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...