Denial or diversity? creating new spaces for sustainable development

Abstract

This paper assesses the current position of environmental social science from a perspective which locates it within an increasingly contested set of conditions. These are associated with the politics and economics of denial, on the one hand, but the increasing legitimacy of environmental vulnerabilities and resource depletion on the other. In this context it is important to assess how elements of ecological modernization—as diverse alternatives and more spatially embedded, resource-based frameworks—can be established and developed in different regions. The paper argues that environmental social science sits in the juxtaposition of increasing environmental and social vulnerability and the economics and politics of its denial. This context needs to encourage more critical treatment of alternatives to the conventional ‘treadmill of production’ model while situating these in their contested and competitive relationships with it. This could contribute to a more effective and normative ‘sustainability science’. More specifically, it is argued that it is in the ‘newly-industrializing’ regions—such as the agri-food regions of China and Brazil—that the ‘battleground’ between the ‘treadmill of production’ and carbon-intensive models and the alternative sustainable development models are particularly intense. This argument suggests a re-interpretation of environmental uneven development in ways which assess both conventional and alternative resource frameworks at the same time and in parallel scales and spaces.

Keywords:

• Denial
• vulnerability
• alternative agri-food
• uneven development
• ecological modernisation

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the comments received by anonymous referees to the earlier draft of the paper, and to the verbal comments received in presenting these ideas in the Cardiff School of City and Regional Planning 40th Anniversary Professorial Lecture Series, and at the American Association of Geographers Annual Conference in Chicago, March 2006.

Notes

1. By the ‘economies and politics of denial’ here I am referring to the increasingly complex ways in which state agencies, corporate interests and many academic and scientific groups continue to relegate even if they begin to recognise the dual problems of resource depletion and environmental vulnerability. Some recent examples of this ‘denial’ are recorded with regarded to Hurrican Katrina.