A Hornborg
Biographic Data
| ID | 16204 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Hornborg |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Hornborg |
| SIGNATURE | HORNBORG A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lund University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2102-5875 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 97 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1675 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 97 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
The political ecology of money
This review of a selection of literature in critical geography, political ecology, eco-Marxism, and ecological economics over the past five decades reflects on the paucity of discussion on the phenomenon of modern, all-purpose money. This is paradoxical, given the almost universal denunciation of mainstream economics and capitalist political economy in this literature. The critiques of environmental injustices and uneven development tend to targe…
Was the Inca Economy Based on “Protomoney”? Or, Why Accounting Systems Should Not Be Conflated With Concepts of Exchange Value
The khipu knotted string records in the ancient Andes were accounting systems, but they did not indicate any concepts of commensurability or exchange value. They were not incipient money; instead, monetized commerce appears to have predated the economic organization of the Inca society. The article begins by tracing the emergence of coinage in the Aegean area around 600 bce and reflecting on the subsequent role of money fetishism in Eurasian econ…
The Root of All Evil
The paper traces the common roots of climate change and diversity loss to the phenomenon of general-purpose money, viewed as a recent addition to the biosemiotics of the planet. Money is the driver of increasing greenhouse gas emissions as well as the homogenizing processes of globalization. From an evolutionary perspective, the money sign can be understood as emerging from the human capacity for symbolism, yet it is not itself a symbol, as it ca…
Swedish human ecology, political ecology, and the struggle for interdisciplinarity
Interdisciplinary research and education on human-environment relations has a natural place in many Anglo-American geography and anthropology departments. In Sweden, however, critical scholarship across the socio-natural divide has largely been outsourced to the interdisciplinary field of human ecology. Since the 1970s, Swedish human ecologists have sought to integrate perspectives from the social and natural sciences, giving rise to challenging …
Envisaging the Future through the Lens of Dualism
The article examines Kim Stanley Robinson's novel The Ministry for the Future (2020) as an example of how the commonsensical modern distinction between the material and the social pervades mainstream deliberations on technological solutions to problems of sustainability. To expose the fetishism of modern technology, founded on the unwarranted ontological distinction between nature and society, we need to retain an analytical dualism that distingu…
Coming to Our Senses
Challenging the Green Machine
We respond to David Schwartzman’s critique of our paper. We argue that his“solar communism,” his approach to the question of energy return on energyinvestment (EROI), and his critique of Georgescu-Roegen’s fourth law ofthermodynamics situate him as a left ecomodernist, albeit with sympathy fordegrowth. Schwartzman’s take on these issues illustrates how the ontologicalseparation of human ingenuity and global social metabolism obscures thequestion …
Beyond prometheanism
Technologies developed since the late eighteenth century differ from earlier forms of technology by being as dependent on world market prices of labour, land and other biophysical resources as on human inventiveness. Yet, whether their outlook is mainstream or heterodox, modern people tend to view technology simply as ingenuity applied to nature, while oblivious of the extent to which it is contingent on the asymmetric exchange of resources in gl…
Theorizing ethnolinguistic diversity under globalization
This paper seeks to advance our theoretical understanding of diversifying and homogenizing processes in human societies by exploring the sources of and threats to ethnolinguistic or cultural diversity. Invoking concepts such as ethnogenesis, schismogenesis, and structural transformations, it discusses the parallels as well as the divergences between biological and cultural theory. Models in historical linguistics risk importing unwarranted assump…
Limiting money
The transdisciplinary argument in this article is that the social and ecological unsustainability of modern, globalized capitalism ultimately derives from the design of its central artifact: what Polanyi called all- or general-purpose money. The notion of a singular measure of economic value is a peculiar cultural conception that is inherently at odds with physical reality, yet it pervades modern economic thought and practice as if it were immuta…
Beyond the Veil of Market Prices - The Implications of Ecologically Unequal Exchange for Conceptualizations of Technological Development
This article surveys the emergence of theories of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) and outlines the implications of an EUE perspective for a materialist conceptualization of trade and technological development. It briefly traces the progression of new perspectives and methodologies for identifying EUE from the early 1970s, reviewing the genealogy of concerns with asymmetric global transfers of embodied energy, materials, land, and labor that a…
Technology as Capital
Debates on technologies for harnessing renewable energies tend to generate a polarized arena in which critical voices are automatically denounced as defenders of fossil energy. This has created a difficult situation for activists and scholars voicing concerns about the comparatively low power density, low net energy, and environmental justice concerns of such technologies. In this paper, we highlight the contradictions and ambivalences underlying…
The trope of 'the ecological Indian' in retrospect
https://doi.org/10.33063/diva-550513
Defetishizing money
Following up on Steve Gudeman's insight that economic categories are fundamentally cultural, this lecture juxtaposes different perspectives on money that transcend the conventional society/nature divide. It considers money as a unique semiotic phenomenon that imperils life itself by accelerating the production of entropy. The "agency" of the money artifact extends beyond society into the physical metabolism of the biosphere. Money organizes and o…
Transhistorical perspectives on commodities, fetishism, and world-systems
A caminho
Unpacking the black box of ‘energy technology’
Transitions to low-carbon energy technologies and other forms of climate mitigation tend to involve disempowerment and environmental injustices of various kinds. This paper argues that such tendencies are inherent in the social rationale of technological systems promoted by the logic of the world market. The production and operation of technological artifacts are imbued with economic rationality and must not be conceptualised as distinct from the…
Ecologically Unequal Exchange
Somerville's rejoinder highlights some fundamental divergences between ecologically unequal exchange theory and the classical Marxist position. This brief intervention addresses a few points in his rejoinder that are particularly illustrative of the incompatibility of the two frameworks. It is argued that historical materialism should acknowledge the materiality of world trade as foundational to global inequalities and unsustainability
The homogenisation of diversity
This paper is an experiment in applying an evolutionary perspective to the semiotic selection processes inherent in modernity, globalisation, and capitalism. The ongoing global loss of biological diversity is not only paralleled by the loss of cultural and linguistic diversity, but also related to it in complex ways. The social condition of modernity promotes cultural homogenisation as unremittingly as capitalism promotes biological monocultures.…
Why ecological economics should not adopt Marxian value theory
Ecologically Unequal Exchange Theory as Genuine Materialism
Somerville's brief critique of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) theory illustrates how entangled traditional labour theories of value are in 19th century discourse on political economy. His incapacity to understand the point of EUE theory reflects the idealist myopia of such discourse, largely oblivious of the material metabolism of world society. For theorists genuinely committed to historical materialism, EUE theory should provide a welcome …
Signs of Power and the Power of Signs
This chapter uses ethnohistorical information on prehispanic Andean kingdoms to illuminate how semiotic and material aspects of political economy are intertwined in premodern and modern approaches to various kinds of signs of social status. It argues that both anthropologists and mainstream economists tend to focus on semiotic aspects of human societies while largely ignoring their material conditions and repercussions, which are fundamental to g…
A pandemic can do what a movement cannot
Over the past two centuries, more and more of humankind has taken progress for granted. Growing numbers of people have assumed that problems of various kinds will eventually be solved. Some problems have been alleviated – in privileged parts of the world – by economic and technological development, such as the drudgery of heavy labour that has been relegated to machines. Other issues have required legislation and political activism, such as the a…
System boundaries as epistemological and ethnographic problems
This article examines an epistemological dilemma at the center of social and environmental impact assessment: where and when the "system boundaries" that define the extent of an energy technology with socio-environmental impact should be drawn. We demonstrate how system boundaries give rise to different epistemological problems, first, when socio-environmental impact is studied across commodity chains, notably in life cycle assessments (LCA), and…
Machines as manifestations of global systems
Anthropologists have generally found it reasonable to understand the Industrial Revolution in Britain as a product of global historical processes including colonialism and the structure of world trade. The extent to which the industrialization of British textile production was contingent on global processes has been illuminated in detail by historians such as Joseph Inikori. Andre Gunder Frank proposed that we should reconceptualize technological…
Objects Don't Have Desires
