Abstract
This Introduction to the Handbook aims to: convey the present environmental emergency conditions, describe the urgent need for a positive alternative vision of an environmentally sustainable and socially just way to live, detail the long creation process of the Handbook because of COVID, and to summarize the sections and chapters within them that make up the Handbook itself.
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Notes
- 1.
Working Group II Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Summary for Policymakers, edited by Hans-Otto Portner and Debra C. Roberts, Working Group II Co-chairs, 27 February 2022, D.5.3. 35. https://www.ipcc.ch/working-group-wg-2/ accessed: 20 April 2022.
- 2.
“UN Climate Report: ‘It’s now or never’ to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.” United Nations, UN News: Global Perspectives, Human Stories, 4 April 2022. https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/1115452 accessed: 20 April 2022.
- 3.
Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth: A Report to the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, Second Edition, New York: New American Library, 1975.
- 4.
See, for example, greenhouse emissions for the first pandemic year in the United States of 2020 declined by 10%, only to see such emissions rise in 2021 in the United States by 6.2%. See, Brad Plumer, “U.S. Greenhous Gas Emissions Bounced Back Sharply in 2021.” New York Times, January 10, 2022, Section A. 11. www.nytimes.com accessed: 25 April 2022.
- 5.
See, Joel Jay Kassiola, The Death of Industrial Civilization: The Limits to Economic Growth and the Repoliticization of Advanced Industrial Society, Albany: The State University of New York Press, 1990; Timothy W. Luke, Ecocritque: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy and Culture, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
- 6.
Rabbi Tarfon, Ethics of the Fathers, Philip Birnbaum, Translator and Annotator, New York: Hebrew Publishing, 1949, Chapter Two, Verse 20, 16. The words in brackets were provided in the text of this edition. The quotation may be found in Kassiola, The Death of Industrial Civilization, 217.
- 7.
Kassiola, The Death of Industrial Civilization, 217.
- 8.
George Lakey, Strategy for a Living Revolution, San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1973, 28. Quoted in: Kassiola, The Death of Industrial Civilization, 199.
- 9.
For a profile of such a climate change denier organization, the Heartland Institute, see, Naomi Klein, “Capitalism vs. the Climate” in Klein’s On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, New York: Simon and Shuster, 2019, 70–103.
- 10.
For a presentation of the history and critique of limits environmentalism, see, Damian F. White, Alan P. Rudy and Brian J. Gareau, Environments, Natures and Social Theory: Towards a Critical Hybridity, London: Palgrave, 2016, Chapter 3: “Limits/No Limits? Neo-Malthusians, Promethians and Beyond,” 52–70.
- 11.
For an example of the former, book-length application of the Western political theory canon (with one exception) to the environment see, Peter F. Cannavo and Joseph H. Lane, Jr. eds. Engaging Nature: Environmentalism and the Political Theory Canon, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014. For the latter, analytical and normative political theory applied to the environment see, Steve Vanderheiden, Environmental Political Theory, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020. On the increasing literature on Comparative Political Theory or Non-Western Political Theory, one example would be: Fred Dallmayr, ed. Comparative Political Theory: An Introduction, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
- 12.
For a detailed analysis of this key concept of Bataille’s and the degrowth body of thought see, one of the co-author’s works, Romano, in his “Depense,” in Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis, eds. Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, New York: Routledge, 2015, 86–89.
- 13.
See, Kassiola, The Death of Industrial Civilization, 217.
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Jay Kassiola, J., Luke, T.W. (2023). Introduction: The Time for Social and Political Transformation Based on the Environment Is Now. In: Jay Kassiola, J., Luke, T.W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Politics and Theory. Environmental Politics and Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14346-5_1
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