Suchergebnisse

Selective pressures favoring rapid decisions would have led to the evolution of simple decision-making mechanisms that could take the form of heuristics and rules that use as little available information as possible. Such decision heuristics can only be ecologically rational—yielding accurate inferences in particular problem domains—if they exploit the way that information is structured in the environment. The author presents a variety of fast and frugal heuristics that are ecologically rational and shows how they can be organized in the mind's adaptive toolbox of decision-making strategies.

This article considers theories of collective action in relation to the management of communal water resources in Nkayi District, Zimbabwe. Taking a critical view of institutional explanations of common property resource management, it illustrates how the addition of social theory can enrich such approaches. The prevalence of rational choice premises in defining the problem of collective action and the persuasiveness of institutionalism in apparently offering solutions to it is questioned. The article rejects simple evolutionary theorizing about institutions in favour of an embedded approach that allows for complexity, for the social and historical location of collective action and for an examination of the interface between agent and structure. It is argued here that collective management of water supplies does exist but that it is more partial, changeable and evolving and less attributable to single factors than suggested in much of the literature.

1. The ecological crisis of reason -- 2. Rationalism and the ambiguity of science -- 3. The politics of ecological rationality -- 4. Inequality and ecological rationality -- 5. The blindspots of centrism and human self-enclosure -- 6. Philosophy, prudence and anthropocentrism -- 7. The ethics of commodification -- 8. Towards a dialogical interspecies ethics -- 9. Unity, solidarity and deep ecology -- 10. Towards a materialist spirituality of place -- 11. Conclusion.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- PART ONE The Intensification of Rationalization and Its Alternatives -- 1 Rationalization Under the Premise of Plasticity -- 2 Rationalization and Ecological Irrationality -- 3 Rationalization Under the Premise of Greenness -- 4 Rerationalization -- 5 Derationalization -- PART TWO The Sociology of Environmental Degradation -- 6 The Political Economy of Waste -- 7 Accounting for Waste and Accountability for Waste -- 8 Environmental Classes and Environmental Conflict -- PART THREE Toward a Symbiotic Relationship with Nature -- 9 Science and Applied Science as Partial Knowledge -- 10 Parasitism: A "Light Cloak" or an "Iron Cage"? -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Book and Author

Lowi, T. J.: Think globally, lose locally. - S. 17-38. Lafferty, W. M.: Democracy and ecological rationality: new trials for an old ceremony. - S. 39-65. Jinadu, L. A.: Globalization and the new partnership: an African perspective. - S. 67-81. Deblock, C.; Brunelle, D.: Globalization and new normative frameworks: the mulitlateral agreement on investment. - S. 83-126. Perreault, N.: Czechoslovakia: secession and the formation of a new partnership. - S. 129-151. ... Seymour, M.: The virtues of partnership. - S. 267-283. Pelletier, R.: The institutional arrangements of a new Canadian partnership. - S. 285-300

Abstract Although the conservation title of the 1985 Food Security Act was hailed by many as revolutionary in its attempts to control soil erosion, it has failed to live up to its billing. A theory is used that asserts that the state's systemic commitment to promoting capitalist growth constrains it from establishing and implementing policies that accomplish anything more than displacing one environmental problem onto others. The theory is tested through a discourse analysis of the hearings surrounding the Federal government's attempt to control soil erosion through the 1985 Food Security Act, which revealed that policy recommendations challenging the drive to maximize efficiency and production were declared flawed and unacceptable. Hence, the hearings were systematically distorted in favor of the dominant instrumental rationality. It is concluded that government policy initiatives alone are insufficient and that creating alternative social organizations of production is necessary to promote ecological well‐being.

Our global ecological crisis demands that we question the rationality of the culture that has caused it: western modernity's free market capitalism. Philip Goodchild develops arguments from Nietzsche, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marx, to suggest that our love of Western modernity is an expression of a piety in which capitalism becomes a global religion, in practice, if not always in belief. This book presents a philosophical alternative that demands attention from philosophers, critical theorists, philosophers of religion, theologians, and those in ecological politics.

A review essay on books by: Andrew McLaughlin, Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology (Albany, NY: State U New York, 1993); Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1992); & David Oates, Ecological Belief in an Age of Science (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State U Press, 1989 [see listings in IRPS No. 76]). McLaughlin's book offers an ecological critique that blames personal insecurity & consumerism for environmental ills. Drawing on deep ecology, the book provides an analysis of ecological ethics & advocates a stronger role for the state in the creation of deep ecological policies. Gore's book argues that the task of restoring the natural balance of the earth's ecological system could reaffirm the US's longstanding interest in social justice, democratic government, & free market economics. Oates's book develops an ecological ethics that rests on the notion that the human & the natural coincide, & advocates the "environmentalizing" of rationality. All three books are assailed as superficial, arguing that they reflect new class empowerment & communal disempowerment. W. Howard