Postdualist" approaches, such as the material turn in the humanities and social sciences, represent understandable reactions to the humanist and idealist traditions in Western thought, but tend to be deluded by a focus on individual artifacts rather than on the global, material relations on which their existence depends. The attribution of agency and even desires to abiotic objects, championed by posthumanist researchers such as Bruno Latour and …
The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative
The Anthropocene narrative portrays humanity as a species ascending to power over the rest of the Earth System. In the crucial field of climate change, this entails the attribution of fossil fuel combustion to properties acquired during human evolution, notably the ability to manipulate fire. But the fossil economy was not created nor is it upheld by humankind in general. This intervention questions the use of the species category in the Anthropo…
Zero-Sum World
This article discusses various ways in which conventional discourse on sustainability fails to acknowledge the distributive, political, and cultural dimensions of global environmental problems. It identifies five interconnected illusions currently postponing systemic crisis and obstructing rational societal negotiations that acknowledge the political dimensions of global ecology: 1) The fragmentation of scientific perspectives into bounded catego…
Global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange
Towards an ecological theory of unequal exchange
Structuring sustainability science
It is urgent in science and society to address climate change and other sustainability challenges such as biodiversity loss, deforestation, depletion of marine fish stocks, global ill-health, land degradation, land use change and water scarcity. Sustainability science (SS) is an attempt to bridge the natural and social sciences for seeking creative solutions to these complex challenges. In this article, we propose a research agenda that advances …
Ethnogenesis, Regional Integration, and Ecology in Prehistoric Amazonia
This paper critically reviews reconstructions of cultural development in prehistoric Amazonia and argues for the primacy of regional and interregional exchange in generating the complex distributions of ethno-linguistic identities traced by linguists and archaeologists in the area. This approach requires an explicit abandonment of notions of migrating "peoples" in favor of modern anthropological understandings of ethnicity and ethnogenesis. Furth…
Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups
Environmental issues have become increasingly prominent in local struggles, national debates, and international policies. In response, scholars are paying more attention to conventional politics and to more broadly defined relations of power and difference in the interactions between human groups and their biophysical environments. Such issues are at the heart of the relatively new interdisciplinary field of political ecology, forged at the inter…
Artifacts have consequences, not agency
This article challenges the urge within Actor-Network Theory, posthumanism, and the ontological turn in sociology and anthropology to dissolve analytical distinctions between subject and object, society and nature, and human and non-human. It argues that only by acknowledging such distinctions and applying a realist ontology can exploitative and unsustainable global power relations be exposed. The predicament of the Anthropocene should not prompt…
Animism, fetishism, and objectivism as strategies for knowing (or not knowing) the world
Animistic or 'relational' ontologies encountered in non-Western (i.e. premodern) settings pose a challenge to Western (i.e. modern) knowledge production, as they violate fundamentalassumptions of Cartesian science. Naturalscientists who have tried seriously to incorporate subject-subject relations into their intellectual practice (e.g. Uexküll, Bateson) have inexorably been relegated to the margins. Surrounded by philosophers and sociologists of …
Machine Fetishism, Value, and the Image of Unlimited Good
The accumulation of industrial infrastructure within restricted sectors of the world systemii indicates that world market prices obscure more fundamental measures of 'value'. The thermodynamic concept of exergy (or negative enitropy) is offered as a measure of 'use value' geared to the reproduction of industrial 'teclihiomass', and it is establislhed that the logic of industrialismll sets price and exergy contenit in inverse relation to eachi oth…
Technology as Fetish
This article discusses how the way in which post-Enlightenment humans tend to relate to material objects is a fundamental aspect of modern capitalism. The difficulties that conventional academic disciplines have in grasping the societal and political aspect of 'technology' stem from the predominant Cartesian paradigm that distinguishes the domain of material objects from that of social relations of exchange. This Cartesian paradigm has constraine…
Environmentalism, ethnicity and sacred places
Un mouvement d'opposition à l'aménagement d'une carrière de granite au Cap Breton sert de point de départ à une réflexion sur les problématiques plus de la constitution de l'identité, du discours et du pouvoir à l'époque moderne. L'adoption de modes décontextualisants de production du discours et d'auto‐déTinition fait naître des ambivalences et des contradictions au sein de tout mouvement qui se crée en opposition à une structure social fondée s…
Global Magic
Modern thought on economics and technology is no less magical than the world views of non-modern peoples. This book reveals how our ideas about growth and progress ignore how money and machines throug
