The Politics of Unsustainability

Eco-Politics in the Post-Ecologist Era

Ingolfur Bluhdorn, Ian Welsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138882331
• eBook ISBN: 9781317968351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Two decades after its launch by the UN Brundtland Commission, the paradigm of sustainability seems to have reached its limits. Whilst the concept figures more prominently in public debate and policy making than ever before, the ecological footprint of advanced liberal consumer societies continues to grow, and the forceful economic development of countries such as China and India reinforces concerns that the world is moving further away from, rather than closer towards the ideal of sustainability. Given the proven failure of ecological modernisation strategies to secure sustainability, the traditional question "How may our established lifestyles and socio-economic practices be made more sustainable?" needs to be supplemented by a second, equally important, question: "How do advanced modern consumer democracies try and manage to sustain what is known to be unsustainable?" Put differently, traditional research into the politics of sustainability needs to be supplemented by a new line of research into the politics of unsustainability. Exploring the recent transformation of eco-political discourses and a variety of ways in which the unfolding paradox of sustaining the unsustainable is being managed, the present volume pioneers this new research agenda.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Environmental Politics.

Eco-politics beyond the Paradigm of Sustainability: A Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda

INGOLFUR BLÜHDORN & IAN WELSH

*Department of European Studies, University of Bath, Bath, UK, **Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales, UK

ABSTRACT This contribution sketches a conceptual framework for the analysis of the post-ecologist era and outlines a research agenda for investigating its politics of unsustainability. The article suggests that this new era and its particular mode of ecopolitics necessitate a new environmental sociology. Following a review of some achievements and limitations of the paradigm of sustainability, the concept of postecologism is related to existing discourses of the ‘end of nature’, the ‘green backlash’ and the ‘death of environmentalism’. The shifting terrain of eco-politics in the late-modern condition is mapped and an eco-sociological research programme outlined centring on the post-ecologist question: How do advanced modern capitalist consumer democracies try and manage to sustain what is known to be unsustainable?

A Watershed in Eco-politics?

This volume is devoted to exploring the stakes associated with entry into an era in which the historically radical and transformative elements of environmental movements and eco-political thought are blunted through mainstreaming and have been reconfigured by comprehensive cultural change. We are proposing to call this the era of post-ecologism and its eco-politics the politics of unsustainability. Furthermore, we are suggesting that this new era and its particular mode of eco-politics necessitate a new environmental sociology. We are aware that these propositions will trigger responses of intuitive caution not only within the academic community. Given the prominence of key eco-political issues in current public debate and the overpowering declaratory commitment of leading societal actors to the goals of sustainable development and global justice, terms like hyper-ecologism might intuitively seem more appropriate. Also, the notion of post-ecologism is reminiscent of diagnoses of the ‘end of nature’ (e.g. Carson, 1962; Merchant, 1980; McKibben, 1990) and earlier announcements of ‘post-environmentalism’, the ‘fading of the Greens’ and the ‘death of the environmental movement’ (Young, 1990; Bramwell, 1994; Shellenberger & Nordhaus, 2005). Such announcements have always been around – and they have always proved premature. Are things really going to be different with the post-ecologist era and its politics of unsustainability? Is it really appropriate to speak of a watershed in eco-politics? Is there really a need for a new environmental sociology?

We believe so! As the reassuring belief in the compatibility and interdependence of democratic consumer capitalism and ecological sustainability has become hegemonic, different and perhaps counter-intuitive lines of enquiry are not particularly popular. They appear disturbing, even counter-productive. As faith in technological innovation, market instruments and managerial perfection is asserted as the most appropriate means for achieving sustainability, empirical experience reveals the limitations of such approaches. This insistence on the capabilities of these strategies; the denial that the capitalist principles of infinite economic growth and wealth accumulation are ecologically, socially, politically and culturally unsustainable and destructive; the pathological refusal to acknowledge that western ‘needs’ in terms of animal protein, air travel or electric energy, to name but three examples, simply cannot, i.e. can not, be satisfied in ecologically and otherwise sustainable ways, is itself a syndrome that deserves close sociological attention. But more generally, an environmental sociology that opportunistically refrains from pursuing potentially inconvenient lines of enquiry and instead confines itself to serving and enabling the prevailing techno-economic hegemony fails in terms of both academic and eco-political integrity. For these reasons, a new sociological effort to grasp and address what we are calling the post-ecologist era and its politics of unsustainability is in fact imperative.

