounded bitterly.
There is, however, a more serious problem of the rhetorical clash, than an ongoing mutual skepticism. The
apocalyptic temporality
and teleological tone of the environmental critique combined with some radical versions of
posthumanism have resulted in labeling the narrative of sustainability as extremism, or even as a form of
antimodern fundamentalism. Thus, there has emerged a new figure in the corpus of modern apocalyptic anxieties the Mad
Scientist. The ecologists nowadays often get to be placed on the spot of the hidden enemies, perceived
as the opponents of the social order. For example, Ronald Bailey states in his book Ecoscam: The False Prophets of Ecological
Apocalypse, that ecological critics are essentially equivalent to the contemporary selfproclaimed chosen
people, who are the only ones able to see the hidden signs of the coming punishment. *I+t is a
paranoid type of politics, he writes, one that believes that all of humanity's ills can be traced to a single center and hence can be
eliminated by some kind of final act of victory over the evil source There is a chilling similarity between the old Marxist aspiration of molding a
New Soviet Man and the deep ecologist's desire to create a New Ecological Person.37 Another author, Deepak Lal, concludes in his article
EcoFundamentalism, *whereas+ it may appear that the environmental movement is 'scientific' and hence 'modern' while the religious
fundamentalists are 'nonscientific' and 'premodern', they share a fear and contempt of the modernity whose central features are rightly seen
to be an instrumental rationality which undermines humanity's traditional relationship with God or Nature.38 He thus accuses ecological
critics in attempting to impose their particular teleological values onto the neutrally structured modern international institutions.
In short, it is noticeable, that apocalyptic
logic in general does not do any good for the political ecology, as it
ultimately places it into a specific marginalized spot within modern discourse. Progressivism and sustainability,
the two competing ideologies, ultimately speak the same millenarian language, but claim to evoke incompatible modes of political action.
Jacques Derrida in his analysis of the apocalyptic philosophy comes to the conclusion that it is ultimately the problem of the two opposing
temporalities: a modern time set from the start (as the vector), and a postmodern time set to the end (as the countdown).39 The
central
obstacle for productive politics appears to be this conflict of temporalities and the following from it
teleological clash, not the futuristic fantasies themselves. Thus, following the solution, suggested by the French
philosopher, I believe we need to get rid of any teleology, to set a common zero hour, and to leave the future open for the people, nature and
the world.
It is not the use of the word "emergency" that is necessarily significant here but rather the
assumptions that so commonly go along with the word. We think these assumptions need to be brought
out into the open and discussed.
Let us be clear. We believe climate change is a vitally important issue. We believe action should be taken, the sooner and the more effective the
better, to prevent the adverse consequences of global warming. Calling climate change an emergency might be a good approach - but on the
other hand it might not be, indeed it might be counterproductive. We think both the advantages and disadvantages of emergency framing
should be discussed.
The emergency frame implicitly prioritises climate change above other issues. On the other hand, some critics,
like Lomborg (2006), argue that other issues should have higher priority. We think it can be a mistake to prioritise one issue
over others, because this may encourage competition between activists rather than cooperation.
There are plenty of issues of vital importance in which millions of lives are at stake, among them nuclear war, global poverty, HIV, inequality and smoking, which could kill one billion people this century (Proctor 2001). It is natural to expect campaigners on other vitally important issues
- such as torture, sexual slavery and genocide - to remain committed to their concerns. Rather
pacify constituencies and lobbies through expenditure, for the rich as much as the poor. Few
The challenge is to build a long-term movement, cooperating with other movements, that will persist
after media attention declines should climate change not occur as rapidly as scientists anticipate, and
will also persist should some of the more calamitous scenarios eventuate. The world needs a
sustainable climate change movement built not on fear but on widespread commitment.
pitfall for the full and sustained elaboration of environmental crisis is, though least discussed,
perhaps the most deeply ironic. A problem with deep cultural and psychological as well as social effects, it is embodied in a
startlingly simple proposition: the worse one feels environmental crisis is, the more one is tempted to turn
one's back on the environment. This means, preeminently, turning one's back on "nature"-on traditions of
nature feeling, traditions of knowledge about nature (ones that range from organic farming techniques to the different
departments of ecological science), and traditions of nature-based activism. If nature is thoroughly wrecked these days, people
need to delink from nature and live in postnature-a conclusion that, as the next chapter shows, many in U.S. society drew at the end of the
millenium.
Explorations of how deeply "nature" has been wounded and how intensely vulnerable to and
dependent on human actions it is can thus lead, ironically, to further indifference to nature-based
environmental issues, not greater concern with them.
proper names are assigned to a post-political populist politics (Badiou, 2005). Post-political
populism is associated with a politics of not naming, in the sense of giving a definite or proper name to its domain or field
of action. Only empty signifiers like climate change policy, bio - diversity policy or a vacuous
sustainable policy replace the proper names of politics. These proper names, according to Rancire (1998; see
also Badiou, 2005), are what constitute a genuine democracy, that is, a space where the unnamed, the
uncounted and, consequently, unsymbolized become named and counted. Consider, for example, how class
struggle in the 19th and 20th century was exactly about naming the proletariat, its counting, symbolization, narration and consequent entry
into the technomachinery of the state. In the 20th century, feminist politics became named through the narration, activism and symbolization
of woman as a political category. And, for capitalism, the creative class is the revolutionary subject that sustains its creatively destructive
transformations. Climate change has no positively embodied name or signifier; it
for one state are losses for another, and each states attempt to maximise its power
relative to all other states is simply a reflection of its rational pursuit of its own security. The upshot is
the normalisation of political violence in the international system, including practices such as overexploitation of energy and the environment, as a rational strategy even though this ultimately
amplifies global systemic insecurity. Inability to cooperate internationally and for mutual benefit is
viewed as an inevitable outcome of the simple, axiomatic existence of multiple states. The problem is that
neorealism cannot explain in the first place the complex interdependence and escalation of global crises.
Unable to situate these crises in the context of an international system that is not simply a set of states, but a transnational global structure
based on a specific exploitative relationship with the biophysical environment, neorealism
the very act of projecting global crises as security threats, neorealism renders itself powerless to
prevent or mitigate them by theorising their root structural causes. In effect, despite its emphasis on the
reasons why states seek security, neorealisms approach to issues like climate change actually guarantees
greater insecurity by promoting policies which frame these non-traditional issues purely as
amplifiers of quite traditional threats. As Susanne Peters argues, the neorealist approach renders the
militarisation of foreign and domestic policy a pragmatic and necessary response to issues such as
resource scarcities yet, in doing so, it entails the inevitable escalation of resource wars in the name of
energy security. Practically, this serves not to increase security for competing state and non-state actors,
but to debilitate international security through the proliferation of violent conflict to access and
control diminishing resources in the context of unpredictable complex emergencies.60 Neorealism thus
negates its own theoretical utility and normative value. For if security is the fundamental driver of
state foreign policies, then why are states chronically incapable of effectively ameliorating the global
systemic amplifiers of insecurity, despite the obvious rationale to do so in the name of warding off
collective destruction, if not planetary annihilation?61
In a modest effort to contribute to the lacuna identified by Brauch, this paper begins with an empirically-oriented, interdisciplinary exploration
of the best available data on four major global crises climate change, energy depletion, food scarcity and global financial instability
illustrating the systemic interconnections between different crises, and revealing that their causal
origins are not accidental but inherent to the structural failings and vulnerabilities of existing global
political, economic and cultural institutions. This empirical evaluation leads to a critical appraisal of
orthodox realist and liberal approaches to global crises in international theory and policy. This critique
argues principally that orthodox IR reifies a highly fragmented, de-historicised ontology of the international
system which underlies a reductionist, technocratic and compartmentalised conceptual and
methodological approach to global crises. Consequently, rather than global crises being understood
causally and holistically in the systemic context of the structure of the international system, they are
securitised as amplifiers of traditional security threats, requiring counter-productive militarised
responses and/or futile inter-state negotiations. While the systemic causal context of global crisis convergence and
acceleration is thus elided, this simultaneously exacerbates the danger of reactionary violence, the
problematisation of populations in regions impacted by these crises and the naturalisation of the
consequent proliferation of wars and humanitarian disasters. This moves us away from the debate
over whether resource shortages or abundance causes conflicts, to the question of how either can
generate crises which undermine conventional socio-political orders and confound conventional IR
discourses, in turn radicalising the processes of social polarisation that can culminate in violent
conflict.
the acceptance of the security consequences of climate change as an intractable problem could well
reduce efforts to find peaceful solutions to the conflicts that will inevitably come with climate change.
Climate change will have major consequences, particularly in countries where living conditions are already precarious (IPCC 2007, WBGU 2007). The consequences
of climate change on some basic foundations of life, such as fresh water supplies, arable land and agricultural productivity in various parts of the world can already
be roughly estimated for various global-warming scenarios. There are also more or less well founded predictions of the consequences of reduced availability of
natural resources such as arable land and water on hunger and disease, even though such consequences are highly dependent on counter-measures and adaptation
efforts in affected regions. There is no inevitability about these consequences.
Impact Alienation/Domination
Apocalyptic fears simply begin another chapter of colonization and domination
of nature leads to human alienation from our biosphere, enables more climate
change driven damage to occur.
Crist 7 [Eileen Crist, Associate Professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech
University, 2007, Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse, Telos, Volume
141, Winter, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Telos Press, p. 50-51]//JH
Domination comes at a huge cost for the human spirit, a cost that may or may not include the scale of
physical imperilment and suffering that apocalyptic fears conjure. Human beings pay for the
domination of the biospherea domination they are either bent upon or resigned to with
alienation from the living Earth.60 This alienation manifests, first and foremost, in the invisibility of the
biodiversity crisis: the steadfast denial and repression, in the public arena, of the epochal event of mass
extinction and accelerating depletion of the Earths biological treasures. It has taken the threat of climate change (to
people and civilization) to allow the tip of the biodepletion iceberg to surface into public discourse, but even that has been woefully inadequate
in failing to acknowledge two crucial facts: first, the biodiversity crisis has been occurring independently of climate change, and will hardly be
stopped by windmills, nuclear power plants, and carbon sequestering, in any amount or combination thereof; and second,
the
devastation that species and ecosystems have already experienced is what largely will enable more
climate-change-driven damage to occur.
Human alienation from the biosphere further manifests in the recalcitrance of instrumental
rationality, which reduces all challenges and problems to variables that can be controlled, fixed,
managed, or manipulated by technical means. Instrumental rationality is rarely questioned substantively, except in the
flagging of potential unintended consequences (for example, of implementing geoengineering technologies). The idea that instrumental
rationality (in the form of technological fixes for global warming) might save the day hovers between misrepresentation and delusion: firstly,
because instrumental rationality has itself been the planets nemesis by mediating the biospheres constitution as resource and by condoning
the transformation of Homo sapiens into a user species; and secondly, because instrumental
Alternatives
Alt Criticism/Reframing
Vote negative to endorse a radical critique of fatalist thinking, this is key to
breaking down the dominance of industrial consumer civilization over our
environment.
Crist 7 [Eileen Crist, Associate Professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech
University, 2007, Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse, Telos, Volume
141, Winter, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Telos Press, p. 53-55]//JH
In fatalistic thinking, the trajectory of industrial-consumer civilization appears set on tracks that
humanity cannot desert without derailing; it is implied that while the specifics of the future may elude us, in broad outline it is
(for better or for worse) a fixed direction of more of the same. Fatalism projects the course of human history (and concomitantly of natural
display, from a
fatalistic viewpoint,66 present patterns of global economic expansion, consumption increase,
population growth, conversion and exploitation of the land, killing of wildlife, extinction of species,
chemical contamination, depletion of oceans, and so on, will more or less keep unfolding.67 We glimpse
here what Horkheimer and Adorno had in mind when they pointed out that logical necessity . . . remains tied to domination,
as both its reflection and its tool.68
history) as the inevitable unfolding of the momentum of present trends. By virtue of the inertia that massive forces
Indeed fatalism is a mind-set that strengthens the trends that generate it by fostering compliance to those very trends. The compliance
that fatalism effects is invisible to the fatalistic thinker, who does not regard him or herself as a
conformist, but simply as a realist.69 But the conceptual and pragmatic fortification of the
socioeconomic establishment by fatalistic reasoning is incontestable, arising as an effect cognate to
what is called positive feedback in cybernetics,70 looping action in philosophy,71 and self-fulfilling prophesy in sociology.72
The complicity of fatalism in sustaining the dominance of industrial consumer civilization merits close
scrutiny: fatalism may be the most cinctly recaptured the concept, serves to impede making the foundations of society the object of thought
and reflection.73 The declaration that we live in the Anthropocene (to stay with this key example) has the
ideological effect of discouraging deep questioning and dismissing even discussion of revolutionary
action. Rather, we are indirectly advised, our fate is to live our days in the Age of Modern Man, within which we must manage ourselves
and the world as best we can. Further, the narrow and technical conception of climate change as the problem is
beholden to the same fatalistic mind-set. The real problemthe industrial-consumer complex that is
overhauling the world in an orgy of exploitation, overproduction, and wasteis treated with kid gloves, taken
as given, and regarded as beyond the reaches of effective challenge.
But this
civilization is not beyond the reaches of radical actionand it is certainly not beyond the
reaches of radical critique.74 If the price of think[ing] in terms of alternatives to the dominant order
[is to] risk exclusion from polite intellectual society, as social theorist Joel Kovel observes about our times, then let us
pay the price while preserving our clarity about the unredeemable socioeconomic reality in which we
live.
principally or solely to population growth. Although population is an important factor, the limits perspective's focus on population leaves out
other, equally important factors: economic incentives for developers to build large houses at low density, real estate interests' dominance of
zoning and land-use planning decisions, and government funding for sprawl-inducing freeways instead of urban mass transit. All of these
political, social, and economic factors are key for understanding sprawl, and, more important, for doing something about it.
The politicalecological approach is part of a growing body of research by geographers, anthropologists, economists, and biologists that draws
on biological and social sciences to understand environmental problems. An excellent example is from Vandermeer and Perfecto (1995), who
analyze the political and ecological causes and consequences of deforestation in Costa Rica. Other examples from very different perspectives
include a collection by Painter and Durham, The Social Causes of Environmental Destruction in Latin America (1994), Richard Norgaard's
Development Betrayed (1994) about the Amazon, and a recent critical review by Peet and Watts (1996).
