Sustainability, Wellbeing and the Posthuman Turn

Softcover Nachdruck of the original 1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-3-030-06790-8
Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 93 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 151 mm x 212 mm, Gewicht: 150 g

This book examines how the way we conceive of, or measure, the environment changes the way we interact with it. Thomas Smith posits that environmentalism and sustainable development have become increasingly post-political, characterised by abstraction, and quantification to an unprecedented extent. As such, the book argues that our ways of measuring both the environment, such as through sustainability metrics like footprints and Payments for Ecosystem Services, and society, through gross domestic product and wellbeing measures, play a constitutive and problematic role in how we conceive of ourselves in the world. Subsequently, as the quantified environmental approach drives a dualistic wedge between the human and non-human realms, in its final section the book puts forward recent developments in new materialism and feminist ethics of care as providing practical ways of re-founding sustainable development in a way that firmly acknowledges human-ecological relations. This book will be an invaluable reference for scholars and students in the fields of human geography, political ecology, and environmental sociology.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, Thomas S. J.

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Entwicklungsstudien
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Nachhaltigkeit
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Umweltsoziologie
• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Humangeographie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1: IntroductionHere, the problematic of sustainable development shall be established, beginning with a synopsis of 20th century environmental debates, followed by discussion of how the discourse of sustainable development emerged to bring together concerns for the environment with those regarding wealth, quality of life and inequality. I shall here review how the idea of going ‘beyond growth’ has become a prominent concern amongst those who question the ecological and social impacts of contemporary global economy. It will briefly examine the origins of such debates in the seminal work of green and ‘steady state’ economists, including E.F. Schumacher and Herman Daly, amongst others.Chapter 2: WellbeingWith the interest in transcending GDP, and mounting evidence that increased wealth hasn’t translated into increased social flourishing, notions of wellbeing have come to the fore in recent decades. This has resulted in an explosion of popular and academic work on the topic, including best-selling books, dedicated journals and high-profile national statistical commissions. Influential policy initiatives such as the Kingdom of Bhutan’s famous metric of ‘Gross National Happiness’ and Ecuador’s emphasis on ‘buen vivir’ will also be introduced here, as exemplifying this trend. Concluding the section, the argument shall be made that the term ‘wellbeing’ is, amidst this proliferation, often taken for granted, perhaps more than it should be.Chapter 3: SustainabilityLike wellbeing, sustainability has increasingly been made relevant in overwhelmingly abstract and quantitative terms of late, largely displacing previous philosophical and moral concerns in environmental thought, for example with regard to ‘ecocentrism’ and ‘intrinsic worth’.
Chapter 4: The Posthuman Turn: Ecological Ethics and the Multiple SelfThis final chapter takes a more polemical approach, summing up what has been lost in current understandings of sustainable development, and how recent work on posthumanism and new materialism, bolstered by a feminist ‘ethics of care,’ could help to address this. Chapter 5: ConclusionThe conclusion of the book thus re-asserts the texts main question; namely, how can the double dividend – sustainable flourishing – be reconceptualised in a way which doesn’t posit a radical separation of the sovereign self-knowing human from their material environment? And what implications could this have for technocratic understandings of sustainability, which often emphasise dematerialisation and protection of an apparently-inert environment ‘out there’, instead of an ethos of solidarity with a more-than-human world, ‘in here’?

Über Autor(innen)

Thomas S.J. Smith received his PhD from the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Studies at Masaryk University, Czech Republic, and an editor at the Dark Mountain Project, an environmental literary initiative which gathers writers, poets, and artists who are interested in challenging the conventional narratives of civilisation.