Environmentalism and Democracy in the Age of Nationalism and Corporate Capitalism

Abstract

Environmental commodification, trading and offsetting are business as usual approaches to environmental policy. There is also consensus across political divides about the need for economic growth. Many environmental NGOs have become apologists for corporate self-regulation, market mechanisms, carbon pricing/trading and biodiversity offsetting/banking, while themselves commercialising species 'protection' as eco-tourism. In this issue of Environmental Values the state and direction of the environmental movement are at the fore. D'Amato et al. contrast pragmatism with the need for revolutionary change and consider which will achieve social ecological transformation. Parry raises the issue of how animal activists should operate within an idealised deliberative democracy and what they could then legitimately justify doing to further their cause. Quist and Rinne are concerned with the challenges that disenfranchised groups face in building shared agendas and expressing themselves in their struggles to protect the environment and their ways of life. How natural resource extraction issues are framed by the media is the concern of Davies et al. Issues of power, inclusion and representation in the environmental movement are also raised in the paper by Fenney, which addresses the challenges specifically faced by disabled people. Societal change is an inherently value laden and political issue. Environmental policy is no more a win-win than any other policy; this journal issue shows how different polices change winners and losers.

Reconnecting with the social-political and ecological-economic reality

“…Clive Spash's various editorials for Environmental Values, and his video-recorded talks and interviews, have provided examples and arguments to illustrate the case (e.g. Spash, 2016Spash, , 2017aSpash, , 2020aSpash, , 2021. Other ecological economists, scientists and artists have similarly amassed evidence and arguments of the ills of the time and the surprising lack of concerted high-level initiated efforts.…”

“…Permaculture principles and shared community endeavours are already evident but not widespread. As Spash (2017a) argues, simplicity and sufficiency here is meant in a social-minded context that encompasses some self-sufficiency but not in a neo-liberal system kind of way. Frugality is also likely for most by necessity and hence we need entrepreneurism with conscience for a stationery state, or degrowth (Hickel et al 2022), rather than growth (Mill, 1848/1871).…”

Moral and Institutional Foundations of Sustainable Technological Entrepreneurship

“…Corporations may take advantage of the charismatic figures who lead them [50]. As Spash shows, business leaders take positions in NGOs and policy bodies [51,52]; and corporations influence policy goals and leverage projects etc. Politically, they increasingly try to "determine the laws which are supposed to govern them" [48] (p. 12).…”

Ecological economics in the age of fear

“…Ecological economics has devoted considerable efforts to develop and apply methods for eliciting values, including those that stress the role of deliberation and participation (Zografos, 2015;Kenter, 2017). The key role of valuation is to facilitate the articulation, expression and incorporation into social decision making of the values held by different actors, and by doing so improve the chances of achieving more sustainable and fairer decision making outcomes (Spash, 2017). We contend that in a context of rising anti-environmentalism by authoritarian regimes, supported by post truth politics, a plead for investing in refining current valuation techniques may be a futile and misleading strategy to advance in the pressing global sustainability agenda, in the same way that in a context of climate change denial more and better evidence (on top of what we already know) about the causes and consequences of climate change is not likely to be effective to help understand how to best transform the economic model that underlies global warming.…”