Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Luke (2005) suggests some caution. He is concerned with how private-sector
interests have penetrated ecological initiatives, suggesting there is no sure guarantee
that the market will result in better environmental outcomes. What is needed is a
genuine 'public ecology', with new institutions, ideas and organizations that can
balance the competing but often complementary insights of science and private
stockholders with concerns about social equity. The socio-technical order has to be
rebalanced so that commercialized private-sector beliefs and practices of com-
moditization do not fully define the everyday activities of governments, societies and
social systems. It is important to ensure that human civilization and the biosphere
on which it depends are not managed as if they were a capitalist corporate enterprise
writ large. Only thus can a sustainable ecology emerge in which human and non-
human life-forms can flourish.
These debates are important for green politics, since, like any other democratic
practice, good communication, transparency and open dialogue on values and policies
is essential. In
Rethinking Green Politics
, Barry (1999) suggests that it is harder to
secure agreement on philosophical values than it is on the moral rightness of a par-
ticular course of action or policy. People may agree to the same policy for different
reasons. Indeed, green activists, deep and shallow, seem for pragmatic reasons to
increasingly agree on policy. For Barry, this is quite positive, not least because:
green arguments and policy proposals would receive a better hearing by the
public if environmental policies were cast in terms of extended human interests,
rather than emphasizing non-human interests. A clear example of this is
environmental policy based on a moral concern for future generations.
(1999: 26)
The problem with deep ecology, similar in part to the expiring environmentalism
referenced above, is that it gives green politics a 'fundamentalist complexion', creating
a distance between believers and non-believers. So often environmentalists have been
accused of not caring sufficiently about people, leading Barry to suggest that the
most appropriate political approach to sustainable development is to be critical of
anthropocentrism, of existing human-social-environmental relationships, without
denying their significance completely. Science can be enlisted to help 'displace the
arrogance of humanism', to indicate that human beings are both part of, and apart
from, the natural environment. And, simultaneously, scientific knowledge has a role
in fashioning agreements on the nature of ecological problems and in developing
politically acceptable agreements on social-environment issues and actions. Sustainable
development cannot escape politics, but it is to the politics that most attention needs
to be paid even though sustainability and sustainable development may not neces-
sarily imply any specific socio-political 'ism', such as liberalism, conservatism,
libertarianism or socialism. For political geographer Erik Swyngedouw (2007: 27)
'the desired sustainable environmental future has no name and no process, only a
state or condition'. Thus, for journalist Naomi Klein (2013), there is a distinct
political possibility that climate change could usher in 'a disaster capitalism free for
all' as corporations continue to reap the benefit of weakly constrained neoliberal
economic policies. Such allegedly win-win solutions like the UN's Clean Development
Mechanism, the US's Climate Action partnership or the European Union's carbon
trading schemes have not resulted in a reduction in GHG emissions but have seen
large amounts of public money essentially going to private corporations. Many green
