Going against both the naive techno-optimism of 'greening business as
usual' and a resurgent 'catastrophism' within green thinking and
politics, The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability offers an
analysis of the causes of unsustainability and diminished human
flourishing. It makes a case for seeing that it is profound and
deepening unsustainability and growing injustice that characterizes
the modern world. The books locates the causes of unsustainability in
dominant capitalist modes of production, debt-based consumerism, and
the imperative for orthodox economic growth. It suggests that valuable
insights into the causes of and alternatives to unsustainability can
be found in a critical embracing of human vulnerability and dependency
as both constitutive and ineliminable aspects of what it means to be
human. Rather than seeing invulnerability as the appropriate response,
the book defends resilience, the ability to 'cope with' rather than
'solve' vulnerability, as a more productive strategy. The Politics of
Actually Existing Unsustainability offers a trenchant critique of the
dominant neoclassical economic groupthink, which the book argues must
be seen not as some value-neutral form of 'expert knowledge' but as a
thoroughly ideological 'common sense' that has corrupted and limited
creative ways of thinking about and through our current predicament.
It offers a green political economic alternative which replaces
economic growth with economic security, and views economic growth as
having done its work in the minority, affluent world, which should now
focus on human flourishing and lowering socio-economic inequality and
fostering solidarity as part of that new re-orientation of public
policy. Complementing this green political economy, the book outlines
and develops an account of 'green republicanism', which represents an
innovative and original contribution to debates on the political
responses to the crises and opportunities of global unsustainability.
The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability draws widely from a
range of disciplines and thinkers to produce a highly relevant,
timely, and provocatively original statement on the human predicament
in the twenty-first century.
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Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon Constrained World
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780191628498
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter