Synopses & Reviews
Amid the hubbub of daily life and the seemingly endless bounty of capitalism, its easy to forget that all human action must be played out within our planets limitations. Any hope of infinityof infinite growth, infinite prosperity, and the likeis an illusion. Yet that very acknowledgment of the earths limits, highlighted by environmentalists for decades, has been assimilated almost seamlessly into the rhetoric, dynamics, and power structures of development.
Wolfgang Sachs predicted as much nearly twenty years ago in Planet Dialectics, his now-classic collection of trenchant and elegant explorations of the crisis inherent in the Wests relationship to nature and social justice. Looking specifically at such key concepts as efficiency, speed, globalization, sustainability, and development, Sachs shows that our current economic system is utterly incompatible with true sustainability and the quest for justice among the worlds people. Only by taking back the concepts of sustainability and justice, and acknowledging that they demand wholesale change to the Wests growth-obsessed economics, can we make real change for good in the world.
Synopsis
All effects of human action will inevitably be played out within our planet's limits; any hope of infinity is an illusion. And yet, as Wolfgang Sachs warned almost twenty years ago, environmental concerns have been assimilated into the rhetoric, dynamics and power structures of development.
This classic collection of trenchant and elegant explorations address the crisis of the Western world's relations with nature and social justice. Examining specifically the notion of efficiency - the mantra of our times; speed - the love affair with modernity; globalization - a market inevitability and the juggernaut of history; sustainability - oxymoron as rhetoric; and development - the great undelivered promise, Sachs shows that sustainability, truly conceived, is incompatible with the worldwide rule of economism and that the Western development model is fundamentally at odds with both the quest for justice among the world's people and the aspiration to reconcile humanity and nature.
Synopsis
Behind the public's hope of effective action by governments on environmental issues lies a complex terrain of conceptual confusion, conflicts of interest and philosophical dispute. This is why some of the world's leading environmental thinkers have come together in this volume to probe critically the new language being developed by environmental professionals.
They examine the contradictions inherent in the fashionable notion of sustainable development. They explore the emerging conflicts over the distribution of environmental risks between North and South. And they warn that 'global ecology' seen in a managerial perspective, may degenerate into an effor to redesign and manage Nature in order to keep economic growth going in the face of a rising tide of resource plunder and pollution.
This book seeks to launch a critical debate in order to clarify the issues involves and what might constitute appropriate action.
About the Author
Wolfgang Sachs is a researcher, writer, and university teacher in the field of environment, development and globalization.
Table of Contents
Foreword to the critique influence change edition
Susan George
Preface to the first edition
Bibliographical note
Part 1 The Archaeology of the Development Idea
1. The Archaeology of the Development Idea
Part 2 The Shaky Ground of Sustainability
2. Global Ecology and the Shadow of 'Development'
3. The Gospel of Global Efficiency
4. Environment and Development: The Story of a Dangerous Liaison
5. Sustainable Development: On the Political Anatomy of an Oxymoron
Part 3 In the Image of the Planet
6. One World - Many Worlds?
7. The Blue Planet: On the Ambiguity of a Modern Icon
8. Globalization and Sustainability
Part 4 Ecology and Equity in a Post-development Era
9. Ecology, Justice and the End of Development
10. The Two Meanings of Resource Productivity
11. Speed Limits
12. The Power of Limits: An Inquiry into New Models of Wealth
Bibliography
Index