Modernist Ecology

12 Key excerpts on "Modernist Ecology"

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  Rethinking Green Politics

  Nature, Virtue and Progress

  • John Barry(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  A Reconstructive Critique of Ecological Modernization This section begins with a critical examination of attempts to 'green the machinery of government', focusing on what has become known as 'ecological modernization' (i.e. existing state-initiated environmental political practice). I then consider how this approach can be used to advance a more radical conception of green politics, collective ecological management, within which the state has a key role (i.e. possible environmental governance). Although criticized for betraying an environmentalist or green reformist outlook, because it works within the existing institutions of modern societies, and does not seem receptive to anything other than an economic view of the non-human world, 'ecological modernization' does represent a 'realist ic' theory of dealing with ecological problems and suggests one path for sustainable development. The transforma-tions it demands, although not as radical as those proposed by eco-anarchists, are not as reformist and limited as critics often suppose. The basic tenet of ecological modernization is that the zero-sum character of environment-economy trade-offs is more apparent than real. 1 14 RETHINKING GREEN POLITICS Ecological modernization challenges the idea that improvements in environmental quality or the protection of nature are necessarily inimical to economic welfare, the fundamental position which dominated the early response to the 'environmental crisis'. In this earlier debate the green position was that a steady-state economy, in conjunction with zero population growth, was the only economy-ecology relationship which could ensure long-term sustainability (Daly, 1973b; 1985; Olson and Landsberg, 1975; Kerry-Smith, 1979). 7 In opposition to this idea, ecological modernization suggests that economic competit iveness is not incompatible with environmental protection; indeed, as Weale points out, 'environmental protection [is] a .

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  Risk, Environment and Modernity

  Towards a New Ecology

  • Scott Lash, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Brian Wynne, Scott Lash, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Brian Wynne(Authors)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  A more radical version of the cultural politics perspective would break with the traditional understanding of politics as a centralised process. It would take the very process of the creation of discursive realities as its object. Rather than seek to develop arrangements that allow to 'get behind' the metaphors it would explore how new perspectives on society can be created. The issue would not be to 'free' the natural human identity that now suffocates under the hegemony of technological applications; its aim would rather be to explore the unintended potentials of new tech-nologies to create new identities and facilitate the awareness of affinities between various distinct identities. 7 In all, ecological modernisation as cultural politics starts off by opening up the three black boxes of society, technology and nature and seeks to illuminate the principal openness of ecological discourse. Indeed, it would go so far as to inquire what the meaning could be of the present ecologisation of the risks of modernisation. The Social Dynamics of Ecological Modernisation In sociological theory the ecological crisis is interpreted as the confron-tation of industrial society with its own latent side-effects. Zygmunt Bauman speaks about post-modernity as 'modernity coming of age'. We are, says Bauman, now able to see modernity as a 'project'. We have acquired the ability to reflect on what brought us the unprecedented wealth and we now see the (ecological) risks and dangers that we have created in the process of modernisation (see Bauman, 1991). The theory of reflexive modernisation as proposed by Ulrich Beck suggests that it is the uninten-tional self-dissolution or self-endangerment which he calls 'reflexivity' ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION 261 which has produced the ecological crisis. Reflexivity here relates to modernity as a social formation that constantly and immanently undercuts itself (see Beck et al., 1994; Beck, this volume).

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  Rationality and the Environment

  Decision-making in Environmental Politics and Assessment

  • Bo Elling(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Incidentally, such a distinction is not easy to sustain. Buttel (2000) stresses that the concept of ecological modernization encompasses an ample range of usages, and identifies four different forms of application: (a) sociological theories of ecological modernization; (b) a portrayal of dominant environmental political discourses; (c) synonymously with environmental management, industrial ecology, eco-reconstruction and so on; and (d) an expression of nearly every innovation in environmental policy or environmental improvement. However, what really matters, according to Buttel, is that the explosive growth in the interest in ecological modernization does not stem from clarity in the theoretical arguments of this line of thinking, but from ecological modernization being an effective answer to a series of circumstances and imperatives in the socio-ecological thinking of the 1990s.

