Abstract
This chapter questions the ideas and actions of one of the most unquestioned environmental movements now operating all over the world, namely, groups supporting the goal of ‘sustainable development’. One must wonder about concepts like sustainable development. Some will take sustainable development to mean ecologically sustainable.1 Others can just as rightly see it as economically sustainable, technologically sustainable or politically sustainable.2 Consequently, chambers of commerce and ministries of industry in the 1990s glibly appropriate sustainable development discourse as their own: this dam, that factory, these highways, those powerlines must be built to sustain, not nature, but job creation, population growth, industrial output or service delivery, because such elements improve human life and enhance its ecosystems’ carrying capacities. This construction, however, clashes with more ecological interpretations of sustainability in which humans allegedly are seeking ‘social and material progress within the constraints of sustainable resource use and environmental management’ and, as a result,
renewable resources (plants, trees, animals and soil) will be used no faster than they are generated; non-renewable resources (such as fossil fuels and metals) will be used no faster than acceptable substitutes can be found; and pollutants will be generated no faster than can be absorbed and neutralized by the environment.3
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Notes
See, for example, the annual reviews of the Worldwatch Institute, such as L.R. Brown et al., State of the World 1994. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994) as well as the previous 1984–93 editions; M.R. Redclift, Sustainable Development: Exploring the Contradictions (London: Methuen, 1987); or IUCN, World Conservation Strategy (Gland, Switzerland: International Union for the Conservation of Nature, 1980).
J. Makower, The E-Factor: The Bottom-Line Approach to Environmentally Responsible Business (New York: Times Books, 1993); B. Piasecki and P. Asmus, In Search of Environmental Excellence: Moving Beyond Blame (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990); and A. Gore, Earth in the Balance (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).
D.J. McMichael, Planetary Overload: Global Environmental Change and the Health of the Human Species (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 309.
For a discussion of Foucault’s intellectual project, see J. Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); and J. Rajchmann, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
D.H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Unicorn Books, 1972), p. 27.
See L. Brown, C. Flavin and S. Postel, Saving the Planet: How to Shape an Environmentally Sustainable Society (New York: Norton, 1991).
World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 8.
Ibid., p. xi.
See M. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Post-modernity (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1994).
M. Foucault, ‘Governmentality,’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 93.
Ibid. p. 102.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 100.
See T. Luke, ‘Green hustlers: a critique of eco-opportunism,’ Telos, Vol. 97, Fall, 1993, pp. 141–54.
These topics are addressed in M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980); and H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermenentics, 2nd edn (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1960), pp. 138–42.
Ibid. p. 143.
Ibid. p. 142.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 143.
Ibid.
Ibid. pp. 143–4.
See T.W. Luke, ‘Placing powers/siting spaces: the politics of global and local in the new world order,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 613–28. 1994; and T.W. Luke, ‘Worldwatching at the limits to growth,’ Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Vol. 18, June, 1994, pp. 43–63.
See, for more discussion of this tendency, International Union for the Conservation of Nature, United Nations Environmental Project and World Wildlife Fund, Caring for the Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living (Gland, Switzerland: Earthscan, 1991).
For a typical expression of sustainability discourse as a legitimation code, see J. Young, Sustaining the Earth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
See T.W. Luke, ‘Discourses of disintegration, texts of transformation: rereading realism in the new world order,’ Alternatives, Vol. 13, 1993, pp. 229–58.
M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 29.
See, for example, I. Sachs, ‘Ecodevelopment: a definition,’ Ambio, Vol. 8, 1978, p. 11. Also see I. Sachs, ‘Developing in harmony with nature: consumption patterns, time and space uses, resource profiles, and technological choices,’ Ecodevelopment: Concepts, Projects, Strategies, ed. B. Glaeser (New York: Pergamon Press, 1984), p. 211; M.R. Redclift, Development and the Environmental Crisis: Red or Green Alternatives (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 34; R.F. Dasmann, ‘Achieving the sustainable use of species and ecosystems,’ Landscape Planning, Vol. 12, 1985, p. 215; or R. Riddell, Ecodevelopment (London: Gower, 1981), pp. 8–9.
See P. Bartelmus, Environment and Development (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986); and R.F. Dasmann, The Conservation Alternative (London: Wiley, 1975).
See L.R. Brown, Building a Sustainable Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981) as well as the Worldwatch Institute’s latest series of surveillance reports beginning in 1992 or, most recently, L. Brown et al., Vital Signs: The Trends that are Shaping our Future (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994) for more illustration.
These possibilities are explored in L.W. Milbrath, Envisioning a Sustainable Society: Learning our Way out (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989); and G. Hardin, Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos (Oxford University Press, 1993).
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Luke, T.W. (1995). Sustainable development as a power/knowledge system: the problem of ‘governmentality’. In: Fischer, F., Black, M. (eds) Greening Environmental Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08357-9_2
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