Suchergebnisse

In this article, I explore four California-based eco-utopias: The Earth Abides (George Stewart, 1949), Ecotopia (Ernest Callenbach, 1975), Pacific Edge (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1990), and Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson, 1992). All four novels were written during, and deeply informed by, the Cold War (Although published in 1992, Snow Crash was clearly written toward the end of the Cold War and in the shadow of Soviet implosion), against a backdrop of imminent nuclear holocaust and a doubtful future. Since then, climate change has replaced the nuclear threat as a looming existential dilemma, on which a good deal of writing about the future is focused. Almost 70 years after the appearance of The Earth Abides, and 40 years after the publication of Ecotopia, eco-utopian imaginaries now seem both poignant yet more necessary than ever, given the tension between the anti-environmental proclivities of the Trump Administration, on the one hand, and the tendency of climate change to suck all of the air out of the room, on the other. And with drought, fire, flood, wind and climate change so much in the news, it is increasingly difficult to imagine eco-utopias of any sort; certainly they are not part of the contemporary zeitgeist—except in the minds of architects, bees and futurists, perhaps. But does this mean there is no point in thinking about them, or seeking insights that might make our future more sustainable? This article represents an attempt to revive eco-utopian visions and learn from them.

Liberalism will survive this crisis, as it has many others, but it will have changed. The felt need to ensure the security of the economy, and the threats posed to the social order by individuals with potentially threatening capabilities, will require more and more surveillance of our everyday lives and more and more of our participation in those processes of 'keeping an eye out' for anonymous parcels, suspicious behaviours, provocative speech and dangerous thoughts. We will all be enlisted in the Army of Observation, free to choose but self-regulating in our choices. Everyone will watch everyone, and the new age of opto-liberalism will have dawned.

The search for a sustainable civilization—an essential concomitant of dealing with global warming—will be driven, in part, by the "normalization" of a low-carbon lifestyle. To date, most research and discussion of this transition have centered on technological fixes and their psychological equivalent, "getting prices right." Although both approaches seem to point to reduced levels of consumption as a result of more "efficient" processes and practices, neither really addresses the material and cognitive changes associated with the "low-throughput" economy (along the lines of what Herman Daly called the "steady-state economy) that is likely to follow from the current economic downturn and the need for drastic reductions in carbon-burning. More specifically, there is a glaring contradiction between the impetus for high rates of economic growth and the major modifications of "lifestyle" necessitated by environmental crisis. "Lifestyle" is usually approached as an individual attribute: each of us has preferences, linked to basic needs and "expressive functions," which we seek to fulfill through "choices in the market." This disregards both the societal and regulative aspects of lifestyle, the first conditioned by subjectivities shaped through socialization from an early age into class, nation, ethnicity, identity, and other groups, the second by the governmentalization of consumption through advertising and other forms of preference-shaping, which serve to link lifestyle to "identities." In other words, if "we are what we consume," it is the regulation of "who we are" that will determine not only "what we consume" but also "whether we survive."

In this article, I put three works into conversation: William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and Kenneth Waltz's Man, the State and War. I do this in order to interrogate the foundations and sources of social violence, both within societies and between them. I compare Golding's and Hobbes's stories of 'origins' to illustrate how, on the one hand, fairly straightforward notions of supply and demand, production and reproduction, and a social division of labour belie the possibility of a pre-social state. Indeed, that both Hobbes and Golding were commenting on English society and its history, rather than a mythical anarchy, only reinforces this often-ignored point. No one would call Golding a theorist, yet there is a great deal of social theory to be found in the novel. No one would call Thomas Hobbes a political economist, yet there is a great deal of political economy to be found in Leviathan . Waltz, of course, wrote about the conditions outside of societies rather than within them, but we may take the sources of violence that concern him to lie not in the anarchy he posits but in the lessons learned, by both statesmen and schoolboys, as they are socialised into 'proper' behaviour towards their inferiors.

A review essay on the following books, Dillard, Jesse [Ed], Veronica Dujon [Ed], and King, Mary C. [Ed] Understanding the Social Dimensions of Sustainability; Parr, Adrian, Hijacking Sustainability; and Rockwood, Larry L. [Ed], Stewart, Ronald E.[Ed], and Dietz, Thomas [Ed], >FTRI>Foundations of Environmental Sustainability -- The Coevolution of Science and Policy..