It is 27 years since André Gorz likened ecology to the movement for universal suffrage and the campaign for a 40 hour working week, movements initially dismissed as ‘anarchy and irrationality’ until accumulating ‘factual evidence and popular pressure’ made ‘the establishment suddenly give way’ (Gorz, 1980/1987: 3). ‘What was unthinkable yesterday becomes taken for granted today’, Gorz noted, but ironically, ‘fundamentally nothing changes’: democratic consumer capitalism assimilates ‘ecological necessities as technical constraints, and adapt[s] the conditions of exploitation to them’ (Gorz, 1980/1987: 3). Today, the ascendancy of neo-liberal free market principles and the ‘metaphysics of efficiency’ (Blühdorn, 2007a: 80 – 5) renders Gorz's insights tangible amidst discussion of the ‘inexorable growth of environmentalism’ (Jordan & Maloney, 1997: 7). Indeed, the environment has acquired a position of unprecedented prominence within economics and international politics (witness the UK Treasury's Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (Her Majesty's Treasury, 2006)). An abundance of eco-political measures are being considered and implemented. Yet the key principles governing western practices of production, circulation, exchange and consumption remain immutable. The key principles of consumer capitalism, i.e. infinite economic growth and wealth accumulation, which ecologists have always branded as fundamentally unsustainable, remain fully in place.¹ Over the past few decades there has been a steady build-up of work that is fascinated by this resilience of democratic consumer capitalism and is setting itself against both the hegemony of eco-economic ‘win–win thinking’ and the ongoing flow of eco-apocalyptic doomsday literature. This literature pays particular attention to symbolic stakes, rhetorical forms and the enactment of forms of societal self-deception in eco-political matters. It explores the ways in which the formalisation, declaration, communication and absorption of ecological politics take place within the context of wider social, political and economic transformation beyond the confines of traditional modern politics. It is exactly this agenda which we are seeking to formalise around the notions of the post-ecologist era and the politics of unsustainability.

The transformation of communication and other technologies since the 1980s (Thompson, 1995) has significantly changed what it is possible to know about the environment, how quickly this knowledge can be accessed and how it is disseminated and socially distributed (Adam et al., 1999). The knowledge economy and the information society are widely depicted as increasingly reflexive, adaptive and innovative compared to a previous corporatist era which had been constrained by the dead hand of the state. Social movements are portrayed as critical social forces scrutinising ‘every individual speck of cement in the structure of civilization for the potential of self-endangerment’ (Beck, 1992: 176). They are said to be capable of constraining the ‘juggernaut’ of modernity (Giddens, 1990: 151). Public–private partnerships are advanced as dynamic means of innovation to meet the challenges of globalisation including ecological ones. Yet amidst this technological and managerial optimism western consumer democracies are experiencing a metamorphosis that does indeed qualify as something like a paradigm shift in eco-politics. Indicators include inter alia:

• the normalisation of the environmental crisis, with reports about the worst ever floods, droughts, forest fires, famines, species extinction rates, desertification, deforestation, shrinking of ice caps, etc. becoming a standard feature of daily news coverage;
• the globalisation-induced reinforcement of the fixation on economic growth, international competitiveness, consumer spending, material accumulation, etc., which are radically incompatible with the ecological virtues (Blühdorn, 2007a) constitutive of a sustainable society;
• the acceptance by environmental figureheads such as Jonathon Porritt of capitalism as an integral ingredient of the solution to deepening problems of unsustainability (Porritt, 2005);
• the alignment of traditionally radical non-governmental organisations (NGOs) like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace with regulatory initiatives and commercial partnerships consistent with ecological modernisation;
• the transformation of Green parties across Europe and their struggle to redefine and reposition themselves in a radically changing political landscape;
• the rebranding of nuclear energy as green energy, inverting its symbolic status and historic founding role for eco-politics as the iconic symbol of an unsustainable form of civilisation.

