Abstract
The aim of this article is to assess the validity of the culturalist explanation of unsustainability by critically examining the social–cultural interpretation of the risks on which it is epistemologically based. First, we will explore the different ways in which the notion of Anthropocene is changing our perception of risks. Second, we will analyze the limits of the social–cultural explanation of risks relative to the global (non-linear) interdependence between human activities and environmental processes that defines the Anthropocene. Third, we will introduce the Chinese concept of Ecological Civilization and analyze its cultural foundations and culturalist assumptions. Finally, we will develop the practical consequences of this critic of the social-cultural interpretation of risks and of culturalist explanations of unsustainability.
Highlights
Anthropocene, Planetary Risks and the Limits of Culturalist InterpretationsOur current mode of production and consumption of goods, in addition to our exploitation of organic resources, all modeled with regard to human economic productivity and not to bio-capacity, is endangering man’s living environment, but all the while transforming human’s social institutions: “The science is clear that a significant part of recent global warming is driven by human activities. [ . . . ] [H]uman economic activity leads to changes in Earth system elements which are fed back into the distribution and kinds of human activities which are economic” [1]
Risks in the age of the Anthropocene are the direct consequences of this ongoing process of global anthropization of nature: “The most likely global catastrophic risks all seem to arise from human activities, especially industrial civilization and advanced technologies” [4]
Referencing back to the concept of Chinese ecological civilization, we can note that when Pan Yue affirmed: “it’s not a wise choice to copy the Western model of industrial modernization, especially in China, because that model will result in serious conflicts with the environment” [70], he seemed to suggest that it is the Western quality of development, its so-called “cultural specificity” that will lead to growing environmental risks
Summary
Our current mode of production and consumption of goods, in addition to our exploitation of organic resources, all modeled with regard to human economic productivity and not to bio-capacity, is endangering man’s living environment, but all the while transforming human’s social institutions: “The science is clear that a significant part of recent global warming is driven by human activities. [ . . . ] [H]uman economic activity (energy and resource use, agriculture, forestry and more) leads to changes in Earth system elements (climate, land cover, sea level change and more) which are fed back into the distribution and kinds of human activities which are economic” [1]. The Anthropocene is a term stressing the totipotent influence of human beings on nature, but a geological category evidencing “the capability of contemporary human civilization to influence the environment at the scale of the Earth as a single, evolving planetary system” [7]. It denotes an age in which all the boundaries between science and society, society and environment, artificial and natural, global and local collapse [8]. We will develop the practical consequences of this critic of the social–cultural interpretation of risks and of culturalist explanations of unsustainability
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