Abstract
While the precautionary principle may have offered a sound basis for managing environmental risk in the Holocene, the depth and width of the Anthropocene have made precaution increasingly untenable. Not only have many ecosystems already been damaged beyond natural recovery, achieving a sustainable long-term global trajectory now seem to require ever greater measures of proactionary risk-taking, in particular in relation to the growing need for climate engineering. At the same time, different optical illusions, arising from temporary emissions reductions due to the COVID-19 epidemic and the local deployment of seemingly “green” small-scale renewable energy sources, tend to obscure worsening global trends and reinforce political disinterest in developing high-energy technologies that would be more compatible with universal human development and worldwide ecological restoration. Yet, given the lack of feedback between the global and the local level, not to mention the role of culture and values in shaping perceptions of “sustainability”, the necessary learning may end up being both epistemologically and politically difficult. This paper explores the problem of finding indicators suitable for measuring progress towards meaningful climate action and the restoration of an ecologically vibrant planet. It is suggested that such indicators are essentially political as they reflect, not only different assessments of technological feasibility, but orientations towards the Enlightenment project.
Highlights
While the precautionary principle may have offered a sound basis for managing environmental risk in the Holocene, the depth and width of the Anthropocene have made precaution increasingly untenable
Even among the broader public, it has become common to associate climate action with different forms of sacrifice (Maniates and Meyer 2010)
Reflecting a kind of banal methodological individualism, children in left-bourgeois families today are brought up to a reductionist language of carbon debt and ecological footprint calculators that puts their own existence at odds with the planet
Summary
Considering the destruction that humanity has wrought upon the natural world, it is not surprising that much environmental discourse has an unforgiving undertone The political center appears stuck in managerial discourses of “Agenda 2030” and visions of renewable energy sprawl, extensive agriculture and industrial forestry that would essentially spell an end to the non-human natural world This discrepancy produces a conundrum; by what indicators should progress towards long-term global sustainability be measured? Almost regardless of what actions are taken today, the global environment is likely to continue to deteriorate for the foreseeable future given the long response times of the climate system in particular (Van Vuuren and Stehfest 2013) This means that it will take a considerable political effort to sustain any macro-level environmental policy regime in the face of “apparent failure” while at the same time remaining open for learning. By reaffirming the essentially ideological nature of these debates, the paper concludes by arguing the need to move beyond the binary denier/believer dichotomy with regard to global environmental change
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