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Zero-Sum World: Challenges in Conceptualizing Environmental Load Displacement and Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the World-System

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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...

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Citations
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Journal Article

The New Imperialism

TL;DR: This article argued that the British Empire was a " liberal" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade.
Journal ArticleDOI

Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference

TL;DR: In this article, the material frames of daily life are constituted and represented through social practices, not as separate elements but in relation to each other, and they then become fundamental to the exploration of political, economic and ecological alternatives to contemporary life.
Journal ArticleDOI

Resilience and disaster risk reduction: an etymological journey

TL;DR: The authors examines the development over historical time of the meaning and uses of the term resilience and concludes that the modern conception of resilience derives benefit from a rich history of meanings and applications, but that it is dangerous to read to much into the term as a model and a paradigm.
References
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Journal Article

Our Ecological Footprint: reducing human impact on the earth - eScholarship

TL;DR: Wackernagel and Rees as mentioned in this paper presented an analysis of the aggregate land area required for a given population to exist in a sustainable manner, and showed that at 11 acres per person, the U.S. has the highest per capita footprint.
Book

The Entropy Law and the Economic Process

TL;DR: In this paper, the Entropy Law and the economic process are discussed. But their focus is on the distribution of the entropy in the system, and not on the process itself, as we do.
Book

Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management

C. S. Holling
TL;DR: In this article, various methods of environmental impact assessment as a guide to design of new environmental development and management projects are discussed. But the authors do not reject the concept of the environmental impact analysis but rather stress the need for fundamental understanding of the structure and dynamics of ecosystems.
Book

Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth

Gene Bazan
TL;DR: Wackernagel and Rees as mentioned in this paper presented an analysis of the aggregate land area required for a given population to exist in a sustainable manner, and showed that at 11 acres per person, the U.S. has the highest per capita footprint.
Book

Justice, nature, and the geography of difference

David Harvey
TL;DR: In this article, the Dialectics of Discourse are used to describe the relationship between social and environmental change, and a Cautionary Tale on Internal Relations is presented. But it does not address the effect of environmental change on social relations.
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