Articles

As the US economy continues to worsen and unemployment rises, everyone including the President is holding their breath. Everyone except the veteran economist Paul Volcker, that is. George Blecher says he might be on to something.

In its current form, cap-and-trade amounts to a system that interferes with development patterns in the South to offset carbon emissions resulting from “business as usual” in the North. Politics should be seeking alternatives to the trading model, argue Tim Forsyth and Zoe Young.

Dominant discourses of sustainability, argues Ingolfur Blühdorn, remain firmly within the growth paradigm, their hegemony being a reflection of the exhaustion of the critique of industrial society and consumer capitalism. For any genuine turn towards sustainability, the limits of rights and freedoms widely held to be sacrosanct must be re-politicized, and their content and limitations redefined.

While freedom has been the most important motif of accounts of human history since the Enlightenment, there has never been an awareness of the geological agency human beings were gaining through processes linked to their acquisition of freedom. Whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions that work like boundary parameters of human existence.

Committed, critical writing in Denmark has long since left the domain of literature and turned to genres such as documentary film and journalism, writes Andreas Harbsmeier. As it emerges from its sheltered existence in a reservation, recent Danish literature is collapsing the boundaries between the literary field and the broader public sphere.

The fundamentalist justification for ecological politics is outdated, writes Jürgen Trittin, chairman of the German Green party. The ecological reform of the global economy must bring on board those with no interest in preserving nature per se. The more radical, “nature-oriented” and naive a demand is, the less likely it is to be realized and the more catastrophic the consequences will be.

Global warming, if left unchecked, will undermine development, overtax social capacities and endanger international stability. Progressive policy must focus on “managing the unavoidable” and “avoiding the unmanageable”.

Combining feminist and ecological approaches, ecofeminism opposes the domination of the white male over women, over the poor and over the natural world. Virginie Maris surveys epistemological, moral and social forms of the ecofeminist critique, drawing conclusions about the association between reductionist science and paternalist capitalism.

Climate policy is heavily dependent on expert scientific opinion, with the IPCC the leading authority. Yet uncertainty surrounds the science of climate change, and in particular the 2° target. Does politics’ reliance on inexact science disqualify its decisions? And does scientists’ involvement in politics prejudice their objectivity? Not necessarily, writes Åsa Knaggård.

The economies of central eastern Europe have remained unchanged in at least one respect: their high level of energy wastage. Add to that the explosion of car-use in the region, and eastern central Europe becomes the EU’s major obstacle to reaching its emissions targets for 2020. So why does funding allocated through the European Union still disfavour climate-friendly development?

Barack Obama’s statements to the UN about the potentially devastating impacts of climate change are in stark contrast to Democratic policy back home, where climate policy is negotiated exclusively in terms of US domestic interests. Rick Piltz, director of Climate Science Watch, explains how the combination of political parochialism and the effects of Bush-era climate change denial are stalling the necessary decision-making.

Daniel Knorr’s work can described as a conceptually inflicted practice of very immateraial ideas, write curator and critic Dieter Roelstraete. “His is an art predicated on the immediate experience of the irreducible materiality of all thought, on the crafty mining of those ideas that lie dormant in matter, clutter, stuff.”

“Histories” means many things, but above all that the history written in western Europe does not necessarily coincide with the one the eastern Europeans are trying to write, observes Biancamaria Bruno in her essay about her first visit to the Lithuanian capital.

The notion of abandoning the East for the sake of a brighter western dominates the Polish memory of ’89, writes Wojciech Przybylski. Renewed debate among the born-free generation about the period of change would foster a more individual cultural identity

The figure of the German in recent Polish literature reveals shifts in perspective from the experience of war to that of exile and resettlement. Representations of the German other in Polish self-imagining.