An Apparatus of Answers? Ecologism as Ideology in the 21st Century

Abstract

This article examines how far we are, individually and collectively, from “the end of ideology” by mapping how “green living,” after the time when ideology allegedly “ended,” now becomes that political point where ecology can morph into “the ideology of ends.” As popular enthusiasm for realizing green moral and political ends builds, many are turning “ecological” values, thoughts, and practices into an apparatus of answers for the conduct of their everyday life. By transforming such Earth-centered programs for valorizing, thinking, and doing various human activities, proponents of “ecologism” become advocates of representing the Earth as an apparatus of answers on how to live in “the present.” Such seemingly significant markers for ethical guidance in ecologism are then adopted as cohesive clusters of political responses to pressing contemporary social necessities. Once endorsed as such, one supposedly can discover paths to a “sustainable society.” Sustainability's questionable existence or ultimate attainment is rarely doubted, because of the awe with which this apparatus of answers from ecologism is regarded as a changing face of ideology in the 21st century.

Notes

¹ Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 1–27.

² Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009).

³ Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), p. 10.

⁴ Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), p. 11.

⁵ Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 9–11.

⁶ Ulrich Beck, “Critical Theory of World Risk Society: a Cosmopolitan View,” Constellations 16:1 (2009), pp. 3–22.

⁷ See Ulrich Beck, The Risk Society (London: Sage, 1992); Jared Diamond, Collapse (New York: Viking, 2005); and Manfred Steger, Globalisms, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

⁹ Dobson, op. cit.,, pp. 2–3.

⁸ Dobson, op. cit., p. 2.

¹¹ Dobson, op. cit.,

¹⁰ Dobson, op. cit.,, p. 3.

¹² For more discussion, see William Vogt, The Road to Survival (London: Victor Gollancz, 1947); Fairfield Osburn, Our Plundered Planet (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948); Samuel Croway, Jr., Resources and the American Dream (New York: Ronala Press, 1953); Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962); William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1977); Lester Brown, Building a Sustainable Society (Washington, DC: W.W. Norton, 1981); and Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995);

¹³ See Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993); John Barry, Rethinking Green Politics (London: Sage, 1999); and, Timothy W. Luke, Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

¹⁴ Manfred Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

¹⁵ Manfred Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (New York: Oxford University Press)

¹⁶ Dobson, op. cit., p. 73.

¹⁷ See Timothy W. Luke, Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology: Departing from Marx (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

¹⁸ See Gilbert Plass, “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change,” Tellus 7:2 (1956), pp. 140–154; Gilbert Plass, “Carbon Dioxide and the Climate,” American Scientist 44: 3 (1956), pp. 302–316; and, Gilbert Plass, “Carbon Dioxide and the Planet,” Scientific American (2001), 28, pp. 41–47.

¹⁹ Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Signet, 1972).

²⁰ Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989) and Al Gore, Jr., Earth in the Balance (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).

²¹ Al Gore, Jr., An Inconvenient Truth (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006). Also see Steve Vanderheiden, ed. Political Theory and Climate Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

²² Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For more discussion, see Steve Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

²³ Elizabeth Rosenthal, “UN Report Describes Risks of Inaction on Climate Change,” New York Times, November 17, 2007, p. A1.

²⁴ Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-environmental World”, available at: < www.breakthrough.org/images/death_of_environmentalism.pdf>; Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).

²⁵ Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Breakthrough, op. cit., p. 240.

²⁶ Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Breakthrough, op. cit.,, p. 10.

²⁷ Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Breakthrough, op. cit.,

²⁸ Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Breakthrough, op. cit.,, p. 40.

²⁹ Ophuls, op. cit.; Brown, op. cit.

³⁰ Robyn Eckersley, The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 16.

³¹ Robyn Eckersley, The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 16

³² Robyn Eckersley, The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 16, p. 15.

³³ Andrew Dobson and Derek Bell (eds), Environmental Citizenship (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 7. For more discussion, see John Barry and Robyn Eckersley (eds), The Global Ecological Crisis and the Nation-State (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

³⁴ See Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1999); some of these passages also appear in my article. ”A Green New Deal: Why Green, How New and What is the Deal,“ Critical Policy Studies 3:1 (2009), pp. 14–28.

³⁵ T. Nordhaus and M. Shellenberger, Break through: from the death of environmentalism to the politics of possibility (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).

³⁶ Amory B. Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Towards A Durable Piece (New York: Harper Collins, 1977).

³⁷ Amory B. Lovins et al., Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profits, Jobs and Security (Snowmass, CO: Rocky Mountain Institute, 2007).

³⁸ See Amory B. Lovins, Hunter L. Lovins, and Paul Hawken, “A Road Map for Natural Capitalism,” Harvard Business Review, May–June 1999, pp. 145–158.

³⁹ Here one can see Hunter L. Lovins, for example, serving as the guiding executive and intellectual influence behind a naturalized capitalist enterprise that vends consulting and other corporate services. Here see the company operating under the name of “Natural Capitalism, Inc.,” in Eldorado Springs, CO, < http://www.natcapinc.com>.

⁴⁰ See Diane MacEachern, The Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner Green World (New York: Penguin, 2008); Joanna Yarrow, How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint: 365 Simple Ways to Save Energy, Resources, and Money (London: Duncan Baird Publishers, 2008); and David Bach with Hillary Rosner, Go Green, Live Rich: 50 Simple Ways to Save the Earth (and Get Rich Trying) (New York: Broadway Books, 2008). The emphasis on “simple suggestions” for households to save money, or economic efficiency, mimics the easy evidence of individuals professing patriotism. Hence, as Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage Publications, 1995) would observe, loving the Earth also is banalized, routinized, and standardized “simply” by living in a certain fashion; some of these passages also appear in my article. ”A Green New Deal: Why Green, How New and What is the Deal,“ Critical Policy Studies 3:1 (2009), pp. 14–28.

⁴¹ William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way Things Work (New York: North Point Press, 2002).

⁴² William McDonough, The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability (Charlottesville, VA: William McDonough & Partners, 1992).

⁴³ Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (eds), (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 87–104.

⁴⁴ See Timothy W. Luke, “Environmentality as Green Governmentality,” Discourses of the Environment, ed. Eric Darier (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 121–151.

⁴⁵ See William R. Mangun and Daniel Henning, Managing the Environmental Crisis: Incorporating Competing Values in Natural Resource Administration, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 199); and Timothy W. Luke, “Training Eco-Managerialists: Academic Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation,” in Living with Nature: Environmental Discourse as Cultural Politics, ed. Frank Fischer and Maarten Hajer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 103–120.

⁴⁶ For example, Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

⁴⁷ Some of these passages and points also are made in my “A Green New Deal: Why Green, How New, and What is the Deal?,” Critical Policy Studies 3:1 (2009), pp. 14–28.