The Routledge journal, Global Discourse, has a call for papers in a special issue devoted to the implications of climate change. It's edited by John Foster. The descriptor begins:
It is no longer completely out of court among thinkers and scholars concerned with environmental issues to argue that the ‘sustainability’ discourse and policy paradigm have failed, and that we are moving into a new era of much bleaker prospects. A recent Policy Review paper in the journal Society and Natural Resources (Benson and Craig, 2014) is bluntly entitled ‘The End of Sustainability’. Authors as diverse as Clive Hamilton (2010), Tim Mulgan (2011), Dale Jamieson (2014) and John Foster (2015) write with the working assumption that climate change, on a scale lying unpredictably between the seriously disruptive and the catastrophic, is no longer something we must find ways of avoiding, but something we are going to have to live with. Parallel to this recognition is the rise to prominence of the ‘anthropocene’ trope (e.g. Hamilton et al, 2015) with its defining acceptance that human beings have decisively altered the atmosphere and set in motion a mass extinction as drastic and now inevitable as any produced by Earth-system changes over geological time.
Retrospectively, indeed, we can begin to see how impotent the sustainability model was always going to prove. Constraining immediate needs (or desires) to serve future needs, the anticipation, interpretation and measurement of which were all to be carried out under pressure of the immediate needs and desires supposedly to be constrained, could never have offered anything but a toolkit of lead spanners, capable only of bending helplessly when any serious force was applied. No wonder we continue to find the nuts and bolts of unsustainable living so stubbornly unshiftable.
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The special issue calls for papers to explore a range of related questions, including:
- Where does widespread denial come from? How will it be overcome?
- What options for political and personal action will remain open in a radically degraded world? What are the conditions of habitability of such a world?
- How will economic and community life, political and social leadership and education be different in such a world?
- What will the geopolitics be? (What might what we now call a refugee ‘crisis’ look like when sub-Saharan Africa becomes uninhabitable? How could we deal with that? What is the role of defence and armaments – including nuclear armaments – in such a world?)
- Are there any grounds for hope that don’t rest on denial?
I expect there will be a flood of papers saying that ESD is the answer – but only from those who've taken their eye off the questions.
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