Conclusions
The claim that, for the most part, there are not biophysical limits to economic growth may disturb many environmentalists. Dropping the
limits/catastrophe paradigm is unattractive if one believes that appealing to people's rational desire to avoid a crash is the only way to motivate
change and stop environmental destruction. The tapestry metaphor and the related politicalecological approach may be seen as pessimistic
because they suggest that there are no external limits that are going to force a stop to environmental destruction. Without the threat of
catastrophic limits, there is no guarantee of a fundamental commonality of interests to stop destructive practices. If environmental degradation
is often gradual and continuous rather than catastrophic, then those in power who benefit materially from our current destructive economic
system will fight to maintain the status quo.
the tapestry metaphor and the politicalecological approach have a hopeful side. Halting
destructive processes is a political struggle that requires people to see beyond the aggregate numbers
of resources, consumption, and population to understand the political, economic, and social forces
responsible for environmental destruction. A politicalecological analysis often reveals that levels of
consumption and destructive production processes are not fixed and inevitable but rather the result
of political, economic, and cultural decisions that are subject to change. Environmental movements in many
However,
countries have been successful in bringing about significant changes, often against powerful political interests. For example, the US Clean Air
and Clean Water Acts have greatly reduced air and water pollution. A
new economy of
feeling that accents intimate connections and relational otherness rather than independent
coexistence must come into play. People's bodies are vulnerable to ecosystems, as ecosystems are
vulnerable to people; environmental and ecosocial deterioration is increasingly an intimate matter;
the closed circle has brought people and environment closely together. To achieve sustainability., to
dwell in crisis, then, people need to work with a new economy of feeling, one that extends a variety of
affects and affective practice to environmental contexts. People need to extend erotic, marital, parental, filial, and other
kin feelings to environmental relationships. They also need to consider intimacy, nurturing, education, caring,
embeddedness, embodiment, exposure, and vulnerability as crucial aspects of environmental as well
as social-human, experience.
If antienvironmental thought could once sneer at wilderness passions as inhumanly purist-as focusing care on wild, pristine, nonhuman places
and not giving a damn about the reworked/worked-over human ones-the ecofeminist economy of feeling yields just the opposite response. As
humanitys sense of connection with its damaged biosphere and increasingly environmentally
stressed societies increases, so does its need to care. Indeed, the worse damage means the more care. A child's sickness
intensifies the desire to nurture; something of the same is evoked by wounded environments felt intimately. Equally, a renewed ferocity
about the damage they have suffered emerges. If one is reluctant, as McKibben wisely noted, to make friends from among
the terminally ill, one is equally fierce about close kin put at risk by what society has done. Perception of deepened environmental crisis thus
does not have to lead to political passivity, to calls for inhumanist authoritarian solutions, or to trying to walk away from the damage.
Dwelling in crisis that is firmly perceived as such, coupled with the exploration of a new economy of
feeling, opens up a very different set of possibilities for care, commitment, and doing all one can.
the current system cannot continue on one planet, just as slavery could not continue with
trends in democracy and free markets and religious rights and human rights, then the action is with
those with a bit of foresight, those with a vision of a different way of living on the planet, of living
with nature, not against nature. The action is with those who can accept limits indeed, embrace them.
So readers of this book, I assume, may be comfortable, but they are not content. They are looking ahead, they are concerned, they are looking for change. And they
know that a fundamental shift is inevitable. They know that all systems, from organisms to ecosystems, from household economies to global economies, have limits.
They are the ones preparing the way, laying the groundwork, devising the principles and, yes, the
technologies and markets that will allow everyone to live within immutable ecological constraints . They
are the ones making sure the sand and the sandbags are on hand so that others can pitch in when the time comes. They are the ones building the compost piles,
collecting the information, experimenting with new forms of community, speaking truth to power. The others, the people who need a crisis to act, are not the
leaders. They will eventually act, to be sure; they
will act when personally threatened. But they will need guidance. They will need
role models, concrete examples, opportunities to engage and do good as they protect themselves.
And they will need enabling language. That's where the real leaders come in. And now is the time to prepare-not
when the crisis hits home and hits hard. So make no mistake, some people will act when there's a crisis. But many others will be getting ready now. These are the
concerned and committed, the
"moral entrepreneurs" who are already discovering that acting now is very
satisfying, very engaging. It's hard, yet at times quite simple.
announced many
times1. The proclaimed end of Nature does not, of course, imply a de-materialization of human life, the
apogee of modern "man's" quest to severe the ties that bind him to Nature. On the contrary, humans and non-humans
are ever more entangled through myriad interactions and transformative processes
(LATOUR, 1993). The death of Nature signals rather the demise of particular imaginings of Nature, of a set of symbolic inscriptions
that inferred a singular Nature, at once external and internal to humans and human life.
In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton calls Nature "a transcendental term in a material mask
[that] stands at the end of a potentially infinite series of other terms that collapse into it"
(MORTON, 2007: 14). He distinguishes between at least three interrelated places or meanings of Nature in our symbolic universe.
meaning can be gleaned only by relating it to other more directly recognizable signifiers.
Nature becomes a symbolic tapestry, a montage, of meaning, held together with quilting points. For example,
"biodiversity", "eco-cities", "CO2", or "climate change" can be thought of as quilting points (or
points de capiton) through which a certain matrix of meanings of Nature is articulated. These quilting points are also more than mere
anchoring points; they refer to a beyond of meaning, a certain enjoyment that becomes
structured in fantasy (in this case, the desire for an environmentally balanced and socially harmonious order)2. In other
words, there is always a remainder or excess that evades symbolization.
Second, Morton argues, Nature has "the force of law, a norm against which deviation is measured" (MORTON, 2007: 14), for
example when Nature is summoned to normalize heterosexuality and to think queerness
as
deviant and unnatural or to see competition between humans as natural and altruism as
a produce of "culture" (or vice versa), or when a particular climatic condition is normatively posited as ideal.
Normative power inscribed in Nature is invoked as an organizing principle that is
transcendental and universal, allegedly residing outside the remit allocated to humans and non-humans alike but
that exercises an inescapable performative effect and leaves a non alienable imprint. This is
a view that sees Nature as something given, as a solid foundational (or ontological) basis from which we act and
that can be invoked to provide an anchor for ethical or normative judgments of ecological, social, cultural, political, or economic
procedures and practices. Consider for example how the vision of a stable climate is elevated to a
"public good", both by the British parliament and by the UNHCHR: "[T]he delivery of a stable climate, as
an essential public good, is an immediate security, prosperity and moral imperative, not
simply a long-term environmental challenge."3
And, third, Nature contains a plurality of fantasies and desires, like, for example, the dream of a sustainable
nature, a balanced climate, the desire for love-making on a warm beach under the setting sun, the fear for the revenge
of Nature if we keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Nature is invoked here as the
stand-in for other, often repressed or invisible, longings and passions - the Lacanian object petit
around which we shape our drives and that covers up for the lack of ground on which to base our subjectivity (ZIZEK, 1999). It is
the sort of fantasy displayed in calls for restoring a true (original but presumably presently lost)
humane harmony by retro-fitting the world to ecological balance and in the longing for a
Nature that functions as the big "Other", the one that suggests the pathway to redeem our predicament. Here,
Nature is invoked as the "external" terrain that offers the promise, if attended to properly,
for finding a truly harmonious life4, but also from which threat of disaster emanates if we perturb its internal
functioning.
In sum, these
meaning of empty signifiers is a decidedly political gesture. The disavowal or the refusal to
recognize the political character of such gestures, the attempts to universalize and suture the situated and
positioned meanings inscribed metonymically in Nature lead to perverse forms of de-politicization, to
rendering Nature politically mute and socially neutral (SWYNGEDOUW, 2007). The disavowal of the
empty core of Nature by colonizing its meaning, by filling out the void, staining it with inserted meanings that are subsequently
generalized and homogenized, is the gesture par excellence of de-politicization, of placing Nature outside the
political, that is outside the field of public dispute, contestation, and disagreement. In
addition, such symbolizations of Nature disavow the Real of natures, the heterogeneous,
unpredictable, occasionally catastrophic, acting out of socio-ecological processes that
mark the Anthropocene. It is these un-symbolized natures that haunt in their excessive acting: droughts,
hurricanes, tsunamis, oil-spills, recombinant DNA, floods, globalizing diseases,
disintegrating polar ice are a few of the more evocative markers of such socio-natural processes.
Bruno Latour, albeit from a rather different perspective, equally proposes to abandon the concept of Nature
and suggests instead considering the world as filled with socio-natural quasi-objects. For
Latour, there is neither Nature nor Society (or Culture) outside the cultural and discursive
practices that produced this binary formulation (LATOUR, 1993). For him, the imbroglios of human and non-human
things that proliferate in the world consists of continuously multiplying nature-culture hybrids that stand between the poles of nature
and culture (LATOUR, 2005).Think of, for example, greenhouse gases, Dolly the cloned sheep, dams, oil-rigs, or electromagnetic
waves. They are simultaneously social/cultural and natural/physical, and their coherence, i.e. there relative spatial and temporal
sustainability, is predicated upon assembled networks of human and non-human relations (SWYNGEDOUW, 2006). Nature is
always already social (JANKOVIC, 2000). This perspective, too, rejects retaining the concept of
Nature and suggests in its stead to consider the infinite heterogeneity of the procedures
of assembling dissembling reassembling the rhizomatic networks through which things, bodies, natures and cultures
become enmeshed and through which relatively stable quasi-objects come into purview (CASTREE, 2003; BRAUN, 2006). This
gesture also attempts to repoliticize the environment, to let quasi-objects enter the public assembly of
political concerns.
Eminent natural scientists echo these critical social theory perspectives. Harvard biologists Levins and Lewontin, for example, argue
too that Nature has been filled in by scientists with a particular set of universalizing meanings that ultimately de-politicize Nature and
facilitate particular mobilizations of such scientifically constructed Nature (LEVINS, 1985; LEWONTIN, 2007). In contrast, they
insist that the biological world is inherently relationally constituted through contingent, historically produced, infinitely variable forms
in which each part, human or non-human, organic or nonorganic, is intrinsically bound up with the wider relations that make up the
whole6. Levins and Lewontin abhor a simplistic, reductionist, teleological and, ultimately, homogenizing view of Nature. They concur
with the view that a singular Nature does not exist, that there is no trans-historical and trans-
crisis, the inadequacy of our symbolic representations of Nature becomes more acute
as the Real of Nature, in the form of a wide variety of ecological threats (global warming,
new diseases, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, pollution) invades and unsettles our
received understandings of Nature, forcing a transformation of the signifying chains that
attempt to provide content for Nature, while at the same time exposing the impossibility of
capturing fully the Real of natures (ZIZEK, 2008). The point of the above argument is that the natures we see and
work with are necessarily radically imagined, scripted, and symbolically charged as Nature. These inscriptions are always
inadequate, they leave a gap, an excess or remainder, and maintain a certain distance from the co-produced natures that are there,
which are complex, chaotic, often unpredictable, radically contingent, historically and geographically variable, risky, patterned in
endlessly complex ways, ordered along strange attractors8. In other words, there is no Nature out there that needs or requires
salvation in name of either Nature itself or a generic Humanity. There is nothing foundational in Nature that
needs, demands, or requires sustaining. The debate and controversies over Nature and
what do with it, in contrast, signal rather our political inability to engage in directly
political and social argument and strategies about re-arranging the socio-ecological coordinates of everyday life, the production of new socio-natural configurations, and the arrangements of socio-metabolic
organization (something usually called capitalism) that we inhabit. In the next section, we shall exemplify and deepen further this
analysis by looking at climate change policies and arguments as depoliticizing gestures, predicated upon a growing concern for a
Nature that seems to veer off-balance.
Only accepting the variability of nature can solve for the current problems.
Swyngedouw 11, Erik Swyngedouw Geography @ School of Environment and Development University of Manchester
[Whose environment? The end of nature, climate change and the process of post-politicization]
(http://www.scielo.br/pdf/asoc/v14n2/06.pdf) //MC
6. Conclusion: From Environmentalizing Politics to Politicizing the Environment Taking the
political interventions are irredeemably violent engagements that rechoreograph socio-natural relations and assemblages, both distant and nearby; that always split the consensus and produce inegalitarian outcomes. Engaging with natures, intervening in socio-natural orders, of course, constitutes a
political act par excellence, one that can be legitimised only in political terms, and not - as is customarily
done - through an externalised legitimation that resides in a fantasy of Nature. Any political act is one
that re-orders socio-ecological co-ordinates and patterns, reconfigures uneven socio-ecological
relations, often with unforeseen or unforeseeable, consequences. Such interventions signal a totalitarian moment, the
temporary suspension of the democratic, understood as the presumed equality of all and everyone
qua speaking beings in a space that permits and nurtures dissensus. The dialectic between the
democratic as a political given and the totalitarian moment of policy intervention as the suspension of the
democratic needs to be radically endorsed. While the democratic political, founded on a presumption
of equality, insists on difference, disagreement, radical openness, and exploring multiple possible
futures, concrete environmental intervention is necessarily about closure, definitive choice, a singular
intervention and, thus, certain exclusion and silencing. The democratic political process dwells, therefore, in two spheres
simultaneously. Jacques Rancire (RANCIRE, 1995; MARCHART, 2007) define these spheres respectively as 'the political' and 'the police' (the
policy order). The (democratic) political is the space for the enunciation and affirmation of difference, for the cultivation of dissensus and
disagreement, for asserting the presumption of equality of all and everyone in the face of the inegalitarian function of the polic(y)e order. Any
policy intervention, when becoming concretely geographical or ecological, is of necessity a violent act
of foreclosure of the democratic political (at least temporarily), of taking one option rather than another, of producing one sort
of environment, of assembling certain socio-natural relations, of foregrounding some natures rather than others, of hegemonizing a particular
metonymic chain rather than another. And the legitimation of such options cannot be based on corralling Nature into legitimizing service. The
production of socio-environmental arrangements implies fundamentally political questions, and has to be addressed and legitimized in political
terms. Politicizing environments democratically, then, become an issue of enhancing the democratic political content of socio-environmental
construction by means of identifying the strategies through which a more equitable distribution of social power and a more egalitarian mode of
producing natures can be achieved. This requires reclaiming proper democracy and proper democratic public spaces (as spaces for the
enunciation of agonistic dispute) as a foundation for and condition of possibility for more egalitarian socio-ecological arrangements, the naming
of positively embodied ega-libertarian socio-ecological futures that are immediately realisable. In other words, egalitarian
ecologies
are about demanding the impossible and realising the improbable, and this is exactly the challenge
the Anthropocene poses. In sum, the politicization of the environment is predicated upon the
recognition of the indeterminacy of nature, the constitutive split of the people, the unconditional
democratic demand of political equality, and the real possibility for the inauguration of different
possible public socio-ecological futures that express the democratic presumptions of freedom and
equality.
Tapestry Metaphor
A metaphor based on a tapestry accurately portrays the relationship between
economic growth and the environment there is no sudden collapse, only slow
degradation that gradually diminishes the function and beauty of the tapestry.
Davidson 2000 Professor of Environmental Studies, San Francisco State University, [Carlos
Davidson, Economic Growth and the Environment: Alternatives to the Limits Paradigm, BioScience,
May, Vol. 50 Issue 5, p433-435]//JH
The relationship between economic activity and environmental quality is extremely complex. It is difficult to define, let alone meaningfully
measure, the size of the economy or environmental quality. Consequently, our
What is meant by ecological limits to economic growth can best be seen in the rivet metaphor developed
by Paul and Anne Ehrlich (1981). In this well-known metaphor, an airplane is analogous to Earth. Each act of
environmental destruction (loss of a species, in the original metaphor) is like pulling a rivet from the plane's wing.