  In the social sciences, it was seen as necessary to react to the rising influence of radical environmentalist movements, particularly to assess whether radical environmental activism would become a dominant factor of power in society and a necessary forerunner to effective environmental improvements and reforms. Moreover, the concept of sustainable development – which initially seemed so promising to the social sciences – began to manifest its shortcomings regarding the indication of visions for future evolutions and environmental policies. The concept of sustainability was originally developed in a North–South dialogue against the background of experiences concerning primary and renewable sectors in the non-city or rural settings of developing countries. In this context, the concept of ecological modernization provided a platform for new thinking concerning the problems and their solutions, which were mostly related to sectors being transformed in cities in advanced industrial nations. Finally, the advocates of ecological modernization, unlike radical environmentalists, saw the role of environmentalist movements from a fresh perspective by refraining from romanticizing them, and by appreciating the elementary roles that science, technology, capital and the state could play in the processes of environmental innovation.

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  Environment and Global Modernity

  • Gert Spaargaren, Arthur P J Mol, Frederick H Buttel, Gert Spaargaren, Arthur P J Mol, Frederick H Buttel(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  And this new politics would successively gain support from major parts of the environmental movement and from business circles as well. Ecological Modernization Theory 45 This process of a renewed policy outlook emerging with regard to environmental problems, was not restricted to the Netherlands only. On the international level the Brundtland report - of 1987 - signaled the definite breakthrough of the new policy approach. With the notion of sustainable development gaining ground, the con-cepts of economy and ecology were no longer regarded to be antithetical. Accord-ing to Albert Weale, the broad and enthusiastic support that the Brundtland report received was a major sign of the fact that 'there was a new belief system emerging that might be named ecological modernization' (Weale, 1992: 31). Summarizing the description provided by Albert Weale, this new belief system can be said to include the following propositions: - challenging the conventional idea of a zero-sum trade-off between economic prosperity and environmental concern (to be popularized later on in slogans like 'creating win-win-situations'; 'Doppelnutzung'; 'Pollution Prevention Pays' (PPP) etc.), - redefining the relationship between the state, its citizens (including those organ-ized in social movements) and private corporations and, - a recognition of the fact that most of the pressing environmental problems exceed the level of the national state, making a supra- or transnational approach to the problem a fundamental necessity. Besides Weale, both Maarten Hajer (1995) and Peter Wehling (1994) refer to the new environmental policy approach or discourse with the term 'ecological mod-ernization'. Both Weale and Hajer based their conclusions regarding the new policy approach on their analyses of pollution and acid-rain politics in different countries in Europe (Germany, the Netherlands and the UK).

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  The Environment and International Relations

  • Mark Imber, John Vogler, Mark Imber, John Vogler(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  fait accompli . The misrecognition of environmental concerns is now remedied through an approach which attempts to bring the environment into international relations. Such an approach is inherently limited, however, because it fails to account for the previous exclusion. Studying the political economy of the environment necessitates an attempt to understand why environmental issues had been hitherto neglected. That is, a past failure to include environmental concerns in the discipline cannot simply be regarded as a fact with no implications for the theorisation of the global system. Accelerated environmental degradation raises crucial questions concerning humanity’s relationship with the natural world, and with other species. Analyses of the global ecological crisis therefore require a rethinking of fundamental concepts and assumptions. Unless international relations theory sets out explicitly to tackle the set of questions which arise from the interaction between the economy and the ecosystem, it will instead merely find itself co-opting environmental analysis and accommodating ‘green’ issues within the prevailing conception of international relations. It is not in fact the case that international relations theory had previously ignored environmental issues altogether, but rather that (like all social sciences) by internalising environmental issues, it had rendered them invisible. International relations theory had traditionally removed from critical view the ways in which, historically, environmental issues had been silenced.

  The crucial question now becomes: how is the new-found visibility to be articulated? And it is important, indeed, to recognise which approaches will provide the best starting point for assessing the politics and economics of global environmental degradation. Before examining the contribution of IPE, it is necessary to look at the manner in which conventional international-relations theory has approached this task of assessment.

