Reassessing the crisis: Ecology and liberal international relations

Alternatives

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 137-162

  Mulligan, Shane ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO   (Canada)

Author keywords

Ecology; International relations; Liberalism; Limits to growth; Peak oil

Indexed keywords

EID: 77952406716     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437541003500203     Document Type: Article

References (108)

1. There are exceptions, of course, following Jim MacNeill, Pieter Winsemius, and Taizo Yakushiji, Beyond Interdependence: The Meshing of the World's Economy and the Earth's Ecology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
2. For a recent commentary on the "declining returns" from social con-structivist approaches to nature, see Karen Bakker and Gavin Bridge, "Material Worlds? Resource Geographies and the 'matter of nature,'" Progress in Human Geography 30, no. 1 (2006): 5-27.
3. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
4. Eric Laferrière and Peter J. Stoett, International Relations Theory and Ecological Thought: Towards a Synthesis (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 72.
5. John Peet, Energy and the Ecological Economics of Sustainability (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1992), p. 155.
6. While fossil fuels, or energy supplies in general, are not often viewed as an "ecological" factor, any ecological interpretation must focus on energy in one way or another. "To study a process ecologically means to establish its energetic and material 'budget'": Juan Martinez-Alier, in Juan Martinez-Alier with Klaus Schlüpmann, Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment, and Society (Oxford: Blackwell. 1987), p. 88.
7. E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939 (Houndmills, Basing-stoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001) remains a relevant and insightful critique of liberal utopianism.
8. The latter reference is of course to that icon of late liberal triumphalism, Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
9. William Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (Champaign: University of Illinois, 1980).
10. Carr, Twenty Years' Crisis, p. 29.
11. Ibid., p. 45.
12. See especially "On Property," Chapter 5 of his Second Treatise, in Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 285-302.
13. Ted Benton, "Marxism and Natural Limits: An Ecological Critique and Reconstruction," New Left Review 178 (November 1989): 51-86.
14. Chris Boyle, "The Mystery of Modern Wealth: Mercantilism, Value, and the Social Foundations of Liberal International Order," European Journal of International Relations 14, no. 3 (2008): 405-429.
15. Nicholas Xenos, "Liberalism and the Postulate of Scarcity," Political Theory 15, no. 2 (May 1987): 225-243, at 235.
16. Thomas Prugh, with Robert Costanza et al., Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival, 2d ed. (Boca Raton, FL: Lewis Publishers, 1999), p. 8;
17. citing Herman Daly and John B. Cobb, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon, 1989), p. 111.
18. Prugh, Natural Capital, p. 19.
19. Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend, introduction to Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 51.
20. As cited in George Myerson and Yvonne Rydin, The Language of Environment: A New Rhetoric (London: University College, 1996), p. 41.
21. William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977), p. 9.
22. Laferriere and Stoett, IR Theory and Ecological Thought, pp. 42-46.
23. Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, p. 222.
24. Ibid., p. 223.
25. Tim Hayward, "International Political Theory and the Global Environment: Some Critical Questions for Liberal Cosmopolitans," Journal of Social Philosophy 40, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 276-295, 276-277.
26. Hayward, "Critical Questions," p. 285.
27. Dennis C. Pirages and Paul R. Ehrlich, Ark II: Social Response to Environmental Imperatives (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 163.
28. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, "Millennial Ecology: The Apocalyptic Narrative from Silent Spring to Global Warming," in Carl Herndl and Stuart Brown, eds., Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 21-45.
29. Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972), p. 24.
30. Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought, 2d ed. (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 25.
31. For a useful clarification of the use of the terms overshoot and collapse in Meadows, The Limits to Growth, see Jorgen Randers, "Global Collapse: Fact or Fiction?" Futures 40 (2008): 853-864. The concept of carrying capacity has engendered much debate in ecological circles.
32. See David Price, "Carrying Capacity Reconsidered," Population and Environment 21, no. 1 (September 1999): 5-26.
33. For instance, the World Wildlife Fund's calculations on our "ecological footprint" suggests that "Humanity's demand on the planet's living resources ⋯ now exceeds the planet's regenerative capacity by about 30 percent": Living Planet Report 2008, 2, www.footprintnetwork.org.
34. Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, Limits to Growth: The Thirty-Year Update (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004), p. 5.
35. E.g., Robert Costanza, Lisa J. Graumlich, and Wil Steffen, eds., Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
36. R. Beddoe et al., "Overcoming Systemic Roadblocks to Sustainability: The Evolutionary Redesign of Worldviews, Institutions, and Technologies," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106 (2009), pp. 2483-2489.
37. Ophuls, Politics of Scarcity, p. 227.
38. Dobson, Green Political Thought, pp. 149-158.
39. Ted Robert Gurr, "On the Political Consequences of Scarcity and Economic Decline," International Studies Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1985): 51-75, at 54.
40. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, "Energy and Economic Myths," Southern Economic Journal 41, no. 3 (1975); online at http://www.eoearth.org/ article/Energy-and-economic-myths-(historical).
41. Hayward, "Some Critical Questions," p. 287.
42. "Shell Chief Fears Oil Shortage in Seven Years," Times Online, January 25, 2008; http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/wef/ article3248484.ece
43. Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 4.
44. Ibid., p. 198 (original emphasis).
45. Ibid., p. 50.
46. Randers, "Global Collapse," p. 856.
47. On the "neoclassical" approach that dominates environmental (though not ecological) economics, see Michael Jacobs, "The Limits to Neo-classicism: Toward an Institutional Environmental Economics," in Michael Redclift and Ted Benton, eds., Social Theory and the Global Environment (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 67-91.
48. The argument for peak oil has been well developed in David Good-stein, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil (New York: Norton, 2004);
49. Kenneth Deffeyes, Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005);
50. Richard Heinberg, The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2005);
51. Jeremy Leggett, The Empty Tank: Oil, Gas, Hot Air, and the Coming Global Financial Catastrophe (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. 1-64;
52. Jeff Rubin, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization (Toronto: Random House, 2009).
53. Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (London: Norton, 2008), p. 21.
54. Robert L Hirsch, Roger Bezdek, and Robert Wendling, Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management (US Department of Energy, February 2005), p. 4.
55. Ibid., p. 64.
56. Leggett, Empty Tank, pp. 191-193.
57. James Hamilton, "The Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Spring 2009); www.brookings.edu/economics/bpea/bpea.aspx.
58. This point is widely debated, of course. The tendency to blame it on speculators, rather than "fundamentals," seems to me a manifestation of our preference to attribute human ecological problems to human agency. Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times in 2008, seems to agree; "The Oil Nonbubble," http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/opinion/12krugman.html.
59. Rubin, A Whole Lot Smaller, p. 23.
60. Graham Turner, "A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality," CSIRO Discussion Paper Series 2008-09, June 2008; http://www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf.
61. Dennis L. Meadows, Donella H. Meadows and Jorgen Randers, Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 1993), p. xv.
62. Georgescu-Roegen, "Energy and Economic Myths."
63. Richard Heinberg, "Reasons to Be Cheerful," at http://www.newforesttransition.org/index.php?/archives/262-Reasons-to-be- cheerful-Richard-Heinberg.html. Heinberg's views on the postpeak future resonate with the radical libertarianism of Murray Bookchin;
64. see Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986 [1971]);
65. and The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982).
66. Mark Jaccard, "Peak Oil and Market Feedbacks: Chicken Little versus Dr. Pangloss," in Thomas Homer-Dixon, ed., Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future (New York: Random House, 2009), p. 113.
67. From George Basalla, "Energy and Civilization," in C. Starr and P. C. Ritterbush, eds., Science, Technology, and the Human Prospect (New York: Pergamon, 1980);
68. cited in Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History (Boulder: Westview, 1994), p. 51. Smil more recently argued that the world's expectations for the transition from fossil fuels are unrealistic.
69. See "Moore's Curse and the Great Energy Delusion," The American, November 19, 2008; www.theamerican.com.
70. Richard Duncan, "World Energy Production, Population Growth, and the Road to Olduvai Gorge," Population and Environment 22, no. 5 (May-June 2001).
71. C. A. S. Hall, R. Powers, and W. Schoenberg, "Peak Oil, EROI, Investments, and the Economy in an Uncertain Future," in David Pimentel, ed., Renewable Energy Systems: Environmental and Energetic Issues (London: Elsevier, 2008), pp. 113-136.
