Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
strengthening of the ways we can be responsible for each other. He writes of the
need for a radicalized pragmatism and an experimentalism that will 'turn society
into a mirror of the imagination' (2007: 172) while recognizing the value of openness,
repudiating 'the illusion of neutrality' and emphasizing a commitment to 'development
through difference' (2007: 179 and 180).
Unger identifies strategies for a high-energy politics with high-energy engagement
in forms of direct and representative democracy, and a self-organizing civil society.
This would involve a disaggregation of consolidated property rights, a progressive
redistribution of assets, a renewed relationship between economic classes, a 'jumbling'
of social roles and the development of a caring economy alongside the productive
one. Of primary importance is the lifting of the 'ordinary lives of ordinary people
to a higher level of capacity and intensity' through new forms of human association,
lifelong learning and the revaluing of labour and co-operative activity organized
between small and medium-sized producers. A radicalization of competition and
meritocracy would also occur. Democracy has alternative futures which, through
combining insight with practice, will enable us to escape from assumptions of
invulnerability. Empowerment means our opening up to others, which may cause a
heightened vulnerability but will enable us to imagine, give, receive or refuse love.
For Unger, empowerment and vulnerability are the guarantors of change, and the
condition and possibilities for change at institutional and individual levels:
In everyday life, the chief expression of the practice of unprotection is the
willingness to endure the risks that every innovation imposes on the established
form of cooperation, and the determination to press for a higher form of
cooperation: one that is more hospitable to repeated and accelerated innovation
and to the narrowing of the gap between the activities that take the context for
granted and the activities that challenge and change it.
(2004: 117)
As critics have noted, however, Unger fails to cover many things with his broad
theoretical and rhetorical brush, including gender, poverty, race, militarization and
the environment. He also lacks any notion of a critical or political adversary, which
renders his approach to political agency, at least for Anderson (1992: 148), basically
indeterminate: 'intimations of harmony discount considerations of strategy, in a
reminder of the other side of the utopian tradition'. Nonetheless, Anderson continues,
with Unger 'something new has occurred: a philosophical mind out of the Third
World turning the tables, to become synoptist and seer of the First'.
Working on the inside: 'The death of environmentalism'
and third generation environmentalism
A significant amount of political lobbying, campaigning, publishing and research
is undertaken by 'think-tanks'. Some are corporate-sponsored and others funded
from a variety of sources, including public-sector grants and membership subscrip-
tion. In Europe and the US, Forum for the Future, New Economics Foundation, the
Green Alliance/E3G, The Natural Step and the Sierra Club critically engage with
environmental and sustainability issues. In 2004 the Breakthrough Institute secured
a significant degree of publicity and generated considerable debate when it published
