{"id":6539,"date":"2016-01-11T08:03:44","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T08:03:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=6539"},"modified":"2016-01-11T08:03:44","modified_gmt":"2016-01-11T08:03:44","slug":"after-sustainability-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2016\/01\/11\/after-sustainability-what\/","title":{"rendered":"After sustainability \u2013 what?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Routledge journal,\u00a0Global Discourse<\/em>, has a call for papers in a special issue<\/a> devoted to the implications of climate change. \u00a0It's edited by John Foster. \u00a0The descriptor begins:<\/p>\n

It is no longer completely out of court among thinkers and scholars concerned with environmental issues to argue that the \u2018sustainability\u2019 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\u00a0Society and Natural Resources\u00a0(Benson and Craig, 2014) is bluntly entitled \u2018The End of Sustainability\u2019. Authors as diverse as Clive Hamilton (2010), \u00a0Tim 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 \u2018anthropocene\u2019 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n

...<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The special issue calls for papers to explore a range of related questions, including:<\/p>\n