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Nature is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate. Despite countless pledges and summits, we remain on course for a catastrophic 3 degrees Celsius of warming. In a world of immense wealth, billions still live below the poverty line and on the frontlines of environmental breakdown. Increasingly, the world is waking up to this reality, but are the ‘solutions’ being proposed really solutions? In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the escalating plunder of the natural world under financial capitalism, and exposes the fatal biases that have shaped climate and environmental policymaking. Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, vested interests and environmental governance, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish. The book explains what is wrong with carbon pricing, off-setting and asset management’s recent interest in all things environmental. Both honest and optimistic, The value of a whale asks us – in the face of crisis – what we really value.
2 ‘I am not afraid to die’: contemporary environmental crisis fiction and the post-theory era Louise Squire For an evanescent moment within the history of the Earth, Homo sapiens sought its own exclusion from the laws of the universe. No matter the wider cost, humanity would overcome its mortal limitations. The outcome, however, of this refusal to die – this rejection of natural laws – turns out to be death itself, since the abuses of planetary resources upon which death denial relies cause the promise of death to rebound upon humanity. Or as Claire Colebrook
The Autonomous House Project ( AHP ) model was displayed for the first time in 1972 at the annual conference of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in London, whose theme was, “Designing for Survival: architects and the environmental crisis.” (See Figures 85 and 86 .) This public meeting was a continuation of the celebrated 1972 Stockholm conference on the environment and the Club of Rome publication, The Limits to Growth (1972), which introduced the concept of sustainable development. 2 The discussions during the annual RIBA conference
was compiled. The front cover featured a picture of the Earth from space. It was a place of life surrounded by a pitch-black void. Humanity’s future was at stake. To the inhabitants of Sweden in 1972, the threat to the planet and to humanity was nothing new. Anyone who regularly read newspapers, listened to the radio, or watched the television news would have encountered the global environmental crisis. School pupils had participated in educational days and watched documentary films. A myriad of small environmental
idea that the human denial of death has in part contributed to our approach to environmental crisis. She considers the possibilities for literary critique to account for these difficulties, focusing on contemporary environmental crisis fiction. The novels discussed are the three books of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013), Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007). Each of these books explores the notion of death-facing as an ecological imperative. She reads this fiction as being in dialogue with the
In the autumn of 1967, scientific warnings of an impending global catastrophe were nothing new. Knowledge that humanity posed a threat to its own survival had been circulating throughout the postwar period. At first the focus lay on the dramatic threat of a nuclear war causing total annihilation. In parallel with this, equally serious discussions began about overpopulation and dwindling natural resources. Knowledge about a global environmental crisis emerged in, and was shaped by, this broader historical context
completely different scope and character. They make it possible to visualize and analyse significant parts of the grassroots activity that followed the major breakthrough of environmental issues in Sweden. From this material, a motley group of actors, organizations, ideas, and initiatives emerges. The letters hence demonstrate that knowledge about the environmental crisis was circulating in Swedish society. Environmental issues were not only being discussed at the Government Offices and the Karolinska Institute. Interest among
disaster-zones, as well as the more familiar regions of environmental crisis. Cultural alchemy The great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1872: ‘We Americans are all cuckoos, we make our homes in the nests of other birds.’ 2 The statement articulates a primary new-world exclusion: Native Americans are not included in the category of ‘we Americans’, who are all cuckoos. Like much great cultural and mythic work, this statement addresses a relation of power and positions it beyond human control. Here a
. Sven Fagerberg’s review is one of the clearest examples of how knowledge about a looming environmental crisis and Hans Palmstierna’s future-orientated expertise were being co-created in the autumn of 1967. However, Fagerberg was far from being alone in his assessment. On the contrary, at the beginning of December there was great unanimity in the Swedish public arena that Palmstierna was a knowledgeable, pragmatic, and action-focused environmental debater. In the liberal broadsheet Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning
environmental crisis requires an interventionist Keynesian response. There have been influential calls for a Green New Deal or simply green Keynesianism. There is a constituency for change in economic interests and a powerful social movement, but there are also dangers in a lowest-common-denominator approach which ‘greenwashes’ insufficiently radical reform, which can be undone by the dynamics of capitalist and inter-state rivalry. The final section argues that reining in capital in more consistently Keynesian ways would require a leap of political faith which probably goes