Hence the need for Marxist political economy, updated to become a geographical-historical materialism. One of the more disappointing aspects of the book is the failure to engage with recent Marxist debates on "the ecological challenge.
In his discussion of the importance of the Frankfurt School's contribution to the debate concerning social- environmental relations, Harvey does not explore recent Marxist views on the "domination of nature" thesis such as John O'Neill's excellent monograph Ecology, Policies and Politics , Routledge.
For that matter, he doesn't really engage in a debate with Benton's thought- provoking "ecological critique and reconstruction" of central aspects of Marxism in his Natural Relations , Verso , or Hay ward's more recent attempt to develop an "eco-Marxist" political ecology in his Ecological Thought: An Introduction , Polity.
Harvey's critique of "sustainability" and "sustainable development," was for this reader rather one-sided and not entirely convincing. While one can agree with him that "What is then evident is that all debate about ecoscarcity, natural limits, overpopulation, and sustainability is a debate about the preservation of a particular social order rather than a debate about the preservation of nature per se" p. For example, the point is that in the debate about sustainability at least in recent and more imaginative aspects "the social order" itself is not "given" and sustainability is understood in large part to rest on the idea that it requires seeing a different social order as central to what sustainability is all about.
In short, there is always the possibility of "slippage" and the possibility of radicalizing state approaches to "environmental management," as he himself notes in reference to "ecological modernization" and its political potential for the "environmentalism of the poor" chapter At the same time, many radical ecologists reject the Malthusian emphasis on overpopulation, preferring to draw a distinction and an extremely important one politically and morally between "ecoscarcity" and "overpopulation.
His simple but powerful claim is that a dialectically informed view of social and environmental change and politics is one that has as an animating principle the idea that the "environment is where you live" and that the focus ought be on "environment" and not just "nature" understood usually to refer to the non-human world.
As he puts it, "The created environments of an urbanizing world An extremely practical reason to focus on the urban, human, built environment is that since more and more of the world's population will live in urbanized areas, "The qualities of urban living in the twenty-first century will define the qualities of civilization itself p.
This is related to another practical, political consideration namely, that such an urban focus but one that does not exclude the "non-human" world is a vitally important step in creating an ecologically informed politics that can appeal to the urban dispossessed and the working classes.
The U. It is difficult to do justice no pun intended to this excellent, thought-provoking and challenging book, in such a short review. And while Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference does not "sum up" Harvey's thoughts on social-environmental politics a subject on which he has been writing for over 30 years , it is a fitting "milestone" in his continuing refinement of a Marxist approach to the place of ecological concerns within anti-capitalist political economy.
New York: The Guilford Press, The essays collected by David Macauley in Minding Nature address issues of philosophy, ecology and democracy squarely, and with a depth and breadth of history and theory that actually does these subjects justice.
Minding Nature a contribution to the CNS and Guilford Press Democracy and Ecology book series is a fine anthology to supplement original works by the philosophers in a seminar format, or in a survey course on ecological philosophy. Uniformly, the essays contain accurate, careful, and mercifully in the case of the phenomenologists brief summaries of the philosophical stances of thinkers as diverse as Heidegger, Carson and Bookchin.
Each thinker is treated sympathetically, and not polemically. They are each discussed in their social and intellectual milieus before thoughtful critiques are made. Yet with this emphasis on philosophical moderns, the shadow of Aristotle looms large, particularly in the book's middle essays on Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas and Ernst Bloch.
The order of the essays is roughly based on the chronological order of the lives of its philosopher subjects. Given the depth and breadth of the essays, Macauley could perhaps have employed other orderings to good effect; for example, they could have been clustered around themes such as technology, ecological ethics, deep ecology, Utopian impulses in green thought, and political ecology.
