The fundamentalist justification for ecological politics is outdated, writes Jürgen Trittin, chairman of the German Green party. The ecological reform of the global economy must bring on board those with no interest in preserving nature per se. The more radical, “nature-oriented” and naive a demand is, the less likely it is to be realized and the more catastrophic the consequences will be.
Global warming, if left unchecked, will undermine development, overtax social capacities and endanger international stability. Progressive policy must focus on “managing the unavoidable” and “avoiding the unmanageable”.
Combining feminist and ecological approaches, ecofeminism opposes the domination of the white male over women, over the poor and over the natural world. Virginie Maris surveys epistemological, moral and social forms of the ecofeminist critique, drawing conclusions about the association between reductionist science and paternalist capitalism.
Climate policy is heavily dependent on expert scientific opinion, with the IPCC the leading authority. Yet uncertainty surrounds the science of climate change, and in particular the 2° target. Does politics’ reliance on inexact science disqualify its decisions? And does scientists’ involvement in politics prejudice their objectivity? Not necessarily, writes Åsa Knaggård.
The economies of central eastern Europe have remained unchanged in at least one respect: their high level of energy wastage. Add to that the explosion of car-use in the region, and eastern central Europe becomes the EU’s major obstacle to reaching its emissions targets for 2020. So why does funding allocated through the European Union still disfavour climate-friendly development?
Barack Obama’s statements to the UN about the potentially devastating impacts of climate change are in stark contrast to Democratic policy back home, where climate policy is negotiated exclusively in terms of US domestic interests. Rick Piltz, director of Climate Science Watch, explains how the combination of political parochialism and the effects of Bush-era climate change denial are stalling the necessary decision-making.
In its current form, cap-and-trade amounts to a system that interferes with development patterns in the South to offset carbon emissions resulting from “business as usual” in the North. Politics should be seeking alternatives to the trading model, argue Tim Forsyth and Zoe Young.
Dominant discourses of sustainability, argues Ingolfur Blühdorn, remain firmly within the growth paradigm, their hegemony being a reflection of the exhaustion of the critique of industrial society and consumer capitalism. For any genuine turn towards sustainability, the limits of rights and freedoms widely held to be sacrosanct must be re-politicized, and their content and limitations redefined.
While freedom has been the most important motif of accounts of human history since the Enlightenment, there has never been an awareness of the geological agency human beings were gaining through processes linked to their acquisition of freedom. Whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions that work like boundary parameters of human existence.
Committed, critical writing in Denmark has long since left the domain of literature and turned to genres such as documentary film and journalism, writes Andreas Harbsmeier. As it emerges from its sheltered existence in a reservation, recent Danish literature is collapsing the boundaries between the literary field and the broader public sphere.
Daniel Knorr’s work can described as a conceptually inflicted practice of very immateraial ideas, write curator and critic Dieter Roelstraete. “His is an art predicated on the immediate experience of the irreducible materiality of all thought, on the crafty mining of those ideas that lie dormant in matter, clutter, stuff.”
“Histories” means many things, but above all that the history written in western Europe does not necessarily coincide with the one the eastern Europeans are trying to write, observes Biancamaria Bruno in her essay about her first visit to the Lithuanian capital.
Nation-states have enough instruments of their own to ward off the threat of populism. Wojciech Przybylski, editor of Res Publica Nowa, responds to Samuel Abrahám’s warning that European stability is threatened by the type of illiberal politician gaining ground in the Visegrád Four nations.
In an editorial for a special issue of Res Publica Nowa, Carl Henrik Fredriksson argues that narrow-minded realpolitik in Central Europe, driven by nationalist and populist agendas, makes transnational publishing endeavours all the more important. In the context of such transnational practices, the question whether Central Europe still exists becomes less consequential.
“A person comes in, protests just like you, then shouts and rants, and then, when finally shown the piece of paper that was signed when they were on military service, they crumple.”
The Czech communist party might be an anachronism, but to ostracize it only prolongs its existence. Whether irrational or calculated, anti-communism in the Czech Republic distracts from more pressing problems, writes Marek Seckar.