Embracing the politics of ambiguity: Towards a normative theory of quot;sustainability"

Capitalism, Nature, Socialism

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 111-125

  Amsler, Sarah S ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK; NATURAL RESOURCE; SUSTAINABILITY; THEORETICAL STUDY;

EID: 70849085709     PISSN: 10455752     EISSN: 15483290     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10455750902941169     Document Type: Article

References (89)

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5. Quote from the United States National Science Foundation, cited in Bill Hopwood, Mary Mellor, and Geoff O'Brien, "Sustainable Development: Mapping Different Approaches," Sustainable Development, Vol. 13, 2005, p. 40.
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12. American Museum of Natural History, "Climate Change: The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future," exhibition website, available online at: http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/climatechange/ (accessed December 5, 2008).
13. For an example of the critique, see Edward Rothstein, "Apocalypse Now, via Diorama," New York Times, October 16, 2008, available online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/arts/design/ 17clim.html?pagewanted=all (accessed December 2, 2008).
14. British Broadcasting Corporation, "Climate Change," from the BBC Weather Center, available online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/ (accessed December 3, 2008). See also a related BBC site, "Climate Change," available online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/ climatechange/ (accessed December 3, 2008).
15. Channel 4, "The Great Global Warming Swindle" website, available online at: http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/G/ great_global_warming_swindle/ (accessed December 6, 2008).
16. Climate Crisis, An Inconvenient Truth, official film website, available online at: http://www.climatecrisis.net/ (accessed December 4, 2008).
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18. Climate Crisis Coalition, official website, available online at: http://www.climatecrisiscoalition.org/ (accessed December 5, 2008).
19. Crisis Forum, "Crisis? What Crisis?" available online at: http://www.crisis-forum.org.uk/about_us/ (accessed December 6, 2008).
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21. J. Potter, Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction (London: Sage, 1996)
22. M. Redclift and Ted Benton (eds.), Social Theory and the Global Environment (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
23. United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future, available online at: http://www.un-documents.net/ wcedocf.htm (accessed June 17, 2007).
24. Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1995), p. 169.
25. Michael Jacobsen and Keith Tester, "Sociology, Nostalgia, Utopia and Mortality: A Conversation with Zygmunt Bauman," European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2007, pp. 305-25. The phrase "how we live and how we might live" is borrowed from William Morris, and is the title of a lecture delivered to a London audience in 1884.
26. See William Morris, "How We Live and How We Might Live" in The Collected Works of William Morris, XXIII. Also available online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1884/hwl/ index.htm (accessed June 25, 2007).
27. Hopwood et al. op. cit.
28. Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (London: Zed Books, 2002).
29. Kovel, ibid., p. 8, italics mine.
30. James G. Speth, The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
31. For more on the relationship between ecological discourses and social critique, see also David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
32. Ulrich Beck, "Living in the World Risk Society," Hobhouse Memorial Public Lecture, given February 15, 2006, London School of Economics and Political Science, p. 4, available online at: http://www.lse.ac.uk (accessed June 20, 2007).
33. Speth, op. cit., p. 18.
34. United Nations, op. cit., p. 16.
35. Ibid.
36. See also Don Hinrichsen, World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future: A Reader's Guide (Earthscan, 1987).
37. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 1
38. see also Speth, op. cit., p. 18.
39. Stefan Skrimshire, "Curb Your Catastrophism," Red Pepper, June/July, 2008.3
40. Kovel, op. cit., p. 5.
41. Here, "critical theory" refers primarily to the Frankfurt School tradition and other forms of neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian thought.
42. Luke, op. cit.
43. Hopwood et al., op. cit.
44. Kovel, op. cit.
45. Hopwood, et al., op. cit., p. 38.