The essays are that thorough. But ultimately, the real point of the essay's order is to point to the emerging role of historical materialism as an important intellectual method in ecological philosophy, a conscious boosting of the project to create a true political ecology. Both are Utopians and their contrasts — Hobbes with his dark views of human nature and life as "nasty, brutish and short" and Fourier with his eroto-socialistic and liberatory vision — set forth the stakes of elaborating an ecological philosophy.
Roelofs contribution is a well-written romp, nicely punctuating this pairing. After Fourier, however, the reader scales the imposing phenomenological edifice of Martin Heidegger, assayed by Michael Zimmerman.
Zimmerman's effort illuminates the potential dystopian logic of deep ecology using the example of Heidegger and his affinities with German Nazism. At the same time, he points to ways in which deep ecologists can deepen their analysis and reach out to other kinds of ecological activists to avoid Heidegger's problems.
Probably one of the most synthetic and original thinkers examined here is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, discussed by David Abrams. Merleau- Ponty was one of the best of the 20th century's phenomenologists, whose place in ecological thought is secure for having developed a non- Cartesian approach to science and philosophy.
Mind you, you may have to be in an altered mental state to grasp phenomenology, but Abrams' essay manages to integrate Merleau-Ponty's views of "the things themselves" with a "clarified epistemology" for ecology itself as a way of knowing nature. Alas, Merleau-Ponty died young at 53 in Ramachandra Guha's appreciation of Lewis Mumford highlights Mumford's prescience, and Mumford's relative obscurity stresses the narrowness with which Americans often construe the appropriate bounds of environmental politics.
Garb's essay sympathetically and compellingly demonstrates the power and limitations of Carson's choices. Critical theory, with its roots in Marx, Freud, and the madnesses of the 20th century, comes in for treatment as well in Minding Nature. Utopia reappears in Henry T. Blanke's essay on Herbert Marcuse, whose influence on the s American student movements was profound. And Joel Whitebook's essay, reprinted in the book with an author's preface, adeptly reconstructs Jiirgen Habermas' reconstruction of critical theory in order to establish a more autonomous, less instrumental rationality for nature in critical theory.
After summarizing Bookchin's telos of domination and hierarchy as the radical roots of environmental destruction by modems, Rudy and Light note Bookchin's ecological dialectical method, but aver that Bookchin "does not have a rich materialist theory to link his dialectics and ethics with practical politics.
Bookchin's Utopia of direct democracy and ecological community, argue Rudy and Light, founders on the shoals of a naive political strategy, one ignoring the fuller history of how capitalist institutions dominate society and nature. Throughout Minding Nature, the contributors presume that thought and action are intimately related, and the essays by Macauley on Hannah Arendt and John Ely on Ernst Bloch establish a place for Aristotle at the "left" side of the pantheon of green thinkers. Minding Nature is best seen as a whole, as a comprehensive statement of key themes in ecological philosophy, of the central problems in building ecological democracy, and what modernity's most attentive thinkers have said on the subject — and how we might do better.
The book's limitations are that it contains no treatments of ecological feminism and no examination of female or Third World thinkers. The philosophers treated here are squarely in the traditions of the West, and the globe's industrial North. Macauley's introductory essay does little more than recount the road map of theses in the book; little attempt is made anywhere in the book to attempt an assessment of viewpoints, to indicate where one argument like phenomenology takes up where critical theory might leave off, and vice-versa.
There is much work done so far in Minding Nature, and more to be done on both of these counts. Herman and John T. O'Connor: Who Owns the Sun?
People, Politics, and the Struggle for a Solar Economy. With the recent discovery of additional oil reserves and the power of OPEC greatly diminished as a result of internal factions, cheap gasoline is ubiquitous. In light of such developments, what — one might wonder — ever happened to the renewable energy movement of the mid- to-late s? In Who Owns the Sun? They argue that ironically "the biggest victory of the oil and coal companies, electric utilities, automakers, and road builders has been to turn their former environmental adversaries into collaborators.