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  The Politics of the Environment

  Ideas, Activism, Policy

  • Neil Carter(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  PART I Theory: Thinking About the Environment Part I examines how political theorists think about environmental issues. Specifically, it asks the question: is there a sufficiently comprehensive, coherent and distinctive view of environmental issues to justify talking about a green political ideology, which can be called ecologism? There has been a phenomenal growth in the literature on environmental philosophy and political thought in recent years. The distinction between reformist and radical approaches provides a useful shorthand means of categorising two quite different ways of thinking about environmental problems. Broadly speaking, reformist approaches adopt ‘a managerial approach to environmental problems, secure in the belief that they can be solved without fundamental changes in present values or patterns of production and consumption’ whereas radical positions (i.e. ecologism) argue that ‘a sustainable and fulfilling existence pre-supposes radical changes in our relationship with the non-human natural world, and in our mode of social and political life’ (Dobson 2007: pp. 2–3). (Dobson uses the term ‘environmentalism’ rather than ‘reformism’, but this is a very particular use of the term that can give rise to confusion, for example, when discussing ‘modern environmentalism’ or the ‘environmental movement’.) In short, reformist and radical approaches represent qualitatively different interpretations of environmental problems. From this distinction flows a bigger and bolder claim that ecologism should be regarded as a distinct political ideology. To cohere as an ideology, ecologism must have three basic features: (1) a common set of concepts and values providing a critique of the existing social and political systems; (2) a political prescription based on an alternative outline of how a society ought to look; (3) a programme for political action with strategies for getting from the 11

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  Bruno Latour

  Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World

  • Anders Blok, Torben Elgaard Jensen(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Latour 1998  c: 224ff). Unless environmentalists manage to articulate a fresh set of normative coordinates, they risk seeing the specific value of their interventions gradually vanish from politics.

  In parallel to this normalization, however, another (and partially related) trend is similarly in effect: the tendency toward a radical professionalization of environmental politics, whereby responsibility for the future of the planet is potentially placed in the hands of a small group of powerful ecological experts. This kind of professionalization likewise extends a well-established modernist tradition: As the Latourian philosophy of modernity shows, the “chamber” of Nature has been entrusted to spokespersons of science ever since the 1600s. In the extreme, one may imagine an environmental politics that functions like a completely de-politicized global thermostat, where experts adjust human activities depending on the limits and needs of Nature (or Gaia). Latour, however, is highly skeptical of such a “technocracy of brains,” which is not only undemocratic – because any connection to ordinary citizens and politicians is quickly lost – but also bases itself on scientifically unsound and potentially “anti-human” notions of totality (Latour 1998  c: 222). In this context, Latour urges environmentalists to not blindly copy the misleading modernist concept of science – with its hard, unambiguous and so-called “realistic” facts – in an effort to achieve quick gains. Instead, eco-advocates ought to learn from the new knowledge politics of constructivist science studies (Latour 2003  c). Ecological politics needs to acknowledge that ecological crises are not simply crises in nature, but also a crisis of objectivity: By definition, its objects are uncertain, controversial and shape-shifting hybrids; or, to use the term just introduced, matters of concern (Latour 2004

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  Nature, Environment and Society

  • Philip Sutton(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Because of this, ‘one might reasonably assume that the future of the Earth would be a central concern of postmodernism and that postmodernists would be drawn to environmentalism’ (Coates 1998: 185). If we think of some of the central themes of radical ecology this possibility becomes clear. Greens take a critical stance on modern science and its reduction of nature to a set of passive resources to be exploited more and 160 Nature, Environment and Society more efficiently. The implication of science in the exploitation of nature pulls away a major supporting structure from all of the modernist solutions to environmental degradation that rely on scientific analysis and technological fixes. Environmentalists do of course use scientific evidence to support their arguments for reform and to lend weight to their campaigns. This strategy has been extremely successful and has produced some significant environmental reforms. However, radical ecologists critical of the reliance on mechanistic science see more hope in the ‘new physics’ of quantum mechanics and chaos theory (Capra 1975, 1983; Zukav 1980; Prigogine and Stengers 1984), which are more amenable to an ‘ecological’ reading that emphasises indeterminacy, uncertainty and the existence of multiple realities. For radical ecologists this (ironically) provides a ‘new’ scientific legitimacy for their own arguments in favour of promoting diversity, as a ‘new age’ takes shape. The ecocentric critique of modern science thus challenges one form of scientific knowledge and method, but pins some hope on internal transformations within leading-edge scientific disciplines such as theoretical physics. Similarly, the modern mentality that emphasises order and predictability is confronted by radical ecological arguments that see instability, unpredictability and creative disorder as producing their own constantly changing ‘orders’.