The idea of progress has in recent years increasingly been put into question. The key experience contributing to disengaging the idea of progress from the idea of rationality has been the ecological crisis. This crisis has made modern culture look like it fosters a way of organizing social life that is self- destructive. The crisis has nourished cultural movements counter to modernization. There are groups and discourses, everyday ones and intellectual ones, that plead for reenchantment as opposed to disenchantment. Modern culture has started to react to this experience by putting into question its key concepts: rationalization and rationality. Modernization based on rationality appears to be only one of many alternative ways of organizing modern social life. It appears to be nothing but the social form forced upon the majority of societies in the world by a dominant European culture and its American and Russian derivatives. Modernity is a cultural force that has imposed upon us a form of social evolution that cannot control its own consequences. New, alternative ideas and movements are increasingly being directed against this type of modern rationality. These counterprocesses are not adequately described as antimodern or traditionalistic regressions. Instead, they represent another type of rationality and rationalization within the legacy of modern culture. The increasing concern with nature that we experience today is symptomatic of a fundamental cultural cleavage within the culture that underlies, accompanies and regulates the development of highly complex societies in European-type modernization processes. This cultural cleavage is traceable to the Semitic and Greek origins of modern culture. Two conflicting traditions, one of bloody sacrifice and one of unbloody (vegetarian!) paradise, still define the cultural universe within which we live. Expanding the notion of cultural traditions constitutive for the European experience of modernization and conceptualizing it as the manifestation of competing codes of modern culture, we are able to identify not one but two types of relationships with nature in modern society. Thus we arrive at two types of rationality encountered in modern culture: utilitarian rationality and communicative rationality, and at two types of culture within modern culture: culture as profit and culture as communication. Ultimately, we have the outline of a new theoretical notion of progress. It is one that puts into question any social theory premised on its own progressiveness in terms of the European version of progress. The current ecological crisis has destroyed the last bastion of the belief in natural progress, the mastery of nature. Social theory should continue the task of de-illusioning this self-ascription, of disengaging European-style progress from the notion of modernity.

In the course of the 1990s, the ideas and practices of environmentalism tended to lose whatever politically mobilizing force they might earlier have had, and largely came to resemble what Herbert Marcuse, in his classic text of the 1960s, termed the pure stuff of administration. The redefinition of environmental politics as an ambiguous quest for sustainable development can be seen as a form of reification, bringing environmental politics under the control of the established order and its administrative apparatus and making environmental problems amenable to the objective and instrumental procedures of technological rationality. What had seemed for many of us in the late 1970s to be a broad, social movement out to save the planet from further environmental destruction and ecological deterioration has given way to a much more amorphous, and socially acceptable political agenda and range of practical activity. The "environmental movement" has been effectively stripped of its underlying human meanings and motivations and instead transformed into institutions and professions; and the ideas of political ecology and the practices of appropriate technology have become a fragmented array of institutional, intellectual and practical activity, what I have termed the "making of green knowledge" (Jamison 2001). This paper is an attempt to explore some of the cultural dynamics of these transformation processes in terms of the human agency that have been involved in this multifarious shift in political agenda and practical focus.

Cover -- André Gorz and the Sartrean Legacy -- Contents -- Preface -- List of Abbreviations -- 1 Introduction to a Life -- 2 Sartre and the Existential Subject -- 3 Gorz and the Moral Conversion -- 4 An Existential Journey -- 5 Marxism, Alienation, and the End of Work -- 6 Ecological Crisis and the Limits to Economic Rationality -- 7 Critical Theory and the Sociology of the Subject -- 8 Freedom and Its Foundations: Towards a Person-Centred Social Theory -- Afterword: A Conversation with André Gorz -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Preface. 1. Putting Social Sciences Together Again: An Introduction to the Volume, Timothy A. Kohler. 2. Nonlinear and Synthetic Models for Primate Societies, Irenaeus J. A. te Boekhorst and Charlotte K. Hemelrijk. 3. The Evolution of Cooperation in an Ecological Context: An Agent-Based Model, John W. Pepper and Barbara B. Smuts. 4. Evolution of Interference, Brian Skyrms. 5. Trajectories to Complexity in Artificial Societies: Rationality, Belief, and Emotions, Jim E. Doran. 6. MAGICAL Computer Simulation of Mesolithic Foraging, Mark Winter Lake. 7. Be There Then: A Modeling Approach to Settle

One of the main features of the contemporary environmental crisis is that no one has a clear idea of what is going on. The author uses an extension of Marx's theory of alienation to explain why people find it so difficult to relate their different knowledges of the natural and social world. He argues that nevertheless it is possible to relate these to the abstractions of ecological discourse. Emancipation can come only through embracing science and rationality rather than rejecting them and, in the process, humanity as well as the non-human world will benefit