Post-environmentalism: an internal critique

Abstract

‘Post-environmentalism’ is an approach to ecological modernisation in the United States which criticises mainstream environmentalism's emphasis on placing limits on economic activity to address the climate crisis. Building upon Ronald Inglehart's analysis of shifting cultural values, post-environmentalists Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger reject this antipathy towards economic growth because it undermines the material conditions that enable post-material, quality of life concerns like environmentalism to flourish in the first place. Yet some of the policies advocated by Nordhaus and Shellenberger to promote economic growth actually serve as obstacles to the realisation of post-material values. An alternative account of the emergence of modern environmentalism situates it within the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist model of economic growth. This analysis reveals more promising possibilities for promoting post-material values such as autonomy, self-realisation, and environmental concern than the proposals put forward by Shellenberger and Nordhaus.

Keywords:

• economic growth
• post-environmentalism
• post-Fordism
• post-materialism
• work

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Bill Chaloupka, Andrew Jones, Michael Nordquist, Mark Somma, Rosa Williams, and several anonymous reviewers for commenting on earlier versions of this essay.

Notes

1. Alain Lipietz [1992, p. 84] prefers the reverse formulation: ‘everybody working so that people can work less’.

2. An entry for ‘time stress’ exists, but this variable measures one's ‘desire to obtain better control of one's life stress, particularly as it applies to better time management’, and not one's desire for more free time [American Environics 2006, p. 72].