Objects Don't Have Desires
Postdualist" approaches, such as the material turn in the humanities and social sciences, represent understandable reactions to the humanist and idealist traditions in Western thought, but tend to be deluded by a focus on individual artifacts rather than on the global, material relations on which their existence depends. The attribution of agency and even desires to abiotic objects, championed by posthumanist researchers such as Bruno Latour and …
The political economy of technofetishism
The ethnography of human-object relations in native Amazonia can help to illuminate the role of technological artifacts in modern society. Rather than abandon the categories of "subject" and "object" and of "Society" and "Nature," as suggested by proponents of "the ontological turn," anthropologists can compare subject-object transformations and the naturalization of social power relations in the two contexts. In native Amazonian animism the attr…
Symbolic technologies
By extending the Marxian theory of fetishism from money and commodities to machines, we may achieve an epistemological shift in our understanding of the foundations of 'technological development'. The first part of the article discusses previous definitions of fetishism in order to distil some central themes that appear to be particularly significant to the argument on machine fetishism. It is argued that semiotic theory can be useful in distingu…
Vital signs
Ecosemiotics represents a theoretical approach to human ecology that can be applied across several disciplines. lts primary justification lies inthe ambition to transcend "Cartesian", conceptual dichotomies such as culture/nature. society/nature, mental/material. etc. It argues that ecosystems areconstituted no less by flows of signs than by flows of matter and energy. This paper discusses the roles of different kinds of hmnan sign systems in the…
Money and the Semiotics of Ecosystem Dissolution
This paper argues for a semiotic approach to the problematic interface of economics and ecology. It begins by tracing the origins of materialist science and discussing strategies for transcending Cartesian dualism in the study of human ecology. It then discusses pre-modernity, modernity and post-modernity as transformations of semiotic relations with implications for identity and culture as well as human-environmental relations. The phenomenon of…
Ecosystems and World Systems
World-systemic processes of capital accumulation are inextricably intermeshed with ecology. Not only do they have obvious repercussions on landscapes and ecosystems ( e.g., erosion, deforestation), but they are also fundamentally dependent on ecological aspects such as topsoil, forests, or minerals. The analytical disjunction of ecology and economics is a persistent feature of modern science. The minority of researchers who have seriously tried t…
Ecologically unequal exchange and ecological debt
This article introduces a Special Section on Ecologically Unequal Exchange (EUE), an underlying source of most of the environmental distribution conflicts in our time. The nine articles discuss theories, methodologies, and empirical case studies pertaining to ecologically unequal exchange, and address its relationship to ecological debt. This is the introductory article in Alf Hornborg and Joan Martinez-Alier (eds.) 2016. "Ecologically unequal ex…
The Unequal Exchange of Time and Space
Introduction In this brief essay, I would like to address the topic of unequal exchange-one that recurs in Maurice Godelier's work and is a cornerstone of Marxian social theory. Many social scientists, looking at the world around them, are intuitively convinced that there is such a thing as 'unequal exchange', but would admit to having a hard time defining it. The problem of 'unequal exchange' is a paradigmatically Marxian topic in that our diffi…
The Money-Energy-Technology Complex and Ecological Marxism
This is Part 1 of an article arguing for an extended application of Karl Marx’s insight that the apparent reciprocity of free market exchange is to be understood as an ideology that obscures material processes of exploitation and accumulation. Rather than to confine this insight to the worker’s sale of his or her labor-power for wages, and basing it on the conviction that labor-power is uniquely capable of generating more value than its price, th…
Has Cuba exposed the myth of “free” solar power? Energy, space, and justice
Given the many problems with fossil energy, the fact that solar energy still only constitutes an insignificant fraction of global energy use requires explanation. The most common explanation is that multinational corporations with vested interests in fossil fuels have been actively preventing the development of solar energy technologies. But this explanation is difficult to apply to the case of Cuba. This article takes Cuban energy policy since t…
Toward an alternative dialogue between the social and natural sciences
Interdisciplinary research within the field of sustainability studies often faces incompatible ontological assumptions deriving from natural and social sciences.The importance of this fact is often underrated and sometimes leads to the wrong strategies.We distinguish between two broad approaches in interdisciplinarity: unificationism and pluralism.Unificationism seeks unification and perceives disciplinary boundaries as conventional, representing…