The wing has lots of rivets, so nothing happens when the first few rivets go. But eventually and
inevitably, as more rivets are pulled, the wings break off and the plane crashes. In a related metaphor,
environmental destruction is likened to speeding toward a cliff in a car. If the car does not stop, it will eventually go over the cliff. Figure 1a
presents a graphical representation of these limits metaphors.
aspects of the rivet and cliff metaphors shape thinking about environmental problems. First, the
initial changes have little effect contributes to a false sense of
security and unwillingness to recognize limits and change course. Second, when limits are reached, the results are
catastrophicthe plane crashes, the car goes over the cliff. Limits theorists generally predict that, if limits are reached
or exceeded, there will be an ecological collapse which will in turn force a collapse of the human
economy (in Figure 1a, both economic scale and environmental quality collapse when limits are reached). Limits are seen as
absolute constraints on economic activity, not just as points beyond which economic growth results in
environmental degradation. For example, Ludwig (1996) writes, Either we will limit growth in ways of our choosing or it will be
Three essential
limited in ways not of our choosing (p. 16). The third essential component of these metaphors is that, in the event of a catastrophe, everyone
suffers and therefore everyone has a clear self-interest in avoiding a crash.
The limits concept has been heavily criticized by neoclassical economists who believe that technical change will allow the economy to overcome
all resource constraints and expand indefinitely (Nordhaus 1992). The basic neoclassical conceptual model, however, predicts either no
environmental destruction or destruction only until the economy reaches a certain level of affluence (Figure 1c; Grossman and Krueger 1993);
because of this prediction and others, this model has been criticized by ecological economists (e.g., Daly 1996).
A metaphor based on a tapestry provides a more accurate and useful view of the relationship
between economic activity and the environment than either the limits metaphors of rivets and cliffs or the
technological optimist model of neoclassical economics . Tapestries have long been used as metaphors for the richness and
complexity of biological systems (e.g., the tapestry of life). As a metaphor for environmental degradation, each
small act of destruction (akin to removing a rivet) is like pulling a thread from the tapestry. At first, the results
are almost imperceptible. The function and beauty of the tapestry is slightly diminished with the
removal of each thread. If too many threads are pulledespecially if they are pulled from the same
areathe tapestry will begin to look worn and may tear locally. There is no way to know ahead of
time whether pulling a thread will cause a tear or not. In the tapestry metaphor, as in the cliff and rivet metaphors,
environmental damage can have unforeseen negative consequences; therefore, the metaphor argues
for the use of the precautionary principle. The tapestry is not just an aesthetic object. Like the airplane wing in
the rivet metaphor, the tapestry (i.e., biophysical systems) sustains human life.
metaphor differs from the rivet and cliff metaphors in several important aspects.
First, in most cases there are not limits. As threads are pulled from the tapestry, there is a continuum of degradation
rather than any clear threshold. Each thread that is pulled slightly reduces the function and beauty of the tapestry. Second,
impacts consist of multiple small losses and occasional larger rips (nonlinearities) rather than overall
collapse. Catastrophes are not impossible, but they are rare and local (e.g., collapse of a fishery) rather than
global. The function and beauty of the tapestry are diminished long before the possibility of a
catastrophic rip. Third, there is always a choice about the desired condition of the worldanywhere
along the continuum of degradation is feasible, from a world rich in biodiversity to a threadbare
remnant with fewer species, fewer natural places, less beauty, and reduced ecosystem services. With
the rivet and cliff metaphors, there are no choices: no sane person would choose to crash the plane or go
over the cliff. This difference is key for the political implications of the metaphors . Finally, in the rivet or cliff
metaphors, environmental destruction may be seen primarily as loss of utilitarian values (ecosystem services to humans). In the tapestry
metaphor, environmental destruction is viewed as loss of utilitarian as well as aesthetic, option, and
amenity considerations. (See Sagoff 1995 for a critique of conservation strategies that focus too narrowly on utilitarian values.)
Actual environmental destruction: limits or continuums?
How useful are the rivet and tapestry metaphors in describing actual experiences with the relationship between economic growth and
environmental destruction? This question can be examined by looking at the variety of biological and physical limits to economic activity that
have been proposed by ecologists, environmentalists, and ecological economists. In this article, I discuss five types of possible limits: input
limits, limits on waste assimilation, entropy/thermodynamic limits, limits on human use of the products of photosynthesis, and limits
attributable to the loss of biodiversity.
K Prior
Discourse First
Framing must come first analysis of apocalyptic rhetoric acts as a mediating
frame in global warming discourse.
Foust and Murphy 9 (Christina Foust , Assistant Professor in the Department of Human
Communication Studies at the University of Denver, William Murphy, a doctoral student in the
Department of Human Communication Studies at the University of Denver, Revealing and Reframing
Apocalyptic Tragedy in Global Warming Discourse A Journal of Nature and Culture, 3:2, p. 153-154)//JH
While frames cannot guarantee how a reader will interpret or comprehend an issue or text, they play
a fundamental role in
structuring the range of likely decodings (Greenberg & Knight, 2004, p. 157), often in ways that support
dominant ideologies. For instance, Antilla (2005) found that US press coverage framed climate change in terms of
controversy, skepticism, and uncertainty. Such framing upholds prevailing ideologies of free-market
capitalism and neo-liberalism (Carvalho, 2005, p. 21). It has impacts beyond individual readers
interpretations, as Boykoff (2007b) argues, opening spaces for US federal policy actors to defray
responsibility and delay action regarding climate change (p. 486). Given its power to shape interpretations, policy, and
action, close attention to how the press frames the issue is crucial to building a political will to mitigate
climate change.
Apocalyptic rhetoric, we argue, represents a mediating frame in global warming discourse. Certain versions
of this frame may stifle individual and collective agency, due to their persistent placement of
natural events as catastrophic, inevitable, and outside of human control. Analyzing them could
help explain why some individuals take a fatalistic attitude toward, or consider their agency very
small in comparison to, the challenge of climate change (Lorenzoni, Nicholson-Cole & Whitmarsh, 2007). Moreover,
apocalyptic framing helps us understand two vocal minorities who might well stand in the way of
building a collective will*the alarmists, who believe global warmings catastrophic consequences
are veritably unstoppable, and the naysayers, who view global warming as a conspiracy created by
environmentalists and the media (Leiserowitz, 2005, p. 1440).
Overheated climate rhetoric drowns out any chance for rational discussion
leads to despair and hopelessness.
Gary Mason, Globe and Mail Columnist, 07 ["Climate change discourse has ring of boy-cried-wolf," The
Globe and Mail (Canada), April 12, 2007]//JH
At a recent dinner party, the
conversation turned to climate change. And then to despair. It seems the recent
spate of stories warning of famine and heat waves and violent storms that will kill millions have
begun to take their toll. And the reaction they're causing is not all good. The dire warnings by climate-change
scientists are meant to wake the world up to the potential impacts of global warming. But the unrelenting pace of their grim prophecies has
some people crying - Enough! When the UN climate panel that released its report this month predicted that greenhouse gases would cause
desertification, droughts and rising seas that would kill hundreds of thousands, you could almost hear the reaction: "Yes, we know. If we don't
die from starvation or by getting swallowed up in a tsunami, we stand a good chance of frying to a crisp." The
apocalyptic reports
have become as predictable as the February rain here. There is a sameness, a nothing-new feel about the
stories on global warming these days. They are all accompanied by a familiar, semi-shrill, semihysterical tone. The litany of catastrophic consequences that will be unleashed on the planet is
repeated again and again and again. People have begun to stop listening. Few argue any more that climate
change is not real and that nothing needs to be done to reverse the impacts of global warming. We know what's going to happen if we ignore
the warning signs. But screaming: "We're all going to die," day after day after day is doing us no good. The
quite honestly," says Michael Howard, professor of anthropology at Simon Fraser University. "Some of it
hear a disconnect
between the apocalyptic vision that some are predicting while at the same time being told that they
can help by changing the kind of light bulbs they use," Mr. Marshall said. "It's like: 'Don't tell me I can change a light bulb
and fix climate change because that just doesn't make sense.' " The impact we, as individuals, can have is a whole other
discussion. And one we should be having. It makes more sense than retreating into some hole, waiting
for the world to end. Climate change is real, we know that. But it's a problem we can do something about. It will involve more than
changing the type of light bulbs we use, but it's not insurmountable. And that's what we need to focus on now. Fear mongering is just
getting in the way of licking this thing.
if the materiality and the extend of human impacts on the climate system are undeniable
and increasingly growing, the transformation of environmental problems and climate change into a
security issue is not only the result of a growing awareness of their impacts. As Hulme argues an emerging
discourse of climate catastrophe reveals more about the struggle for ascendancy between the
institutions of science, government, business and civil society than it does about a physical reality
waiting to strike (Hulme 2008, 18).
A discursive approach can help understanding these dynamics. A discourse is a shared way of apprehending the
world. Embedded in language it enables subscribers to interpret bits of information and put them
together into coherent stories or accounts. Each discourse rests on assumptions, judgements and
contentions that provide the basic terms for analysis, debates, agreement and disagreements (Dryzek
1997, 8, as quoted in Hulme 2008). In Kleins words, a discourse is a way of producing something as real, as identifiable, classifiable, knowable
and therefore meaningful. Discourses creates the condition of knowing (Klein, quoted in George, 1994, 30). The
construction of a
discourse about global climate change is based on the interaction between material changes in
environmental conditions and a growing awareness of environmental issues which affects public
values.
This suggests a transformation which does not only involve a different perception of the environment,
first from a relatively stable background to a fragile system and then from a linear system
characterised by slow, incremental transformations to a non linear one, characterised by tipping
points and sudden changes. Discourses about climate change also challenge what is understood as
security; who deservers protection, the means that should be employed and who is supposed to
provide security. The possibility of understanding this transformation however is limited by the
tendency of associating security with a set of problematic practices which are supposed to be rather
fixed. To understand why this is the case it is necessary to explore how discourses and practices about what counts as security have been
framed.
the successful promotion of universal or global values, even if they are to some degree genuinely shared, will often depend on the
willingness of particularly powerful states to promote them (Hurrell and Woods 1995). The
we must
ask the same question of any pretender that we would ask of a state or other potential actor, and that is not
which actor will promote our interests (they will probably promote their own), but to which actor(s) shared
values about the future of the planet are to be entrusted.
We can not readily solve this problem without focusing on environmental values rather than on
environmental threats to national interest, since the values will determine the signicance of
environmental security and such a set of values must underwrite any political interests.
income of the big environmental organizations have grown enormously over the past 30 years especially since
the election of George W. Bush in 2000. The institutions that define what environmentalism means boast large
professional staffs and receive tens of millions of dollars every year from foundations and individuals .
Given these rewards, its no surprise that most environmental leaders neither craft nor support proposals
that could be tagged non-environmental. Doing otherwise would do more than threaten their
status; it would undermine their brand.
AT: Perm
Overheated climate rhetoric drowns out any chance for rational discussion
leads to despair and hopelessness.
Gary Mason, Globe and Mail Columnist, 07 ["Climate change discourse has ring of boy-cried-wolf," The
Globe and Mail (Canada), April 12, 2007]//JH
At a recent dinner party, the
conversation turned to climate change. And then to despair. It seems the recent
spate of stories warning of famine and heat waves and violent storms that will kill millions have
begun to take their toll. And the reaction they're causing is not all good. The dire warnings by climate-change
scientists are meant to wake the world up to the potential impacts of global warming. But the unrelenting pace of their grim prophecies has
some people crying - Enough! When the UN climate panel that released its report this month predicted that greenhouse gases would cause
desertification, droughts and rising seas that would kill hundreds of thousands, you could almost hear the reaction: "Yes, we know. If we don't
die from starvation or by getting swallowed up in a tsunami, we stand a good chance of frying to a crisp." The
apocalyptic reports
have become as predictable as the February rain here. There is a sameness, a nothing-new feel about the
stories on global warming these days. They are all accompanied by a familiar, semi-shrill, semihysterical tone. The litany of catastrophic consequences that will be unleashed on the planet is
repeated again and again and again. People have begun to stop listening. Few argue any more that climate
change is not real and that nothing needs to be done to reverse the impacts of global warming. We know what's going to happen if we ignore
the warning signs. But screaming: "We're all going to die," day after day after day is doing us no good. The
hear a disconnect
between the apocalyptic vision that some are predicting while at the same time being told that they
can help by changing the kind of light bulbs they use," Mr. Marshall said. "It's like: 'Don't tell me I can change a light bulb
and fix climate change because that just doesn't make sense.' " The impact we, as individuals, can have is a whole other
discussion. And one we should be having. It makes more sense than retreating into some hole, waiting
for the world to end. Climate change is real, we know that. But it's a problem we can do something about. It will involve more than
changing the type of light bulbs we use, but it's not insurmountable. And that's what we need to focus on now. Fear mongering is just
getting in the way of licking this thing.
Waever has noted that ?[t]here is no literature, no philosophy, no tradition of ?security? in non-state terms; it exists only as a critical idea? (1995: 48-9). Since
its inception security has been the business of the state, for it is at the heart of the social contract
which brought the state into existence that citizens sacrifice freedoms and liberties to the sovereign in
order that security be provided in return (Hobbes, 1651: 91ff). As such, at the mention of security one?s focus is invariably turned towards
the state as the great protector. As far as the environmental sector is concerned the focus on the state is
detrimental in a number of ways.
Firstly, for many years the security of states has been achieved at the expense of other states. Security is innately linked with the ?identification of others which
threaten the purpose and cohesion of the state? (Barnett, 2001: 30). This stems from the project of nation building, for which security proved to be an important
tool. By focussing attention on the threats posed by outsiders, national elites found that the domestic populace could be more easily homogenized and managed. As
Huysmans has detailed ?fear-of-the-power-of-the-other to kill me splits the human species, or better, unites atomic individuals in communities? (1998: 235).
Therefore, states in the process of providing security have a tendency to focus on external enemies in order to unite the internal population. There
is a
danger that a security framework could import this type of ?us versus them? thinking into the
environmental realm to detrimental effect. By searching only the external realm for the causes of
insecurity ?our complicity in evil is erased? (Campbell, 1993: 3) and the faults in our own actions are
overlooked. This aspect of security logic would be unwelcome in the environmental sector, for as Ulrich Beck has
emphasised in his analysis of the present ecological threat ?[t]his threat to all life does not come from outside? It emerges
within, enduringly as the reverse side of progress peace and normality? (Beck, 1995: 163). Put simply ?society
today is confronted by itself? (Beck, 1992a: 183). Any discursive association which obscures this fact is likely
to prove counterproductive in the quest to address environmental issues.
Secondly, the
short-term focus of
government elites and the long-term nature of the environmental threat means that any policy which
puts the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of governments should be viewed with scepticism
as this may have the effect of breeding inaction on environmental issues.