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  Green Political Thought

  • Andrew Dobson(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Conclusion

  We have established the differences between ecologism and other major political ideologies, and the incompatibility between what I have called environmentalism and ecologism is now clear. Ecologism seeks radically to call into question a whole series of political, economic and social practices in a way that environmentalism does not. Ecologism envisages a post-industrial future that is quite distinct from that with which we are most generally acquainted. While most post-industrial futures revolve around high-growth, high-technology, expanding services, greater leisure, and satisfaction conceived in material terms, ecologism’s post-industrial society questions growth and technology, and suggests that the Good Life will involve more work and fewer material objects. Fundamentally, ecologism takes seriously the universal condition of the finitude of the planet and asks what kinds of political, economic and social practices are (a) possible and (b) desirable within that framework. Environmentalism, typically, does no such thing.

  In terms of human relationships with the non-human natural world, ecologism asks that the onus of justification be shifted from those who counsel as little inference as possible with the non-human natural world to those who believe that interference is essentially non-problematic. Environmentalists will usually be concerned about intervention only as far as it might affect human beings; ecologists will argue that the strong anthropocentrism that this betrays is far more a part of our current problems than a solution to them.

  Practical considerations of limits to growth and ethical concerns about the non-human natural world combine to produce, in ecologism, a political ideology in its own right. We can call it an ideology (in the functional sense) because it has, first, a description of the political and social world – a pair of green spectacles – which helps us to find our way around it. It also has a programme for political change and, crucially, it has a picture of the kind of society that ecologists think we ought to inhabit – loosely described as the ‘sustainable society’. Because the descriptive and prescriptive elements in the political-ecological programme cannot be accommodated within other political ideologies (such as socialism) without substantially changing them, we are surely entitled to set ecologism alongside such ideologies, competing with them in the late twentieth-century political market-place. In contrast, I maintain that the various sorts of environmentalism (conservation, pollution control, waste recycling, etc.) can be slotted with relative ease into more well-known ideological paradigms, and that the way these issues have been readily taken up right across the political spectrum shows this co-option at work.

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  The Turning Points of Environmental History

  • Frank Uekötter, Frank Uekotter, Frank Uekötter(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Pittsburgh Press

    (Publisher)

  The path of (industrial) development West-ern societies had followed since the early nineteenth century seemed to be a big mistake. Environmentalism and political ecology became a prominent symbol by which a wide range of radical critique of contemporary society could be ar-ticulated. Environmentalism was not only a “cultural” movement but a political one as well. Since the early 1970s, it has thus been impossible to imagine politics without environmental protest and Green parties. As environmental protection was a governmental project as well as an op-positional issue, administrative initiative and publicly articulated requests in-teracted, resulting in growing political activity and the creation of new insti-tutions, legislation, and administrations. Since the 1980s, environmental policy has influenced supranational activities, such as the European Community and the Rio Conference on sustainable development. The institutional “capacities” of environmental policy grew considerably. One of the most interesting examples Modern Environmentalism demonstrating the interrelatedness of governmental action, the politics of op-position, media discourse, and scientists looking for resources is perhaps the debate on Waldsterben, meaning “death of the forest.” First discussed in 1981, the Waldsterben complex has created a momentum of discourse, research, and institutions that still works very well, answering to the interests of politicians, journalists, foresters, forest owners, and the environmental movement, although by now most of the forestry experts agree that there never was a dangerous threat to the German forests. 29 Indeed, since the beginning of the 1970s, the scientific findings on the state of the environment have become all but univocal. The complexity of environ-mental knowledge no longer allows simple assessments and solutions.

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  Postpositivist International Relations Theory

  A Globalist Restructuring

  • Amartya Mukhopadhyay(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge India

    (Publisher)

  4

  ENVIRONMENTALISM TO GREEN THEORY

  Postpositivist Antistatism and Transnational Turn

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003451150-4

  Introduction: From Environmentalism to Ecologism and Green Theory, a Terminological Prelude

  Green politics is the fourth chapter of our globalist paradigm and is one of the newest theoretical perspectives in IR. Currently, a distinction is made between ‘Environmentalism’ and ‘Green Politics’. To assess the worth of this distinction we need to know the exact meaning of the words environmentalism, ecologism, and green theory and politics. Dobson says that environmentalism ‘argues for a managerial approach to environmental problems, secure in the belief that they can be solved without fundamental changes in present values or patterns of production and consumption’. But ‘ecologism holds that a sustainable and fulfilling experience presupposes radical changes in our relationship non-human natural world, and in our mode of social and political life’.1 Paterson brings out the political difference between the two in an even clearer way:

  [E]nvironmentalists, broadly speaking, accept the framework of the existing political, social, economic and normative structures of world politics, and seek to ameliorate environmental problems within those structures, while Greens regard those structures as the main origin of the environmental crisis and therefore contend that they … need to be challenged and transcended.

