Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
A happy future for ecological democratization would involve industrial society
giving way to reflexive modernization in a risk society, and the acceptance of
ecological modernization as both a discourse and a set of proven claims about
'tradeoffs' between economy and environment. . . . Matters will look very different
if ecology does not indeed prove good for business in general. Oppositional civil
society becomes more critical in the latter case; but even in the happy scenario,
such opposition is still necessary to prevent a risk-management technocracy.
(1996: 122)
Like Torgenson (1999), Dryzek sees the promise of green politics and democracy
as very much relying on the green public sphere to host various discourses on environ-
mental and sustainability issues, public education, an environmentally aware media,
and public debates and investigations that change political practice. Complementing
Dryzek, O'Riordan (1996) and O'Riordan and Voisey (1998), having expressed some
optimism about the reshaping possibilities of Agenda 21, outline four necessary
implications for a democratic and institutional transition to sustainability:
1
the need for an ecological right to know and guarantees regarding freedom of
information;
2
the sharing of power in an ecological corporatist fashion;
3
controls on the movement of capital to prevent movement that would wreck
economies implementing necessary ecological controls and regulations; and
4
the imposition of limits on capital accumulation that would otherwise lead to
disfiguring and harmful social, economic and political inequalities (and inequities).
The adaptation of key institutions in any transition towards sustainability would
need to articulate clear commitments to:
•
reflect a clear understanding of ecological limits;
•
respond to visions of a more ecologically protective and fair polity;
•
create a sustainable society by negotiated consent, understanding or agreement;
•
measure the effects of policy and actions within ecological and social parameters
linked to agreed norms and targets; and
•
implement policy according to agreed norms and rules located in markets, law,
social values and governmental regulation.
The transition phase will necessarily encompass a wide critical political ecology
that includes an understanding of and clear political engagement with the natural
environment as constituting part of the human moral community. Geography or,
more specifically, the complex intersections between nature, culture, space, place,
landscape, human agency, identity, knowledge, politics, power and economy are
integral components of such a political ecology. In
Places and Regions in the Age
of Globality
, Arturo Escobar (2006b) writes of a spatially grounded understanding
and expression of 'globality' - something that is place-based, enacted and negotiated
at every site or region, and not something imposed through the invisible hand of
global capitalism. Local and indigenous peoples, particularly in the Columbian
Pacific region, have sophisticated ecological knowledges constituting their own notions
of 'globality' which frequently inform their struggles to secure their resources