Moreover, governmental
legislation may not be the most appropriate route to solving the problem at
hand. If environmental vulnerabilities are to be effectively addressed ?[t]he routine behaviour of
practically everyone must be altered? (Deudney, 1990: 465). In the case of the environmental sector it is not large scale and intentional
assaults but the cumulative effect of small and seemingly innocent acts such as driving a car or taking a flight that do the damage. Exactly how a
legislative response could serve to alter ?non-criminal apolitical acts by individuals? (Prins, 1993: 176- 177)
which lie beyond established categories of the political is unclear. Andrew Dobson has covered this ground in claiming that
the solution to environmental hazards lies not in piecemeal legislation but in the fostering of a culture
of ?ecological citizenship?. His call is made on the grounds that legislating on the environment, forcing people to
adapt, does not reach the necessary depth to produce long-lasting change, but merely plugs the
problem temporarily. He cites Italian ?car-free city? days as evidence of this, noting that whilst selected cities may be free of automobiles on a single
predetermined day, numbers return to previous levels immediately thereafter (2003: 3). This indicates that the deeper message underlying the policy is not being
successfully conveyed. Enduring
If we dont first evaluate our own environmental values, we cant determine the
value of environmental security the alternative as a prerequisite is key.
Hugh Dyer, School of Politics and Director of International Studies @ Leeds, 01 [Theoretical Aspects of
Environmental Security, In: Petzold-Bradley E; Carius A; Vincze A (eds.) Responding to Environmental
Conflicts: Implications for Theory and Practice. NATO Science Partnership Sub-Series: 2.Springer.
p.78]//JH
it now seems more likely
that the security of the global environment - incorporating localities within it - constitutes the basic condition
for human security, and this may be better conceived in terms of the sustainability of life ways . Nevertheless, while such a
perspective on security may permit an escape from the tyranny of state-centric discourses, it does not
resolve the problem of making provision for security once that value has been redefined, and paradoxically,
Where the territorial security of delimited groups may once have been fundamental to human betterment,
the successful promotion of universal or global values, even if they are to some degree genuinely shared, will often depend on the
willingness of particularly powerful states to promote them (Hurrell and Woods 1995). The
we must
ask the same question of any pretender that we would ask of a state or other potential actor, and that is not
which actor will promote our interests (they will probably promote their own), but to which actor(s) shared
values about the future of the planet are to be entrusted.
We can not readily solve this problem without focusing on environmental values rather than on
environmental threats to national interest, since the values will determine the signicance of
environmental security and such a set of values must underwrite any political interests.
The broad American public is exposed to virtually no doomsday messages, let alone constant ones, on
climate change in popular culture (TV and the movies and even online). There is not one single TV show on any network
devoted to this subject, which is, arguably, more consequential than any other preventable issue we face.
The same goes for the news media, whose coverage of climate change has collapsed (see Network News
Coverage of Climate Change Collapsed in 2011). When the media do cover climate change in recent years, the
overwhelming majority of coverage is devoid of any doomsday messages and many outlets still
feature hard-core deniers. Just imagine what the publics view of climate would be if it got the same coverage as, say,
unemployment, the housing crisis or even the deficit? When was the last time you saw an employment denier quoted on TV or in a
newspaper?
The public is exposed to constant messages promoting business as usual and indeed idolizing
conspicuous consumption. See, for instance, Breaking: The earth is breaking but how about that Royal Wedding?
Our political elite and intelligentsia, including MSM pundits and the supposedly liberal media like, say, MSNBC, hardly
even talk about climate change and when they do, it isnt doomsday. Indeed, there isnt even a single
national columnist for a major media outlet who writes primarily on climate. Most liberal columnists rarely
mention it.
At least a quarter of the public chooses media that devote a vast amount of time to the notion that
global warming is a hoax and that environmentalists are extremists and that clean energy is a joke. In
the MSM, conservative pundits routinely trash climate science and mock clean energy. Just listen to, say, Joe Scarborough on
MSNBCs Morning Joe mock clean energy sometime.
The major energy companies bombard the airwaves with millions and millions of dollars of repetitious
pro-fossil-fuel ads. The environmentalists spend far, far less money. As noted above, the one time they did run a
major campaign to push a climate bill, they and their political allies including the president explicitly did NOT talk much about climate
change, particularly doomsday messaging
Environmentalists when they do appear in popular culture, especially TV, are routinely mocked.
There is very little mass communication of doomsday messages online. Check out the most popular websites.
General silence on the subject, and again, what coverage there is aint doomsday messaging. Go to the front page of the
(moderately trafficked) environmental websites. Where is the doomsday?
If you want to find anything approximating even modest, blunt, science-based messaging built around
the scientific literature, interviews with actual climate scientists and a clear statement that we can
solve this problem well, youve all found it, of course, but the only people who see it are those who
go looking for it.
Of course, this blog is not even aimed at the general public. Probably 99% of Americans havent even seen one of my headlines and
99.7% havent read one of my climate science posts. And Climate Progress is probably the most widely read, quoted, and reposted
climate science blog in the world.
Anyone dropping into America from another country or another planet who started following popular culture and the news the way
the overwhelming majority of Americans do would get the distinct impression that nobody who matters is terribly worried about
climate change. And, of course, theyd be right see The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2.
It is total BS that somehow the American public has been scared and overwhelmed by repeated
doomsday messaging into some sort of climate fatigue. If the publics concern has dropped and
public opinion analysis suggests it has dropped several percent (though is bouncing back a tad) that is
primarily due to the conservative medias disinformation campaign impact on Tea Party conservatives
and to the treatment of this as a nonissue by most of the rest of the media, intelligentsia and popular
culture.
perceive
climate change as a kind of break in the historical narrative, or in scenario planning terms, a branch
point in history. The future on the other side of this break remains, to a certain extent, unimaginable. And yet, Chakrabartys use of
Weismans thought experiment also illustrates, in ways that he leaves largely unpacked, how popular conceptions of climate change intersect
with older and deeper anxieties about the end of the world.
Apocalypse is an older idea than climate change. For at least 3,000 years, ecocritic Greg Garrard writes, a fluctuating proportion of the worlds
population has believed that the end of the world was immanent (85). Garrard locates the origins of apocalypticism in Zoroastrianism:
Notions of the worlds gradual decline were widespread in ancient civilizations, but Zoroaster bequeathed to Jewish, Christian, and later
secular models of history a sense of urgency about the end of the world (85). Importantly, however, the word apocalypse has not always
referred to the end-times. The etymological root of apocalypse is the Greek apokalypsis, meaning unveiling or uncovering. I want to
emphasize this etymological understanding of apocalypse.
There is a deep psychological dimension to thinking about the end-times. According to Frank Kermode,
apocalypse is a pattern of anxiety that we shall find recurring, with interesting differences, in
different stages of modernism. Its recurrence is a feature of our cultural tradition, if not ultimately of
our physiology (96). Kermodes analysis builds upon D.H. Lawrences argument that We always want a conclusion, an
end, we always want to come, in our mental processes, to a decision, a finality, a full-stop. This gives
us a sense of satisfaction. All our mental consciousness is a movement onwards, a movement in
stages, like our sentences, and every full-stop is a mile-stone that marks our progress and our arrival
somewhere (93). Apocalypse, then, is not so much about predicting the end of the world as it is about
making us feel as though we are a part of a critical moment in history. As Kermode succinctly puts it, Crisis is a way
of thinking about ones moment, and not inherent in the moment itself. (101) In Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern
Imagination, Elizabeth Rosen explains that apocalypse
Much environmentalist discourse deploys apocalyptic rhetoric. Lawrence Buell has argued that Apocalypse is
the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at
its disposal (285). Greg Garrard devotes a chapter of Ecocriticism to apocalypse, and he points to several texts in the environmentalist
canon that make extensive use of the trope, from Rachel Carsons Silent Spring (1962), to Paul Ehrlichs The Population Bomb (1972), to Al
Gores Earth in the Balance (1992) (Garrard 93). And in An Inconvenient Truth and elsewhere, Al Gore frequently refers to watching the evening
news about climate related weather catastrophes as taking a nature hike through the book of Revelation.
This apocalyptic rhetoric tends to polarize responses. In From Apocalypse to Way of Life, Frederick Buell explains that Since Rachel Carson,
environmental crisis has rapidly evolved and substantially changed in form, not just in nature, but also
in human discourse about it. Announcing itself as apocalypse, environmental crisis has been
debunked, resisted debunking, has been reworked, and has been dramatically diversified and
expanded, resurfacing in unusual new forms (xii). Buells analysis explicates the conservative response to environmentalism
that emerged during the 1980s and 1990s. This anti-environmentalism, Buell argues, emerged as an aspect of the larger neo-conservative
resurgence after the 1970s. Buells history of anti-environmentalism includes figures and organizations like James Watt, Ronald Regans
Secretary of the Interior, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Elizabeth Whelan, co-founder of the American Council on Science and Health, Ron
Arnold, Alan Gottlieb, Julian Simon, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and others. Their standard
line of attack has been to vilify environmentalists as pathological crisis-mongers, Chicken Littles, apocalypse abusers, false prophets, joyless,
puritanical doomsters, chic-apocalyptic neo-primitives, sufferers from an Armageddon complex, and toxic terrorists (34). Despite this
response, Buell
argues, the discourse of environmental crisis has persisted and evolved, and retains
value.
As powerful a structure as apocalypse is for understanding the world, it is also dangerous. The critique of environmental doomsayers should
prompt at least this reflection. Drawing upon Lawrence, and Kermode, Greg Garrard describes several characteristics of apocalyptic narratives
worthy of consideration:
the social psychology of apocalypticism that has historically inclined such embattled movements to paranoia and violence; the extreme moral
dualism that divides the world sharply into friend and enemy; the emphasis upon the unveiling of trans-historical truth and the corresponding
role of believers as the ones to whom, and for whom, the veil of history is rent. But most importantly, for our purposes, apocalypticism is
inevitably bound up with imagination, because it has yet to come into being. To use the narratological term, it is always proleptic. And if,
sociologically, it is a genre born out of crisis it is also necessarily a rhetoric that must whip up such crises to proportions appropriate to the end
of time. This dialectic in which apocalypticism both responds to and produces crisis will be important in our evaluation of it as an ecocritical
trope. (86)
Garrard is cautious in his approach to the deployment of apocalyptic rhetoric for environmentalist
purposes. Apocalyptic rhetoric, he argues, polarizes people, engenders violence and paranoia, and produces crisis as much as it responds to
it. At the same time Garrard, like Buell, sees both persistence and value in the narrative of environmental
apocalypse. Garrard also highlights the proleptic character of apocalypse, the way that it is bound up with the imagination of the future.
Apocalypse, in this way, bears a distinct resemblance to science fiction.
present evidence for climate change and the future scenarios that can be predicted based on mis evidence, and by
using diese predictions to persuade audiences for the need to take action to avoid these scenarios, both
An Inconvenient Truth and Climate Change Show enact basic features of the apocalyptic narrative structure though,
in the latter case, the style and tone are not alarmist.
Our claim is that, in the context of each work's explanation of climate change science, this basic
apocalyptic framework
combines with the communicative strategy of narrative explanation that Norris et al. (2005) have identified as an
important-but not widely recognized or practiced-mode of science education. As a number of professional communication scholars have
demonstrated, narrative
science must embrace narrative as a valid scientific method. Per Bak (1996) explains in How Nature Works that the
behavior of any nonlinear, self-organizing critical structure (such as a sand pile, a brain network, or an ecological system) can be understood
only in terms of dynamic interrelations, and such complexity cannot be reduced to a sheer cause-effect chain. In such cases, only the
epistemological perspective of narrative or story can describe the emergent property of the scientific subject. For Bak, narrative is
not
just a communication device; like a chemical formula or a mathematical equation, it is a way to describe nature, and,
perhaps more importantly, a method of modeling to predict the future based on existing knowledge.
literatures, such as those specified above, can be seen to have traditionally served the two
primary functions of criticism: diagnostic , and remedial . The inclusion of an apocalyptic tone adds a
third aspect, oriented to the future. Put simply, this teleological-critical function says implicitly or explicitly:
Either the status quo must change, or humanity and nature will end . Second, in uncovering this desire or
need to change, the implementation of the apocalyptic narrative in environmental literature is
political. It is employed both to increase the saliency of environmental issues in the minds of the
public and to encourage change on an individual or collective level. The technique recognizes the fact that although
awareness of environmental issues is now very high, they continue to be low priority for many (Whitmarsh 2011, 691). Killingsworth and Palmer
(1996, 22) succinctly observe that for
Webs most influential climate-change blogger. Romm was acting assistant secretary of energy for
energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997, where he oversaw $1 billion in R&D, demonstration,
and deployment of low-carbon technology. He is a Senior Fellow at American Progress and holds a Ph.D.
in physics from MIT, February 6, 2012]//JH
This new
study confirms that view that Gores movie and his efforts helped drive up public awareness
and concern about this issue across the ideological spectrum. Because this study should inform climate
communications efforts going forward, let me review the key findings: Media coverage is crucial: First, media coverage of
climate change directly affects the level of public concern. The greater the quantity of media coverage
of climate change, the greater the level of public concern. This is in line with the Quantity of Coverage theory of media
effects, and existing individual level research on the impact of television coverage on climate-change concern. The importance the media
assigns to coverage of climate change translates into the importance the public attaches to this issue. Second, in
a society with a
limited amount of issue space, unemployment, economic prosperity, and involvement in wars all
compete with climate change for public concern. So are elite cues: The most important factor in
influencing public opinion on climate change, however, is the elite partisan battle over the issue. The
two strongest effects on public concern are Democratic Congressional action statements and
Republican roll-call votes, which increase and diminish public concern, respectively. This finding points
to the effect of polarized political elite that is emitting contrary cues, with resulting (seemingly) contrary
levels of public concern. As noted by McDonald (2009: 52) When elites have consensus, the public follows suit
and the issue becomes mainstreamed. When elites disagree, polarization occurs, and citizens rely on
other indicators, such as political party or source credibility, to make up their minds. This appears to
be the case with climate change.
A2 Ecoimperialism
Ecoimperialism leads to collaborative pragmatism, not violent securitization.
Hugh DYER School of Politics and Interational Studies @ Leeds 5 [Environmental Imperialism: Theories
of Governance and Resistance POLIS Working Paper No. 21
http://www.polis.leeds.ac.uk/assets/files/research/working-papers/wp21hdyer.pdf]//JH
Hierarchy is an abiding problem, and one which may remain unresolved in as much as we can not
easily do without effective authorative allocations of value. There are, of course many proposals for
evading hierarchy in the anarchist literature, and much of this specifically of an ecological orientation
(Bookchin, 1982; Findhorn Foundation, 1996; Naess, 1989). However, all anarchist proposals face the problem of community boundaries,
beyond which the anarchist principles may not extend, and outside of which is a world of more familiar political and economic and ecological
processes on which anarchistic communities may be dependent. There
local context (where hierarchy can be more easily avoided) would always have to be escaped in order even to coordinate (if not dictate)
global initiatives on issues that are not simply additive but genuinely global in their logic. We haven't yet worked out how to coordinate on a
large scale without some element of hierarchy to give effect to collective choice and action.
