Journal ArticleDOI
Zero-Sum World: Challenges in Conceptualizing Environmental Load Displacement and Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the World-System
TLDR
In this article, the authors discuss various ways in which conventional discourse on sustainability fails to acknowledge the distributive, political, and cultural dimensions of global environmental problems, and identify five interconnected illusions currently postponing systemic crisis and obstructing rational societal negotiations that acknowledge the political dimension of global ecology.Abstract:
This article discusses various ways in which conventional discourse on sustainability fails to acknowledge the distributive, political, and cultural dimensions of global environmental problems. It traces some lineages of critical thinking on environmental load displacement and ecologically unequal exchange, arguing that such acknowledgement of a global environmental `zero-sum game' is essential to recognizing the extent to which cornucopian perceptions of `development' represent an illusion. It identifies five interconnected illusions currently postponing systemic crisis and obstructing rational societal negotiations that acknowledge the political dimensions of global ecology: 1) The fragmentation of scientific perspectives into bounded categories such as `technology', `economy', and `ecology'. 2) The assumption that the operation of market prices is tantamount to reciprocity. 3) The illusion of machine fetishism, that is, that the technological capacity of a given population is independent of that popula...read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
The role played by social-ecological resilience as a method of integration in interdisciplinary research
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focused on the tensions and opportunities arising from interdisciplinary dialogue and the understandings and manifestations of resilience in the disciplines involved, and evaluated specific cognitive and social functions of resilience as a method of integration.
Journal ArticleDOI
Coffee exports as ecological, social, and physical unequal exchange: A cross-national investigation of the java trade
TL;DR: The authors employed an unequal exchange perspective to assess if dependency on coffee exports in less-developed nations significantly impacts rates of deforestation, secondary schooling, and malnutrition, capturing specific dimensions of environmental, social, and physical well-being.
Book ChapterDOI
Social metabolism and conflicts over extractivism
TL;DR: Martinez-Alier et al. as discussed by the authors used a sociometabolic approach to examine the material flows (extraction, exports, imports) of Latin American economies and furthermore look into the socioenvironmental pressures and conflicts that they cause.
Journal ArticleDOI
How norms, needs, and power in science obstruct transformations towards sustainability
TL;DR: The authors argue that the blockage created by these countervailing forces is shielded from scrutiny and change through retreats behind shields of neutrality and objectivity, stoked and legitimated by fears of losing scientific authority.
Journal ArticleDOI
From Talloires to Turin: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Declarations for Sustainability in Higher Education
TL;DR: The authors apply critical discourse analysis to examine how sustainability and the university are socio-politically constructed within these documents, uncover evidence of ideological assumptions and structures that are potentially misaligned with notions of sustainability often discussed in the sustainability in higher education literature.
References
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Book
We Have Never Been Modern
TL;DR: This article argued that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology, which allowed the formidable expansion of the Western empires.
Book
The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill
TL;DR: The Perception of the Environment as discussed by the authors is a collection of essays focusing on the procurement of livelihood, what it means to "dwell" and on the nature of skill, weaving together approaches from social anthropology, ecological psychology, developmental biology and phenomenology in a way that has never been attempted before.
Journal ArticleDOI
Historical overfishing and the recent collapse of coastal ecosystems.
Jeremy B. C. Jackson,Jeremy B. C. Jackson,Michael Xavier Kirby,Wolfgang H Berger,Karen A. Bjorndal,Louis W. Botsford,Bruce J. Bourque,Roger Bradbury,Richard G. Cooke,Jon M. Erlandson,James A. Estes,Terry P. Hughes,Susan M. Kidwell,Carina B. Lange,Hunter S. Lenihan,John M. Pandolfi,Charles H. Peterson,Robert S. Steneck,Mia J. Tegner,Robert R. Warner +19 more
TL;DR: Paleoecological, archaeological, and historical data show that time lags of decades to centuries occurred between the onset of overfishing and consequent changes in ecological communities, because unfished species of similar trophic level assumed the ecological roles of over-fished species until they too were overfished or died of epidemic diseases related to overcrowding as mentioned in this paper.
Book
The New Imperialism
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe how America's power grew and how capital bondage was used for accumulation by dispossession and consent to coercion by consenting to coercion.
Related Papers (5)
Resilience: the emergence of a perspective for social-ecological systems analyses
Carl Folke,Carl Folke +1 more