46. Desta Mebratu, "Sustainability and Sustainable Development: Historical and Conceptual Review," Environmental Impact Assessment Review, Vol. 18, No. 6, 1998, pp. 493-520.
47. Sarah Lumley and Patrick Armstrong, "Some of the Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Sustainability Concept," Environment, Development and Sustainability, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2004, p. 376.
48. Mark Neocleous, "Against Security," Radical Philosophy, March-April, 2000.
49. James O'Connor, "Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible?" in P. Allen (ed.), Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1993), pp. 125-138
50. Paul Burkett, "Marx's Vision of Sustainable Development," Monthly Review, October, 2005, pp. 35-62.
51. I am indebted to my anonymous reviewers for this observation.
52. Frederic Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. xii
53. Kovel op. cit.
54. Speth, op. cit., p. 199.
55. Morris, op. cit.
56. Morris has recently been referred to as an early ecosocialist, an argument that I will refrain from making here, but that I recommend exploring in, e.g., Bradley Macdonald, "William Morris and the Vision of Ecosocialism," Contemporary Justice Review, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2004, pp. 287-304.
57. Andrew Feenberg, "Marcuse: Obstinacy as a Theoretical Virtue," Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 11, 1992, p. 40.
58. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Free Press, 1959).
59. Martin Luther King, Jr., "A Knock at Midnight," in C. Clayborne and P. Hollorn (eds.), A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1963/1998). Also available online at: http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/mlkpapers/ (accessed June 19, 2007).
60. Marcuse, 1964, op. cit., p. 9.
61. Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be (London: Abacus, 1978), p. 19.
62. Video clips discussing the "new time of the Doomsday Clock" are available online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6270871.stm#map
63. and the "clock" itself can be viewed on the Bulletin website at http://www.thebulletin.org/minutes-to-midnight/ (accessed March 15, 2008).
64. Molly Bentley, "Climate Resets 'Doomsday Clock,"' The Guardian, January 17, 2007. The title of this article is a useful illustration of how such subjective representations can become reified; here, for example, the climate rather than the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is responsible for "resetting" the clock.
65. Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives (London: Routledge, 2002).
66. Kovel, op. cit., p. 12.
67. Ibid., p. 17, emphasis mine.
68. Beck, op. cit.
69. See, for example, Blake Ratner, "'Sustainability' as a Dialogue of Values: Challenges to the Sociology of Development," Sociological Inquiry, Vol. 74, No. 1, 2004, pp. 50-69
70. and Dale Jamieson, "Sustainability and Beyond," Ecological Economics, Vol. 24, Issue 2-3, February 1998, pp. 183-192. For recent work in theorizing sustainability more holistically, see Yosef Jabareen, "A New Conceptual Framework for Sustainable Development," Environment, Development and Sustainability, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2008, pp. 179-192.
71. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
72. United Nations, op. cit.
73. Marcuse, 1969, op. cit., p. 14.
74. Marcuse, 1964, op. cit., p. 4.
75. Ibid., p. 5.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., p. 245.
78. For critical considerations of Marcuse's theories of need, see Ben Agger, "Marcuse's Growing Relevance," in The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992), pp. 87-101
79. Douglas Kellner, "Marcuse and the Quest for Radical Subjectivity," in W. Wilkerson and J. Paris (eds.), New Critical Theory: Essays on Liberation (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), pp. 85-104
80. and Steven Vogel, Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory (Albany: SUNY University Press, 1996).
81. For example, see Kate Soper, "Rethinking the 'Good Life': The Consumer as Citizen," Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2004, pp. 111-116
82. and Kate Soper, "Rethinking the 'Good Life': The Citizenship Dimension of Consumer Dissatisfaction with Consumerism," Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2007, pp. 205-229.
83. For additional comment on the importance of critical theories of sustainability, see Merle Jacob, "Critical Theory in Political Practice: Sustainable Development and Development Theory," Science, Technology and Society, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1997, pp. 99-129.
84. Marcuse, 1964, op. cit., p. 152.
85. Ibid., p. 6.
86. Soper, 1995, op. cit, p. 168.
87. Speth, op. cit, pp. 199-200
88. see also Soper, op. cit., pp. 272-278.
89. Speth, op. cit., p. 204.