Post-Capitalist Ecologies
the underlying assumption of an abstract equivalence among incomparable qualities.Technologies, like the money which makes them possible, in Marxist theory tend to be visualized as intrinsically innocent artifacts detachable from the unequal societal contexts in which they have emerged.To prevent such technological fetishism from continuing its destructive historical course, the money artifact itself must be redesigned so as to insulate local sur…
Lineality in Two-Line Relationship Terminologies
Stratification and exchange in the pre‐Columbian Andes
The Transition to Statehood in the New World, edited by G. D. Jones and R. R. Kautz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ix + 254 pp. The Inca and Aztec States 1400–1800: Anthropology and History, edited by G. A. Collier, R. I. Rosaldo and J. D. Wirth. New York: Academic Press, 1982. xx + 475 pp. Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms. Frank Salomon. Cambridge: Cambridge University …
Machine Fetishism, Value, and the Image of Unlimited Good
The accumulation of industrial infrastructure within restricted sectors of the world systemii indicates that world market prices obscure more fundamental measures of 'value'. The thermodynamic concept of exergy (or negative enitropy) is offered as a measure of 'use value' geared to the reproduction of industrial 'teclihiomass', and it is establislhed that the logic of industrialismll sets price and exergy contenit in inverse relation to eachi oth…
Panoan Marriage Sections
Almost 50 years ago, George Peter Murdock (1949:56) could assert that systems of marriage sections had never been reported outside of Australia and a limited area in Melanesia. Since then, ethnographers of several Pano-speaking peoples of southeastern Peru have given us reason to revise Murdock's assessment. The Cashinahua, Sharanahua, and Mayoruna have apparently maintained systems of social classification which strongly resemble the classical, …
Environmentalism, ethnicity and sacred places
Un mouvement d'opposition à l'aménagement d'une carrière de granite au Cap Breton sert de point de départ à une réflexion sur les problématiques plus de la constitution de l'identité, du discours et du pouvoir à l'époque moderne. L'adoption de modes décontextualisants de production du discours et d'auto‐déTinition fait naître des ambivalences et des contradictions au sein de tout mouvement qui se crée en opposition à une structure social fondée s…
"Encompassing encompassment Anthropology and the u-turn of modernityreflections on the textbook "assessing cultural anthropology
A recent collection of "assessments" serves as point of departure for an even more condensed stock-taking of the range of concerns in contemporary anthropology. Its ever deepening reflexivity now provides frameworks for juxtaposing and integrating our various understandings of the cultural, political and economic dimensions of modernity. Anthropology's critical scrutiny of itself can be expanded into a critique of power. The ambition to encompass…
Human ecology
Dual Organisering, Hierarki Og Firedelingslogik I Andes
Alf Hornborg: Dual Organization, Hierarchy and the Logic of Quadripartition in Andean Societies. A Comparative Approach A comparative perspective can help to illuminate the quadripartite, ethnic hierarchies of Andean communities by placing them in a wider, South American context. The ethnography of Southern India also provides us with valuable clues for understanding the structure of traditional, Andean hierarchies. The endogamous moiety systems …
Ecosystems and World Systems
World-systemic processes of capital accumulation are inextricably intermeshed with ecology. Not only do they have obvious repercussions on landscapes and ecosystems ( e.g., erosion, deforestation), but they are also fundamentally dependent on ecological aspects such as topsoil, forests, or minerals. The analytical disjunction of ecology and economics is a persistent feature of modern science. The minority of researchers who have seriously tried t…
Towards an ecological theory of unequal exchange
Ecological Embeddedness and Personhood
Cet article reprend une polemique soulevee lors de la reunion annuelle de l'Association Americaine d'Anthropologie (AAA) en 1997, organisee en hommage a l'oeuvre de Roy Rappaport, et qui avait pour theme les relations entre la culture, le pouvoir, l'histoire et la nature. L'A. montre quelles sont les relations entre la personnalite du chercheur et ce qu'il entend par ecologie dans toute recherche en anthropologie ecologique. Il serait indispensab…
Money and the Semiotics of Ecosystem Dissolution
This paper argues for a semiotic approach to the problematic interface of economics and ecology. It begins by tracing the origins of materialist science and discussing strategies for transcending Cartesian dualism in the study of human ecology. It then discusses pre-modernity, modernity and post-modernity as transformations of semiotic relations with implications for identity and culture as well as human-environmental relations. The phenomenon of…
Vital signs
Ecosemiotics represents a theoretical approach to human ecology that can be applied across several disciplines. lts primary justification lies inthe ambition to transcend "Cartesian", conceptual dichotomies such as culture/nature. society/nature, mental/material. etc. It argues that ecosystems areconstituted no less by flows of signs than by flows of matter and energy. This paper discusses the roles of different kinds of hmnan sign systems in the…