Conclusions
All of this suggests some confusion in the traditional map of political, or even human, interests, and in doing so destabilises common points of
reference for either ecological concern or politics - or more likely, both. As it happens, this is a disciplinary issue for the study of international
relations - which may always have been a mixed bag in any case (lacking the clearer disciplinary foundations of, say, natural sciences). Some
have concluded that the
global environment is
'...a crucible for the debates, dialogues, and disputes by which people either re-create or transform
the social institutions that give form to the future. Given the centrality of issues of power, wealth,
legitimacy, and authority to questions of environmental change, we are hopeful that it is becoming
increasingly difficult to ignore the former when discussing the latter' (Lipschutz and Conca, 1993: 342)
Eco-imperialism has been employed here as a device, making use of a well-established discourse in a
novel context to throw up contradictions and problems, from which some insight might be gained: for
example, the critique (and design) of imperialism and colonialism has always implicated both global and local
elites, and so assumptions about both global and local political actors, structures and processes are challenged by such contradictions and
problems - perhaps in the rubble of this deconstructive exercise may be found some opportunity for new
political spaces, rather than simply the temptation to rebuild the old ones.
The fundamental issue raised by the idea of eco-imperialism is the relative importance of, and
emphasis on, economic rights and relationships as opposed to political rights and relationships. This
reflects a well known ideological and theoretical distinction between structuralist or historical
materialist perspectives on the one hand and liberal or realist perspectives on the other. In terms of
governance and resistance relating to the global environment, eco-imperialism is invoked as a critique
of liberal-institutionalist designs or the states whose interests are seen to be reflected in them. The initial
puzzle about strange alliances in this critique is answered by observing a shared concern about hegemony, respectively economic or political,
between those seeking (typically collectivist) economic rights and those seeking (typically individualist) political rights - both may see global
environmental governance as antithetical to their aspirations, if for rather different reasons, and both are likely to see some combination of
commercial, state and institutional vested interests rather than human interests as motivating such governance adventures. In this sense, for
some quite diverse opponents of global environmental governance, the
The world is rife with arrogance, ignorance, corruption, inequality, etc, and environmental policy and
practice is not an exception, but all of these need to be tackled directly in concrete terms, while
encapsulating all of these in terms of eco-imperialism suggests that they are intrinsic (even the intention of)
to the political order promoted by environmental concern and that doesnt seem quite right. Of course we might still
agree that a range of fundamental questions for the social sciences can really only be answered in relation to each other, that is, from a worldsystems perspective (Wallerstein, 1997b).
Terms such as governance, globalization and democratization are every bit as open to rhetorical use and abuse as eco-imperialism is, but the
rhetorical force of the former seems to hang on the hope for incremental change which enhances human interests and human security, where
the force of the latter seems to hang on despair and radical hence unlikely change. Where global environmental governance offers potentially
beneficial policy and planning (whatever the reality), resistance to it is bound to be cast in a negative register. Perhaps this just means that
governance is easier to talk up, and resistance is by definition marginal to existing power structures but in politics (and in environmental
protection), this also might suggest a winning strategy.
On the one hand it
would be in some respects quite handy to have eco-imperialism of a kind which offered
hegemonic leadership but with an inversion of the usual economic flows that is, at a cost to imperial powers
without corresponding economic benefits. Even so, it would not be effective without cooperation from those in the
developing world whom the empire purports to 'sponsor' in environmental protection, and for whom
any form of empire would be viewed with deep suspicion. On the other hand, and given such suspicion, it is not
surprising to find eco-imperialism raised as a charge against global environmental policy, even if this might be generalized from particular
circumstances, and used rhetorically to draw an audience for grievances and as a rallying cry for resistance. For all
If any imperialistic
characteristics are to be successfully supported, they will in any case have to be supported from the
bottom up, such that eco-imperialism would be that strangest beast of all: a participatory empire.
Even this sort of empire could be questioned if participation itself is merely an agenda driven from the top-down which reproduces existing
power relations (Cooke and Kothari, 2001), but it increases the potential for legitimacy. As Ikenberry says of American empire, it reflects less an
interest in ruling the world than an interest in a world of rules (Ikenberry, 2004: 630). Of course this leaves the issue of whose rules, and who
benefits from them, in the sense that we might observe procedural justice without satisfying claims to distributive justice. So we
are left
to wonder if grassroots resistance to environmental governance would be sufficiently satisfied by
participatory negotiation of the rules, to provide legitimacy to 'imperial' authority in respect of the
great global environmental challenges.
The governance aspects of environmental imperialism seems to be less egregious than the uneven
economic aspects appending to globalization, such that the points and dynamics of resistance are
focussed on the latter rather than the former - in the latter respects the charge of imperialism is both
fair and revealing. As with the anti-globalization protest directed at the exploitative aspects of
globalization rather than its potentially beneficial or benign aspects, the exploitative and dominating
aspects of environmentalism deserve to be challenged and studied closely - but this may have less bearing on
environmental governance per se than on the economically globalized world in which it evolves. The eco-imperialism critique has
merit, but resistance should inform rather than undermine global environmental governance's
necessary and still fragile collective initiatives, or risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
sharp cut in
greenhouse gas emissions could still keep catastrophic consequences from occurring: The message is,
it does make a difference what we do (p. A1). Comically, the telos does not overshadow the significance of
human choice, which may stave off total catastrophe.
Schwarzes discussion of melodrama (Kinsella, 2008). As Schwarze (2006) argues, the polarizing structure of melodrama may
inspire action: Promoting division and drawing sharp moral distinctions can be a fitting response to situations in which identification
and consensus have obscured recognition of damaging material conditions and social injustices (p. 242). Though
melodrama and apocalyptic tragedy differ, they share a tendency to divide audiences, for
instance, into heroes against villains (Schwarze, 2006) or believers against non-believers (Brummett, 1991).
Perhaps the polarizing rhetoric of melodrama may shift the ground of the climate change debate away from economic costs and
benefits, to the moral stakes of decimating the earth, as Peterson suggests (Kinsella, 2008). Drawing clear distinctions
between heroes and villains could motivate identifications to mitigate emissions. As Check counters, the
complex issue of climate change may not lend itself to divisive, melodramatic structure, for it does not have a single clear rhetorical
devil that is powerful, ubiquitous, deceitful, and identifiable (Kinsella, 2008, p. 98). We, too, worry that divisive rhetoric,
particularly in the form of tragic apocalypse, has precluded and will continue to suffocate
opportunities for a widespread collective will to form. If we accept the view advocated by a number of
experts*that global warming represents a challenge to every aspect of modern development*it is imperative for as
many different sectors of society as possible to contribute to positive change. Polarizing
the community while denying the potential for action, as in apocalyptic tragedy, seems
an untenable rhetorical strategy for encouraging the public to become active participants in climate change
mitigation.
As a frame, apocalyptic
distinguishes
between tragic and comic apocalypse.Garrard draws upon rhetorician Stephen OLeary to suggest that the drama of
apocalypse is always shaped by a frame of acceptance that may be either comic or tragic. The
choice of frame will determine the way in which issues of time, agency, authority and crisis are
dramatized. (87) OLeary writes:
Tragedy conceives of evil in terms of guilt; its mechanism of redemption is victimage, its plot moves
inexorably toward sacrifice and the cult of the kill. Comedy conceives of evil not as guilt, but as error;
its mechanism of redemption is recognition rather than victimage, and its plot moves not toward
sacrifice but to the exposure of fallibility. (qtd in Garrard, 87).
Garrard highlights the characteristic features of tragic apocalyptic rhetoric in Rachel Carsons Silent Spring, for example: the warning is
presented in terms of absolute authority; the material threat is evil, and so, by association, are the authors of it; the consequences of failure to
A comic frame of
acceptance, on the other hand, sees a way through the catastrophe, or learns lessons from the experience
of loss. This comic mode, Garrard argues, is more appropriate for environmental apocalypse, which,
ideally, is not about anticipating the end of the world, but about attempting to avert it by persuasive
means (99). Garrard argues that Eschatological narrativebrings with it philosophical and political problems that seriously compromise its
heed the warning are catastrophic, and the danger is not only imminent, but already well under way (95).
and import of scientific consensus, and in the final analysis defer to it, even as they analyse the ways
such results are shaped by ideology and rhetoric. (107)
Garrard argues here for the different kinds of authority that scientists and humanists have with regard to environmental crisis. I wish to qualify
his argument that ecocritics must defer to scientific consensus, however, by suggesting that even the variety of projections ofglobal
population or climate change that legitimate scientific discussion will produce are as much ideology and rhetoric as they are falsifiable
scientific hypotheses. The distinction between the sciences and the humanities does not hold with regard to scenario planning.
In Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, D.H. Lawrence spends time discussing the oracles of the classical world:
The old oracles were not supposed to say something that fitted plainly in the whole chain of circumstance. They were supposed to deliver a set
of images or symbols of the real dynamic value, which should set the emotional consciousness of the enquirer, as he pondered them, revolving
more and more rapidly, till out of a state of intense emotional absorption the resolve at last formed; or, as we say, the decision was arrived at.
As a matter of fact, we do very much the same, in a crisis. When anything very important is to be decided we withdraw and ponder and ponder
until the deep emotions are set working and revolving together, revolving, revolving, till a centre is formed and we know what to do. And the
fact that no politician today has the courage to follow this intensive method of thought is the reason of the absolute paucity of political mind
today. (93-94)
Lawrences description here offers some insight into how we might better understand scenarios about
climate change as well as the apocalyptic frame within which environmentalists communicate global
warming. These narratives are stories meant to help interpret uncertain times. They are not
deterministic nor predictive; rather, they are imagistic, intended to inspire creative reflection.
Warming O/w
Warming outweighs and no root cause history requires a global context not
just cherrypicking
Morell 12, (John J.: Dissertation for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English @ Vanderbilt University) [THE
DIALECTIC OF CLIMATE CHANGE: APOCALYPSE, UTOPIA AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION] (pg. 21 //MC)
Chakrabartys third thesis is that the geological hypothesis regarding the anthropocene requires
us
to put global histories of capital in conversation with the species history of humans (212).
Climate change, Chakrabarty argues, forces a species understanding of humans that goes
against the grain of a historical methodology that has emphasized the role of the individual
and the collective in political and economic contexts that do not account for our
geological agency. The ecological limits of the planet are, as yet, an unaccounted factor in histories of globalization;
moreover, those limits are independent of politics and economy. Chakrabarty argues that whatever our
socioeconomic and technological choices, whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as
our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions (such as the temperature zone in
which the planet exists) that work like boundary parameters of human existence. These
parameters are independent of capitalism or socialism (218). Globalization and global
warming might be born from overlapping processes, but they are not reducible to one
another. Climate change, Chakrabarty argues, will no doubt accentuate the logic of inequality that
runs through the rule of capital. But the whole crisis cannot be reduced to a story of
capitalism. Unlike the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and privileged
(221). Chakrabarty is surely correct that climate change will accentuate the inequality that characterizes global capitalism, though I
am less convinced of his assertion that the rich will not find ways to escape the damage and capitalize on the crisis.
Pragmatism Good
Even if there isnt consensus about the origin of environmental problems, the
only ethical course is one of action to mitigate the immediate situation.
Graham Harris Adjunct Prf. @ Centre for Environment University of Tasmania 7 [Seeking Sustainability
in an age of complexity p. 9-10]//JH
I am not going to address the global 'litany' at length here. The arguments have been well made by others, especially and most elegantly by E.
O. Wilson. What 1 wish to address here is the question: 'Can we grasp the complexity of it all and, if so, what do we do about it?' Given
the
fundamental nature of the problem the destruction of the biosphere and its ecosystem services
together with the huge changes going on in human societies and cultures driven by globalisation and
technological change the precautionary principle would suggest that even if the epistemology is
flawed, the data are partial and the evidence is shaky, we should pay attention to the little we know
and do whatever is possible to mitigate the situation even if we fundamentally disagree about the
means and the ends. The only ethical course of action is, as John Ral- ston Saul writes," based on 'a sense of the
other and of inclusive responsibility'. We know enough to act. Ethics is about uncertainty, doubt,
system thinking and balancing difficult choices. It is about confronting the evidence. Over the past two
or three decades, as there has been an increasing appre- ciation of the importance of good
environmental management, and as western societies have become more open and the ICT revolution
has made informa- tion much more widely available there has been a growing debate between the
worlds of science, industry, government and the community around environ- mental ethics and
environmental issues and their management. During this period new knowledge has been gained,
ideas have changed (sometimes quite fundamentally) and there have been huge changes in
government and social institutions and policies. We are all on a recursive journey together: we are literally 'making it up as we go along'. This is not easy and there are no optimal solutions. This is an
adaptive process requiring feedback from all parts of the system. Yes, there will be surprises. This is why it is so
important that when we act we constantly reflect on what we know and what we are doing about it
and where it is all going. As we reach the physical limits of the global biosphere the values we place on things are changing and must
change further. A new environmental ethic is required, one that is less instrumental and more embracing.
Traditionally there has tended to be a schism between those who take an anthropocentric view (that the world is there for us to use) and those
who take the non-anthropocentric view (those who value nature in its own right). Orthodox anthropocentrisni dictates that non-human value is
instrumental to human needs and interests. In contrast, non-anthropocentrics take an objectivist view and value nature intrinsically; some may
consider the source of value in non-human nature to be independent of human consciousness.45 What
is required is a more
complex and systems view of ethics which finds a middle ground between the instrumentalist and
objectivist views. Norton '46 for example, proposes an alternative and more complex theory of value - a universal Earth ethic - which
values processes and dynamics as well as entities and takes an adaptive management view of changing system properties. For sustainable
development to occur, choices about values will remain within the human sphere but we should no longer regard human preferences as the
only criterion of moral significance. 'Humans and the planet have entwined destinies"' and this will be increasingly true in many and complex
ways as we move forward. There are calls for an Earth ethic beyond the land ethic of Aldo Leopold.45 The science of ecology is being drawn
into the web .49 Ecologists
are becoming more socially and culturally aware and engaged" and the 'very
doing' of ecology is becoming more ethical.tm' Some scientists are beginning to see themselves more
as agents in relationships with society and less as observers.
In global science and remote sensing programmes there is a need for techno- logical, institutional and
intellectual resources to store, conceptualise, process and visualise the data coming in, 'There is a real data
assimilation problem, which has to deal with errors and uncertainties as well as parameterisation and scaling issues. What are required
are sources of data about the present status of resources and trends over time, conceptual models
and prediction engines to assimilate the data and turn it into information, arid institutions and
systems to enable action to be taken where required. With the explosion of data and information systems in the past two
or three decades, it is the institutional arid governance systems that we are lacking the most. Data systems provide infor- mation, institutional
and governance systems allow management action to be taken, but it is values and beliefs that ultimately determine whether anything is done.
In global meteorological observation and weather forecasting we now have some very sophisticated systems to receive the satellite
observations as well as predictive models to assimilate the data as they are received. Models of the global atmospheric circulation are
continuously updated by streams of detailed information about the present state of the atmosphere. Huge investments have been made in
solving some of the problems of data fusion and assimilation across scales and between image and point source data. This improves forecasting skill and, as we can all see in our daily newspapers, four- to five-day forecasts are now routine and accurate. This
is one case
where the necessary science, technology, infrastructure and institutional arrangements are in place to
effectively assimilate the data and turn them into useful products and out- conies. Other examples of
action taken on the basis of monitoring information may be cited. These include the observation of rising
CFC concentrations in the atmosphere and the realisation of a connection to the so-called 'ozone hole'
in the stratosphere. The observations and process understandings were effectively turned into
desirable outcomes through the Montreal protocol and the banning of CFCs in refrigeration and other
industrial processes. Other examples are the reduction in emissions of sulphur and nitrogen oxides in North America and Europe, which
were shown to cause 'acid rain' and an increase in the acidity of soils and surface waters with consequent damage to forests and fish
populations, and the control of nrstrient discharges to lakes, which caused nutrient enrichment (eutrophication) and widespread toxic algal
blooms. Finally, I may cite the example of the international Whaling Commission, where clear evi- dence of declining whale numbers led to an
international ban on whaling and the declaration of large marine reserves to protect whale species.