72. See Janice L. Dickinson, "The People Paradox: Self-esteem Striving, Immortality ideologies, and Human Response to Climate Change," Ecology and Society 14, no. 1 (2009): 34; at http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss1/ art34/
73. Cases in Nigeria, Ecuador, Canada, and elsewhere give ample evidence that there are "natural limits" to the protection of human rights. See Michael Watts, "Human Rights, Violence, and the Oil Complex," Economies of Violence, Working Paper no. 2, University of California, Berkeley, 2004.
74. James McCarthy and Scott Prudham, "Neoliberal Nature and the Nature of Neoliberalism," Geoforum 35 (2004): 275-283, at 278.
75. Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 247.
76. Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 47.
77. John J. Ikenberry, "Liberal Hegemony and the Future of American Post-war Order," in T. V. Paul and John A. Hall, eds., International Order and the Future of World Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 123-145, at 137.
78. McCarthy and Prudham, "Neoliberal Nature," p. 279.
79. Jonathon Porritt, Seeing Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 44;
80. cited in Ted Benton, "Marxism and Natural Limits: An Ecological Critique and Reconstruction," New Left Review 178 (November/December 1989): 51-86, at 52 (n. 1).
81. The annual game between Russia and Europe over natural gas supplies is indicative. For a broader picture of Russia's situation, see Adam N. Stulberg, Well-oiled Diplomacy: Strategic Manipulation and Russia's Energy Statecraft in Eurasia (Albany: State University of NY Press, 2007).
82. The history of the geopolitics of oil is well presented in Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991).
83. Hongyi Harry Lai, "China's 'Oil Diplomacy': Is It a Global Security Threat?" Third World Quarterly 28, no. 3 (2007): 519-537.
84. Tainter, Collapse, p. 215.
85. On the prospects for a rise of fascism in the era of peak oil, see Legget's thoughts on the British National Party presence at an oil-depletion meeting in Edinburgh in 2005: Leggett, Empty Tank, pp. 137-140.
86. See www.oildepletionprotocol.org.
87. See www.irena.org.
88. Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004);
89. Dilip Hiro, Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources (New York: Nation Books, 2007);
90. Daniel Moran and James A. Russell, eds., Energy Security and Global Politics: The Militarization of Resource Management (London: Routledge, 2009).
91. Susanne Peters, "Coercive Western Energy Security Strategies: 'Resource Wars' as a New Threat to Global Security," Geopolitics 9, no. 1 (2004): 187-212;
92. Lutz Kleveman, The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).
93. Michael T. Klare, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), p. 7.
94. Edward Rhodes, "American Grand Strategy: The Imperial Logic of Bush's Liberal Agenda," Policy 19, no. 4 (2003): 29-48;
95. David Long, "Liberalism, Imperialism, and Empire," Studies in Political Economy 78 (Autumn 2006): 201-223.
96. Michael Klare, "The Futile Pursuit of 'Energy Security' by Military Force," Brown Journal of World Affairs 13, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2007): 139.
97. Marc Neocleous, "The Problem with Normality: Taking Exception to the 'Permanent Emergency,'" Alternatives 31, no. 2 (2006): 191-213, at 206.
98. Ibid., 208.
99. For a foundational argument, one might look to Jacques Derrida's "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" in Drucille Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 3-67.
100. Anne Chisholm, Philosophers of the Earth: Conversations with Ecologists (London: Sidgewick & Jackson, 1972), frontispiece.
101. Ramachandra Guha, "Lewis Mumford, the Forgotten American Environmentalist: An Essay in Rehabilitation," in David Macauley, ed., Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology (London: Guilford Press, 1996), pp. 209-228, at 224. Guha describes Mumford's histories as "essentially ecological histories of the rise of modern Western civilization."
102. Tainter, Collapse, pp. 213-216.
103. Ronnie Lipshutz recently made a rather ironic reference to an "Or-wellian liberalism" characterized by extreme surveillance in conjunction with the containment of new forms of property, including thoughts. His paper was presented at the same conference panel as an earlier version of this article.
104. See Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) for a study that is relevant to the concerns of this article.
105. For elaboration of this point, see Shane Mulligan, "Heads in the Sand? Or, Why Don't Governments Talk About Peak Oil?" guest post for The Oil Drum, January 5, 2010; http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6100.
106. Ugo Bardi, "Peak Oil: The Four Stages of a New Idea," Energy 34 (2009): 323-326.
107. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An introduction to the Study of International Relations, ed. Michael Cox (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 27.
108. Shane Mulligan, "Questioning (the Question of) Legitimacy in IR: A Reply to Jens Steffek," European Journal of International Relations 10, no. 3 (2004): 475-484.