Planet Dialectics - Explorations in Environment and Development

About the book

Wolfgang Sachs is one of the most thoughtful intellectuals to tackle the crisis in the Western world's relations with nature and social justice. In this book readers will find trenchant and elegant explorations of some of the foremost issues the world faces in the new century:

• Efficiency - the mantra of our times
• Speed - the love affair with modernity
• Globalization - a market inevitability and the juggernaut of history?
• Sustainability - oxymoron as rhetoric
• Development - the 20th century's great undelivered promise
• Limits - a new principle for the coming century

About the author

Wolfgang Sachs is a senior research fellow at the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, currently also chairman of the board of Greenpeace in Germany and member of the scientific advisory board of SERI. He is the author of For Love of the Automobile. Looking Back into the History of Our Desires (Univ.of California Press, 1992), the editor of the enormously influential and frequently reprinted The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (Zed Books, 1992), and Global Ecology (Zed Books, 1993). His most recent book in English, Greening the North: A Post-Industrial Blueprint for Ecology and Equity, marks an important shift of agenda beyond critique to envisaging concrete alternatives and feasible processes of social transition (co-edited with Reinhard Loske and Manfred Linz, Zed Books, 1998). Wolfgang Sachs travels widely as a public speaker and university lecturer in Europe, North America and the South.

CONTENTS

PART I: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE DEVELOPMENT IDEA

1. The Archaeology of the Development Idea - A Guide to the Ruins - The Discovery of Poverty - Technology as a Trojan Horse - The Economist's Blind Eye - From 'Development' to 'Security'

PART II: THE SHAKY GROUND OF SUSTAINABILITY

2. Global Ecology and the Shadow of Development - Truman and what followed - Ambiguous Claims for Justice - Earth's finiteness as a management problem - Bargaining for the rest of nature - Efficiency and sufficiency - The Hegemony of Globalism
3. The Gospel of Global Efficiency - More out of Less - Resources Everywhere - Never Enough - Always Rational
4. Environment and Development: The Story of a Dangerous Liaison - Setting the Stage for the Brundtland Report - A Successful Ambivalence - Survival as a new Raison d'etat - Global Knowledge versus Local Knowledge - Towards a Global Ecocracy?
5. Sustainable Development: The Political Anatomy of an Oxymoron - At the Dawn of the Security Age - The Horns of the Dilemma - The Contest Perspective - The Astronaut's Perspective - The Home Perspective

PART III IN THE IMAGE OF THE PLANET

6. One World -- Many Worlds? - One humankind - One market - One planet - Space against place - Cosmpolitan localism
7. The Blue Planet: On the Ambiguity of a Modern Icon - The Construction of the Earth through an Image - Invention of the Biosphere - The Image and Sentimental Ecology - The Image and Technocratic Ecology
8. Globalisation and Sustainability - The Rise of the Transnational Economy - How Economic Globalization reduces the Use of Resources - How Economic Globalization expands and accelerates the Use of Resources - How Economic Globalization fosters a new Colonization of Nature - How Economic Globalization changes the Geography of Environmental Stress - Which and Whose Globalization ?

PART IV ECOLOGY AND EQUITY IN A POST-DEVELOPMENT ERA

9. Ecology, Justice and the End of Development - Point of departure - Landslide - Impasse - The New Colour of Justice
10. The Two Meanings of Resource Productivity - Productivity as Abundance - Productivity as Efficiency - Can Limits be Productive? - The Full Sense of Resource Productivity - The Blind Spot of Efficiency - Efficiency and Sufficiency
11. Speed Limits - Body and Machine - Colliding Timescales - Double Power - In Remembrance of Time Gained - Counterproductive Effects - Selective Slowness
12. The Power of Limits: An Inquiry into New Models of Wealth - Eco-intelligent Goods and Services - Lower Speeds and the Plurality of Time Scales - Shorter Distances and the Plurality of Spaces - Wealth in Time rather than Wealth in Goods - Well-being instead of Well-having

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