Blog Action Day 2007 – My position on environmental issues

I haven’t really had time to prepare this post, but I thought it might be good to summarise my position on environmental issues:

We are facing unprecedented levels of risk with regards to the collapse of ecosystem services

Following the reports from the IPCC and UNEP, it is clear that many of our ecosystem services are heavily degraded, anthropogenic global warming and the nitrogen cycle being the main worries.

Dogmatically sticking to ideology has serious side effects

For a start, I completely reject anarchoprimitivism. The idea that all cities should be destroyed and form primitive communes across the world is absurd and dangerous.

Human population is so large that urbanization is a necessary condition to support that population. Cities can be highly efficient, even without sustainable planning. Optimal densities seem to be around 10 million.

Poverty reduction and ecosystem degradation mitigation and adaptation are highly inter-related

Considering most poor urban populations are located in areas liable to flooding and landslides, ecosystem degradation and millennium development goals need to pursued together.

This will require a limitation on the power of fragmented NGOs operating as fiefdoms that feed off the international banking system. The work of building strong institutions will require a lot of work from both national governments and cosmopolitan transnational actors.

Don’t be alarmist

There is no need to talk about tipping points or rapid rising of sea levels. We simply don’t know. What we do know is already of such gross concern for the majority of the global population that to simply deny the scale of the problem should be treated with derision.

Don’t recourse to Malthus

I have little time for people who claim that there is too many people on this planet. Distribution of resources is far more important than absolute numbers of people.

Areas of interest

It would be interesting to investigate the climate change issues in forms of performativity. To what extent do climate change denialists perform postmodernist critiques of science? How can we evaluate different policies in the face of the pervasiveness of the neoliberal frame? Do the New Atheists have the ability to balkanise opinion over climate change as well as religion?

Recommended books

Assessment, M. E. (2005). Ecosystems and Human Well-being. Island Press.

Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Sage Pubns.

Beck, U. (1995). Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk. Polity Press Cambridge.

Beck, U. (2006). The Cosmopolitan Vision. Blackwell Publishing.

Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums. Blackwell Synergy.

Latour, B. (2004). Politics of Nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. Harvard University Press.