Symbolic technologies
By extending the Marxian theory of fetishism from money and commodities to machines, we may achieve an epistemological shift in our understanding of the foundations of 'technological development'. The first part of the article discusses previous definitions of fetishism in order to distil some central themes that appear to be particularly significant to the argument on machine fetishism. It is argued that semiotic theory can be useful in distingu…
Cornucopia or Zero-Sum Game? The Epistemology of Sustainability
This article contrasts two fundamentally different understandings of economic growth and "development" that lead to diametrically opposed approaches to how to deal with global ecological deterioration. One is the currently hegemonic perspective of neoclassical economic theory, which has been used to advocate growth as a remedy for environmental problems. The other is the zero-sum perspective of world-system theory, which instead suggests that gro…
The Unequal Exchange of Time and Space
Introduction In this brief essay, I would like to address the topic of unequal exchange-one that recurs in Maurice Godelier's work and is a cornerstone of Marxian social theory. Many social scientists, looking at the world around them, are intuitively convinced that there is such a thing as 'unequal exchange', but would admit to having a hard time defining it. The problem of 'unequal exchange' is a paradigmatically Marxian topic in that our diffi…
Amazon Sweet Sea
Book review of Amazon Sweet Sea: Land, Life, and Water at the River’s Mouth. Nigel J.H. Smith. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. xii + 296 pp., plates, map, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. ISBN 0-292-77770-1
Ethnogenesis, Regional Integration, and Ecology in Prehistoric Amazonia
This paper critically reviews reconstructions of cultural development in prehistoric Amazonia and argues for the primacy of regional and interregional exchange in generating the complex distributions of ethno-linguistic identities traced by linguists and archaeologists in the area. This approach requires an explicit abandonment of notions of migrating "peoples" in favor of modern anthropological understandings of ethnicity and ethnogenesis. Furth…
Footprints in the cotton fields
Animism, fetishism, and objectivism as strategies for knowing (or not knowing) the world
Animistic or 'relational' ontologies encountered in non-Western (i.e. premodern) settings pose a challenge to Western (i.e. modern) knowledge production, as they violate fundamentalassumptions of Cartesian science. Naturalscientists who have tried seriously to incorporate subject-subject relations into their intellectual practice (e.g. Uexküll, Bateson) have inexorably been relegated to the margins. Surrounded by philosophers and sociologists of …
Learning from the Tiv
Although careful not to romanticize the premodern cultures that have traditionally been the central object of their research, anthropologists might reconsider some classical ethnography in the light of ongoing deliberations on sustainability. Economic anthropology is in a unique position to achieve a distanced view of modern money and neoliberal market ideology by contrasting its notions of value and reciprocity with those of premodern, "multicen…
Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology
Book review of Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology: Studies in the Neotropical Lowlands. William Balée and Clark L. Erickson, editors. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. The Historical Ecology Series. xii + 417 pp., maps, figures, tables, notes, references, index. $80.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-231-13288-3. [www.columbia.edu/cu/cup
Machine fetishism and the consumer's burden
The prospect of peaking oil extraction prompts us to rethink processes of development and decline in the world system. Rather than simply revive Malthusian concerns over the dismal destiny of humankind as a whole, we need to approach the notion of "cheap energy" as an experience situated in societal space as well as in historical time. Energy has been perceived as "cheap" only within core segments of world society, whose ideology of progress and …
Zero-Sum World
This article discusses various ways in which conventional discourse on sustainability fails to acknowledge the distributive, political, and cultural dimensions of global environmental problems. It identifies five interconnected illusions currently postponing systemic crisis and obstructing rational societal negotiations that acknowledge the political dimensions of global ecology: 1) The fragmentation of scientific perspectives into bounded catego…
Structuring sustainability science
It is urgent in science and society to address climate change and other sustainability challenges such as biodiversity loss, deforestation, depletion of marine fish stocks, global ill-health, land degradation, land use change and water scarcity. Sustainability science (SS) is an attempt to bridge the natural and social sciences for seeking creative solutions to these complex challenges. In this article, we propose a research agenda that advances …
Sociology (58 works) · Economics (43 works) · Political science (42 works) · Philosophy (39 works) · Epistemology (38 works) · Law (34 works) · Politics (32 works) · Philosophy (28 works) · Ecology (27 works) · Anthropology (26 works)