So there
are clear examples where data on meteorology, global atmospheric chemistry, water quality
and anthropogenic impacts on the populations of 'charismatic megafauna' have led to changing practices and
regulation lead- ing to desirable outcomes. Success seems to he achieved where the data are clear and
the science is explicit, the models are not complex and easily com- municated to both the public and
managers, the alternatives are simple and effective, the political and economic pain is not too great
and a strong lobby for action exists. In addition, there is a link between strong institutional and
governance mechanisms and effective action. If society decides on a change in management practice,
it is important to be able to make the decision 'stick'.
Climate change is already in motion proactive policy and action are a logical
necessity.
Schneider 11, Professor of Emergency Management Policy @ of North Carolina-Pembroke [Dr. Robert
O. Schneider (Chair of the Department of Political Science & Public Administration), Climate change: an
emergency management perspective, Disaster Prevention and Management, 20. 1 (2011): 53-62]//JH
It is suggested herein that climate change be viewed not as something far off, but as already in motion.
As such, it may be helpful to dene it as a multifaceted, multi-event, prolonged, high probability, high-impact global disaster. Its unfolding
will span generations and constitute an ever present threat to be managed by human communities
around the world. Its full magnitude is imperfectly known because that will be in some measure
subject to the intelligent application or the reckless avoidance of strategies to mitigate, adapt, or
respond to it. No matter what we do, or fail to do, there is a high probability that its effects will impose global challenges to human safety
and well being. Viewed thusly, it would be incomprehensible to take a wait and see approach or to gamble that
we can muddle through with the status quo. Proactive policy and action is a logical necessity. At a
minimum, political disputes and any long term uncertainty aside, there are clear steps that can be taken in the
context of global warming just as there would be in any other natural disaster scenario. What follows is an
emergency management perspective on global climate change designed to provide a general conceptual framework for policymakers
responding to climate change. It is a perspective rather than a prescription, but a perspective that might bring order and sensibility to the local,
national, and international efforts to evaluate and respond proactively to climate change. We will build this perspective around the emergency
management processes of mitigation, planning, preparedness, and response as a guide for policymaking.
O. Schneider (Chair of the Department of Political Science & Public Administration), Climate change: an
emergency management perspective, Disaster Prevention and Management, 20. 1 (2011): 53-62]//JH
We have demonstrated that the
evidence and the consensus about climate change are substantial enough to
warrant its being a priority for policy makers. We have offered an emergency management perspective on
climate change and suggested that such a perspective may aid policy makers at all levels in assessing and
responding to the challenges posed by climate change. While emergency planning, mitigation, and response is typically
best implemented at the community level, policy makers at all levels would do well to adopt an emergency management perspective. A
consensus of perspective, so to speak, is required at all levels to the promote actions both local and
across jurisdictional lines that are necessary for success. The remaining question is what does this mean in practice?
Putting the emergency management perspective into practice means putting to rest
counterproductive debates about whether climate change is real or whether it requires a policy
intervention. There may be much to debate or to logically disagree about, but not this central fact. It means focusing on the
scientic evidence that the climate is in fact changing. It means constantly rening and improving
efforts to accurately monitor a changing climate and to enhance our understanding of climate change
impacts. It means targeting for assessment the risks and vulnerabilities that can reasonably be
identied on the basis of the best scientic consensus. It means above all a process that is analytical,
uid, and proactive. The following is suggested as a guide for policymakers at all levels to utilize as appropriate to their sphere of
responsibility in pursuing these objectives:
(1) Assess climate change impacts in all sectors. The emphasis should be placed on assembling and assessing the best scientic information
available. This should be done with the realization that while sufcient information may not be available to produce consensus on long-term
projections, denite and accurate trends may be observed and there is an indisputable consensus about these.
(2) Conduct hazard identication and hazard vulnerability studies in relation to projected climate change impacts. These will vary from
community to community and region to region, but all will be affected. This will only compliment and enhance the ongoing work already taking
place to assess risks and vulnerabilities and to prepare for natural disasters.
(3) Identify and prioritize actions designed to mitigate identied risks and vulnerabilities in order to reduce impacts of climate change.
Emphasize environmental protection and enhancement and the role that it plays in creating hazard resilient communities and reducing the
impacts of future disasters. Hazard resilience is every bit as important as efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions given the impacts of an
already changing climate and those that are expected.
(4) Improve response capabilities for all natural disasters and expand resources to meet the expected impacts of global climate change. It is also
critical to cast an eye toward planning for unprecedented mega-disasters and worst-case scenarios. These in particular will exceed current
coping strategies and response capabilities.
(5) Foster regional, national, and international cooperation in assessing risks and vulnerabilities and in responding to increasingly probable and
unprecedented mega-disaster scenarios. In essence, national and international consensus together with the development of greater capacity to
cooperate across jurisdictional lines is necessary in the face of what is a global threat or a global crisis already in motion.
(6) Measure progress and update all assessments of climate change impacts. The situation is uid. Events will unfold. Scientic information will
continue to expand and with it our knowledge base for intelligent policy. Hence, policy must be nimble enough to adjust to changing
circumstances and new evidence.
It is the ultimate conclusion of this analysis that
change. Placing global warming in the context of emergency management, dening it as a natural
disaster already in motion, and applying the basic principles of emergency management planning,
preparedness, response and mitigation as a guide for the policy process may offer the best and least
problematic model for policy makers to incorporate as they seek to make their efforts more
consistent and more responsible in the face of a truly global challenge.
seem to suppose that duty-driven voluntary change in individual behavior is all that
global-climate-change ethics is about. If so, catastrophic global climate change and the likely demise
of human civilization is all but inevitable, due to the familiar free-rider problem. If there is a chance at averting
climate catastrophe it lies in scaling up the moral agent as well as the moral patient.
The identity of that moral agent is no mystery: the worlds several governments acting in concert to
create policy and law that will effectively drive changes in individual behavior. The manufacture of halogen light
bulbs might be discontinued through international agreement. A steep excise tax on gas-guzzling SUVs might be globally imposed. A
transnational carbon tax might be imposed or an international cap-and-trade market might be instituted. Research on alternative fuels might
be lavishly subsidized. And so on and so forth. My purpose here is not to provide an inventory of actions that governments can take, but to
identify the effective moral agent for an ethics of global climate change.
Nor do I mean to reject altogether out of hand the efficacy of voluntary individual effort to stem the tide of global climate change. When one
see others undertake lifestyle changes, especially if such changes, as they often do, entrain other personal benefits such as better fitness
attendant upon biking, better nutrition attendant upon the consumption of local foods, the economic savings of lower domestic energy
consumption there is a contagious effect. That, in turn, leads to self-organizing communities to promote such things as car pools, urban
gardens, and reforestation projects, not to mention organizing for greener policies and laws. After
obligations as obligations to future generations collectively. In short, the hyperindividualism that has
characterized the ethical theory dominating Jack-and-Jill moral philosophy for more than two
centuries now becomes incoherent when we contemplate our obligations to future generations on
the temporal scale calibrated in centuries and millennia, not years and decades of global climate
change. Implied by the abandonment of an individualistic ontology for an ethics of global climate
change is the abandonment of ethical rationalism. Both Kantian deontology and utilitarianism derive our moral obligations
from the most fundamental law of logic, the law of non-contradiction or self-consistency. Both the spatial and temporal scales
of global climate change and the billions of individuals, who have intrinsic value and/or equal
interests with our own, swamp our capacity to treat all individual persons, living now and in the
future, as ends in themselves, and/or our capacity to give equal weight to their equal interests. More
deeply, shifting from an individualistic to a holistic moral ontology, persons are not conceived as
externally related social atoms. Our internal relationships the relationships that make us the
persons that we are are multiple and various, each kind of which plays differently on our finely
tuned moral sentiments. Thus we may be passionately concerned for the global climate of the near future because our loved ones, for
whom we passionately care, will have to live in it. We may be passionately concerned about the global climate of the far-flung future because
the now contingent and thus indeterminate individual members of distant future generations will be heirs and custodians of human civilization,
for which we passionately care. Moreover, we
Perm
Action to restore the environment combined with a new ethical worldview is
the only way to ensure a sustainable future.
Graham Harris Adjunct Prf. @ Centre for Environment University of Tasmania 7 [Seeking Sustainability
in an age of complexity p. 274-276]//JH
Pretty well this entire planet is now managed in one way or another; there are few independent pristine areas. From the equator to the poles,
everywhere is affected to some degree by climate change and the global transport of various pollutants Ultimately, restoration
should
be our goal: from an ethical stance, mere management and conservation is not sufficient. This is going to
be a very hard task. Restoration and management require not only understanding of many fundamental
processes in landscapes," but also an ability to observe, understand and predict the outcomes of
purposeful interventions in catchments and landscapes of various kinds. I have argued that there are some
fundamental constraints on what we can know about ecological systems and that we must accept that
we will always have to act on the basis of imperfect knowledge. A deeper understanding of the properties of CAS is
going to be essential. The key paradigm shift has been to begin to understand how to link the local to the
global: how the actions and interactions of individual agents (be they organisms or individual people) can scale up
to system properties .52 Complex systems show the emergence of often quite surprising properties. The traditional approach of
science has been reductionist: to take complex entities apart and to seek simple models. CAS require a quite different approach, which
attempts to understand the statistical ensemble properties of the whole system, together with all the extreme events, surprise, emergence and
hysteresis that we so often see. Merely
sustainable goals at regional scales increases the level of difficulty; first, there
are many players and many aims and objectives to rec- oncile and second, what must result from any
regional resource management plan is a mosaic of land uses and environmental values. This is the challenge
of designing and restoring a complex adaptive system with environmental, social and economic processes and scales overlapping in subtle and
interactive ways. All
development of a more universal Earth ethic, which attempts to bridge the gap
between the two extremes of instrumental and intrinsic values, and moves beyond objectification and
the rise of a globalised 'placeless' set of (largely economic) values. Norton argues that it is essential that we move
beyond the arguments between adherents of the two philosophies, that we cease trying to sort types
of capital and that we value the uniqueness of place. He places value in discussions and debates over
possible trajectories and processes that increase resilience and suggests an 'adaptive management
model as a way of understanding human-nature interactions from the viewpoint of a community
adapting to a larger, changing eco-physical system.59 Strong sustain- ability and intergenerational equity are ensured
through a sense of responsibility ('a sense of the other and of shared responsibility') and through monitoring of progress, deliberative processes
and the inclusion of other values.
A new world order is emerging from the shadows. It is a world with a different set of values
is a more ethical
world - a world of systems thinking - that recognises and indeed exploits bounded complexity and
variability instead of trying to control or eliminate it, A 'triple bottom line' world requires profitability, variability, diversity
and compassion. It will be a world in which CAS are understood and in some cases guided towards more
sustainable futures.
from the instrumentalist, corporatist world of globalisation, economic efficiency, profit and shareholder value. It
Accordingly,
I propose a conception of climate ethics that is pluralist: broad and interdisciplinary, yet
presumably also conictual and tragic. While compromises between various perspectives may be
acceptable and perhaps even necessary, an adequate climate ethics is characterised by modes of
moral discourse that each have their strengths and shortcomings, and interact with each other on the
basis of co-existence and competition without the prospect of fusion.
I aim to reconstruct the various positions along the following guidelines. If
Consumption K Updates
making claims like these, postmodern industries often speed up rather than alter
many of the ecologically and socially troubling effects of hypermodernization. They open up dramatic
new areas for human engineering of the physical world; they turn nature more and more into a
factory; make organisms and microbes into machines; distance people further than ever before from
appreciation and experience of nature; erase rurality and urbanize both the agrarian and the microworlds; and reduce biodiversity. As well, they dismantle nature's last barriers to human intervention,
such as the integrity of species, the slowness of evolution, and the "otherness" of "life"; turn more
and more of the commons into the products and property of individuals; open vast new areas of the
environment (globally and microscopically) to capitalist exploitation and commodification; and
consolidate social power and wealth into fewer hands.
mining economy takes as axiomatic that resources are to be used and, when a rational
calculation can be made, used up. It explores, tests, extracts, manufactures, distributes, consumes,
throws away, then goes back for more. When the stuff is all gone, it goes elsewhere, to new frontiers
where raw materials and places to dump abound. What it leaves behind is waste. In fact, a mining economy
creates waste, unlike nature's economy where, in ecological communities, one organism's excretion is
another's nutrient. Creating waste for which there is no use is one defining feature of this uneconomical economy. Another defining
feature is its intellectual pedigree. Behind it all is a form of reasoning, an analytic framework, a set of sophisticated models. It is called
neoclassical economics, within which resource economics starts with a simple premise: there is an optimal extraction rate for every resource.
"Optimal" refers to that which generates the most benefit over a given time periodin practice, a time period relevant to investors and
politicians. And in practice, "benefit" usually means money, private or public. It
continuous shopping and hiring. A home economy, by contrast, generates and regenerates; it is self-sustaining. Its roots are producerist
(chapter 9), not consumerist. People are defined not by their shopping but by their producing, by their ability to buy as little as possible. Its
burdens are more substantial-making, creating, caring-and its responsibilities closer to home-wastes either assimilate or are prevented
altogether. In value terms (chapter 6), to emphasize buying is to value ephemeral relationships, relationships with little attachment, little
obligation, little allegiance beyond that prescribed in a contract or through the exchange of money. To
Techno-fixation masks the incompatibility of solving climate change with unlimited economic growth.
Even if energy consumption can be reduced for an activity, ongoing economic growth eats up the
improvement and overall energy consumption still rises. We continue destructive consumption in the
expectation that new miracle technologies will come and save us.
The hope of a future techno-fix feeds into the pass-it-forward, do-nothing-now culture typified by
targets for 2050. Tough targets for 2050 are not tough at all, they are a decoy. Where are the techno-fix plans for the peak in global
emissions by 2015 that the IPCC says we need?
Even within the limited sphere of technology, we have to separate the solutions from the primacy of profit. We need to choose what's the most
effective, not the most lucrative. Investors will want the maximum return for their money, and so the benefits of any climate technologies will,
in all likelihood, be sold as carbon credits to the polluter industries and nations. It would not be done in tandem with emissions cuts but instead
of them, making it not a tool of mitigation but of exacerbation.
Climate change is not the only crisis currently facing humanity. Peak oil is likely to become a major
issue within the coming decade. Competition for land and water, soil fertility depletion and collapse
of fisheries are already posing increasing problems for food supply and survival in many parts of the
world.
Technological solutions to climate change fail to address most of these issues . Yet even without climate
change, this systemic environmental and social crisis threatens society, and requires deeper solutions
than new technology alone can provide. Around a fifth of emissions come from deforestation, more
than for all transport emissions combined. There is no technological fix for that. We simply need to
consume less of the forest, that is to say, less meat, less agrofuel and less wood.