For mainstream American environmental groups, confrontation is out and green capitalism is in" p. According to Berman and O'Connor, the rise of the modern environmental movement and the fallout from the oil crisis provided the impetus for the boom in consumer demand for inexpensive renewable energy. A Harris Poll, for example, found that 94 percent of the American public favored the expansion of solar power.
These developments both sparked the renewable energy movement and led to the inevitable counterattack launched by fossil fuel corporations, nuclear power producers, and energy utilities.
Fossil fuel producers in particular bought out the most promising solar enterprises and subsequently kept them "under control" p. Federal tax credits for the purchase of solar hot water heaters were phased out at the state and national level during Ronald Reagan's first term in office.
And in California, where the movement towards renewable energy had been most widespread, local and state building codes gradually prohibited the installation of "unsightly" solar panels and water heaters.
What in had been a million dollar industry employing 19, workers, two years later had virtually disappeared p. Utilities, dominated by fossil fuel producing corporations and stock-holders demanding increased profits, not surprisingly proved unwilling to champion renewable energy or promote reductions in usage.
For Berman and O'Connor, mainstream environmental support of demand-side management by profit motivated utilities was perhaps the cruelest cut of all. Yet, despite the demise of the renewable energy movement, the logic which spurred its rise in the s remains as salient today as ever. According to Berman and O'Connor this explains the dramatic technological advancements and rebirth of interest in renewable energy despite the disappearance of tax credits for local homeowners and federal funding for research and development.
In fact, contrary to popular perception, solar and wind power have become increasingly less expensive and more efficient. When the cost of environmental degradation air pollution, water pollution, depletion of the ozone layer , deterioration of health standards, and costly tax subsidies to oil, coal, and nuclear producers are calculated, solar and wind energy have become substantially less expensive. For Berman and O'Connor, the revival of the renewable energy movement is essential not only for the long-term health of the environment, but also because renewable energy technology is efficient, inexpensive, and "inherently democratic" p.
Citing developments in the U. Who Owns the Sun? For example, chapter six, "Labor, Solar, and the Energy Economy," concludes that, although workers and unions occasionally took an interest in solar energy and the environment, alliances between labor and environmentalists were "usually little more than a hope and a prayer in the minds of a few dedicated local activists" p. Yet during the s alliances between organized labor and the environmental movement expanded rapidly and succeeded in securing the passage of much workplace health and safety and environmental legislation.
In other words, is it reasonable to assume that local communities can democratize control over energy without fundamentally challenging the free-market paradigm that continues to treat workers, communities, and the environment as expendable commodities?
These qualifications aside, however, Who Owns the Sun? Particularly useful is Herman and O'Connor's insistence that renewable energy has become increasingly inexpensive and efficient and that the main reason that solar and wind power have not expanded more rapidly is the continued dominance and opposition of wealthy multi-national fossil fuel corporations, energy utilities, and their political supporters. Toronto: Lorimer, Jim O'Connor writes: "It is possible to decode the logic of history writing by keying it to the developmental logic of capitalism itself.
The elements of such a history are beginning to emerge; several of its important components already have been written. Martin Melosi 2 has provided rich historical details which Louis Blumberg and Robert Gottlieb have put into a more critical context. Why Environmental History? Washington: Island Press, The reward will undoubtedly be a clearer sense of policy needed to improve the management of resources.
It will likely also lead to a richer understanding of the operation of capitalism itself and therefore to a better understanding of the limitations of public policy initiatives. The final part of the book deploys the foundational arguments the author has established to consider contemporary problems of social justice that have resulted from recent changes in geographical divisions of labor, in the environment, and in the pace and quality of urbanization.
Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference speaks to a wide readership of students of social, cultural and spatial theory and of the dynamics of contemporary life.
It is a convincing demonstration that it is both possible and necessary to value difference and to seek a just social order. Home Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. In "ValuingNature"Harveyshowswith great economy how capitalist relationshipsof production and consumption do com- mand how natureis valuedand what the discursiveconsequencesare.