This list of indicators could easily be extended;² they signal entry into what we are calling the era of post-ecologism. But of course none of this means that environmental issues have disappeared from either political agenda(s) or the public sphere. What we are describing as the politics of unsustainability is not simply the denial of environmental problems; nor must it be understood as an anti-environmentalist backlash. If anything media coverage and mainstream party political commentary on environmental issues have increased as debates over climate change intensify amidst incessant commentary on ‘the war on terror’. Indeed climate change and terrorism compete in terms of which represents the greater threat to established patterns of western life, with energy security having emerged as the key concern connecting the two. So ecology and the environment have moved centre stage within formal politics, but at the same time, a combination of structural and contingent phenomena leaves established eco-politics in something of a hiatus. Commenting on the US, Cohen notes that the eco-political trajectory that had its origins in the 1970s has ‘come to an end’ marking the start of a protracted period of ‘foraging’ to ‘find a new path forward’ (Cohen, 2006: 77). This assessment is mutatis mutandis also applicable to the European context. The causes and wide-ranging implications of this reconfiguration of eco-political stakes and remedial strategies need to be investigated.

The objective of this contribution is to sketch a conceptual framework for the analysis of the post-ecologist era and outline a research agenda for investigating its politics of unsustainability. As a preliminary exercise, the next section will review some achievements and limitations of the paradigm of sustainability. This paradigm was instrumental in obtaining the status of a ‘non-controversial public concern’ for the environment (Eder, 1996: 183), and without it, it would not make sense to speak of an eco-politics beyond the paradigm of sustainability. The third section will then be devoted to some of those observers who have talked about the ‘end of nature’, the ‘green backlash’ and the ‘death of environmentalism’. A review of their work will help to establish a conceptual framework for the exploration of the post-ecologist era. Building on this framework, the fourth section will sketch the research agenda into the politics of unsustainability. We will conclude with an overview of the contributions which are assembled here and with some pointers as to how these analyses fit into the much larger research project that this volume is hoping to launch.

The Limitations of the Sustainability Paradigm

Whilst the notion of sustainable development (SD) has been central for establishing environmentalism as an ‘ideological masterframe’ (Eder, 1996: 183), sustainability remains a contested concept in academic and political circles, giving rise to practical policy approaches to which broader publics find it difficult to relate. It is now a commonplace to distinguish between different forms of sustainable development and sustainability (e.g. Dobson, 1998: 33–61; Jacobs, 1999). The prime distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ forms involves differences in emphasis placed on inter-generational equity, North–South equity and the importance attached to precaution within regulatory and legislative institutions (Baker, 2006). Furthermore, the question of what is to be sustained and how is a critical issue. If this is first and foremost the established economic system, or cherished western practices of individualised, consumption-oriented identity formation, then this is a far cry from the demand to sustain planetary ecological integrity and the intrinsic value of nature. Carruthers (2001) argues that the continued primacy of economic growth within SD, reinforced by World Bank and International Monetary Fund approaches, represents the effective subversion of any radical counter-hegemonic programme. Meadowcroft (2000), in contrast, sees SD as a cumulative process with long term positive consequences, even though it may in the short term contain unsustainable practices and technologies. Key commentators over the lifetime of the SD debate now argue that even actors which are widely perceived as adopting a pro-active stance – such as the European Union (EU) – have prioritised economic and commercial dimensions of sustainability at the expense of ecological and social dimensions (Baker, 2006 and in this volume).

At the societal level conditions are no more favourable. The culture of mass consumption remains fundamentally incompatible with the principles of sustainability. Furthermore, as the axiom of individual self-responsibility cascades down through societies via the institutions of market-oriented governance, citizens find their capacities...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Environmental Politics/Routledge Research in Environmental Politics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Eco-politics beyond the Paradigm of Sustainability: A Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda
• 2. Changing Public Discourse on the Environment: Danish Media Coverage of the Rio and Johannesburg UN Summits
• 3. Participation and Sustainable Development: The Post-ecologist Transformation of Citizen Involvement in Denmark
• 4. Sustaining the Unsustainable: Symbolic Politics and the Politics of Simulation
• 5. Symbolic Environmental Legislation and Societal Self-Deception
• 6. Sustainable Development as Symbolic Commitment: Declaratory Politics and the Seductive Appeal of Ecological Modernisation in the European Union
• 7. Dissolving the Nation: Self-deception and Symbolic Inversion in the GM Debate
• 8. The Post-ecologist Condition: Irony as Symptom and Cure
• 9. In Defence of Civilisation: Terrorism and Environmental Politics in the 21st Century
• Index