Planet Dialectics: Explorations in Environment and Development

ISBN-13: 9781783603404 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 248 str.

Wolfgang Sachs

Opis

Amid the hubbub of daily life and the seemingly endless bounty of capitalism, it s easy to forget that all human action must be played out within our planet s limitations. Any hope of infinityof infinite growth, infinite prosperity, and the likeis an illusion. Yet that very acknowledgment of the earth s 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 West s 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 world s people. Only by taking back the concepts of sustainability and justice, and acknowledging that they demand wholesale change to the West s growth-obsessed economics, can we make real change for good in the world."

Spis treści

Foreword to the Critique Influence Change Edition - Susan George Preface to the First Edition Part I: The Archaeology of the Development Idea 1. The Archaeology of the Development Idea Part II: 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 III: 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 IV: 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