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Sustainable Development and Climate Change
Published in Dalia Štreimikienė, Asta Mikalauskienė, Climate Change and Sustainable Development, 2021
Dalia Štreimikienė, Asta Mikalauskienė
For a long time, in the discussions about the relationship between economic growth and the environment, a pessimistic attitude prevailed, which is best reflected in the famous report The Limits to Growth written to the Club of Rome by Donella Meadows et al. (1972). The report aimed to clarify the limits of production expansion and population growth, while the starting point was the frightening exponential growth of the population and the economy. The conclusions reached by the scientists were disappointing: the contradictions between nature’s limitations and the extremely rapid growth pace of its use, the increasing environmental pollution and the rapid population growth in the mid-21st century could lead to a global ecological crisis. The Limits to Growth and the subsequent projects developed on the initiative of the Club of Rome, such as Beyond the Age of Waste, Goals for Mankind, formed a new mentality and brought the need to ensure global equilibrium to the forefront (Čiegis 2006).
The Godavari Marble Case and Rights of Nature Discourse in Nepal
Published in Cameron La Follette, Chris Maser, Sustainability and the Rights of Nature in Practice, 2019
Environmental challenges are increasingly becoming more serious in Nepal. The intersection of weak environment management and regulation coupled with urbanisation, population growth, improper disposal of solid waste, haphazard discharge of industrial effluents in the river systems and vehicular emissions is creating a new era of ecological crisis. Unregulated infrastructure development, particularly road construction, has created a major problem of dust pollution. Unregulated brick kilns operating in the vicinity of Kathmandu Valley are another prominent cause of air pollution in the region. Dust pollution and vehicular emissions are major pollutants affecting urban areas of the country.8 Nepal is not a large industrialised nation. As the population is predominantly rural, the indoor burning of wood, dung and similar biomass is one of the major sources of indoor air pollution.9 Many environmental problems in Nepal are due to improper management and regulation, rather than quantity of discharge. Nevertheless, Nepal ranks in the top range of ‘most polluted countries’, as indicated by the Environmental Performance Index, which shows that Nepal was ranked 176th in environmental performance in 2018.10
Cutting the Gordian Knot
Published in Manisha Rao, Reframing the Environment, 2020
The centralisation of population growth or consumption as the cause of the ecological crisis we face emerges from an understanding of humans as a singular undifferentiated whole rather than as a stratified society. It is ahistorical in ignoring the specific historical trajectories of colonialism and imperialism that have influenced trajectories of population growth and consumption in specific geographical regions and populations. The UN projects that world population will increase 41 per cent by 2050, to 8.9 billion people, with nearly all of this growth in developing countries. The 12 per cent of the world’s population that lives in North America and Western Europe accounts for 60 per cent of private consumption spending, while the one-third living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 3.2 per cent (Worldwatch 2016). Nation-states meeting frequently to deal with climate change remain embroiled in disagreements, but generate and sustain a discourse that pits social justice and economic growth against a safe planet. Following path-breaking ideas on development as an anti-politics machine (Ferguson 1990) and a powerful discourse (Escobar 2011), it can be argued that the failure of global climate negotiations is in fact a success, measured in terms of creating a public discourse that presents a dichotomy of development versus environment, where dealing with the impending ecological crisis appears inimical to better standards of living. It frames the problem as a competition amongst nation-states, as essential differential interests of the rich and the poor states/nations/regions, all the while carefully avoiding the structures and processes that lead to differential interests. Capitalism remains unquestioned as a given, and failure seems to stem from individual personalities or abstract regional obstinacies.
Science, technology, and life politics beyond the market
Published in Journal of Responsible Innovation, 2020
STS arguments for public participation and dialogic democratization of science and technology have a strong affinity with the Third Way (Thorpe 2010; Thorpe and Gregory 2010, 282–285, 294–295). STS advocacy of public participation expresses what Giddens termed ‘life politics,’ embodied and articulated in new social movements, bringing what Ronald Inglehart calls ‘post-materialist’ questions of qualitative value to bear on what might otherwise have been treated as unproblematically technical and economic questions (Giddens 1994; Inglehart 1997). As in the Third Way, STS uses the language of democratization, participation and engagement, resonating with the opportunity to express qualitative life-political concerns. However, the qualitative demands of new social movements come into contradiction with the ideology of neoliberal free-market fundamentalism and private control of the means of production. This may be seen, for example, in the way in which corporate interests in the US have funded climate-change denial, deliberately undermining the scope for societal reflexivity as a response to ecological crisis (McCright and Dunlap 2010; Oreskes and Conway 2010).