Our level of consumption is inequitable. Making it universal is simply impossible. The scientist Jared Diamond
calculates that if the whole world were to have our level of consumption, it would be the equivalent of
having 72 billion people on earth.
With ravenous economic growth still prized as the main objective of society by all political leaders the world over, that 72 billion would be just
the beginning. At 3% annual growth, 25 years later it would be the equivalent of 150 billion people. A century later it would be over a trillion.
Something's got to give. And indeed, it already is. It's time for us to call it a crisis and respond with the proportionate radical action that is
needed.
We need profound change not only government measures and targets but financial systems, the
operation of corporations, and people's own expectations of progress and success. Building a new
economic democracy based on meeting human needs equitably and sustainably is at least as big a
challenge as climate change itself, but if human society is to succeed the two are inseparable.
Instead of asking how to continue to grow the economy while attempting to cut carbon, we should be
asking why economic growth is seen as more important than survival.
Alt
We endorse the development of an entirely new economic system future
questions of consumption should prioritize the conservation of nature over
consumerist economic growth.
Princen 10Thomas Princen School of Natural Resources and Environment @ Michigan [Treading
Softly p.34-38]//JH
Living within our means is not easy; it's hard. Postponing that day of reckoning by binging and borrowing now is easy. But it can't last. We are
already seeing the effects-job loss, mortgage foreclosures, crumbling infrastructure, collapsed fisheries, global warming. So now let's tackle the
question head-on:
how can we consume less and not hurt the economy? This is probably the most common
question I get in discussions of overconsumption, suggesting that people accept the notion of
overconsumption. They just cannot envision an alternative. Nobody is saying that we should "stop consuming." All
organisms consume. Consumption is essential to life. But there are different kinds and levels of consumption, some that sustain lives without
risking life-support systems-for example, only harvesting the surplus growth in a forest-and some that degrade such systems-for example,
overpumping groundwater to the point that rivers run dry. So the real question is not "How can we continue to increase consumption and not
hurt the economy?" This is like an overweight adult asking how to continue to eat more every day and be healthy. It's
like an addict
asking how to continue to shoot up and not lose her job. It's like a homeowner taking out yet another mortgage with
even higher interest rates and expecting not to lose the house. Rather, the real question is this: how can we consume in a
way that does not undermine our economy, that does not consume the very basis of that economy,
namely, its waters and soils and the atmosphere and the oceans? To ask this question is necessarily to ask how much
is enough, ask how much is too much. It is to ask what kinds of consumption can be sustained, and what kinds cannot. These are hard
questions. Policy mak- ers don't like them. Most citizens in a consumerist society don't either: "Don't tell me what I can and can't buy!" And to
ask these hard questions is to entertain the idea that "the economy" is more than what is captured in measures like GDP and trade flows, let
alone capital flows. It is to consider that the real economy is grounded in "real estate," in natural systems. So the
everyday
observation that we're consuming too much and it can't continue combines with the scientific truth
that no organism or species can increase its material and energy consumption without eventually
crashing. All this then leads to one simple conclusion, one absolutely contrary to what one would take
from the original question: the consumption of vital lifesupport systems cannot continue indefinitely.
The consumption of products of that system can continue indefinitely, provided the system is
maintained, but no advanced industrial society is currently maintaining the system. Nor are the great bulk of
less industrialized societies, all trying to get on the growth bandwagon by exporting their natural wealth. Each is consuming the system. It can't
go on. Part
of what is at issue here is language-not just words and phrases, but perceptions and actions.
It is through language that we understand our world and enact our world, including abstractions like
"the economy" and "consumption." When people speak of the economy as if it is an organism, all of
us cannot help but think of the economy as being natural, a real living being. This way of thinking is typified by
attitudes that now constitute the conventional wisdom: A growing economy is a strong, healthy economy. A weak economy is anemic,
lethargic. It needs a stimulus. It must be revived. In this culture,
today's needs, not the needs of past centuries, and one that fits this one and only planet. The good news is that such a new creation, a
sustainable economy, is already here, albeit only in small patches. Some patches are long-standing (the odd timber company that has always
restrained its harvest to ensure harvests in perpetuity, for example). And some are emerging (community-supported farms and farmers'
markets, for instance). Everywhere we look (and, yes, sometimes you have to look h<tJgi), people are consciously and conscientiously building
this new sustainable economy, one farm, one store, one vehicle, one locality at a time. So as
myth of a consumer
economy (and it is just that, a myth, a story made up to promote certain goals, like rapid industrialization). This myth holds that
consumption feeds the economy and that it is a person's duty to keep on consuming. What beast is
this economy that needs such feeding? How does consuming-using up things-feed anything? Isn't it more sensible to feed
people and animals, not an "economy"? Isn't it more sensible to view "the economy" as a system of exchanges, not a living organism, as some
creature that can be hurt, stimulated, revived, and fed? Isn't it more sensible to see the economy as a system that ultimately depends on other
systems-natural systems and social systems? Why do people have to lose jobs and consume mindlessly "for the economy"?
The affirmatives focus on producing more energy to fulfill our needs creates a
feedback loop breaking away from this requires rejection of green
justifications for consumption.
John Naish, health journalist for The Times (UK), 08 [Enough: Breaking free from the world of more,
2008, p.4-10]//JH
These discoveries, along with advances in evolutionary psychology, show how we
are circuits in our heads that can enable us to take the next
essential step, although modern society increasingly sidelines these little lifesavers. These circuits can
encourage us to savour, to appreciate and to grow. We need to revive them, to evolve an 'enough'
button in our culture and in our heads, to break the vicious spiral of more, more, more.
Otherwise we're stuck like Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel, perpetually stencilling an extra number on our amplifiers: 'You're on ten all the way up.
Where do you go from there? Eleven.' Hardly. Our new enoughist responses will tell us when we have obtained the optimum amount of any
one thing, to be glad of it, and to stop exhausting our precious, finite personal resources - time, attention and energy - by chasing evermore.
Sustainability is the key - and personal sustainability in particular. All but the most cotton-headed among us now
believe that the Earth's ecosystem is in danger. Trouble is, life is so padded with minor preoccupations that
it's hard to recognise the threat as monstrous enough to make us do anything more than make gestures at it. 'Yeah, it's scary.
Whatever.' Modern technology exacerbates this problem: I'll show later in the book how many of our more-ofeverything
conveniences work in unexpected ways to shortcircuit our ancient drive to improve the world.
Am I downhearted? No. There's hope in the steady flow of surveys reporting how modern life increasingly leaves us miserable, tetchy, fearful
and mad. Amid the global warming, we are seeing more personal warming - more stress and depression, more melting of our circuits. That's
dismal for individuals. But, hey, it's our one hopeful sign of potential cultural shift. It may push growing numbers of us to embrace enoughism,
to balance our personal ecologies in the pursuit of contentment, sanity and sustainability. As individuals, we can try to find balance by seeking
only the things that we truly desire, rather than chasing manufactured rainbows. The knock-ons for our planet would grow if we could shift
focus from ever-more to enoughness. I'm perched on my wobbly moral plinth here by dint of having spent 20 years trying to live this idea. At
first it was the result of personal quirk, of having grown up quite happily in straitened circumstances. My mum was a widow, a child of the
Second World War, and our approach to acquiring things carried a strong air of rationing: 'Is a new xxxx really necessary?' was the family
mantra. Throughout my upbringing we had the same three-piece suite, a relic from my late dad's bachelor days, though we refurbished it in the
pre-green spirit of make do and mend. (I've still got the sofa -though now it's apparently a '1950s design icon'.) Over the past decade, my sense
of having an inner ration-book has become indispensable as the external clamour for more, more, more has multiplied. I've had to put more
effort into deciding what is 'enough' for me, to discriminate between new things that might enhance life, and those that will ultimately- despite
their glister- detract from the good stuff already in it.
Ultimately I had to start becoming somewhat militant. That's why I no longer own a mobile phone. I did for a while. It seemed a good idea, but
then my work colleagues got hold of the number. The little convenience-enhancer turned into a conduit for constant demands. It's the
telecoms equivalent of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea - you set off to catch some tasty sprats, but instead you suddenly find yourself
on one end of the line with a massive fish at the other. It feels like a prize, but it drags your little boat way into the middle of the ocean. Still you
keep hanging on. And then it turns out that the huge fish is no use anyway. Not wishing to live like Hemingway's harried angler, I didn't replace
the mobile when, by accident, it got broken. We don't have a telly at home either. I do, however, manage to work at the sharp edge of
information as a national newspaper journalist and author. Saying 'enough' isn't about selfdenial: in our communications-saturated society, if
you staunch some of the torrent that jet-hoses us every day, you don't end up with less useful knowledge. The opposite happens (as I explain in
the first chapter). Anyway, our house receives a welter of info through broadband, DVDs and radios. How much more does one need? And
what's the price of more, in terms of time, space and inner life? We are now so rich with things that every time we get something extra, we
have to push something aside to make room, and the swaps are getting ever less rewarding.
Practising enoughness may also help make one's finances more sustainable. If you budget for enough, it will hopefully be easier to work to earn
just enough, to liberate life for the nourishing stuff beyond the narrow sphere of getting and spending. Thus the path of enough can lead,
paradoxically, to more. Smugly, enoughism gives me time to practise t'ai chi and meditate daily (let's not be afraid of cliches here). Likewise, the
missus and I can spend hours trudging through fields and drinking flasks of tea on top of drizzlemisted hills - activities that are clinically proven
to boost morale and strengthen relationships, as well as fending off the Grim Reaper. Simply being, rather than perpetually doing, also fosters
the creativity so often demanded by modern career-life. Minds need space to think. Hence the old Zen joke: 'Don't just do something. Sit there.'
But in this era of unheralded riches, we often feel convinced that we can't afford to spend valuable time balancing on one leg or sitting, eyes
shut, just existing. We gotta be out there, chasing.
Let's not pretend that the answers are all simple. We all like to think we are rational creatures, easily capable of balanced decisions. But human
actions tend to show the opposite. Studies of drivers in central London, for example, consistently find them complaining that they can't afford
the city's congestion charge. And they moan about the time they lose in traffic jams. They say they understand that they are polluting the air
and know they should be using less toxic transport. Then they declare that they intend to keep driving through central London for ever. This
doesn't even seem to be short-sighted selfinterest at work.
Likewise, we have great difficulty setting our levels of enoughness and keeping anywhere near them. Surveys perpetually find us lamenting that
we are overworked and lack free time. Other studies hear us complaining that our homes are full of clutter. Then we put even more hours in at
work to buy more stuff that we never seem to enjoy. Blame our ancient instincts for nagging us into believing that new possessions will boost
our chance of genetic immortality. Back in our neolithic villages, there were strong evolutionary reasons for this. But now our culture has
amplified that nagging into a continual harangue.
No one is immune: I'm writing much of this book at home on a flash, powerful laptop bought in a typical moment of weakness. It consumes so
much juice, emits so much heat and is such a gilt-edged invitation to thieves that the hefty great thing never leaves the house. I got suckered. I
have also written a big chunk of these chapters while on the move, using a cheap old battery-sipping lightweight that I bought second-hand
eight years ago. It does the job just as well.
Nevertheless, there are many enoughist strategies that we can all adopt to dodge and block much of the get-more, have-more, be-more
stimulation. First of all, we have to change how we respond to the barrage. I hope that this book will help to arm you for the task - by exposing
the many snares that our own Pleistocene-era minds unintentionally lay for us, and explaining how the modern world of consumption hijacks
our social brains so that we step right into these traps.
But declaring 'enough' also demands that you challenge your own internal propaganda. Yes, your brain feels
immortal; yes, it whispers that (in the poet Walt Whitman's words) you can contain multitudes; yes, your brain says that you can have it all and
do everything.
These egoistic inklings are all turned up loud and proud by consumer culture's
persistent promises of infinite self-realisation. But in fact no, your brain isn't immortal and you can't have it all. Those are
just convictions that your head evolved to persuade your body out of bed on damp mornings. We are human and limited, and we have to live
within our lives' realistic limits for them to be sustainable and satisfiable. We can hit personal bests in our time, but there will be many other
things that we won't ever see, be, own or do. Enoughism
Reframing our own worldview to an ethic of the long term while combining
ecological and social values is a prerequisite to solving any environmental
problems.
Princen 10Thomas Princen School of Natural Resources and Environment @ Michigan [Treading
Softly p.17-18]//JH
In an ecological order, I will argue in the coming chapters, a society's material foundations are grounded in the biophysical; its daily practices
centered on self-directed, self-restraining work, not the purchasing of goods; and its language imbued with ecological content and long time
horizons. Overarching these elements is a norm against excess and an ethic for living within the society's means, biophysical and social. The
material side of this order I will call a "home economy," implying, among other things, that this is an economy grounded in place.
The first
step in constructing a home economy in an ecological order is to see the disorder in the current order
(part I). The second step is to erect scaffolding for the home economy organizing principles that are
inherently ecological, sensitive to excess, and structured for restraint; practices that connect
ecological and social values; and an ethic of the long term where thrift and prudence are paramount
(part II). The third step is to acquire tools to work from that scaffolding. It is to frame problems, the requisite first step
toward solving problems. Positive sacrifice, the opportunities of limits, and well-being through work
are key concepts. Well-chosen metaphors and a pluralism of worldviews lead to levers for hopeful
change. All of this is straightforward in many ways, yet difficult nonetheless. The difficulty, I must stress, lies not in the complexity of the
task, the vastness of the problems, or the uncertainty and risks of attempted solutions. Rather, the difficulty lies in the way
problems have been framed in the old normal, in the worldviews that have, for a century or more,
been fabulously successful. Successful, that is, in extracting and manufacturing and expanding. Successful in finding frontiers, in
displacing full costs in time and place. Successful in producing and consuming goods, where goods are good and more goods are presumed
better, all as if there are no serious bads. Successful in conflating those goods with the good life. A
the reader will come away with a positive, realistic, grounded sense of the possible. That sense, and these concepts and tools, can be
from the individual to the collective, from doing good work to running a
business, from organizing a neighborhood to leading a movement, from lobbying to lawmaking. These
concepts and tools are designed for imagining, and then enacting, an ecological order. They are
designed to make normal an ethic of living well by living well within our means.
applied in the full range of citizen action,
narrow, all beautifully engineered and perfectly managed, and all endlessly climbing. Maybe the metaphor of a multilane freeway is more apt:
ever farther, ever faster, ever freer. But, we
takes us into the murky water of beliefs and values and behavior change. Succeeding chapters lead us off the precipice and out of the swamp
onto terra firma, from which, with ecological
change in the
accustomed patterns of consumption will result in serious dislocations. This is real and worrisome. But notice a
couple of things. One, this position presumes that nothing we are doing now might hurt the economy. And two, the question-how do we
consume less without hurting the economy?-presumes that the economy itself is doing just fine, that when there are problems, such as a
recession, what's needed is a bit of stimulus here, some productivity gains there, and it'll keep on doing what it is so good at doing-growing,
providing jobs, generating a return on investments. Here
selling them, and earning a profit. But they were equally committed to the notion that political independence was inextricably intertwined with
economic independence and the integrity of one's immediate community. Democracy depended on a populace that could produce for itself,
not just at the national level but at the level of the individual, the household, and the immediate community. "Freedom could not flourish in a
nation of hirelings," wrote historian and social critic Christopher Lasch.5 Nor, one might add from a more recent vantage point, could a rich,
democratic type of freedom flourish in a nation of consumers. Back then, small proprietors in the United States, as well as in England and
France, resisted the label "working class," seeing themselves instead as producers, people who identified their enemy not as employers (they
were self-employed, after all) but as parasitic bankers, speculators, monopolists, and middlemen (chapter 9). Still fanciful? Now try this thought
experiment. Imagine that a century or so ago, at a time of extensive self-production, someone came along and proposed a consumer economy.
