How Do Environments Come to Matter?

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ORCID

Ingmar Lippert http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1683-6983

Notes

1 ‘Gaia’ references the hypothesis of the self-regulating and interrelating living and dying organisms as shaping the environment on a planetary scale, sustaining the possibility of life on a precarious planet earth (see Lovelock and Margulis, 1974), in which humans cannot be expected to master these planetary processes, but are merely one amongst many organisms shaping their environments. The decline and extinction of species is part of sustaining the life of others; and human populations are well at risk of the collapse of their ecological niches.

2 Here probably referring to the US-American, rather than the British, NGO Corporate Watch.

3 In my case, I am most familiar with the discourse of CSR engagement with climate change. With respect to this discourse’s imaginary of sustainability accounting and the Global Reporting Initiative, readers who seek to go beyond comprehending the internal logic of this hegemonic discourse might want to engage with critical and/or empirical studies of the constraints in this field (e.g. Moneva et al., 2006; Levy et al., 2010) or of how such carbon accounting, reporting, and management – supposedly informed by these reports – works in situated and material practice (e.g. Lippert, 2015; Vesty et al., 2015).

4 Although Ottinger does not mention it, her analysis of neoliberalism and the environment may take part in the critical engagement with ecological modernisation. With respect to agents of ecological modernisation (as corporate environmental agents may well be analysed), I read her work as going well beyond the critical semantic analyses by Fineman and as linking to recent conversations about environmental management as situated practice (Lippert et al., 2015) and the agents involved in contesting, configuring and maintaining environmental infrastructures (Blok et al., 2016).