Traditions and Trends in Global Environmental Politics

This volume reviews and updates a 1996 collection on the environment and international relations that was the first of its kind. On the one hand, environmental awareness has increased and we now speak of the Anthropocene era, but our international structures still reflect 'unreconstructed statism' of countries putting their own interests first. The challenge is expressed by the editors in their phrase 'societal multiplicity and planetary singularity' that demands a shift away from pluralism and towards what Robert Falkner calls solidarism. As other commentators like Richard Falk have observed, nation states are incapable of resolving our complex interconnected challenges, so the need for new structures and institutions is urgent. There is an interesting discussion of epistemic communities with authority, such as the IPCC, inputting into policy and helping redefine an expanded concept of security beyond an exclusively military focus. Stephen Hobden outlines the dangers of prospective geo-engineering, already highlighted in previous reviews in this publication, where the danger lies in linear thinking within a complex adaptive system – and all this raises new issues in the relationship between humans and nature, not to mention intergenerational justice.