Economic Vitality in a Transition to Sustainability

Economic Vitality in a Transition to Sustainability, by Neva Goodwin
This paper is part of series with what seems to me a most unpromising title: Growing the Economy Through Global Warming Solutions. Ignore that, and the first couple of obligatory blah blah pages – the good stuff is in the body of the paper itself. It [...]

George Monbiot on climate change: Why we need a 90% cut in CO2 emissions, and how we can achieve it

In his book Heat, George Monbiot looks at the possibility of a climate change catastrophe. He argues that a 2°C rise in global average temperature would precipitate such a disaster, as it would cause many ecosystems to begin to collapse. They would become CO2 emitters rather than the CO2 sinks that they are at present, [...]

What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

This movie deserves a long, thoughtful, elegantly composed review. Oh well. What I can deliver is a brief cheer: “Watch this movie!”
What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire is not Just Another Eco-tastrophe Movie. It’s a personal, poetic, and challenging cultural analysis of the mess Western and rich capitalist societies are [...]

Understanding the logic of capitalism: Efficiency, innovation … and inequality

Property rights in the means of production are the institutional basis of capitalism. While there is no economic theory that supports the need for the unequal distribution of property in a capitalist economy, inequality seems to be built into capitalism. As Christine Greenhalgh writes in an article published in 2005 in the Cambridge Journal of [...]

A vision for the sustainable city: urbanisation with civilisation

Some greens may imagine the sustainable society to be a verdant rural paradise of small agricultural communities and market towns peopled by farmers and artisans. This Romantic dream is a delusion. While in 1800, only 3% of the world’s population lived in cities or urban areas, now, in 2008, the figure is 50%, and it [...]

The news media and climate change: Casting light on the contradictions of consumer capitalism

This is a general election year here in Aotearoa New Zealand and the election will hold the much of the attention of New Zealand’s political junkies. In some respects, though, even for New Zealanders the US presidential election taking place in November is of far more consequence.
I’m thinking in particular of the issue of global [...]

Enough Already! – Part One

A response to: Ronald Inglehart, Globalization and Post-Modern Values, The Washington Quarterly, Winter 2000, pp.215-228. (See here for the wider project).
Conclusions from the study:
1. Reported happiness rises with income up to about U.S.$10,000, at which point it gives no apparent further benefit. (appears to me from the graph that rapidly diminishing marginal returns to income [...]

Passion, compassion, and irony: finding solid ground for activism in a world of unsustainability, injustice, complicity, and paradox.

A summary of and brief response to: “The Post-ecologist Condition: Irony as Symptom and Cure”, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Environmental Politics, Vol. 16, No. 2, 337-355, April 2007.
It seems at first a most unlikely thought: irony as a basis for environmental politics. But according to sociologist Bronislaw Szerszynski, irony as a way of being in the world [...]

The sense of place in environmental protest: Insights from County Mayo, Ireland

Environmental protest very often appears in localised forms: grassroots opposition to ‘development’ projects that grows out of an intuitive sense that a particular project is inappropriate. Such locally based campaigns are almost always accused of selfish or reactionary ‘nimbyism’, simply because local groups only appear to be interested in the locality. It seems that the [...]