  He, however, sounds a note of caution that this ‘obviously … crude simplification of the variety of positions adopted by those within the Green, and broader environmental movement’, is useful here only ‘as a representation of ideal types’.2

  But, even as ideal types, the distinction between the monikers of environmentalism and ecologism has not always been sustained. While considering different alternative labels for ‘environmental political theory’ in their edited volume on it, such as ‘“Green” political thought (or theory)’, ‘political ecology’, ‘political theory of sustainability’, and so on, Gabrielson et al. have referred to the current argument that ‘green’ is a broader label than ‘environmental’, in more effectively betokening ‘the field’s expansive interest in the intersection of environmental concerns with those of social justice, non-violence, and the valuation of the non-human world for more than instrumental purposes’ even as the epithet ‘environmental political theory’ does no more imply the ‘mere application of already formed political theories to the “issue” of environment’. But they still retain the term to maintain the identity of the field from the positions and views of green political parties.3 In course of judging the relevance of the two terms in the context of is wider context of ‘interspecies’, Youatt points out that the import of shallowness and depth in these two terms is misleading. For, ‘shallow ecology is perfectly possible, as is deep environmentalism’.4 This point would be buttressed by the fact that Eckersley’s book on environmentalism and political theory stakes out an ‘ecocentric approach’ and starts with the impact of green parties on it from the fourth line of Chapter 1 5 while Carter’s book on the ‘politics of the environment’ speaks of key ingredients of ‘Green political thought’, the ‘anthropocentric and ecocentric divide’, ‘holistic perspectives’, ‘moral extensionism’, right from the ‘Introduction’, and second and third chapters of the book.6 Some explanation of why this is happening can be found in Mulvaney’s words that the understandings of ecologism ‘can be grouped into two schools, known as “minimalist” and “maximalist”’. In the former approach, ‘the terms environmentalism and ecologism are often used interchangeably’ and either ‘can be used as an umbrella term, encompassing a spectrum that runs from “light green” or “ecological modernization”, at one extreme and “dark green” or “deep ecology” at the other’, taking its roots, as suggested by Andrew Vincent, to the nineteenth century. In the latter, maximalist, approach, best represented by Dobson, a strict distinction between the two terms places the origins of ecologism in more recent times.7

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  Modern Political Ideologies

  • Andrew Vincent(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The picture is further clouded by mutual recriminations. Social ecologists attack the deep ecolo-gists for engaging in mystical claptrap. Deep ecologists, amongst others, attack the eco-socialists as still at root being tied to industrial growth, therefore being part of the problem. Reformist environmentalists attack the social ecologists as re-dreaming the hopelessly nostalgic utopias of nineteenth-century anarchy. Before moving on to a more systematic presentation of the political visions within ecology, it is worth mentioning that there are still some formal common political concerns within the ecology movement, though responses to these differ markedly. There is a strong sense in which many ecologists are probably as concerned about individual values and activities as they are with politics in general. Individuals are viewed as possessing varying levels of responsibility, but individual values are still seen to count in many significant ways. The stress on individual values and auton-omy tends to make political ecology less likely to accept materialist accounts, although biology and evolutionary materialism do still have a firm foothold in ecol-ogy (usually underpinned by some implicit moral pattern). The ecology perspective also tends to combine, uniquely, both respect for local autonomy in communities and a global message. In addition, all ecological schools are concerned to raise ques-tions about the limits of economic growth in industrialized societies. This in turn leads to critical reflections on consumption patterns, production in industry and 214 ECOLOGISM agriculture, energy use and the nature of technology, the concept of work and, finally, demographic patterns and population growth. These concerns are common to all ecologists. They all focus on the central theme of a sustainable society , one which will not damage, but will exist harmoniously with, the ecosystem.

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