Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
they suggest that a solution to the crisis needs to be searched outside of either
capitalism, industrialism or both 13 .
The social existence of EM and its work in and on reality are reason enough to
look more closely at what EM rationality assumes. Two claims can be identified:
(a) reactive technologies are and ought to be substituted by proactive technologies
and (b) the government shall enable the market to allocate environmental goods
efficiently . Implementing these moves would lead to win-win solutions . The EM
rationality goes together with the discourse of Sustainable Development. The lat-
ter can be seen as a form of EM and has become the key discourse through which
environmental problems are discussed since the 1990s 14 .
EMT reflects upon EM and asserts that nature and capitalism (including its in-
stitutions) can and are in the process of being reconciled . Proponents of EMT ar-
gue (wrongly) that the environment is becoming autonomous from the economic
sphere 15 . 'Green' states - they are postulated by EMT - cannot become a reality
without abolishing the capitalist mode of production. The trap into which EMT
falls is that it construes instances of tiny considerations of the environment as
'green societies' becoming true 16 . Such instances might be analytically distinct
from ignoring the environment altogether but are clearly not enough to change the
essence of capitalism 17 . The gain of EMT is that it provides a quite good concep-
tualisation of the rationality of EM. The theory implies that EM has agents who
put it into practice. Unfortunately, EMT does not explicitly theorise its individual
agents, i.e., the individual meaningful actions.
Does Julian's construction of the recycling network fit into the rationality of
EM? We find that Julian in fact enlarged what one could conceptualise as a green
market; he drew other business actors into the recycling market in order to comply
with his task. Thus, this aspect of construction meets the rationality of EM. Fur-
thermore, this way of constructing a recycling network not only increases the
market but also approaches the recycling issue qualitatively in market terms. With
EM we can conceptualise the situation preceding recycling as one in which the
material 'glass waste' was not integrated as a resource into the market 18 . EM sug-
gests that such waste merely has to be processed (technically) and henceforth can
be brought into use again. Thus, the construction of the recycling network also
constitutes an approach to solving problems technically. Overall, then, Julian did a
good job in terms of EM: he reformed his organisation (such that it started recy-
cling) and induced similar changes in other organisations (integrating them into
13 See e.g. Enzensberger (1996) or Pepper (2005).
14 Cf. i.e. Redclift and Benton (1994), Benton (1996), von Weizäcker (1999), Mol (2001).
15 See e.g. Mol (2000) vs. Pellow et al. (2000).
16 Schnaiberg, Pellow and Weinberg (2000, p. 15)
17 Marx (1968, see especially Chapter 4 and 5) showed that capitalism is inherently expan-
sive and exploitive. More recently this has been re-discussed by i.e. Li and Hersh (2002,
p. 196) as well as Clark and York (2005, pp. 406-407).
18 The history of glass had included re-use and recycling. In the situation preceding Julian's
activities, glass along with all other materials out of place were transported to landfills.
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