On luxury environmentalism and emergency environmentalism

Abstract

Although the socio-ecological crisis has been well diagnosed for more than half a century, industrial societies' responses to it fall dramatically short of what is needed. We are in a time of ruptures and discontinuities, sliding rapidly towards an eco-social collapse. Capitalism practices resource appropriation on a planetary scale, and the externalisation of socio-ecological costs on a planetary scale: in the end, the whole Earth becomes a sacrifice zone. We continue to think in terms of luxury solutions, when we need emergency solutions; thus, the luxury environmentalism/emergency ecologism pair of concepts makes it possible to capture what is happening in contemporary conflicts such as those related to renewable energy macro-projects.

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