Only rather than selling the idea as the way to feed one's family or get rich or be modern (the most persuasive selling point of all), the booster
sold it for what it would actually become-a means of alienating work and enriching owners, of pursuing fleeting pleasures with objects soon to
become obsolete, of breaking up the family and community, of becoming dependent on mobile capital, of accumulating debt (for self and
nation), of mining resources, even the renewable ones, and filling waste sinks, even the regenerative ones. (Admittedly, this would be an odd
sort of booster as, by definition, boosters highlight the positive and shade the negative. But this is a thought experiment!) Would this society go
for it? Would it leave its rewarding, productive path for a consuming path? Hard to imagine. Instead, self-producers would take advantage of
technological advances whenever they advanced self-production, but not when they replaced self-production with wage work and shopping,
with being a "consumer"-a strange beast if there ever was one. Whether a producer economy could have happened or, back then, should have
happened is beside the point. Now
a consumer economy reigns supreme, and it does not work-not for the socalled consumer, not for workers, not for citizens, and not for the planet. It is self-destructive. A
producer economy, by contrast, could be self-productive. Its measure would be not the output of
consumables (so-called goods even when they include oil spill cleanups and hospital visits) but its near opposite-the extent
to which consumables are unnecessary. Just as insulation in attics makes a power plant outside town unnecessary,
selfproducing makes much consuming unnecessary. To illustrate, imagine a neighborhood with carpenters, plumbers,
landscapers, doctors, and fruit and vegetable growers. With a bit of organization, they could provision themselves with much of their basic
needs. In so doing, their overall consumption, their draw on natural resources, and their disposing of wastes would be far lower than when such
services are distanced (their production and end use separated by geography or middlemen or cultural divides or power differences) and
contracted out.6 In fact, a neighbor of mine has done just this. He and some friends created a "time bank." Members request services and offer
their own. Each hour of service rendered is credited at the bank and can be drawn on for services needed. No money exchanged (beyond
necessary purchases), and very little transport-it's all in the neighborhood. As the time bank suggests,
a producer economy is
inherently democratic and egalitarian. It minimizes money exchange and maximizes interpersonal
exchange. A core organizing principle is self-ownership and community ownership. That is, patterns of
ownership tend to match patterns of production. The local potter has her own wheel, the potters' guild collectively owns the kiln, and the city
operates a public arts and crafts market. In addition to being democratic, a producer economy is more likely to achieve what market
enthusiasts claim: namely, high levels of satisfaction. But that satisfaction would come from good work, not good shopping. Think about the
work of all those associated with the elm tree in chapter 6. And, as we will see in chapter 9, consider the fact that there is a wealth of literature,
from the social scientific to the literary, that supports the notion that meaning and hope come from engagement, productive engagement, not
from buying, not from taking orders and seeking convenience, comfort, and entertainment. A
Now is the time to reverse trends of ecological exploitation and live within
constraints constructing a new worldview of sustainability is necessary to
preserve our environment.
Princen 10Thomas Princen School of Natural Resources and Environment @ Michigan [Treading
Softly p. 172-176]//JH
No One Right View "The environment" has never been just another issue area represented by another interest group. "The
environment" is the very material substrate on which all else rests, on which all human constructions
are built. It is the grand biophysical system that contains and supports and sets limits on lesser
subsystems (e.g., the economy). It is that thin skin of life that constantly grows and decays, constantly
adapts to the interactions of organisms and their nonliving world. It is, on this spaceship called Planet
Earth, the life-support system we all depend on. It is at once resilient and fragile. To shore up this base, to
keep human activity within bounds, to adapt fast enough but not too fast, to maintain the life-support apparatus, no single view of the
environment can be "the right view," the one and only way, the received wisdom that all others must bow to, the enlightenment that all others
must acquire, the religion to which all must convert. With current knowledge of the current state of flux (political, economic, cultura!), no one
can say a priori what that new set of worldviews, the "sustainability" worldviews, would be. Rather, all we can do, all
speak. We all have these features, and they pass from generation to generation. The other is the capacity to adapt to new and changing
environments during one's lifetime. Our brain is not just an adaptation acquired during the hunter-gatherer stage to function in that ancestral
environment. It is also an adapting organ, one that constantly adjusts to its environment-the body, immediate others, and the larger world,
biophysical and social. The mind is both adapted and adapting.6So the capacity to construct a worldview is an adaptation that probably goes
back to the Pleistocene, those 2 million years that largely shaped us into the organism we are today. But a given world view for a given
individual is the product of an adapting mind: a mind that from birth is constantly building its neural pathways to cope with its environment; an
environment that, from the individual's perspective, is constantly changing, even in a stable society. That adapting mind is looking for ways of
perceiving, of understanding, of separating the important from the less important. In short, it is constantly constructing a worldview, and doing
so to meet its needs, to acquire resources, to protect itself, to reproduce, to associate with others, to feel competent and useful, to do good
work, to have meaning. In sum, world views are adaptations-adaptive and adapting. They enable us to be a special kind of
creature. In a sense, we like adapting (assuming the uncertainties and risks are not overwhelming); it is what we do. We can hardly help but be
creative, help ourselves and help others, and assemble teams, all to tackle problems and solve them. So now, in the twenty-first century, "the
world" is changing: a predictable climate is becoming erratic; the cornucopia of goods can no longer
be presumed "good," not for everyone, not for the long term; economies dependent on cheap fuels,
cheap labor, and clever cost displacement must rebuild fundamentally; the politics of exploitation and
domination and dumping necessarily must give way to one of self-determination, risk minimization,
and prudence. Now is the time to embrace adaptation, not ever more technological fixes and political
gimmicks, let alone more production and consumption, however green. Now is the time for
adaptation to a worldview consonant with the world that we have created and that creates us, a
world at once threatening and full of new opportunities and new challenges, precisely what can bring
out the best in humans.
Aff Answers
Pragmatism
Criticism and focus on individual agency alone cant solve engaging with
governmental and market based producers and with individual citizen
consumers is the only way to create capacity for change.
Lucie Middlemiss Sustainability Research Inst. School of Earth & Environment @ University of Leeds
10 [Reframing Individual Responsibility for Sustainable Consumption: Lessons from Environmental
Justice and Ecological Citizenship Environmental Values 19 p. 152-154]//JH
3.1. Sustainable consumption In the field of sustainable consumption, writers take a range of perspectives on individual responsibility which
hinge on different conceptions of the roles of agency and structure. Seyfang and Paavola categorise research on sustainable consumption into
three areas: two (cognitive and social-marketing) focus on a strategy of providing information to change individual practice (agencyoriented), while a third (systems of provision) appreciates the possibility of lock-in for individuals who may not have the ability to act within
agency-oriented
perspectives are traditionally taken in economics and social psychology, where sustainable
consumption is explained theoretically in terms of the thoughts and actions of the individual, and
structure-oriented perspectives in sociology, where more importance is placed on social determinants
of practice (Spaargaren, 2000). These underlying perspectives also have an impact on policy on sustainable
consumption. The terms individualist and situated will be used in the rest of this article to distinguish these two perspectives on
the structures they inhabit (Seyfang and Paavola, 2008). Spaargaren makes a similar distinction, noting that
sustainable consumption.
The individualist perspective on sustainable consumption research and policy tends to focus on the
consumer as the principal lever of change (Sanne, 2002). Both Seyfang and Hobson note a tendency in mainstream UK policy
to paint the individual as the agent of change in sustainable consumption (Seyfang, 2004; Hobson, 2006). In a detailed critique of this position,
Maniates sees such individualisation as part of a political movement in the 1980s to downsize government and shift the locus of responsibility
cites the Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR, 1998) in the UK to similar effect:
Ultimately the burden on the UKs environment is attributable to the choices and the actions of the consumers. To a great extent producers
are, quite naturally, responding to meet the preferences of the consumers. (DETR cited in Hobson, 2006: 285)
As Hobson explains, DETR clearly
Authors stress the importance of social context in giving meaning to sustainable consumption
lifestyles, and in allowing genuine choice for individuals who want to live more sustainably (Burgess et al.,
2003; Spaargaren, 2003). In theoretical work in this area Spaargaren applies practice theory to sustainable
consumption, positing a cyclical relationship between individual agency and the structures of society.
Spaargaren analyses acts of consumption in particular domains of social life in terms of:
the deliberate achievements of knowledgeable and capable agents who make use of the possibilities offered to them in the context of specific
systems of provision (2003: 688, emphasis in original)
act because they are capable of acting, because they know how to act and
because they are taking an opportunity to act that is offered to them by their context. The recognition
of the importance of structure in forming sustainable practices suggests a different approach to
responsibility in sustainable consumption. If empowering structures are not available, perhaps the
responsibility of the individual is diminished in comparison to the responsibilities of structural agents.
Spaargaren and Martens use the concept of capacity to characterise the structures that influence agency.
Capacities for change can so far be said to result from the concerted actions of (governmental and
market-based) providers and innovative groups of citizen-consumers. (2005: 23031)
Such an understanding of capacity could also be extended to suggest that individuals can take more responsibility in contexts in which provision
is made for environmentally conscious living. I would argue, indeed, that from a situated sustainable consumption perspective the responsibility
of the individual depends on the capacity of that individual, afforded by a specific context, to take on sustainable practices.
Perm
Engaging with the state is net beneficial criticism alone cant solve, working to
change current structures from within is the only effective way of creating real
change.
Robyn Eckersley Politcs @ Melbourne 4 [The Green State p. 89-93]//JH
Green poststructuralists have likewise sought to deconstruct the disciplinary effects of biopower and green governmentality, while green critics
of technocracy have lamented the cult of the expert the so-called the scientization of politics, and the concomitant disenfranchisement of the
lay public and vernacular knowledge in affairs of state administration." The bureaucratic rationality of the administrative state is inn as too
rigid, hierarchical, and limited to deal with the variability, nonreducability, and complexity of ecological problems." Bureaucratic rationality
responds to complex problems by breaking them down, compartmentalizing them, and assigning them to different agencies that respond to a
hierarchical chain of command. This often leads to the routine displacement of prob- lems acn bureaucratic system boundaries,' Once we add
to these developments the more recent revolution in public sector management, we have good reasons to concur with Paul Hint that the
traditional liberal architecture has increasingly "become a gross misdescription of the structure of modern societies?" The tenuous link
between popular political participation and control and technocratic state administration has also been a major theme in the work of Ulrich
Beck. Indeed, Beck (like Martin Janickel argues that politicians and state functionaries act in ways that seek to mask problems rather than solve
them. Ecological problems pens because they are generated by the same economic, scientific, and political institutions that are called upon to
solve them. While the state cannot but acknowl- edge the ecological crisis, it nonetheless continues to function as qir were not present by
denying, downplaying, and naturalizing ecological prob- lems and declining to connect such problems with the basic structure and dynancs of
rccmomic and bureaucratic rationality. According to Beck, this organized irresponsibility can sometimes take on a Kafkaesque form. The state
seeks to manufacture security by providing social insurance systems-health services, unemployment benefits, pensions, and workers
compensation-but it can provide no protection against major hazards that can pierce the thin veneer of normality and expose the inadequacies
of the welfare stare As Beck puts it 'What good is a legal system which prosecutes technically manageable small risks, but legalises large scak
hazards on the strength of its authority, foisting them on everyone, including even those multitudes who still resist them?' It might be tempting
to conclude from this general critique that states are part of the problem rather than the solution to ecological degradation. With its roots in
the peace and antinuclear movements, the green movement has long been critical of the coercive modality of state power-including the statemilitary-industrial complex-and might therefore be understandably skeptical toward the very possibility of reforming or transforming states
into mare democratic and ecologically responsive structures of government The notion that the state might come to represent an ecological
savior and trustee appears both fanciful and dangerous rather than empowering. Yet such an
the seriousness and urgency of many ecological problems (e.g., global warming),
building on the state governance structures that already exist seems to be a more fruitful path to rake
than any attempt to move beyond or around states in the quest for environmental sustainability.2t'
Moreover, as a matter of principle, it can be argued that environmental benefits are public goods that ought best be
managed by democratically organized public power, and not by private power." Such an approach is
consistent with critical theory's concern to work creatively with current historical practices and
associated understandings rather than fashion utopias that have no purchase on such practices and
understandings. In short, there is more mileage to be gained by enlisting and creatively developing the
existing norms,, rules, and practices of state governance in ways that make start power more
democratically and ecologically accountable than designing a new architecture of global governance
de novo (a daunting and despairing proposition). Skeptics should take heart from the fact that the organized
coercive power of democratic states is not a totally untamed power, insofar as such power must be
exercised according to the rule of law and principles of democratic oversight. This is not to deny that state
power can sometimes he seriously abused (e.g., by the police or national intelligence agencies). Rather, it is merely to argue that such powers
are not un- limited and beyond democratic control and redress. The
be on how effective this control and redress has been, and how it might be strengthened.
The same
argument may be extended to the bureaucratic arm of the state. In liberal democratic stares, with the gradual enlargement, spe- cialization,
and depersonalization of state administrative power have also come legal norms and procedures that limit such power according to the
principle of democratic accountability. As (,ianfranco Poggi has observed,
may be
understood as attempts to con- front both public and private power with its consequences, to widen
the range of voices and perspectives in stare administration, to expose or prevent problem
displacement, and/or to ensure that the sites economic, social, and political power that create and/or
are responsible for ecological risks are made answerable to all those who may suffer the
consequences This is precisely where an ongoing green critical locus on the state can remain
productive.
neither
the treadmill of production nor ecological modernization seeks to explain variation in firm
environmental behavior. Yet I contend that the understanding of variation and its consequences is a
necessary and fundamental step toward the eventual understanding of the broader system
tendencies predicted by both theories.
Buttel, 2002; Mol & Spaargaren, 2000; Schnaiberg, Pellow, & Weinberg, 2002; York, Rosa, & Dietz, 2003). As system-level theories,
I call my approach to analyzing the causes and consequences of variation in firm environmental behavior an environmental contestation
An environmental contestation
approach emphasizes the importance of shared understandings of profitable corporate action in the
face of an environmental challenge to both shaping firm environmental strategy and to the
consequences of battles between firms over divergent environmental approaches. An environmental
contestation approach also aims to integrate theories about the causes and consequences of variation
in firm environmental behavior, which are generally considered independently, and to explore the
connections between firm, field, and system-level dynamics.
approach to highlight the contested dynamics of the economy-environment interface.