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
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Journal ArticleDOI
Biodiversity governance and social-ecological system dynamics: transformation in the Australian Alps
TL;DR: In this paper, a modified version of the Resilience Alliance workbook approach was used to explicitly address governance influences at each stage of an assessment of internationally significant biodiversity features in protected areas of the Australian Alps.
Journal ArticleDOI
Refiguring the Plantationocene
TL;DR: The authors pointed out that to invoke the plantation is to simultaneously contend with the intermeshing organization of the colonialist/imperialist, racialist, and capitalist dimensions of the world-system as directly related to global environmental transformation since the 15th century.
Journal ArticleDOI
Social conditions to better realize the environmental gains of alternative energy: Degrowth and collective ownership
TL;DR: The energy boomerang effect as discussed by the authors occurs when decarbonizing the energy supply increases total energy use, which is not an outcome of alternative energy development per se, but only of energy development in a particular kind of society.
Journal ArticleDOI
Unearthing human progress? Ecomodernism and contrasting definitions of technological progress in the Anthropocene
TL;DR: The authors argue that the dominant emphasis on technological progress, though hopeful, is linked to affluent urban perspectives that delegitimize more aggressive and just proposals for climate mitigation and human progress, both with deep theoretical roots familiar to economic and environmental anthropologists.
Book ChapterDOI
Resilience thinking versus political ecology : Understanding the dynamics of small-scale, labour-intensive farming landscapes.
TL;DR: For example, Widgren et al. as mentioned in this paper argue that the landscape is a common good, a good that public funds should be used to manage and sustain and that good theories and good explanatory frameworks are needed to explain the emergence, persistence and decline of particular types of farming systems and their accompanying landscapes.
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