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Placing the Anthropocene: league tables and urban environmental
competition
Posted on 8 October 2011 by mswaber
You may be interested in this recently produced league table of air pollution that has been reported
to-breath/.
In many ways league tables like this fit perfectly with the logic of what Bernstein (2000)
has described as liberal environmentalism: create a competitive landscape for environmental
innovation and the places that produce the best quality environment will benefit as people vote
with their feet and move to them. These arguments have recently been articulated in Matthew E.
Kahn's (2010) liberal environmental manifesto Climatopolis: How Cities will Thrive in a Hotter
Future. According to Kahn (a direct descendent of the Chicago School of Economics) climate change
represents not so much a threat but a new competitive landscape upon which 'green entrepreneurs'
can carve out a new ecological circuit of capital accumulation (presumably to ease the crisis-ridden
primary and second circuits associated with consumable goods and property, respectively). This
cornucopian vision of the environmental future necessitates a global market place (to ensure that
investment can flow en masse to the most environmentally innovative places) and continued
economic growth (to ensure that the incentive for innovation is secured by the promise of wealth).
There are clear problems with the liberal environmentalism embodied in the work of Kahn
and expressed in environmental league tables. At one level, they say little of who is able to move
between places (largely a group of what Cresswell (2006) calls the 'kinetic elite'), or of how wealthy
communities tend to displace polluting activities downstream, downwind and increasingly offshore.
They are also based upon the assumption that technologies can/will solve our current environmental
problems. It is not that I don't believe in the power of technological innovation, but rarely are
technological developments produced in direct response to socio-ecological needs, or wielded by
those who most need them. In a recent article for the International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, Hodson and Marvin (2009) describe the emergence of a new era of urban ecological
security. Urban ecological security describes the processes in and through which already powerful
places (such as New York, London and Tokyo) are using their wealth to create enclaves of security
within which they can ward off the worst effects of climatic threats and energy insecurities. It seems
to me that liberal environmentalism is much more likely to lead to the production of an archipelago
of environmental privilege than a promised land of ecological security for all. Liberal environ-
mentalism is built upon the necessary abandonment of certain (often disadvantaged) places as part
of the uneven development of a new ecological circuit of capital accumulation.
Key readings
Hodson, M. and Marvin, S. (2009) 'Urban ecological security: A new paradigm?', International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research, 33(1): 193-215
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