Part 3, "Space,Time, and Place,"opens the second half of the book, although portions loop back to and advanceaspects of the firsthalf, togetherwith Harvey's thinkingand workof the pastdecadeor so.
On a textuallevel,"time-spacecompres- sion"and expansion seem to be at work producingeffectsthat will strikemany as virtuosity,perhapsothers as being vertiginous,but most readerswill be impressed with the scope, economy, and acuity Harveymanages in re theorizingthese key concepts. The final part, "Justice,Difference,and Politics" threechapters ,bringsup-to- dateHarvey'spioneeringwork on socialjusticeand geography.
Questions of justice and universalityversusparticularismshavebeen madeif anythingmorevexingby the variousturns and criticalcurrentsof the past two decades,but Harveyarguesthat it has become all the more necessaryto answerthe injusticesthat globalcapitalismhas wrought. He offersa numberof instructiveexamples,fromthe chicken-processing- plantfirein Hamlet,North Carolina,to the Zapatistauprisingin Chiapas,to showthe possibilitiesfor linking movementsthat are fightingfor racial,economic, and envi- ronmental,amongotherformsof,justice.
In the finalsectionof the lastchapter,"Pos- sibleUrbanWorlds,"he presents"tenkeyproblemsto be workedupon and a parallel set of myths to be explodedas we considerthe futureof civilizationin a rapidlyur- banizing world" p. Harvey-urbanist, social theorist, geographer,and activ- ist-leaves us with yet anotherset of orderedinsightsand injunctions. And as always, the bottom line here literally,save for a coda by Bertolt Brecht counsels action ratherthan reflection.
Immersion is probablythe only readerresponse that can do justice to the work. New York:FreePress, So begins DavidLowenthal'slatestproject, PossessedbythePast,a book thatexploresthe uses and abusesof heritageand history.
In view of the barrageof culturalproductionssurroundingthe deathof the "people's princess,"Diana,it does appearthatimages,objects,rituals,and sitesof heritagehave invadedthe everydayspacesof many people.
Likeit or not, we had betteraccustom ourselvesto it, for,accordingto Lowenthal,"thelure of heritagenow outpacesother modes of retrieval,"such as history,tradition,memory,myth, or memoir p. Likehis earlierwork, this one focuses on the paradoxicalnature of attitudes and representationsof the past.
Al- though cultural expressionsof heritageare produced to console groups and indi- viduals with the presenceof tradition,the production of heritagecan also resultin xenophobic hatred and chauvinistic nationalisms.
Clarifyingsuch problems and potentials of heritageis a main goal of this book. Another more implicit goal is to criticize academicsfor their negativeand cynical appraisalsof the cult of heritage. Lowenthalsuggests that the heritage industry in and of itself is not "bad";rather, the actions that individualsperformin the name of heritagecan promote tolerance as well as genocidal hatred of other peoples.
According to Lowenthal,academics evaluate heritage using the same criteria they use to judge "good"history,such as verifiableobservation. Yetbecauseheritage and historyaredistinctwaysof knowingthe past,Lowenthalarguesthatsuch assess- ments of heritagearebaseless. Byconfusingthese differentroutesto the past,he continues,criticsforgetthat heritage,no less than history,is a way of understandingour humanizedworlds and that,as such, it providesindividualsand groupswith a sense of identityaswell as the opportunity to forge common stewardshipof a global heritage.
One reasonscholarssometimesfind heritageoffensive,Lowenthalsuggests,is its massappealandvolatilenature.
Indeed,when we look at the historyof heritage,it be- comes clearthatwhatis valued-objects, contexts,and events-is alwaysin flux;hence heritagedefies precise definition. Through cross-culturalcomparisons,Lowenthal investigatesthis elusiveandparadoxicalnatureof heritage. In particular,he examines. Download PDF.
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